this post has nothing to do w/ my puppy

[Tom]

The alexander technique is helpful for neck problems. The neck is the most important part of the system, as everyone has problems with this body part. The top of the spine can be found easily. If you put the tips of your index fingers to your ears, you are pointing at it. Most of the time for most people, the top of the neck is thrown forward and the head is tilted back relative to the top of the spinal column. The muscles of the back of the neck are holding your head up, and your head weighs about 15 pounds. That is a lot even if I don't know how many kilograms that is. It doesn't take long for the consequences to set in. Everything is connected to the neck. Posture, breathing, and then your energy body and mind. The worst part is that even with mirrors set up it is difficult to correct on your own. It took F. M. Alexander several years to fix his own problems, and then he moved from Australia to England to teach other people. I had a few lessons. They helped a lot. Time and money limitations kept me from continuing my lessons. There is only one teacher in the state where I live, and this teacher happens to live in the same city where I live. Convenient, but expensive. It was not like she had much competition.

[fredhedd]

i did some reading and found a place in new jersey that teaches the technique.  that's only about two hours away from where i am so i m going to make an apppt for next week.  

the more i analyze the problem, the more i feel that it has something to do w/ my breathing.  i believe it may be those little tendons or whatever they are that are on the front of your neck near your collarbone, tensing up when they  don't have to be.  this was happening so subtly that i was tricking myself into believing that i was completely relaxed.  i confirmed this somewhat by placing my hands on those areas and kind of massaging them or just letting the weight of my hands aleviate some of the pressure that i thought was there.  it helped a little but not all the way.

all of his may be due to the habitual way i've been breathing.  i've always thought that i breathed correctly.  i've been meditating for a decent amount of time and feel great when doing it.  this book i have been reading about breathing has shown me that most people breathe incorrectly and don't even know it.  it shows how many diseases and illnesses are contributed to, if not cause by breathing incorrectly.  the one that caught my eye was heart atttacks and disease.  i don't recall exactly what was written but it read something like 'one of the major veins coming back to the heart passes directly through the diaphragm, and if it's not allowed to contract and expand properly it constricts this vein.'  this is just one of the aspects of how poor breathing can affect  people.  

i would suggest some breathing research to anyone who doesnt know for sure that they are breathing correctly.  most people don't know.

the alexander technique,  i'm sure will prove useful even if it doesnt fix my problem.

fred

[Tom]

The alexander technique will address correct breathing as well. Anything you do by using your body will be made more effective and with less effort. Unfortunately it takes many lessons and much time. It is a gradual process.

[fredhedd]

this morning i was able to slip into a light trance state after waking.  i concentrated hard on relaxing those little tendons at the base of my neck.  this seems to have been the problem, but i thought i had this thing pegged a few different times.  this makes more sense the more i think about it though, and i'd like to offer what i think the explanation is so it doesnt happen to anyone else.

during the first few months of my energy/trance work i didnt try to project.  during this time i was able to slip into any level of trance i wanted to w/out a problem. i was so excited when i was trying to project that  during my proj. attempts i was having a problem keeping my physical body totally relaxed.  at the point of seperation i kept moving my body in the direction i was trying to project.  i was having trouble drawing the line between a mental and a physical action.  i was doing this ever so slightly w/ my  neck, and some of the time i didn't notice it for ten or fifteen minutes.  the result was a gradual build up of tension on those little tendons at the base of my neck.  i don't believe i strained them but i do believe that i trained them to tense up while i was in trance or trying to project.  

this was happening so slowly that i didn't notice it and ever since then anytime i tried to settle into  a trance they would react the same way.  this felt normal to me because i hadnt noticed it before and thought i was completely relaxed and thought i was just progressing through the stages and had found another problem along the way.

recently i had thought that this neck tension problem was due to poor breathing.  i did some research on correct breathing tek's and found out that most people breathe incorrectly.  i posted something about it in the chat forum and recommend reading it.  after some reviewing of my own breathing process i concluded that i wasn't breathing incorrectly but could have been breathing more deeply.  when i applied the new breathing tek to my trance work it seemed to help w/ my neck tension a little.  i believe this was due to just moving some of the tension downwards.  

robert mentions in ad that the most common problem when trying to settle into a trance state is deep physical relaxation.  i thought i was totally relaxed because i had been during the first few months.  i'm going to spend some time later trying to reach a full trance state.  if i'm successful this would definetly prove to  have been the problem.   it would be nice if this helped someone else out as well  and i'll keep you posted.

fred

[fredhedd]

i've waited as long as i could to post this problem i've been having.  i wanted to be able to kind of do it on my own.  i'm not impatient and have been doing a great job at not being discouraged by my reversal in progress, but i am done being stubborn and would like to get past this.

the first few months that i started to do any type of obe practice  i was able to settle into a nice trance state w/ in about ten minutes of me sitting down. i've been in a deep trance several times also.  after three months or so i started to progressively lose my ability to enter a trance state completely.  i was able to get my entire body except for my neck in the trance state w/ in ten minutes, no matter how long i've waited.

i've tried various different positions and relaxation tek's.  i've never had any problems w/ my neck.  it doesnt feel like muscle tension but more similar to an uncomfortable feeling around the base of my neck.  if you lifted your chest up as high as you could and breathed in hard and fast until you felt a stabbing or a pinching pain at the base of your neck, where there is a gap in between your collar bones, you would have a good idea on what it feels like.  this feeling spreads up towards my chin slightly the deeper i relax. recently i've been noticing that my breathing affects this feeling somewhat,and vice versa.  

i believe i'm already a deep breather.  i've been meditating for quite some time now and have learned how to breathe the right way because of it.   i just picked up a book on breathing to make sure that i m doing that correctly.  i've noticed that when i exaggerate the deep breathing that's done when you try and fill the lower part of your diaphram up instead of the top of your lungs, that it has taken the uncomfortable feeling and moved it down some towards the middle of my chest.  sometimes it goes  away completely for a few seconds, which lets me slip into a full trance state momentarily, before the feeling arises again and pulls me back out of it.

i believe this breathing book i picked up today is going to help me w/ this some, but i m not sure that this is the only problem.  i believe that this is the last obstacle i have to overcome to be able to project consciously consistently.  i feel that i'm  overdeveloped in all of the other areas of oobe compared to me being able to reach this trance state now.  my energy work is going exceptionally well thanks to tom, who has been attuning me, and the few recent times that i've been out have felt great.  those times that i have projected have been from waking up into the symptons of projection.  the last three times have been from me lying on my side.  the vibes don't scare me at all and i don't even have to use a prj tek.  as soon as i want to get out i  pop out.

i know this doesnt sound like one of the normal prj problems but any thoughts at  all would be appreciated.

fred