Cinnabar's quest to Master Astral Projection

[CinStoneCity]

Bought 'Master Astral Projection' and started on, you guessed it, Day 1. I do have a bit of experience in meditation, relaxing body and mind, and energy work, but decided to rinse and repeat, just to make sure I don't miss anything.

Right his morning, I was able to jot down three dreams. One involved an apartment building without facade, so I could look right inside the houses, and managed to fly up into one of them, my brother's place, to help him connecting his audio set. The second one was a short conversation with a classical vocal pro, about technique. In the third dream, I found a ouia planchette in a sink, and the dream soon turned into what looked like a popular witchcraft tv show, like The Secret Circle.

[CinStoneCity]

Today I was watching a video, felt a bit drowsy, and all of a sudden I realized something had happened to me which I immediately had forgotten about. I have a faint memory of someone talking to me, but cannot possibly remember what happened exactly. Looking back, I believe this was a 'shadow memory', as Robert Bruce calls it; it was definitely not the type of deja vu I had had before. This suggests I was well on my way popping out of my body?

[CinStoneCity]

A couple of days ago I had the weird experience that I remembered that someone had just talked to me, without recalling the details of who/what/how. I was feeling drowsy at the moment, and had this feeling when trying to recall a dream when just waking up. Could this be the shadow memory Robert Bruce writes about?

[CFTraveler]

Today I was watching a video, felt a bit drowsy, and all of a sudden I realized something had happened to me which I immediately had forgotten about. I have a faint memory of someone talking to me, but cannot possibly remember what happened exactly. Looking back, I believe this was a 'shadow memory', as Robert Bruce calls it; it was definitely not the type of deja vu I had had before. This suggests I was well on my way popping out of my body? I'm not sure if it is, but I do remember having these 'past dream memory' experiences when I was learning to consciously project.

[CinStoneCity]

Practiced for a week, kept a dream log, which worked out pretty well. However, for the past few nights, I barely remember enough to be able to take notes, and the few notes I manage to take make absolutely no sense. Let's hope this is a matter of going down before going up...

[CFTraveler]

Practiced for a week, kept a dream log, which worked out pretty well. However, for the past few nights, I barely remember enough to be able to take notes, and the few notes I manage to take make absolutely no sense. Let's hope this is a matter of going down before going up... Something like this happened to me around three weeks into the program. I also was very tired, so much that I took a month off from practice, and when I got back into it I projected a month later.

[CinStoneCity]

I'm in Week 3, and dream memory is still mweh. I'm finally back to raising energy, which I had paused to restart NEW through MAP, and it is something I have really missed over the past few weeks. What is new is that the energy bouncing exercises leave my arms, legs and body real cold, something I hadn't experienced before.

As before, when raising energy for more than twenty minutes, I feel the energy burning through my stomach, chest and throat, with tingling sensations in my hand palms, inside of wrists, elbows, armpits, genitals and around my lips and nostrils. It doesn't rise higher usually, although sometimes my brow and crown start to tingle. I guess this is normal, at his stage of the game.

The biggest challenge to come is taming my over-active and over-rational mind, which is really interfering with my practice, making negative comments, or trying to escape in entertaining chitchat. I have to keep myself from screaming "SHUDDUP! SHUT THE F*CKING HELL UP" and probably need a lot of time to shut up Mr Noisy. On the other hand, in the past I did practice meditation to empty my mind, with some success, I guess it takes some time to pick it up from where I left it. I'm currently doing the ring technique, and on the first day I made it to 90 seconds of silence, which is not too bad, I guess.

[CinStoneCity]

Week 4, just made interesting progress in taming my mind. I had already noticed how visualisations/verbalisations easily come with stray thoughts, so I abandoned these, which increased my 'empty time' to 5-10 minutes. Yesterday, for the first time I discovered how breathing in typically goes without random thoughts, breathing out is often disturbed, while the period in between is most vulnerable. Trivial as this observation may seem, it added that little extra bit of awareness to my breathing exercise, so today my mind remained empty for 21 minutes. This starts to look good!

