Holosync update: Level 4.2 Review

For more regular updates, I now write at Zen in Heels on surviving Holosync. You’re welcome to catch up there, too.

It started with an immobile neck and a visit to the GP surgery. That was how I began Awakening Level 4.2. Whether it was pure stress or a severe physical reaction to Holosync, it wasn’t pleasant.

Over the course of the last eight weeks, there have been trials and tribulations, moments when I thought I was about to lose everything, and then a gradual rebuilding that is just now starting to take hold.

Eight weeks ago, my whole life was falling apart and I seemed to lose any desire to do something about it. I hit a wall. I’ve spent my life up until now living, at least subconsciously, as though I was just waiting to die. My internal map of reality was about as helpful as a chocolate teapot in a desert.

I’d built my life on being good at surviving hard times. But I needed to have a reason to survive hard times. When I was young, it was getting to university. I didn’t think beyond that point. To tell the truth, I never imagined I’d ever have something you could call “a life.” I thought I was out of the running for that.

Self-hate, self-esteem that was pretty much non-existant, and a resistance to changing that was fueled by intense fear, all ganged up on me and I found it impossible to act practically to do anything about my situation. I didn’t seem to have a reason to carry on. Something inside me ran on a track that said, “In order to move on, everything that was true before has to die. And that can’t happen!” So I just… stopped.

Then I hit adrenal fatigue. Not only was I struggling with this blank wall of inaction, my brain fogged up, I was tired beyond belief and in constant physical pain.

I’ve recently heard that some people do hit this kind of barrier. The old way of being, the old identity, just doesn’t work anymore, but it’s still there and a new alternative takes time to establish. Without being lucky enough to experience an Eckhart Tolle-style full-on egoic meltdown and rebirth, I just kept bumping against the wall over and over, unable to move forward.

At the beginning of August, I was aware that I couldn’t get beyond where I was. In physical pain, I called an acupuncturist who works with the NHS very cheaply. The sessions have unblocked, somehow, whatever was standing in the way, and over the course of four sessions, I feel remade.

Somehow, in the thick of all of this mess, the only thing in my life that’s worked in any way has been Amnar. Just as in the past, I’ve clung to it as a kind of lifeline, a reason to keep going. Even if the whole world was falling apart around me, it was still there and could still give me an outlet. It’s been invaluable.

By last week, I was beginning to think I would spend extra time on 4.2, just because I felt this was some transformational time, that the inner stuff I was dealing with was huge enough and the resistance strong enough to warrant it. Yet by the start of this week I felt better, and better enough to move up to 4.3.

My life has started moving, slowly, although I’m not sure of the direction. I had ground to a halt, unable to move forward because I so totally believed I couldn’t have any kind of a life. Holosync has done enough for me in just over two years that I cannot live a non-life forever (very few could, anyway), but making the drastic, deep-down change has been so hard. I couldn’t imagine any other way of living.

Then, yesterday, I attended the first Aspire to Enterprise course day. We sat for a few hours in a hot, stuffy room learning business law and the basics of being a business. Real, practical “you can do this” kind of help. At the break, two people approached me asking for my help, to coach them to write books.

I walked out and for the very first time, I had glimmerings that it is possible to live a life beyond the one I’ve been living. To be brief, I’ve lived my entire life as a recluse, feeling rejected by and rejecting the world. I’ve hardly had friends, shut myself off from the possibility of ever having a relationship, or doing anything more than struggling by day to day, waiting for it all to end. Even giving up anorexia six years ago did not shake the deep, subconscious roots of this way of being.

Sitting on the bus on the way home, I thought about the possibility of actually really living life. Of building something of value, that would benefit people. Of not being terrified of being physically hurt, all the time. Of just being OK.

So, I decided it was time to push a little harder, and moved on to level 4.3. Tiny little forward steps are made, and there are little glimmers of light. Perhaps in hindsight I’ll say that these were the most profound months of my life. Right now I feel like we might be heading for the point where I can quote the film Nizah (on which I was raised), and which my father quoted to me ten years ago: Only when the tunnel is darkest can the light come again.

A note to my Holosync readers

It’s been a while coming, as I’ve been distracting by writing a book, podcasting another book, and all sorts. However, the new Holosync blog I suggested for people is here.

