Thread: ADA 7 Mindfullness

Mindfulness focuses on *you* (most importantly, your mind [thoughts, emotions, reactions]), while King Yoshi ADA focuses on immersion of the senses in/of the local environment, although these are not hard and fast rules. Of the two I think mindfulness is much more helpful for LD practice. Both consist of "paying attention" but the emphasis of the attention is quite different.

Originally Posted by FryingMan

Mindfulness focuses on *you* (most importantly, your mind [thoughts, emotions, reactions]), while King Yoshi ADA focuses on immersion of the senses in/of the local environment, although these are not hard and fast rules. Of the two I think mindfulness is much more helpful for LD practice. Both consist of "paying attention" but the emphasis of the attention is quite different.

Thanks fryingMan :-) In Yoshis tutoria he speak of noticing the breath in the lungs, the feel of your clothes, the soles of your feet as your walk etc. Is this not mindfullness or self-awareness? I thought 'awareness' was external environment and self awareness was focusing on oneself (touch, sight, smell,hearing)

^^ We've had this discussion before here on DV. There's a camp that thinks that ADA-style sensory awareness is mostly a lower-level "animal" sort of awareness, and that mindfulness encompasses a higher-level, thinking, cognitive self-awareness. "Awareness" on its own is rather vague, which is why we usually emphasize "self-awareness" in LD practice. E.g., a mouse is certainly highly aware of its environment to avoid predators, but it is "self-aware" in the sense that humans are, particularly, in the sense that it can distinguish between states of consciousness (or even have the desire to do so so?).

Originally Posted by FryingMan

^^ We've had this discussion before here on DV. There's a camp that thinks that ADA-style sensory awareness is mostly a lower-level "animal" sort of awareness, and that mindfulness encompasses a higher-level, thinking, cognitive self-awareness. "Awareness" on its own is rather vague, which is why we usually emphasize "self-awareness" in LD practice. E.g., a mouse is certainly highly aware of its environment to avoid predators, but it is "self-aware" in the sense that humans are, particularly, in the sense that it can distinguish between states of consciousness (or even have the desire to do so so?).

Yes i have read both sides of the debate now including your input and i am logically leaning towards increasing self awareness more that ADA. Im confused how to begin, what exercises should i use to increase self awareness and should i perform reality checks and prospective memory tasks alongside it?

I know that if for example, i am driving my car (correct me if im wrong please) if i look at the shapes of other cars, the colour of the traffic lights, the breeze in the trees then this would be regarded as ADA but im unsure how i would tweak these observations so that i was training / strengthening self awareness instead. Would i need to concentrate of the sound of the engine, the feel of my foot pressing the pedal, the smell of the air freshener etc?

I do want to train for self awareness but i am unsure how,can i have an example and how many times a day would i carry out self awareness training tasks? Many thanks guys
Ezzolucod

One excellent place to start on self-awareness training is the Sageous Lucid Dreaming Fundamentals Q&A thread. He describes a "RRC" (reverse reality check) that is meant to build self-awareness.

There are many ways to go about it. Being mindful is the opposite of being "zoned out", "running on auto-pilot". Yes your car examples seems like more KingYoshi-style ADA. You could make it into a more "critical reflection" moment if you compare the experience to your dream experiences, and look for oddities or dream-like phenomena. Do the cars look "waking normal?" Do they have license plates? Are they for the state that you live in?

To make it into a self-aware moment, you could realize that there you are, in your car, in that place. Are you frustrated by traffic? What are you thinking about? Were you previously just driving along in zombie-mode?

Self-awareness/mindfulness is not really about any one thing, it is a state of being of knowing you are there, paying attention to your interactions with your environment, your thoughts/reactions/emotions, and so forth.

Doing sitting "focus on the breath" meditation can really help get the feeling for paying attention/self-awareness/mindfulness. Over and over you bring yourself back to focus on the breath (or whatever focus you choose) after finding your thoughts having wandered.

But even just noticing these moments all through the day helps to build it.

To be lucid in dreams you first must be lucid in the waking state, the more you work on it the more natural it will seem. Just keep bringing yourself back to paying attention to yourself (and sure, your environment too, but I recommend using it more as critical reflection input rather than simply noticing with no other purpose).

Actually driving is a pretty good time to do awareness of breathing, but make sure you give sufficient focus to the road as well!

self awareness practices are really vague as no one except dear Sageous has talked about it in methodology. even the word awareness is vague. for example you pause for a moment and then you say: OK what should i be aware of now? my clothes? my room? my breath? the feeling that i am now here? what are the elements that are in my waking life that can't be in the dreams? even if we see a weird thing in dreams we can still fabricate something about it. so what's the point of being aware (whether internally or externally)?

these questions have one important mission...they are used to create a pause between what we are involved in our daily activities and the moment of RC. when you use an awareness boost exercise, you should feel like someone who has stick out his head out of the sand...you should get into the moment of deep state of wonder...you can wonder about the environment and how they look real and dreamy like (sort of dream yoga) and if you are awake or dreaming or you can do some internal awareness boost like asking about where you have been and will be in previous and next 15 minutes to pause for a moment. this pause and state of checking yourself in that time duration will make you more aware of yourself and many sort of interactions you had in your life. of course this does not make you lucid as you may also do that in your dreams.

but researches shows that in LD, the frontal lobe of our brain is active and that part of the brain is responsible for self-awareness. by increasing the activity of this part of the brain through awareness exercise of any kind, you will get lucid more often. that's the reason why self-awareness practices and king-Yoshi method both works. so feel free to mix both types of practices for your awareness boost.

in the WILD DVA class Sageous reccomends a "reverse reality check" that i think is pretty neat.