Energy work proceeds slow, but there is progress. I usually experience glowing hand palms and foot soles throughout the day, which I interpret as a steady flow of energy building. My sub-navel storage is glowing, too. When raising energy, in addition to sensitive areas like arm pits, lips, nostrils, ears, I feel my temples glowing too. Stimulating my primary centers feels a little weak for now, with a somewhat buzzing base, and a feeling of energy in navel, solar plexus and heart. In addition, in my heart I felt the very slow pounding sensation that I felt before when meditating. I took this earlier as my heart beat slowing down dramatically, but I now understand this probably was a slowly pulsing heart centre. This is a bit of a recurring theme in energy work: many of the sensations I feel, like the buzzing base, were experienced before, but never paid attention to.

[CinStoneCity]

I'm about to complete Part I, and progress feels slow, albeit progressing. Energy work is no longer accompanied by the burning feeling of energy, so I guess some obstacles have been cleared. Every now and then, nightly practice gives me a throbbing upper lip, and elsewhere in this forums it was suggested this is a symptom of a blockade. If so, it feels like this obstacle is being cleared.

Activation primary energy centres has brought me no sensations worth mentioning, just very mild energy feeling. Not looking forward to force anything, I will leave this as is, hoping to make slow but steady progress. Not throbbing, no strobing, a mild pulsing, at best.

For the rest, I am happy with mind taming, I can keep my mind quiet for 30 minutes, which will do, for now. Trance becomes deeper with practice, I think I know what feeling to look for, although I wouldn't call it 'falling'. Body loosening was not really interesting, until today.

The exercises of bouncing and expanding beyond the physical body were easy to do, although they didn't give me a feeling of anything different. The spinning exercise was harder to do, and I found it next to impossible to spin from the right, leaving my field of vision, continuing at the left, entering. I really had to crank up my imagination to make this work, but when I managed, I not only felt the expected feeling of vertigo, but also a strong sense of floating in the air. I really expected to see myself floating above my chair when I opened my eyes, but I was still sitting. I guess this is a hopeful development.

In addition, I had the same coarse shaking sensation in my brain stem/neck I experienced before when trying out Monroe's OBE instruction. Earlier, I had seen this as a symptom of physically trying too hard, but now I wonder if it may be related to obe. Fortunately, this time I could easily take control back, and ease out of it.

Something else I noted is that with my eyes closed, even in the dark, I can see a faint shadow moving if I am waving my hand. It is too faint to recognize a hand, but there is something out there. Also, I discovered that if I close my eyes in the dark, I see faint patterns, usually attributed to my physical eye lids/retina, but this time, the patterns do not move with my eyes/head. Is this some form of astral vision developing? Any way to develop this further?

I appreciate your feedback on this...

[CFTraveler]

Activation primary energy centres has brought me no sensations worth mentioning, just very mild energy feeling. Not looking forward to force anything, I will leave this as is, hoping to make slow but steady progress. Not throbbing, no strobing, a mild pulsing, at best. Totally normal. The main chakras feel less responsive than the limbs, possibly because the nerve endings in the torso are less sensitive to sensation in itself. But if you feel anything it's because something is happening.

s

[CinStoneCity]

I experienced lots of lucid dreams through my teenage days, after which lucidity disappeared. About ten years ago I had my last lucid dream, which has always remained with me, because I figured out through logical reasoning that the situation I found myself in was a dream, and I was totally confused when it appeared my bed was empty, while I knew I was sleeping there :thumbsup:

I admit is is a little disappointing for me that MAP hasn't brought my lucid dreams back, despite me reciting my affirmations, being motivated. Part of the problem is that my affirmations don't seem to 'land' as I don't see myself doing reality checks on a regular basis, so there is definitely room for improvement. It wasn't until last night that I experienced another lucid dream, and it was a silly one, a moment of lucid stupidity, I guess.