Well, actually, it’s here.

So, if you’re looking for regular updates (I’m going to try for weekly), plus book and product reviews of things in a similar vein, that is the place to go. I will be adding more information as we go along, so feel free to subscribe to keep up, or let me know if you want something particular covered.

Holosync Level 4.2: Exploring radical change

This update is long overdue, as has been pointed out in emails to me. The last four weeks have passed by like a whirlwind, and I’ve been hardly aware of the fact that I’m now four weeks into the second part of Level 4.

Over the last few months, I’ve received some great emails and stories about people’s success with Holosync, for which I’m incredibly grateful. If you want to share stories, don’t hesitate to get in touch or leave a comment. I am working on a blog which will focus in on Holosync, rather than giving these rare reviews, since it seems to be a very popular topic.

One especially good comment came from a man who told me that he had managed to use Holosync to help relieve and cure his depression. His technique was to give himself plenty of time on each level, rather than jumping ahead or sticking to Holosync’s recommended protocol.

It so happened that this comment arrived just as I was considering experimenting with moving onto Level 4.2 a week or so early. What happened that weekend convinced me that often it’s best to follow the advice you’re given – even taking more time on each level – if it’s still affecting you. I had an intense couple of days and it was that comment that convinced me to carry on with Level 4.1 for another week.

What’s always really difficult with writing Holosync reviews like this is that everybody’s experience will be different. I have exchanged emails with people who’ve had similar progressions, but you just can’t tell. There is one key lesson that has come out of this month for me, however.

Change only happens when you’re really ready for it.

I’ve spent the last few years trying to induce change into my life, with very little success. Some things work well, but I always slipped very quickly back into bad habits. It was only really as I started using Level 4.2 that change occurred – mostly because the actions I took changed, and the way I went about doing what I was doing changed.

Awareness is key. Noticing the patterns is the starting point, but often you don’t see them until you’re right into them, and you have to pull yourself up. I’ve found this with my habit of overworking. I avoid painful emotions and thoughts by working every hour I’m conscious. I even create additional suffering just to keep myself busy.

I didn’t really see this until I’d been doing it for a couple of weeks this month and had worn myself out. Once again, it pays to be aware of what you’re doing, and it’s amazing how subtle patterns become when you’re not paying attention.

It has, however, become much easier to notice and accept some of my more obvious patterns of resistance, such as getting depressed or isolating myself. I put a great deal of this down to simply being more aware, more conscious of how I feel and more accepting of how I feel. Rather than judge every mood, they can pass through without comment.

The crucial thing is the journal.

Where would I be without my journal? I’ve found it especially useful for monitoring and noticing when I have a more profound reaction. Just the act of noting down that I’m feeling anger or sadness or tension somewhere inside is enough to shift the reaction I feel to what I’m experiencing.

This commitment to a process of internal change that has been going on now for about three months has now produced changes in how I behave – and that’s bringing about changes in the rest of my life, too.

Some points worth taking away from this are that Bill Harris is right, and rushing through the program does not necessarily reap the best rewards. Slow and steady wins the race, especially if you have a background featuring something like depression.

Really making the most of the time is another great thing to do. I’ve read reviews full of complaints about having to sit still for an hour a day. Make the most of the relaxation in that time. Staying still is a wonderful opportunity to come back to groundedness. Rest, more than anything else. I’ve found it really beneficial to start my day with Holosync. It changes the emphasis of the day from rushed to well-paced.

Keeping note of what you’re experiencing is another key to success with Holosync. Pausing to experience rather than fighting any reactions you get can be tough, but just a few words in a notebook helps to release those feelings.

Finally, I’ve noticed that it’s only been at this stage that Learning Strategies Paraliminals have begun to have an effect. I wonder if it’s because I’m more open to change. If you’re struggling to get benefit from them, consider whether you might actually be resisting the change they say they’ll bring about.

The last few weeks have been intense, and I won’t have time until Friday, when I do the month in review, to go over everything that’s happened. There has been a great deal of change and it’s really only the beginning. Feeling my way along with what feels like a new mind a lot of the time has become something of an adventure.

I will be back with another update shortly, and in the meantime will continue working on a Holosync blog for everybody who’s asked for it. Thank you for reading and for all your patience!

