This thread is for:
- Perfectly natural and functional ideas that came from a spiritual, religious, occultist, parapsychologist etc. source (perhaps with some "baggage")
- Techniques that are bit difficult to explain and may be seen by the gullible as magic, but they actually seem to do something, even if that something is just a novel way to trick the brain.
Both things that are actually useful and "stage tricks" are accepted in this thread.
I really like the Jesuit examen (a way to review your day and plan for the future) and I recommend Fr. Timothy Gallagher's book on this practice. Gallagher is great at outlining the practice and giving concrete examples of how Catholics have used this debugging-your-life ritual -- it helped me notice not just active errors I was making but ways I was passively letting opportunities to be kind slip by.
On a trivial note, a lot of alternative medicine (not talking herbalisms here that can actually have chemical effects good or bad sometimes) boils down to:
A - avoiding sledgehammertastic chemical/surgical interventionism with all the attendant side effects and risks thereof for things that you can actually get better from on your own, and
B - ritualistically dealing with anxiety and expectation in a way that deeply seats these changes, which actually often matters for the human immune system and musculoskeletal system etc since the same organ system that runs all our autonomic functions bizarrely also does the thinking. The placebo effect is real, it matters, and can probably be enhanced in effectiveness over and above the 'oh I took a pill didn't I?" that you see in clinical trials.
I've seen evidence both personal and scientific for shamanistic and meditative interventions doing all kinds of great things for people's autonomic nervous systems from changing base inflammatory levels to enhancing the ability to maintain temperature control in extreme climates. I've seen actual biochemical evidence at a talk at the university that a good chunk of the cardiovactular benefit of exercise might come not from the metabolic effects but from it changing one's mood and this then feeding into changes in the inflammatory pathway.
I've seen actual biochemical evidence at a talk at the university that a good chunk of the cardiovactular benefit of exercise might come not from the metabolic effects but from it changing one's mood and this then feeding into changes in the inflammatory pathway.
How does the biochemistry of mood changes feeding into the inflammatory pathway work?
A lot of the interaction between the nervous system and immune system is just suspected without being understood. Some is being figured out however.
A few years ago I had the good fortune to see a talk by Dr. Kevin Tracey, a guy who has done a lot of work on modulation of the immune system via drugs. In it he laid out the history behind his discovery of what he calls the inflammatory reflex, a neurological circuit that modulates the ability of circulating immune system cells to produce TNF and other molecules involved in inflammation.
The short version of what he showed us is that he found a branch of the vagus nerve enervates an enteric ganglion in your abdomen which then sends a norepinephrine-secreting nerve fiber into your spleen. In your spleen, the nerve fibers branch out and form what look for all the world like synapses with a weird population of immobilized lymphocytes. These look like lymphocytes except that they are expressing genes that act as norepinephrine receptors and the production pathway for another neurotransmitter, acetylcholine. When this nerve arc is activated these cells produce acetylcholine and the macrophages and other circulating immune system cells which are temporarily hung up during their passage through your spleen receive the signal and become much less prone to be activated into producing inflammatory signaling molecules for something like a day, I don't remember the exact timeframe. Incidentally, inflammatory signals in peripheral tissues being suppressed by acetylcholine is also partially why most smokers won't get inflammatory bowel disease – nicotine is a mimic of acetylcholine (which blasts all your receptors hard rather than just those at the ends of particular fibers hence all the myriad psychological and physiological effects). It's more complicated than that (of course it is, its biology) and it appears that there are particular circumstances in which nicotine can drive inflammation too, but overall thats its net effect.
Your vagus nerve is a key part of your parasympathetic autonomic nervous system, known for being responsible for lowering heart rate and regulating digestion when you are at rest and affecting a bunch of hormone glands. It regulates things like heart rate and blood pressure and digestion rate and hormone production with levels of arousal and mood. Its activity is strongly affected by mood and wakefulness and can be modulated to a point by all those lovely meditative/biofeedback etc things that some people do.
Dr. Tracy found that patients with autoimmune diseases tended to have quieter than average vagus nerve activity and that by cutting or overstimulating this particular vagus branch he could slow or accelerate the progression of genetically predetermined arthritis in mice by a factor of two. He indicated that he suspects there are other such points of contact that haven't been pinned down yet, such as there apparently being receptors for inflammatory cytokines somewhere in the brain itself that directly affect brain activity within seconds of sensing them, and the fact that mice which received a local anti-inflammatory drug treatment to the brain were much less prone to death from the immune overreactions of sepsis. Your enteric nervous system in particular is an interesting place where there's lots of nerves in close proximity to lots of immune system cells and you might suspect there could be more crosstalk.
