Mental Health, Mindfulness, Meditation and Mastering Dreams

[DreamBliss]

This may have already been covered in various ways in the forum, and I may not even have this in the right section, but I had some thoughts here I wanted to share from my own personal experiences. For a moment I want you to picture yourself meeting a blind person, someone who has never seen anything with his or her physical sense of sight. Imagine yourself trying to describe sight to them, the process of using the eyes, of seeing. Kind of silly right? OK, now imagine you are a dreamer, questing for Lucidity. You want to walk in the spiritual realms and tap into spiritual energies. How are you going to truly understand the energies you encounter on a spiritual level if you have never developed any sort of sense of these energies? This is why in order to be a better dreamer, to be a Lucid Dreamer, to be, as Moss puts it, an Active Dreamer (the ultimate goal I think) you absolutely must learn how to be mindful and how to meditate! Now I'm not talking about breathing a particular way. In my own experience, practicing Qi Gong and Tai Chi, meditation is a process whereby you slow down, you breath, slow and deep, and you are fully present in the moment, otherwise referred to as mindfulness or the unification of your conscious and subconscious selves. Ultimately what is going on here is that most of us come from backgrounds and lives in modern society where the physical realm, and our conscious selves, are given the greatest importance. Your unconscious self is relegated to the realm of dreams for anyone who doesn't tap into it through any kind of creative or artistic ability. Even if we are creative and artistic, using our subconsciousness more, we still place greater emphasis on our conscious self, what I will call the physical parts of ourselves. We pay little attention to the spiritual parts of ourselves and the energy that drives the physical parts of ourselves, call this your spirit, soul, consciousness or some combination of the three. When you practice Tai Chi or moving Qi Gong (I use Matthew Cohen's Fire and Water DVD) you begin to actually feel the energy coming into you or traveling out of you, and it is this awareness that develops the your spiritual abilities. Additionally you are getting physical exercise, which gives your brain certain chemicals you need, and if you do this in a group you receive additional needed chemicals from physically interacting with others. If you can do this outside you get the sunlight you need to develop the melatonin you want later in order to fall asleep quicker. The last thing you learn, and this is the key in this kind of exercise, is how to, "Move in the stillness" and be, "Fully present in the moment." As I read or heard in a source which escapes me right now too often most of us are performing a task but our mind is 10 steps ahead on the next task. We are not fully present in the moment. We are not practicing mindfulness. Our unconscious and conscious selves are not unified. We are on auto-pilot. This can even affect our Lucid Dreams making them appear to blur by around us at a much faster speed then we want. By practicing Tai Chi and Qi Gong we slowly, over time, as we perform the movements, teach ourselves to slow down and be fully present in the moment. When we focus on a task we are focused completely on that task. We give it all our energy and concentration. Once we reach this point we can truly meditate, We can slow down our breathing, relax every part of our body and focus our thoughts inward, or simply on our breathing. When we picture a light or mist moving over and through us we can further relax ourselves, remove negative energy from our bodies, and fill ourselves with positive energy from above us or the earth, cycling that energy back into the earth to be purified. We can see this energy in our mind's eye, sense it, feel it. It is ephemeral but very real to us. Even now, after I performed my exercise for the evening, I can feel the strength of my focus as I write this and the warmth of the energy emanating from my hands Eventually when we dream we are more aware of our surroundings. It's easier for us to tell we are dreaming. We can detect the kind of energy entities we encounter in the spiritual realm may have. The spiritual realm becomes just as real to us as the physical realm. If you can reach this state it will enhance your dreams, your Lucid Dreams, and your spiritual abilities, allowing to do things such as astral projection or remote viewing. A whole new world of possibilities opens to you. To get there you need only discipline and focus, to exercise a certain time a certain number of days per week and not alter it until it becomes a habit (3 weeks or so.) You need to practice slowing down, becoming aware of only your breath, in the beginning stages of meditation. You should try to become aware of every part of your body. Peter Ralston covers this in his very hard to read, but excellent work, "Zen Body Being." You should also try to become proficient at creating mental movies, as described in Maxwell Maltz's, "Psycho Cybernetics." I highly recommend you purchase these books, read them, and add them to your library. I wish you well in the development of your spiritual senses, and your adventures in the spiritual realm! - DreamBliss