Holosync update: When affiliate marketers attack and dreams come true (Level III conclusion)

It’s that time again. Admittedly, I’ve been cheating and am moving on to Holosync Awakening Level IV about a month or so ahead of schedule. Since I decided to start integration for Level IV today, that means it must be about time I did an update for you.

This has been an intensely interesting few months. I started listening to Level III last November, about the time a lot of things changed in my behaviour. For a start, the weirdest side-effect ever noted came to an abrupt halt. All the way through Level II I read Dean Koontz books, pretty much obsessively. I cleaned out the local library and got a few from bookstores and cheaply on the internet.

At the start of Level III I found myself halfway through a book and sat there wondering why.

There has been a general calmness that’s built up over the years I’ve been doing Holosync, which is one of those intangible effects you don’t really notice until you run into a situation where you used to explode and suddenly you just don’t. Aside from the general calming down, there’s the clarity of thought that’s new, the gradual lessening of the Lurking Fear that has occupied my life.

And let’s not forget that for the first time in my life, I’m doing what I love for a living. Well, almost.

I haven’t really written about it because I’ve been subconsciously expecting it to just evaporate into nothingness. Yet it seems to be happening. I noticed that I was thinking negatively about it today, worried that everything was about to go wrong. I decided that I should reconsider the situation with a bit of NLP magic and a reframe: instead of panicking that it’s all going to end abruptly at some point soon, why not celebrate that I’m actually being paid to write books?

Admittedly, they aren’t Amnar books. But it’s a start.

My brain keeps saying: “What? Writing for a living? No, that’s not right…”

So I’m giving it a bit of time to get used to this. Since the Fear Department in my head is fairly huge (with about the clout of several Sir Humphreys* and at least one Whitehall) and run by a combination of Icant Du That and Lurking Dread, not to mention underlings like Neverget Itwrong, I’ve been stymied. I can’t do anything I don’t feel absolutely certain about.

Sometimes, that might be anything other than breathing and writing Amnar. Finally, finally, this is clearing up. I know that over the course of my life, I’ve actually been very successful, but I’ve done it by a combination of fighting through a haze of fear and a stony determination that is just too painful to keep up for long. When it came to doing something I truly love, and being paid for it, that pressed about every button I had going.

I still resist, but it’s lessening all the time. It feels as though, over the course of this last few months, one life ended and a new one began. I’m on rather shaky legs, but I have a lot of support, so it doesn’t feel as though I’m doing this on my own anymore, having to prove something to a hostile world. That helps. So the Fear Department has been suffering a lot of lay-offs.

Finally, though, there is one thing that I find if not annoying then slightly bizarre. Affiliate marketing is all the rage on the internet. What gets confusing though is when you buy from different companies, and they’re affiliates of each other. You get double, if not triple, the email and snail mail correspondence about the latest offers. One will offer one kind of discount, and the other another.

This means that I hear from Bill Harris about Learning Strategies, Bill Harris about Bill Harris, Learning Stategies about Learning Strategies and Learning Strategies about Bill Harris. The good thing is that if I miss out on the offer the first time around I’m guaranteed to get at least three other opportunities to take it up.

Now, I’m on to Level IV. Things change here, and instead of taking six (well, OK, five) months to do a level, they take been eight and twelve months. I can really feel the difference listening to the new tracks. I will do updates in future every time I finish a sub-level.

P.S. I get a lot of interest in my Holosync updates and for some time I’ve been considering doing a Holosync-only blog. Would anybody be interested in that?

***

*If you don’t know about Sir Humphrey and Yes, Minister then really, you need to start now. You will need no other education in politics after that.

Holosync update: Awakening Level III.4 Week 2 and Shiva Nata

It’s time for an update! I’m now on the last section of Awakening Level 3. I’m getting excited because this is the last of the ’short’ levels, and after this one, it takes eight months to complete each stage. Just to note: I’m writing this for people who are familiar with Holosync and what it involves, rather than as a basic introduction. I have written elsewhere about the basic structure of the course and what it involves, and you can search my blog for more information.

Side-effects

If you read some of the posts from this week, you’ll probably realise I’ve been pretty blissed out for much of this stage. The huge side-effects of depression, anger and stuckness that I felt through Levels I and II have pretty much evaporated completely. In fact, a lot of the time, it’s hard to tell whether I’m getting any kind of ‘negative’ effect anymore.

