Awakened Mind

Lucid dreaming is a unique process that can be leveraged for spiritual and personal growth. It’s fascinating in and of itself, too, as we’ll see in a moment. In this article you’ll read about what lucid dreaming is, how to do it, and how to make it into a growth practise.

 What Is Lucid Dreaming?

First of all, what is lucid dreaming? In brief, lucid dreaming is when you realise that you are dreaming while you are still dreaming. When this happens, you gain the ability to control your dream rather than cycle through a seemingly externally-prepared script. Your ability to remember the dream (dream recall) usually goes up too, which is convenient, because lucid dreams are worth remembering.

The glory of lucid dreaming is in the details. Within a lucid dream you have a huge, if not infinite, power to control what happens, rather like Neo after he gains his powers in the Matrix. You can conjure up almost any situation you can imagine, practise mind-over-matter skills, fly, have sex, have a conversation with your own subconscious, and so on. If it were a game, it’d be like playing in “cheat mode”.

 How To Lucid Dream

How to lucid dream? Lucid dreaming occasionally happens spontaneously, though it’s most fun when you can take the reigns of the process and get it to happen more often.

One of the first things you can do to start lucid dreaming, and one of the most simple, is to simply *decide* to. That is, take a moment to address your subconscious, or your inner being, or your deepest self, and simply say, “I experience lucid dreams more and more frequently from now on.” Try and feel the truth of those words.

Use any means you feel drawn to to make sure that your inner being fully receives the message. You could meditate on those words and try and go very deep within yourself so that they will be fully received. You could repeat them once every morning as part of your waking up ritual. Or you could use self hypnosis or get a friend to hypnotise you. Don’t worry if you don’t know how to do all of these things; just pick something that works for you.

This is not necessarily the most effective method, though. There are many different methods for creating lucid dreams. A full list is beyond the scope of this article, but for now, we’ll explain the most important one: the reality check.

 
photo credit: h.koppdelaneyReality Checks

A reality check is when you ask yourself, “am I dreaming right now?” – and, for effectiveness, you make a test.

You need to make a test when you ask yourself that question because when you are dreaming, you never *feel like* you’re dreaming. Pink elephants could be jumping around on pogo sticks, but in a dream this will just feel normal.

One of the most popular tests – almost a cliché – is to pinch yourself. In a dream, you won’t feel any pain from it. You can also try moving things with your mind to see if you are able, or look closely at the scenery to see if it shifts around a lot.

To start getting lucid dreams, you’ll want to start doing reality checks as frequently as possible in your everyday life. Once you start doing that, inevitably you’ll eventually do a reality check within a dream.

Instead of testing reality, you can also do this simple powerful technique: look at your hand. Looking at your hand is hard to do in a dream and when you manage it, it will normally jar you into lucidity. In real life, it can also be a good meditation to cultivate wakefulness.

 Lucid Dreaming For Spiritual And Personal Growth

Lucid dreaming is an excellent tool for personal and spiritual growth.

For one thing, it is, in a way, an experience of an alternate sort of reality; and, in the same way as perception altering drugs, it can be a gateway to questioning your experience and finding new insights into reality itself.

There are a lot of parallels between lucid dreaming, which can be thought of as “waking up” to the reality of your dream, and spiritual awakening. In real life, as with dreaming, you can often go through the motions automatically, doing everything in a reactive mode, and your presence as a conscious being in the whole pattern is almost irrelevant. On the other hand, you can “wake up” within either the dream or real life, and then a whole new dimension of options are open to you.

The unquestioned reality of the dream or life itself comes into question. Things are viewed in a more humorous light, as it’s understood that nothing really matters and there is no real danger out there. And the very understanding of the behind-the-scenes mechanics of the reality you are living in – be it a dream or real life – gives you a greater control of what happens. In particular, understanding the nature of real-life reality lets you take advantage of such things as the Law of Attraction. A lucid dream can give you a taste of what it’s like to wake up to such an understanding of things.

 Lucid Dreaming For Personal Exploration

Lucid dreaming also provides an incredibly rich sand-box for your personal exploration.