How do you develop self-awareness? There are many ways, and we’ll likely talk about others during upcoming conversations, but the exercise I’ll offer today is simple introduction to the practice, sort of a Reality Check in reverse:

Here’s what to do: At random intervals during the day – at least once an hour but no more than three times in that hour – stop what you’re doing and wonder. Just hold still for a second and remember where you were five minutes ago, imagine where you’ll be in five minutes, and know that everything you’re doing right now has an effect on everything and everyone around you, and everything and everyone around you has an effect on you – even if you don’t realize it.

The important part here is to think deeply about your place in all the stuff that’s whirling around you at any given time, and to really think about what all that whirling is doing to you, and what you might be doing to the whirling. During waking life, you might find yourself very often assuming that there’s not much whirling about at all or that there’s not much of an exchange of effect going on. There always is, whether you can feel it or not. Think about the fact that there is an exchange of atoms between your feet and the floor you’re treading: in a sense you’re changing reality itself, if ever so slightly, just by standing there! It is therefore extremely important to take a moment and remember that you exist, and your existence matters – even if you don’t think it does. [Edit: Your focus during this questioning period should be on your interaction with your local reality -- things/people your presence has influenced, are influencing, and will influence, or things/people that have/will do the same to you. You should avoid getting too metaphysical or galactic, as that atoms example above might imply. For example, perhaps you were just sitting on the couch in your living room 5 minutes ago, doing nothing... sounds like nothing to wonder about, unless you think about the dent you left in the couch, how it will still be warm for the next person in the room, how your comfortable situation on the couch caused you to ignore an important phone call from your boyfriend; the list can go on and on, if you look).]

You don’t have to recite all those questions every time; that would be annoying, and the process of reciting all that might diminish the effect. Basically you should put it all into a single quick thought that means something to you, and allows wonder to linger after you’ve resumed moving through your waking day. It will be difficult at first, but with practice you won’t be using words at all when you pause, as the questions will have become second nature. Be very careful that the questions never lose their wonder, though. If they become rote -- just a bunch of words you say whenever your iPhone app goes off -- then you will have lost the point of doing the exercise because you will not be acknowledging your self.

If you successfully add this exercise to your waking life, you may already be well on the way to successfully WILD’ing. Indeed, if you can master this exercise, meaning that you can truly realize the presence and importance of your existence at any given time, then holding on to your awareness while falling asleep will be a snap. This might not make sense to you right now, but that’s okay. The way humans are currently wired, it is not supposed to make sense. Just do the exercise above, or something similar, and learn to make self-awareness a part of your waking life.

Here’s the really good part: when you are in (or approaching) your dreaming world, the exercise you’re practicing will translate into something altogether different. This is because when you’re dreaming, you’ll know, for sure, that everything around you is caused by you, and that it is all entirely a reality of your own invention. This new perspective will open doors to creativity and exploration, and allow you to pay attention to things in the dream world that you may never have known existed…Oh, and if all those folks who say so are correct, you will also be much more able to recognize with certainty that there’s someone or something in your dream that probably should not be there.

There are of course other methods for building self-awareness, among them meditation and All Day Awareness (ADA).

Meditation is always an excellent tool for awareness, but it can be difficult to master and, in my opinion, tends to build goals unto itself that might obscure or supersede your LD targets. That is of course my opinion, and serious practitioners of advanced meditation have regularly begged to differ with excellent arguments. So, if you are already a proficient meditator, and see an easy conversion of the Reverse RC I described above into a meditation routine or mantra, then go for it! Also, if you are interested in exploring meditation as it directly relates to LD’ing, then I suggest you sign up for Sivason’s Dream Yoga class, if you haven’t already. Sivason has a real handle on this stuff, and I believe his class and method are both excellent for learning Dream Yoga and for WILD, which is in truth just a form or reflection of Dream Yoga.

I was originally going to suggest that you do ADA, and that is certainly a good thing to do regardless, but after some thought I had misgivings. My problem with ADA is that its practice tends to diminish the “self” as it amplifies the power of environment. With ADA you spend all your time observing and noting everything around you, but you take little notice of your self, and your interaction with everything. Think about it: Animals, especially prey, practice ADA by nature. A fish or a mouse is a master of ADA: if they’re not paying attention to everything all the time, they could wind up being someone’s dinner. But I wouldn’t consider either a candidate for lucid dreaming anytime soon, because all that awareness is driven by instinct rather than sentience. Sure, they can pay lots of attention and have true mastery of the input from their environs, but they have no idea they’re doing it, or that they’re even involved.

So, though ADA is a handy exercise for strengthening your sense of place in reality, it does little to define your interaction with reality, an understanding of which is critical in dreams, when reality is you. Perhaps if you can add a letter to ADA and make it ADSA -- All Day Self-Awareness, then it not only would it make sense, but then you would largely be doing the reverse RC I described above.
Again, if you are already successfully practicing ADA, or wish to add it to your waking life experience, don’t stop because of my words. ADA is an extremely valuable mental tool, and can serve as a foundation for self-awareness. But as I understand ADA, it simply isn’t focused directly on the tools we need to LD. If you think I’m wrong about this, feel free to explain why in the Q&A section -- maybe I missed something!