Once again, it comes down to reading the guide and taking it seriously. This is where Shiva Nata comes in. Bill Harris recommends yoga as a system of physical movement that helps you work through on the physical level what you’re processing on the mental level. I prefer Shiva Nata because it doesn’t require you to be even remotely bendy. As long as you have some arm and leg movement, you can do this.

Jumping levels

Confession: I’ve been cheating a bit. I began Level III back on November 28, 2008, and shouldn’t really finish for a while yet. I cut sections 1 and 3 short by a few weeks each.

This isn’t recommended practice at all. I decided to do it because I’d begun meditating using Holosync two to three times a day. That’s putting a lot of pressure on me to change and cope with the effects, but by that time I was familiar with the whole process of using it, and started to feel like I really wasn’t getting any kind of reaction.

I haven’t actually noticed any ill-effects of doing this. I remember when I started Level I after the Prologue, I didn’t bother doing the two week integration period and my God did that hurt! Don’t recommend that at all. So if you’re considering cutting short any of the sections, don’t do it unless you really think you can hack what might come up for you.

Taking it seriously

When I first started Holosync, I messed around a lot, caved in to whatever was going on in my head. Over the course of Level III, I’ve finally begun to get very disciplined about employing the formal meditation training I received in 2007 during the sessions. Holosync does work best if you can do this, and it’s just good practice anyway.

The irksome thing is doing it for an entire hour. I remember training back then and we started with just 10 minutes of meditation, and hadn’t really progressed between 20 to 30 minutes, with some 40 minute sessions during the weekend retreats. Sitting for long periods is hard work. It requires a lot of discipline. I’m trying not to get too wrapped up in the discipline and maintaining it for the full hour, but using mindfulness during sessions has definitely helped.

A note on positions

Bill Harris recommends sitting with legs and arms uncrossed as the optimal position for Holosync. I lie down. I simply cannot sit for an hour without moving. I have nowhere comfortable to put myself, so I lie down instead. For some people this makes it easier to fall asleep, but since I’m unable to fall asleep without the aid of an hour of Hale Dwoskin’s voice, this isn’t a problem.

And now… Shiva Nata

Everything started to get easy. Shiva Nata has more effect on you if you aren’t naturally co-ordinated, but being a synaesthete and being a former ballet dancer meant that it got easy quickly. And I’m good at copying from DVDs. I’ve been trying experiments!

I learn by looking, and mimicking, so I put the DVD on but turned the screen away so I had to listen to his instructions as he called out the positions of the arms. That has kept me in popping epiphanies for about a week just doing horizontal arms. Of course, as I’m learning I start to see the patterns behind the movements, so that won’t work for long. Adding in leg movements is the next stage.

This is all for now. I’ll report back when I move on to Level IV, sometime next month.

Holosync, meditation, the god Shiva, my nephew and some sausage

I’ve had a very nice email from somebody today who reads my blog. Actually, it was a “poke-poke” email reminding me that I haven’t talked about Holosync in a while.

I’m still doing it. In fact, last weekend I rolled into Level 3.3.

Changing practice

When I first started doing Holosync, back in July 2007, I used to listen at night. In fact, I pretty much used it to get to sleep. This is fine. According to the instructions, it’s fine to lie on your back if you can’t do the sitting thing.

I seriously, seriously cannot sit for an hour listening to rain and Tibetan bowls going bong. I have very tight muscles around my hips and lower back so sitting is also often painful.

As of November 2008, I shifted up to Level 3.1 and started doing it in the morning. It was at this point I started having The Big Life-Changing Thoughts that led me to the place I am now.

I still keep a daily handwritten journal and it demonstrates how far I’ve come since starting.

I remember my first journal once took an involuntary flight across the living room. I had huge crying jags, fits and extremely painful emotional outbursts. These are all gone.

The deep, deep stuff

I’ve had a lot of things coming up. Energy and emotions shifting around. When you reach the point where you start looking at absolute core beliefs around who you are and how you operate in the world, self-rejection and self-love, you’re really tight, in the middle.

