Hello,

I am new to this forum and this website. However, I ordered "My Big TOE" through Amazon and I am looking forward to reading it.

I've been reading as much as I can about removing fear on the path to a lower entropy consciousness.
I have a simple problem. I am easily startled and frightened by sudden events - noises, flashes, etc. I'm wondering how I can combat this instinct. Even if I'm feeling very relaxed and safe in a comfortable environment, a sudden noise can make my heart pound.

It is especially frustrating if I am trying to meditate - the slight changes in perspective can startle me and snap me back to square one. I have experienced the "buzzing" right before an OOBE, and that frightened me enough to stop the process in its tracks.

I know I'm not in danger, but I can't seem to get that message to the "fight-or-flight" part of my brain!

To sum up - I'm jumpy. It feels like something I can't control because my fright response seems involuntary, and it happens before I can even think.

Thank you, this is my first post!

_________________
"Wherever you go, there you are."

Hello Sunshine,
Welcome to Tom's MBT discussion forums. My daughter, her dog, and myself are all jumpy in the same way you are. I'm not sure how to stop being so jumpy, but at least you know are not alone. Maybe we can all work on it together. Welcome again, and if you don't see this until tomorrow, well, good morning Sunshine. :)
Love to you and yours,
Bette

_________________
All That Is
what is?
Consciousness.

Hello Sunshine, nice name :)

I understand your problem, but I am not sure how one can combat it.

Though I have one suggestion. Do also meditate in noisy places on purpose, even though it will be a challenge, it will be more rewarding.

When you have learnt to meditate in noisy places, I don't think you will be as jumpy :)

Hello Sunshine :-)

I found a post by Tom which you may find helpful :

"Needs and fears are a fact of our lives. Some have their utility and serve a useful function within our imperfect world. All of us would be better off if we and the situations we have generated for ourselves found no utility or useful function for the fear in our lives.

The fear, needs, wants, and requirements of our ego as well as our embedded entanglements with the fear, needs, wants, and requirements of others is a large part of our daily lives. This is the stuff out of which our opportunities to be better flow. Simply rejecting your fearful self and surroundings and entanglements is not the solution, or the way of growth. Applying your intention and free will within the ego soup you swim in to improve your own quality of consciousness and to provide an environment that helps others improve theirs is the way of love. One does not succeed by dropping out, but by dropping in. One does not grow by disengaging from the fearful world or disentangling from the limited reality of others -- one grows by interacting wisely and lovingly within the environment one has created for oneself.

The fears and needs of our everyday existence represent the challenges we have to work with - one should not think of them a negative, evil, or bad things to be avoided, rather as challenges to be met. Dealing effectively with them, reducing them, and overcoming them for ourselves and for others define the PMR virtual reality game we are enrolled in. The point of being here is to learn and grow - not to be perfect. Feeling flawed or guilty because you are not perfect is counterproductive, useless and silly. That you have fear, needs, wants, and ego is not nearly as important as how you deal with them - how effectively you learn and grow from the opportunities they represent.

Tom C viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2971&start=30

I agree with specialis_sapientia to meditate in noise.
A little step at a time ;-)



Peter

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"Those who know do not talk.
Those who talk do not know." - Tao Te Ching

Wow! Thanks for the nice welcome and all the advice.

The quote from Tom is really insightful - I'm going to have to read it again. Something did occur to me after reading it - some of my jumpiness may be tied into expectations. Perhaps something in me is conditioned to expect negative results. I have "embedded entanglements" with negative expectations, and the result is fear?

I do think meditating in a noisy place is a good idea - I'll give it a go.

Meanwhile, I just got my copy of theMy Big Toe trilogy in the Mail today - I've got a lot of reading to do!


(Also, I think I owe some of my jumpiness to the large amounts of horror fiction I devoured as a teenager. ;)

P.S. While I was typing this, the cat ran across the roof -like she does every night - and I still jumped! Oh well... :)

_________________
"Wherever you go, there you are."

Sunshine,

Have you considered that your reactions might be just the startle reaction? Everything seems to exist on a bell curve in biological systems and you might just be a little more out on the edge of response than most. Another thing to consider is the so called hunter versus farmer aspect of Attention Deficit Disorder. With ADD, one is readily able to alter one's activities based upon external stimuli. This gives the hunter an advantage in following the leaps of fleeing game or standing by the game trail or seal blow hole with spear poised for hours and still being able to react quickly and decisively when the game comes along. This is contrasted with the farmer who must follow season long cycles to produce a crop and is not about to be startled by watching his crop slowly grow. The farmer is also analogous to the ideal student who must sit still and quietly in their desk while the class drones on. Remember the bell curve.

Patience will get you there.

Ted

Hello Sunshine:

Good to meet you. Those eyes brought me a Sunshine feel.

Those Tom quotes are good and I agree with Specialis_Sapientia (aka SS, since it is hard to write it without misspellings :)'s suggestion.

I compare your scenario with fear of climbing. How to overcome it? Keep practicing climbing. That's why SS suggestion is good. Keep practicing, till all those noise distractions that bring fear start getting familiar. Get used to all the fear those vibrations or buzzes bring. Later on you will feel them as common. Try to think of the vibrations as your friends that come to bring you a pleasant experience, not from ones that want to scare you. Eventually you may turn those weird vibrations to pleasant ones or none (just smooth transitions). Go back to those NPMR preview stages as many times as you can and try to stay long in them, nothing is rushing you.

