Balancing at the Border of Sleep

Why?

Very often an incapability to start an OBE is reported, though several indications like vibrations or sounds have been registered. In some cases the reason is stated in excitement in front of the desired experience. In some cases too much concentration and observation leads to total wakefulness. In all these situations a balance at the border of sleep would be the best way as counteraction to the hindrances. That's the reason why I find the following hints are as important.

Even when "half sleep" methods are practiced, the hints are very useful, because the influences of the surrounding are continually changing and have to be balanced by other features. At the other hand, if the balance does not work, all attempts to start an OBE are ending in sleep or total wakefulness.

A list of hints

Depending from the body position - lying flat or sitting more or less upright - I learned to trigger the degree of awareness. Naturally the more flat the position was, the stronger was the tendency to fall asleep.

A second parameter on the awake-sleep scale, I recognized, is the body temperature. Coolness is activating, but if I got cold feet or a hot head, I stayed awake and got stuck in a long thread of thoughts. If the body was kept too comfortably warm, I tended to fall asleep.

A shift towards sleep at day or a shift towards alertness at night, could be accomplished by the degree of brightness of light. This can be balanced by using a dim lamp at night (as it may be switched on in REM-sleep to support LD's, as I have read in some reports and by blindfolding, when trying OBE´s in daytime. The latter procedure is less important for me since I got independent from daylight by turning my eyeballs upwards.

The time of day plays a role as well. If I am called to start exercises by means of an alarmclock, in the initial hours of sleeptime, I tend to fall asleep immediately, whereas conditions are better in the early morning. My first OBE's I had by chance, when I extended sleeptime on Saturday or Sunday into the late morning. This favoured obviously the occurence of LD's and OBE's. "Professionals" try to increase the frequency of OBE's and therefore want to train throughout the week. In this case they are to start OBE's in night time. Since one tends to fall asleep at that time, it is useful to counteract by taking a seat in an armchair. I have had good results with this kind of arrangement and can better concentrate at night.

Exercises Which Might Help

My OBE-ing does not always turn out as well as I would like. Success is going up and down. There are some reasons for this frustrating unsteadiness. These reasons are found in distraction and energetic constitution, in times of slipshod inner discipline. I won't state that inner discipline is absolutely necessary, but it helps. Anyhow, if I have some kind of inner electricity, OBE's are facilitated. To follow some advices listed below might be useful to others as well.

Control and guide of thoughts and emotions. Even a partial control is of good influence.

Practicing a selfmade European version of Yoga, I have found, that quite a lot of Yoga-exercises were supporting LD's and OBE's. Among the best ones are body-energizing, body-awareness and visualization. For OBE's in the sense of "stepping out", the best exercises, I have found, are those in which you are concentrated on body processes. This prevents you to drift away by any dreamlike pictures. Pictures very easily tend to consume your attention and they let you drop into ordinary dreams, whereas there is nothing of interest, which would distract you from exercising, if your attention is directed on slow motions or vibrations in the range of deep sounds felt in abdomen or breast. At present I prefer this kind of exercise. Several years ago, my central exercise was concentration on warmth-feeling, starting from the feet and going upwards or circling through the whole body (except the head). Besides warmth a second possibility was the imagination of energy circling in the body.

Another helpful exercise, as I have heard from friends, is Eutonie, a train of feeling-imagination-exercises concerning body inspection. These friends had their first OBE's spontaneously, when performing these exercises, without ever having heard about OBE's before.

There had been several requests concerning Eutonie and I was searching in the net to find some articles about. Nothing was to be found. Eutonie seems to be a method, which still is tought in some parts of Germany, but no longer in Austria, France or Canada, as in years before - thus it seems a more and more forgotten practice.

A short explanation about the method of Eutonie:
Eutonie is based on sensory awareness: you try to get an intense feeling of your skin, inch for inch, reviving your body surface by this way. If you have done this first step you deepen your feeling of your muscles, venes etc. and at last that of your bones, such reviving your whole body.

As a next step in Eutonie is tought to extend your awareness outside of your body, feeling the aura of other persons.

Sorry, no further and no more detailed information is available to me. (I do not know any address or link at that field)
 

Letter from Laura (7 Sep 2000)
Greetings from Canada!

My name is Laura and I am a massage-therapy student in Quebec City. I was reading a portion of your page about eutonie and decided to help you dispell a though ot the practicies of eutonie in Canada-it is still done.

I am in a class of all blind students and eutonie is part of our course curriculum. I have only had one session so far but it has thus been really amazing!

Eutonie is done with a psychologist or psychotherapist and places can be found here and there throughtout the province and probably the country so Canada IS still practicing it!-if anything, even more than before. (smile)

See: EUTONIE GERDA ALEXANDER
(Unfourtunately it is only in French but if you play through the links long enough, you will find contact info for people in Quebec).

The University of Laval in Quebec city is offering the courses as well, the professor offers private classes. Their membership, while small, seems to be growing and I am sure that she would be eager to train people in the US and other parts of Canada in order to help "spread the science". I have no idea of what her fees may be but her e-mail address is included somewhere.
Warm regards,
Laura

As mentioned above, currently I prefer exercising on vibrations. In days I can´t feel vibrations, I try to produce body motions in the range of 0,5 to 4 Hz (cps). If I can´t produce them for any reason, I imagine rocking in the frequency of about 1 Hz. When using too slow body movements, I can´t keep up concentration and drift away very soon. Visualization helped to some extent to perform astral projection, but was of no use for etheric OBE's.

OBE Letter 404 .... How do you measure your HZ?
I am quoting you: "I try to produce body motions in the range of 0,5 to 4 Hz (cps)."

.... These body motions are "measured" by observing the heart beat frequency (assuming that the heart beat has aproximately 1 Hz).

Usually the body starts to swing by its own, if two factors are fulfilled:
1) good relaxation - so that your body is soft like a pudding to be able to wobble.
2) the deckchair or whatever you use may not be hard but kept elastically by metallic springs, so that it is able to come into resonance with the body.

Being at the border state (sleep/awake), additional increasing these observation by imagination, you can let your subtle body come out of alignment to the physical, causing a body separation (partly sensory deprivation, partly desorientation of sensory awareness).

The origin of this kind of body movement is, citation of Bentov: "The regular movement of the body indicates that a standing wave is set up in the vascular system, specifically in the aorta." (see: "OBE Related Phenomena")

 
-- Alfred Ballabene (alfred.ballabene@univie.ac.at)

Copyright © 1995 (rev.1997), Alfred Ballabene. All rights reserved.