If you are experiencing a dream which has a significance for your growth and become lucid in the middle of it, it’s actually possible to decipher the meaning of the dream while you’re still in it. Your ability to think clearly while still experiencing the dream clearly will give you an excellent perspective to do so. You can even ask the dream what it means: either conjure up an avatar which represents the dream and ask it questions, or directly address yourself to the different elements of the dream (including objects) and ask them to explain themselves.

You can also conjure up situations that let you practise skills or work out how you feel about different things. For instance, if you’re thinking of going through a change in style you could conjure up a mirror and look at yourself while dressing in different items of clothing and seeing how it feels. Or you could put yourself into a situation where you felt helpless before in real life, and go through different permutations of that scene until you’ve worked out a response you feel good with.

photo credit: TomCollinsLucid Dreaming For Self Evaluation

Finally, a lucid dream can give you two important indicators as to your growth. First, the amount of light and space you have within your dream represents the amount of spiritual “light” you have in you at that moment, that is, your level of consciousness. This will, of course, vary from night to night, but looking at the general tendency of your dreams in this respect will give you an idea of your progress.

Second, your image in a mirror is your self-image. If you have self-love issues, they will be impossible to ignore here: you will look ugly, even distorted, no matter how you look in real life. If this is your case, take it as a sign to make a real effort to improve in this area, and check back in a lucid dream every few months to see your progress.

Lucid dreaming is a powerful and fascinating experience. Seeing as you’ll spend 1/3 of your life dreaming anyway, it just makes a lot of sense to take advantage of this time to enjoy yourself and work on your spiritual growth!

Stress in the workplace is something most people have to deal with, particularly if they work in a hectic environment with quick deadlines, long hours, and competitive co-workers. Although this kind of corporate stress is perfectly normal, it can have detrimental effects on a company’s overall productivity once it soars to higher levels. This is the reason many companies today are starting to take a very proactive stance against the rise of stress in the workplace.
photo credit: stevensimbox

For many years, companies tried to relieve corporate stress by holding regular team-building seminars and other similar activities for their employees. These days, however, such activities don’t seem to be enough. Many big companies today have taken corporate stress management to an entirely new level by installing recreation and relaxation facilities for their employees right inside the office building. Take Google, for instance. If you visit the Google headquarters (nicknamed Googleplex) in Mountain View, California, you’ll see things such as massage chairs, pool tables, foosball, ping pong tables, volleyball courts, and gyms where employees can attend dance and yoga classes. The funny thing is that with all these amenities that seem to encourage laziness, Google has some of the most productive employees in the world today, according to BusinessInsider.com. The lesson is simple: if employees are allowed to work in a stress-free environment, their productivity levels will rise considerably.

If you are running a company and you want to see such results in your own workplace, a great way to begin is to encourage your employees to take part in regular yoga sessions. This age-old meditative practice is one of the best ways to combat stress, whether in the workplace or in other areas. Instead of taking your entire staff on time-consuming and potentially expensive out-of-town team-building workshops, hire a yoga expert to instruct them on the best techniques they can use to conquer work-related stress instead. You can even have one of your conference rooms converted into a yoga center where your employees can relax and de-stress anytime they want during the workday.
photo credit: adifansnet

Even if you can’t provide your staff with a separate room dedicated to yoga and meditation, the concepts and techniques you can introduce to them will still be useful in helping them deal with their own work-related stress. This is because most yoga exercises can be done practically everywhere — while sitting on an office chair, standing in the elevator, or waiting in line at the office cafeteria. The most useful yoga techniques that can be used to relieve corporate stress are breathing exercises like Vinolum and Anulem. When done properly, such yoga exercises can help clear up an employee’s thinking process and enable him to focus fully on the task at hand regardless of how many distractions there may be around. Other popularly used techniques include the Hatha yoga and the Yogic Kriyas.

In addition to being an effective stress reliever, yoga also brings a lot of advantages to a person’s physical and mental wellbeing. So by introducing your employees to yoga, you will not only be increasing their productivity but boosting their overall health as well.