He speculated that the strong vagus activity that you get from cooldown from exercise after working your autonomic nervous system through its dynamic range might have something to do with reducing the inflammatory response that is partially responsible for atherosclerosis, as might the mood improvements that almost always come from going from no exercise to more exercise.
Very interesting.
A couple of followup links: more popular and more technical.
I actually read the more technical one when it came out in 2012. Basically took from it that there is a lot of research going on and a lot of crosstalk going on.
The bit about the movement of different muscles altering the permeability of different parts of the spinal cord to immune cell invasion was particularly weird.
I've seen actual biochemical evidence at a talk at the university that a good chunk of the cardiovactular benefit of exercise might come not from the metabolic effects but from it changing one's mood and this then feeding into changes in the inflammatory pathway.
This matches nicely what I am discussing here that I recommend fun sports over boring exercise because of the psychological effect. Most of weight loss comes from diet but you need to feel confident and courageous before fixing that and that is what sports do.
Also, since your nickname suggests you are knowledgeable about this, why do I feel inflamed all over when I try to lift heavy weights? Back when I was more into the boring kinds of gym stuff I tried to follow the new power lifting trend like Starting Strength instead of my old easier body building routines and I felt very inflamed from things like heavy deadlifting.
See above for a bit of a related comment on first paragraph.
Not sure about feeling inflamed after weightlifting other than perhaps the mild muscle damage is getting noticed and fixed? I do know that letting muscles extend rather than shorten while exerting force with them tends to cause much more pain in the days after since it can jumble the fibers at scales smaller than a cell which takes some time to remodel back into perfect working order...
Saying grace before a meal can help you maintain tranquility (thereby making it more likely you will experience positive emotions) via framing effects:
Before eating a meal, those saying grace pause for a moment to reflect on that fact that this food might not have been available to them, in which case they would have gone hungry. And even if the food were available, they might have not been able to share it with the people now at their dinner table. Said with these thoughts in mind, grace has the ability to transform and ordinary meal into a cause for celebration.
-- William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy
You might consider reflecting on your good fortune to live in a time when food is abundant — indeed, where there's a global agricultural and transport system bringing that food to you.
And you might reflect on the folks actually involved in producing that food and making it available to you. Although (to paraphrase Adam Smith) you do not depend on the benevolence of the baker, the butcher, or the refrigerated truck driver, you're still much better off than if they did not exist to fill those economic roles.
I'm pretty sure initiation rituals artificially heighten the likelihood the initiate will remember that moment vividly (as a flashbulb memory), then introduce concepts or beliefs that the initiatory tradition wants to pass on.
A big one is non-identification with the self, and the radically different state of mind this leads to. Sam Harris' book "Waking Up" explains this decently, entirely without and explicitly against supernaturalism.
Apart from that, I think the storehouse of spiritual techniques has been looted fairly exhaustively. Some things have been found to work in some way (astral projection as lucid dreaming, amulets as comfort objects, various beliefs in mind-altering speech as hypnosis and NLP, various forms of meditation as techniques of relaxation and improved cognitive control) while most have been found to be nonsense. I can't think of any the jury is still out on, except the two above.
Sam Harris has spoken several times on the merits of meditation for atheist practitioners.
Thank you. I mean the looted ones too, I don't think everybody knows about them.
For example, here is a technique I always thought it should exist and simply cannot find it, nowhere at all, maybe it doesn't or maybe I am just really missing something: I have always thought that with something like rapid breathing I should be able to stimulate my central nervous system the way say amphetamines do it, to temporarily be quicker thinking, physically faster, and ignore fatigue, it would be handy in many situations, really this is something that probably exists because if the CNS can be stimulated at all then probably not only through chems, and I am probably just overlooking something. Maybe there is a tribal people somewhere who do this jumping up and down and chanting, calling it a sacred rage induced by the war god or something.
Hyperventilating leads to hallucinations instead of stimulation. I went to a Holotropic Breathwork session once. Some years before that, I went to a Sufi workshop in NYC where Hu was chanted to get the same result. I have to admit I cheated at both events -- I limited my breathing rate or depth so not much happened to me.
Listening to the reports from the other participants of the Holotropic Breathwork session made my motives very clear to me. I don't want any of that. I like the way my mind works. I might consider making purposeful and careful changes to how my mind works, but I do not want random changes. I don't take psychoactive drugs for the same reason.
Random changes can be useful. Human minds are not good at being creative and exploring solution space. They can't give "random" numbers, and will tend to round ideas they have towards the nearest cached pattern. The occasional jolt of randomness can lead to unexplored sections of solution space.
