The following list will exemplify eleven experiments you can make use of immediately. Make use of them to experience–now–the reality of your situation, regardless of how it may currently appear before your eyes. If you make these experiments, please leave a note in the comment section and tell me about your results.
Here we go, in the order my unconscious has decided upon:
1. The Gag Reflex. See my youtube video and other posts on the gag reflex.
2. Stare into your own eyes in a mirror while breathing deeply. Continue for up to an hour or longer.
3. Remember, right now, your whole body. Feel it fully.
4. Dive into your discomforts and reclaim the power you have invested in them. Recognize all bodily sensations as evidence of your vast power.
5. Make a list of traits about yourself. Do the opposite of each of the traits until you stop having ideas about yourself.
6. Remove all to be verbs from your writing, speech, and thought. If you don’t remove them, at least notice when they arise. Meditate on what it means to be.
7. Challenge your deepest feelings about your parents. If you have grown estranged from them, make friends again. If you see them all the time and you allow them to run your life, estrange yourself from them. Initiate arguments, disagreements, and finally, break away for awhile.
8. Enjoy your own sexuality and sensuality as you wish. If you notice discomforts, recognize them as signs of your vast power, your aliveness.
9. Learn something new right now. Find a tutorial on e-how or youtube that demonstrates how to do something you don’t know how to do. Practice until you get good at it. Repeat with new skill, ad infinitum.
10. Laugh at everything, especially when you don’t feel like it.
11. Enjoy everything. Yes, everything. Some have referred to this as: Say Yes to Life. Take a moment to explore the word, enjoy. Think of yourself as a teabag that will infuse the waters of reality all around you. With what will you infuse it? Allow me to suggest joy as an option. Bring joy from within you into your experiences, even the most difficult ones. Watch things transform around you.
To become yourself, enjoy yourself as you find yourself right now. Abandon all ideas about who you are. Stop thinking about yourself, and live. Gawd has no attributes.
Enjoy,
-Garrett Daun
Garrett, thanks for the powerful list.
When I first heard about (and started doing) the gagging exercises from Willis' Reichian Therapy book I felt like I was doing' somethin' forbidden or something, but after some (weeks and months of) practice they get easier and have a profoundly enlivening effect. Now, having some experience of practicing them, it's amusing that I found the idea so disturbing. And so it goes.
The eye exercises I find a lot more challenging, however.
Peace. And keep up the good work!
Yes, this is similar to many people's experience with the exercises presented here. Thanks so much for sharing your experiences here.