Enjoy,

Claudio

_________________
"Every moment can be as good as you want it to be."
"Experience is the ultimate teacher."

> http://soprano.com <

Soprano: "I compare your scenario with fear of climbing. How to overcome it? Keep practicing climbing. That's why SS suggestion is good. Keep practicing, till all those noise distractions that bring fear start getting familiar. Get used to all the fear those vibrations or buzzes bring. Later on you will feel them as common. Try to think of the vibrations as your friends that come to bring you a pleasant experience, not from ones that want to scare you. Eventually you may turn those weird vibrations to pleasant ones or none (just smooth transitions). Go back to those NPMR preview stages as many times as you can and try to stay long in them, nothing is rushing you."

I agree completely. Practice until the unfamiliar becomes familiar. The first experiences I had with the vibrations caused me to get way too excited and I just shifted completely back to the physical. Sometimes it was definitely a fear response. Repition breeds familiarity. Recently, while meditating, they came and I was able to string it out for what seemed like about 20 minutes. Instead of trying to force any specific experience I just relaxed into it and enjoyed it. Heck, I was even able to speed them back up when they started to fade. This was a big step for me and it took many, many times to be that comfortable with them. Keep at it. As they say, there is nothing to fear but fear itself.

Ramon

HI SUNSHINE

Your situation is not unique at all, it tells me that you are very sensitive, have good awareness potential but have an fear alert status of some kind.

Tom' s quote is excellent, read it over again.

However, I respectively disagree with the advice of my other friends here that meditating in a noisy environment will help you for this specific situation. If I am understanding you correctly it is not noises upon noises in general that is distracting but noises or things that go bump and the like that are startling/unsettling to you in a quiet setting or noises/episodes that become prominent relatively speaking.

Anyone in a noisy area can be startled by a huge loud boom. Meditating in a noisy environment would only be useful to deepen your focusing skills once you have freed yourself of this alert/fear feeling that you are encountering. In your current situation, taking that advice will probably give you a false sense of security and turn into a false comfort. It does not address the root of the issue. There is a big difference between having a load of noises in the background, blocking it out into one big lump of static as opposed to sitting quietly but then hearing a bump, odd noise or shifting of some sort that will startle you creating fear easily.

Your jumpy-ness during meditation or other activity is due to a frightful, unknown variable and/or vulnerability issue that you have within yourself for whatever reason. This is something that needs to be looked into by "you"

When it occurs you need to be as aware as possible, sense the way you feel when it happens, the emotion/s that arise, the sensations in your heart, your body, observe your thoughts, feel it all, be completely aware of your being, listen to your intuition. Why do I feel this way? Do I think someone is after me? Is there an irrational fear that you think someone is in the room with you etc. Face these reactions that you are experiencing, head on. The more you face it, feel it, absorb it and try to understand it, the more you will become comfortable and be free of the intense reactions to it.

Eventually one day when it happens and you are sitting there with your eyes closed, you will realize that you have become consciously free of its pettiness, tossing it aside effortlessly, thinking, I can't believe that used to bother me.

OM

Good suggestions OM. What's up!

It's good to vary, exploring different approaches to improve at different levels, but eventually whatever anybody finds his/her particular path of less resistance, then use that. The noisy environment suggestion was meant to overcome the fear that noises start. Hard to believe, but I was able to get into vibrations and NPMR in clubs with very loud music. You just tune yourself to the environment. You can start NPMRing in so many different ways, anyway you are always there, it is just about distracting your PMR focus to easier focus in NPMR.

Anyway, if something works, keep using it, if not try alternatives.

Clau

_________________
"Every moment can be as good as you want it to be."
"Experience is the ultimate teacher."

> http://soprano.com <

I would imagine that if that cat did NOT run across the roof one night, you would feel uneasy without any understanding of why. We are creatures of habit, you expect to be scared by everything. I say this because I think I do it too.
Love to you and yours,
Bette

_________________
All That Is
what is?
Consciousness.

Sunshine,

I did not adequately state my complete thought in my previous post in this thread. I raised two possible reasons for you to be disturbed by changes in your environment more often than you consider to be the norm. Completing the thought is the possibility that you have learned to associate this reaction with fear. It sounds like this is a possibility in that you regularly find that what startles you is insignificant like the cat running across the roof. Pavlov showed us about conditioned responses. I think it is potentially possible that you have come to associate being startled with being fearful. Even though you realize that in 'this' case there is nothing to fear, that something that frequently happens, being startled, and does have a legitimate link with fear has become associated with being fearful in your mind even if there is never anything to be feared in what startled you.

Ted

^^^^
Not to rain on Sunshine's thread but that post as well as your previous post basically describes me perfectly too. I'm easily startled and I think I've associated being startled with actual fear. The hunter/farmer thing you described is pretty applicable and slightly coincidental, seeing as I've recently been doing research in that area(evolutionary biology).

Sunshine, good luck on your journey and I hope to see you in NPMR soon!(when I get over my own fears as well of course ;) )

Hi everyone!

Thanks again for all the great responses. I think the "hunter-gatherer" fear response theory is pretty accurate. :)

_________________
"Wherever you go, there you are."