In my dream, I had an appointment for a job interview, for which I had to travel by bus and by train. I could have known there was something dreamy going on, as my dream was staged in the house where I grew up, while I have moved almost 40 years ago, but I missed that reality check. For some reason, I missed my bus, which rides once every hour, which made it impossible for me to get on the train in time to get to the interview. While I was pondering my options, i.e. send an email, or forget about the interview, I found myself having coffee at the railway station. I immediately realized I had magically landed at the railway station I couldn't possibly get to by bus, and concluded this was a dream.

This is where the silliness kicks in. Instead of realizing the full potential of being lucid, I decided to 'wish' myself at the location of the job interview. I vaguely recall myself finding my way along confusing road signs, arriving at the reception of the office too early, while I could have flown across the Amazon to have fun, but that was something I thought up after waking up.

In a later dream the same night, I was walking a labyrinth, but instead of walking from start to finish, I was walking to and fro along a section of the path. As someone else explained to me in the dream, it is the journey, as opposed to the destination, which is important.

Let's just keep going.

[CinStoneCity]

I am taking a, hopefully, short break from the MAP program. I find it impossible to thoroughly relax my right hamstring: although I can easily relax it, tension returns in minutes, and I am back to square zero, which continuously forces my attention back to my body, breaking my calmness of mind. I suspect there is a minor knot/trigger point in said muscle, not so bad that it hurts, but it makes it impossible to deeply relax. A little massage revealed a sensitive spot, and already alleviated the problem. I guess I will extend my MAP routine with a soft massage.

[CinStoneCity]

It took me little longer than expected to work out the issue with my hamstring. Massage didn't really work, stretching didn't do it, but a modest leg exercise made the relevant muscle behave, nothing more than a slight warming up. In the meantime, I kept working on the basics of energy work, relaxation and mind clearing.

Last night I had a really confusing experience. I dreamed I fainted, and while unconscious, I had a lucid dream where I stood up straight with my arms crossed, and made myself fall backwards to induce an OBE. This worked like a charm, and I soon felt myself floating in a dark sea of energy. Despite my request for clarity, I couldn't see anything, possibly because there was nothing to see, and I could move around a little bit through will power. After a minute or so, I recovered from fainting, found myself on the floor before a coffee machine in university, and soon after that I woke up.

At first, I was really excited that I had managed to induce OBE from a lucid dream, but in retrospect I have no other choice but to conclude that I dreamed doing so. Disappointing, but interesting nevertheless...

[CinStoneCity]

Yay! Last night I experienced vibrations for the first time, and I felt how I slowly disconnected from my physical body, like a pudding slowly popping from its mold! I couldn't see anything other than darkness, though, and commands like 'vision!' and 'clarity!' didn't work. I tried to exit by climbing an imaginary rope, which moved me a little bit, without granting me a full release, but when I imagined myself floating up, all of a sudden I felt myself racing through darkness at high speed. The anticlimax came when I found myself driving a car with an ex-colleague in the passenger seat. That is, on waking up I realized the whole experience probably had been a dream, and it wasn't even a lucid dream :( Well, I guess the good news is that the notion of obe has become ingrained in my subconscious mind, deep enough to make me dream about it. Feel free to share your thoughts on this....

[CinStoneCity]

Looks like I'm not one of the lucky to master astral projection in 90 days ;o) However, I feel I'm making progress, so I will move on.

Recently, I have paid more attention to breathing, which is naturally shallow and quick for me, which doesn't seem to work when projecting. Also, I spent some time adjusting my chair to facilitate a relaxed pose where my spine is properly aligned, i.e. not sagging.

After energy work, I feel very energetic, almost electrically charged, almost like an audible hum. Yet, I feel very physical, and only rarely do I feel there is a separate body, which feels like it is about to float, a feeling that often remains for hours after.

I must say I'm a little disappointed, as I went though the complete routine, without even a single successful projection, from waking or dreaming. All that is left is the need to debug myself, and to keep trying, without a clue as to what works or not. I would love to have someone guiding me through, but know of no one to help me out. I would appreciate a little encouragement here...