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Discussion
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I've posted here about how I was doing the gateway tapes before, had a freaky experience, and stopped doing them. For those who are familiar with the tapes, I was working on wave 1 aiming towards focus 10 state which is mind awake, body asleep. I definitely felt relaxed during meditations and saw some funky stuff but I never achieved the mind awake, body asleep state. Once I had the weird turkey gobble experience I immediately noped out of the tapes and haven't done them since. I will not be doing the tapes again for the forseeable future, if ever, and won't be doing ANY meditation until I feel confident in my ability to protect myself.
My ultimate goal is self-healing, not to flirt with anything dangerous.
Here's the thing though. Even though I haven't done the tapes for a few days, I still had an experience. When I woke up this morning it was just my mind. It was like, I was asleep, and then my mind switched on, but my body stayed asleep. And I was like… "oh, this is what I was working towards before. This is what it feels like." I wasn't scared, and nothing happened. I did have some dark visual still imagery of a lot of people in a state of movement. The images would flash in and out, each lasting for half a second or so, no colour. I got the sense that I was seeing images of an old-timey battle.
I feel like a bit of an idiot because I knew I should just wake my body up and shut it down because I'm still in the research part of learning to protect myself. I don't know why I didn't just shut it down. I was feeling very, very relaxed. But in all honesty my mind was alert enough to be going, "You know what to do, just do it" and for some reason I wanted to hang on. I stayed in it for what I'm guessing was around 15 minutes. It's hard to know as my sense of time wasn't great but it wasn't too long.
Anyways I was feeling like a bit of an ass given the reality check over the past couple days and thinking to myself I need to maybe implement something quick before bed that I can do easily (I really struggle with visualization and it can tip me into an mecfs flare because I'm unstable at the moment after too much meditating). I'm not Catholic or religious at all but when I was a kid I went to a catholic school and I know TLP mostly by heart. I figured maybe that would be a good stopgap method before bed? I started looking it up, and was getting flickers behind my eyes that I used to get during trauma processing via EMDR. It also happens when I'm about to cry, or throw up, etc.
Then I was thinking, you know, my time at that school was pretty awful so maybe I should choose something I have better associations with. My grandparents were old school mennonites and the kindest people you'll ever meet. I have many positive associations with mennonite culture in the 80s and 90s (which is v different from today, at least in my area, where unfortunately their churches have become political– I don't want to bring up politics here but it involves "freedom", covid denialism, and heteronormativity). At the heart of the menno religion is pacifism and loving your neighbour and my grandparents not only talked the talk, they walked the walk. They were amazing. My grandma passed in 1989 or 90 and my grandpa passed in 2009.
Anyways I ended up looking up some mennonite prayers while in the bath, hoping to find something I recognize. I didn't, but something happened where I just started to cry. I cried probably for about 20 minutes in the bath, missing my grandparents, thinking of them, appreciating how kind-hearted these prayers were and also just so sad at the state of things today. But I was also thinking religion has always been used as an excuse for people to persecute each other. I was still crying when I came out of the bath and my husband came and rubbed my back while I cried some more and talked with him about it. He's a staunch materialist but supportive of me.
This has been a novel… sorry about that. I guess I'm just confused. I've been confused for the past year almost, with some periods of time more acutely confusing. Right now I'm really quite confused about what's going on with me. If anyone has any insight they feel like sharing (if they made it through this long AF post) I'd be very interested to hear it.
edit: added detail and wanted to add that yesterday I ordered Psychic Witch from Amazon, also yesterday evening and for a couple hours today I was on youtube learning about multiple protection methods as visualizing is a challenge at the moment