Hyperventilating leads to hallucinations instead of stimulation.
With me, hyperventilation leads to just a woozy/l'm-gonna-faint feeling.
As an aside, if you hyperventilate for several minutes, you then can stop breathing for a surprisingly long time. You just go around your daily routine -- and not breathe. It's a weird experience :-/
Functional:
I have tried multiple relaxation techniques that did not work e.g. flex and relax your muscles. Finally on Wiccan site, of all places, (this is what gave me the idea for the thread) I found this technique, which they use for preparing for astral projection and all. I just use it as a sleeping pill or feel better relaxation stuff, in bed or lying on the couch:
visualize descending slowly a stair of 9 steps into a place that is full of nice lovely stuff
with each step relax a muscle area without flexing it first: 1. head and face 2. neck and back of neck and shoulders and traps 3. chest, back 4. belly, lower back 5. hips, genitals, glutes 6. thighs 7. calves 8. feet 9. toes. At the toes you stepped down the last step, and now you are in that nice place and just rest in it.
I sometimes use a similar technique that I've known since I was a kid, don't remember its origin.
Lie down, relax, and imagine a warm, almost hot, wave slowly pass through your body starting at the top of your head and going out at your feet. Repeat.
You can use the same technique for only part of your body (face/neck/shoulders is the most useful), this allows you to synchronize your breathing to it -- the wave goes down as you exhale.
Hmm, a potential fix for "laptop trapezius". Thanks. The upper trap painful stiffness from bad computer posture is a tough nut to crack. I have noticed how almost every computer user enjoys upper trap massage i.e. there is some stiffness and pain there for all (for me, a lot), but hardly anyone tries to figure out how to solve it. I try, but to not much avail. The basic issue is "turtling up" pulling up the shoulders to the ears and leaving them all day. This is both a poor computer posture thing which is unfixable without rebuilding the office and getting a desktop pc, and actually a bit of fear, stress, worry defensive reaction.
I've heard similar techniques suggested for astral projection and self hypnosis. With the former, I actually heard the reverse order on muscle relaxation, with the idea being to move attention away from the body and into the mind.
Back when I could actually concentrate for more than 5 seconds, my early experiments with this technique resulted in me feeling something odd around my spine, as though there was some sort of force or pressure fluctuating with my breathing (probably because that's how breathing works and my posture was better than usual thanks to the relaxation exercises). I treated that feeling like "Qi" and tried different visualization and breathing tricks to try and make it do something more interesting, but little came from that particular aspect.
I did get into wake-initiated dreaming this way, though.
When I was 12, I tripped on something in my room and cut my knee on a tripple hole-punch I'd taken apart and left in the floor. The wound looked huge to me, so I cleaned it, wrapped it in a wash cloth, and meditated on healing it for quite a while (I don't know exactly how long). It looked like a day-old scratch by that evening. Presumably, my evaluation of the severity of the wound was exaggerated.
I tried the same thing a few years later, when I cut my thumb on a soup can. I could not focus at all.
You mean relaxation going from toe to head made you feel that fluctuation and the WILD? Did you flex the muscles first and then relaxed or just relaxed?
For wounds, I used a Potion of Healing! Lake sized. I was swimming in a lake whose water is rich with NaI, Na2CO3 and MgCO3 and for some reason this speeds up the wound healing process. It felt magical enough - I was about 11.
I prime every day in the morning with the following good emotions (adapted from The six steps meditation):
The process is a bit long to describe (but really takes only two minutes to perform), so I won't launch into it unless someone says it might be of interest.
Most accounts of astral projection are actually describing wake-initiated lucid dreams which are a real thing.
I tend to repeat the "Glory Be" over and over when someone I love dies. This is a very short Catholic prayer that goes:
"Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen."
Imo saying "Glory be" to (Non-existent) God feels like a good way to accept the loss.
Interesting how it comes from very ancient Jewish roots - i.e. it is not some kind of a medieval invention nor did it come from the Germanization. If I remember right, the Jewish prayer when a relative dies is "Be the Just Judge be blessed!"
The "truth" about "energy work," according to me:
(with a brief nod to psychoneuroendoimmunology.)
Nothing is “flowing,” at least for me. This was really annoying to me, in every “energy” book ever. Authors, get past the dogma and pay attention to the actual experience!
To me energy flow is a word that describes a phenomena that I actually experience. You likely lack the relevant experience. Given that you lack it's also not surprising that you didn't get much benefit from your exploration.
Which is also not surprising if you just take a book, and try to follow along.
