Yesterday evening I did the complete E-E program as usual. Things felt different yesterday; there was a feeling as of Eiriu-Eolas leading me to, or opening me to, a great, deep and strong river or current - a feeling of something strong and supportive. It felt to me slightly threatening, or perhaps I should say impersonal and therefore threatening to the narcissistic mind. But it was within me and therefore personal as well! It’s rather difficult to capture the essence of the experience in words.
nicklebleu said:
The other day when sleeping in a communal room (thus unable to do the whole breathing exercise) I tried to do the "Prayer of the Soul" by myself - and I REALLY STRUGGLED!
I don't think that I managed to finish the prayer more than once without loosing the thread - often I "zoned out" and didn't remember where I had drifted off. I tried real hard to concentrate on the sequence of the verses, but to no avail ...
Has anyone had a similar experience? It is kind of frustrating - I am normally quite able to focus, but in this respect I fail abysmally ...
Same here. I love the Prayer of the Soul. I get into bed for the meditative portion of Eiriu-Eolas and I usually fall asleep to it. But like you nicklebleu, I find that if try to do it without Laura’s voice, I lose the thread after two or three lines. I really want to do it but find myself zoning out. And this has increased the more that I do the prayer.
I find that as soon as I start with the first line – O Divine Cosmic Mind – my breathing immediately becomes deep and slow. Although I like to lie down when working with the prayer, it is easier to keep my focus I do it sitting. The prayer seems to create a space in my mind, a feeling of being deeper inside myself, if that makes sense.
I don’t have any great emotional or other experiences during the program, all such experiences are happening at other times. I don’t get any tingling during the bioenergetic breathing, although I do zone out a lot in that portion. I don’t know where I go when I zone out, but I tend to snap back with a slight feeling of panic.
I wonder, though, if the zoning out is something to do with childhood dissociation. I have very very few memories of my childhood, certainly nothing like the sense of a lived childhood. According to Martha Stout this is caused by dissociation as a child, and this dissociation was my way of surviving the narcissistic family in which I grew up. This means that my real feeling self, which was denied as a child and cannot now be remembered, is relegated to some currently inaccessible part of my psyche, and gives rise to various programs, compulsive reactions and so on. So, my idea is that when I am zoning out, I am ‘dissociating’ from my normal day-to-day consciousness, but re-entering that original childhood world of feeling which to my adult self is dark, unknown and very difficult to perceive. Consequently as an adult, this is experienced as ‘going away’, and only becoming aware of zoning out when I return.
This is a working hypothesis at present and may be wide of the mark. I came to this idea while I was considering my inability to remember my childhood and where those memories went. Although I dissociated for the greater part of my childhood, the dissociated state was still a part of me, and so those memories should be stored somewhere in my psyche, osit. I think that the key to re-integrating myself is to somehow gain access to those walled-off memories, and I’m hoping Eiriu-Eolas is that key. It certainly seems to be so far!
There's a setting in the database that can't be edited from the forum software itself. And it doesn't take DST into account. Fortunately, it's fixed now and should automatically work nicely even with DST changes.
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