To actually stop thinking entirely is quite a masterful spiritual achievement which few have experienced; however in this article we will go over several tips which will help you get out of your head and into your senses wherever you are on your path.

Why Stop Thinking?

First of all, why stop thinking? Many spiritual teachers talk of a state of no-mind where there is no thinking at all. This is supposed to be a very lucid state where your attention is solely in your senses and your own being. A greater wisdom than normal thinking arises from this. This is because thinking is often compulsive and disconnected from the real world; yet when we meditate we can connect to a deep sense of perspective and gain a ground of intelligence or “common sense” upon which to base our thinking.

Apart from gaining better clarity, when we stop thinking we are also brought closer to the sensations of the body. This allows us to feel an underlying sense of pleasure at mere existence which most miss and which actually makes pain more tolerable. When we stop thinking we reach a level of being where we are often much healthier and better adapted to life too, which reduces the suffering we go through.

Thinking

photo credit: JavierPsilocybin

How To Stop Thinking

Meditation is often recommended to stop thinking, as are zen exercises such as koans. These are very helpful. You can pick and choose the spiritual practise you want to incorporate into your daily life. If you are a beginner, however, probably the most powerful introduction into the path of spiritual refinement would be to to start up a daily meditation routine.

Recommendations about the length of time to meditate vary, though it’s usually best to think about starting with how ever many minutes a day you can do in a sustainable manner. 5 minutes, for instance, is fine. The key word here is sustainable – with a lot of self discipline many can meditate for an hour but if you can’t keep up the habit you won’t see long term results. Slow but steady is definitely better in this case, and as with weight training you will find that your ability to meditate for long periods steadily improves.

Mindfulness Meditation, the most basic meditation which goes by many names, involves observing the breath. Allow your attention to simply rest at the point where your breath enters the nostril, and observe as the breath moves in and out. Do not worry about how to stop thinking. If you realise you are thinking, be glad that you have realised, because that means that your consciousness has cleared again, and return to focusing on your breath.

If you scold yourself for thinking, stop it. The actual best way to stop thinking is to not resist it – but rather to focus on those things you would focus on if you were not thinking. In Mindfulness Meditation this is the breath. In the rest of your life this could be the sensations of the body, your feelings, your perceptions, and the real world.

The many different ways to stop thinking are too numerous to list here, so find some spiritual books and study them with an open mind. For beginners, The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle is highly recommended for learning how to stop thinking.

Learning how to stop thinking is a long quest, but a worthy one. With proper guidance and a regular spiritual practise, achievement may come faster than you expect.

Thanks to the stress and strain that we are inflicting on our bodies, the majority of us need some kind of relaxation treatment so that we can recover what we have lost. Meditation seems to be emerging as one of the most effective relaxation treatments there is.

Why do we meditate?

Often Meditation is used so that we can remove ourselves from the present situation that we find ourselves in and begin to concentrate on a feeling of nothingness. When we meditate, or concentrate on this nothingness, we are able to remove ourselves from the present and begin to rise above all the things that are bothering us, this in turn removes all the pent up stress we have making us more relaxed and in tune with ourselves.

photo credit: alicepopkorn

But I find it hard to meditate, is there something that can help me ?

Frequencies surround us all the time forming the world around us. While are involved in our daily activities we are present in the Beta frequency. When we meditate we transfer over to the alpha state, which is a much more advanced state. Most people will find it hard to break into this alpha state without a lot of time and practice.

When you do finally break into this alpha zone you may find it hard to stay there for a long period of time and you may fall straight into the Delta Zone which is associated with sleep. Therefore, the idea of meditation is to be able to stay in the Alpha zone for an extended period of time to achieve a refreshing meditation session.

Now that we know what is needed to achieve a meditative state how can we actually obtain it ?

This is where Binaural Beat Recordings can help you achieve this. Even if you have never tried to meditate before or find it hard to, binaural recordings can help you reach the alpha zone easily and effectively keep you there.

The binaural beats will help you fall straight into the Alpha zone, where you can begin meditating almost immediately. You can play these recordings at any time with headphones or on your stereo and quickly find yourself in a refreshing state of blissfulness.