Here is what I usually do:
1) Remain Calm. As hard as it is in the beginning, it's important that you don't get too excited. Just reassure yourself mentally that you have complete trust and faith in the experience, and to "just go with it."
2) Once you find yourself separated, take 3 deep astral breaths. As the air comes into your astral body, imagine yourself getting more lucid and strong within your environment. Sometimes having an OBE feels like getting out of bed with a hangover...things are fuzzy, hard to control, etc. You have to have a CLEAR HEAD to have a clear experience, and taking these astral breaths help.
3) In the beginning, don't try and fly anywhere! This is just my own personal rule, which doesn't have to be followed. The reason why I have this rule is because in the beginning, flying from point A to point B is a surefire way to lose control and end up back in bed.
I suggest that you just explore your own environent. In the beginning of my astral journeys, when I would separate and find myself in my bedroom, I would walk out of my house and just explore around the area. No need to try and fly to some foreign country, or the API. There is plenty to do within the confines of your neighborhood. You could stop and talk to astral entities walking around, or jump on top of your roof and see the surrounding neighborhood from a birds perspective, etc.
The more of these local experiences you have, the easier you begin to control the overall OBE experience in general....so in the future, you WILL be able to fly from point A to point B without losing control.
Thanks for the advice Jeff. I'll be sure to do that the next time I get out.
To remain calm when you are suddenly out of body is very tricky ...
What has helped me, is using "affirmation" type statements whenever I practise. The first few times, I either panicked or got too excited when out of body. As a result I began saying to myself things like "When I get out of body, I WILL remain relaxed"...Repeating these statements may hammer it into your conciousness so that when you do find yourself out of body, it'll be the 1st thing that comes to mind.
Worked for me anyway !
Hey Makaveli,
I agree with Jeff when he says you shouldnt try to teleport or go anywhere far away from your home/neighborhood.. I sometimes find that going farther away from my body for some reason makes it harder to maintain focus but maybe its just something stuck in my subconsious making that happen...
One thing I do that helps me maintain focus even when I'm being sucked back into my body is to start at something and mentally repeat something over and over liek "stay out , I want to stay out , I'm out of body and in control," just keep repeating that until you feel like you can relax a bit and when you feel yourself losing it , immediately stare at something again such as.. a floortile , a wall , something simple and repeat that in your mind. I've done this a lot in class when I felt myself being sucked back into my body like a vaccuum .. staring at something sort of made the tugging feeling go away as well as making my mind clearer for the experience.
If anyone is having trouble flying OBE like I used to.. I also found that if you stare at something a certain way while OBE , I sort of .. float there.. if it is eye level to me , I'll just glide there along the gound as long as I dont take focus away from what im staring at.. if it is in the sky or on the ceiling up high , I stare at it as much as I can without moving my eyes and I float there.. Its a more stable flight than just trying to fly like a bird.. its like theres a line I create with me and the object and I just get yanked along on the line.
That may sound weird but I tried to fly a few times when I got out of body and felt gravity =P Until I started experimenting with focusing on objects , I wasnt able to overcome astral gravity! Have fun , I hope this helps anyone :) ( Astral teleportation trouble might be solved in a similar fashion- I had/have trouble with that also still )
What are the best things to do to properly maintain control of an AP starting at separation? Also what are the best ways go about reentry so you remember clearly?
I had gone through several months being afraid of the vibrations and never going through with it but for some reason I seem to be mostly over that now. In the last 4 days I've been able to separate 3 times. The problem I'm having is that I keep losing control of the entire experience and doing stupid stuff that ruins it. When out I would like to get clarity first then properly explore without emotions getting in the way and maybe go somewhere like API. Once I get out for some reason I do nothing to try and stabilize the experience and end up focusing my attention on useless things and mentally creating LD type stuff. I'm also having problems with my astral vision fading a lot, reality fluctuations, and the memories aren't too clear but I'm guessing that this is because I can't properly control the experience yet. For me now staying unemotional and objective in the astral is much harder then separating.
One example of when I lost control was this morning. Once I started separating I was getting worried because I thought I sensed a fan in the room then this lead to me feeling one blowing on me and I was blind and being sucked away. I briefly got vision and there was a reality fluctuation of a baseball bat sticking in the middle of my bed. When that was over I don't remember exactly what happened but my attention got fixed on mentally creating a gun to have when out. I couldn't see and wasn't creating anything but I couldn't get my attention off of this so it ruined the experience and I woke up.