by some stroke of luck i managed to get a free appointment with biofeedback… I’ll let you all know how it goes, I really hope they can teach me to enter meditative trances.
also, I had a nice ambien trip, but they would only prescribe me 3 pills, and referred me to counseling for relaxation techniques (told them I have sleeping problems, which is not really untrue) so… i got a nice ambien trip and access to free biofeedback equipment…
hoorah.
okay, this thing is nifty, it’s not relating to brainwaves but it measures skin temperature on your finger.
i found that when i induced a brief wave of … “deepening” the temperature rose… the higher the temp the more relaxed you are, and that is legit.
I asked her to ask if she could order me a small neurofeedback thing, she said she’d ask her boss…
anyway, so i just had a session, first was sitting up…
1:33 - 1:37 starting temp 88.5 ending temp 93.5
nice and decently relaxed, not a great relaxed feeling but a good feeling… just doing breath awareness, in the nose, out the mouth.
1:37 - 1:59, laying down to induce deep hypnagogic state. Sufficient progress is made about what I would estimate to be 5-7 minutes after first hearing the mental tone, which I’m glad I can hear in my bedroom, fantastic!
Initial temp ~ 93.5, final temp 80… this tone seemed almost like an alien communication, while in semi trance i got the idea, like maybe this is like, a puzzle you have to break, it’s playing a song one note at a time, and you have to finish… i tried, and i could sort of make the tones come at will, but only about a 2-3 seconds apart or more, and they weren’t always “loud” like they are when I lose a bit of focus/consciousness… the first time I heard them in sufficient clarity they ramped upwards… whole steps at a time maybe? Hmmm…
i got a mild myoclonic jerk at 1:59 and decided that would be a sufficient point to stop. my temperature decreased 13.5 degrees.
I wasn’t cold of course, but I had goosebumps and whatnot, you could say “I” was cold but I was not cold, just my skin, and my body, didn’t bother me at all, it felt nice… I only got cold after I got up… and I was like, well, now I’m cold, so I turned the thermostat up closer to 70.
I often get this kind of coldness when doing this stuff… but now I know it’s physical not just psychological… though it’s the complete opposite of what she said (and the thermometer says) is supposed to happen when you relax, humm… maybe it’s because the body cools off during sleep.
you mean order one like to have in your bedroom? that’d be sweet
ive always wanted to mess around with biofeedback, i hear you can learn to do stuff in weeks that takes monks years of meditation
so anyway how would i go about setting up a biofeedback appointment in my town? do i call psychiatrists or what?
Don’t bet on that…
yes, bet on it.
bio-medical.com/product_info.cfm … odel=T2001
this has not necessarily anything to do with brainwaves, but it is what we used, and the tape said it can help with zen…
anyway, it got me pretty deep, i had to wind the tone down to almost as low as it would go (you … sort of ramp it, i start with a high tone until i get it to stop, or lower considerably, then crank it up, and lower it even more, etc, etc, each time you have to turn the tone up (by turning the knob down) represents a significant increase of relaxation) and… i was in some sort of “trance” and i felt real funky when i stopped…
theta or alpha is all i can guess, it feels like listening to theta on neural noise but… theta is supposed to help you visualize, etc…
whatever, when the tone completely stops it is a rather … “zen” feeling experience, but that’s when it gets tricky, and you start analyzing, and POP that thing is whirring like a mother and you have to get back down there again.
however, in considering the above, it would prove as an immsensely powerful training tool, when you can stop the noise in a DEEP state, and then when you falter and it rises way up real quick, and you can bring it back in a matter of seconds (it took me a few minutes and i could only bring it back to complete silence twice) … man you’ll be good at relaxing.
the thing is you don’t want it to be a crutch, so i’m not sure what i’m going to do about that… on the one hand it helped me enter somewhat … “new” (to me) states of relaxation, and the more i use it the better my understanding of my mind/body link will be (things as simple as thinking something different for too long, or looking at your eyelids will ramp the tone up in a heartbeat, it teaches you what does and does not relax your body, per se, though an EEG will the best, because even if you ramp the tone up you still may be in the same brainwave state, as brainwaves do oscilliate up and down afterall) … so in light of this, it teaches you how to relax on your own, efficiently, but… on the other hand relaxing without biofeedback well… it’s not going to be as fast…
so this thing shouldn’t be used consistantly on its own, once you get a feel for your mind you need to practice without it, as well.
but mark my word, it works well, especially if you have been working on relaxation/meditation for a while but haven’t had a lot of success.
it made me feel almost “high” afterward like i was doped up on ambien, except my mind was clear and i felt happy… also didn’t feel like moving at all… but it was a pleasant comfortable feeling, not at all foreign or drugged up.
and yes you would need to ask a psychiatrist, or call various counceling centers, your best bet is a college, i managed to get them to give me a full free semester of counseling (any kind) because of financial needs on the basis of me not having a job and only getting a limited amount of money (once rent and cable are paid) per month… and not having any direct federal aid, but rather having to use student loans.
sure my parents could probably afford weekly counseling for me, but it was an issue where i didn’t really want to try to explain to them why i’m in counseling in the first place (biofeedback primarily) and… i basically just filled out a form, sat down with the guy for 2 minutes, and he waived all my fees for this entire semester.
If you are referring to, for example, tibetan or other yogi monks, and you claim that this machine can teach you (in a few weeks) what these people learned in a lifetime of meditation and research on consciousness, I am pretty sure that this is absolutely not true.
Of course this tool will help you reach deeper levels of trance, probably way into theta ranges if you got any talent, very nice for zazen meditation indeed. What it does not do however is teach you anything beyond reaching these deeper stages of consciousness. Once there, you will be on your own to learn as much as possible about the abilities, experiences etc you can reach. This is something that might indeed take many years before you even start to fathom the whole range of possibilities.
Holy reality perhaps you don’t agree, but in this case would you be so kind to show me some more results from you or other people using this machine?
What is that, is that where you have an involantary twitch as u r falling asleep?
Isn’t there some biofeedback device out there that we can buy for not too much money?