Emotions move up and down like clouds. Clouds with shoulders that muscle their way through me. Some of it borders on overwhelming, some of it is fantastic. I am opening up my heart to myself, after about twenty odd years of self-hatred so awful I’d starved and cut and generally abused myself.

At Christmas, I was reminded of how much we come to see our basic selves as unacceptable by my nephew, Ollie. He’s two and a half and currently a manifestation of Shiva, God of Destruction. He likes changing things from one state to another, one state being “okay” and the other being “broken.”

My parents and his parents struggle with this. They want to tell him “no” as he once again forcibly inserts a piece of sausage into the carpet in some radical science experiment of his own devising. On the one hand there’s introducing children to the acceptable ways to behave as adults, and then there’s crushing their basic nature.

My experience veered towards the ‘crushing’ end of the spectrum, to the point where I rejected my whole self. I’m still recovering from that. I was ‘physically educated’ (i.e. I was hit, smacked, slapped, punched) into ‘being a good girl.’ Thankfully, my nephew doesn’t have to experience that.

Children learn all the time. They learn acceptable behaviour by challenging it, watching it, copying it. My niece copies me when I speak in French, and I’ve never had a more avid pupil.

It’s not just the physical side, it’s how I was taught what was and wasn’t OK. When you’re made to feel that your whole person, your being, is at fault, rather than your behaviour, either you get destructive outside yourself, or inside. I went inside. Recovering that is where I am now.

Getting physical

This is getting very deep indeed. To get Holosync to really bring about change it needs, I think, to work in tandem with other things. I’d used Sedona Method, The Work and a variety of other things, but there’s one flaw in the plan: they aren’t physical.

I’d pretty much ignored Harris’ advice about yoga positions easing the emotional and energetic congestion you get when you do Holosync. Stuff comes up, and you resist it because it hurts, it’s unwelcome, it’s inappropriate or whatever other feeling you have about it.

The easiest, and newest way I’ve found of dealing with this is physical activity. Not extreme activity, but very gentle sun salutations after Holosync practice make it more effective, as does Dance of Shiva.

Back to the God of Destruction again

I’ve been hedging my bets over learning Dance of Shiva for a long time. Part of me wants to do it, part of me wants to run away and hide. Yet it seemed just perfect when I suddenly started going through radical emotional growth over the last few weeks.

A great deal is being healed all at once. The Big Uber-Stuff that had led me into anorexia and depression. It all came down to a total hatred for, and denial of, myself. I can feel it in my muscles, the constant desire not to be me.

Working it out with a practice that’s both controlled and crazy breaks me out of that whole “I have to do this perfectly first time” routine that’s clouded my life. As a former ballet dancer, where the emphasis is constantly on perfection, Dance of Shiva is an incredible relief. You need to get it wrong.

Havi Brooks sells the best kit for it here. I just bought the DVD and now wish I had the full kit to go with it. Physical release really is intensely effective – I highly recommend it to stop yourself going crazy.

The big, radical healing

What’s happened since the beginning of Level 3.1 has been profound. It lies in being open to change, to adopting new techniques, and to taking it gently. Relaxation techniques have done away with the constant stress, fear and a lot of the internal fighting. I’m excited to see where this whole thing goes next.

When Holosync hurts

I feel faintly ridiculous writing about what you do when Holosync causes unpleasant side-effects, because having been on the program for over a year, I’ve had so much information from Centerpointe on the subject I feel like it’s all been said already. However, I do still get a lot of people looking for information on the “negative side effects” of Holosync, so I thought it might help to write something about them and how to handle them.

I follow the line issued by Centerpointe that anything that happens is just your reaction to what Holosync does. Nobody has the same experience; some people have a wonderful time from beginning to end, and others struggle with reactions as varied as the side-effects list on the dothiepin tablets I used to have to take. I think of it as being the same as lactose allergy. I have an allergy to lactose (about the worst thing in the world for an ice cream addict). This doesn’t mean that lactose is bad or negative, it just means that my body cannot tolerate lactose and sees it as dangerous. So I’ll get wheezes, blocked sinuses and really bad indigestion if I have too much of it.

Yet while the advice for people who have some kind of allergy is to avoid the stuff, it’s not as though lactose is doing something amazing to my body or mind. Holosync works, and the impact on you reflects how much you resist what it does. Having surfed a few forums where people use Holosync, I often see remarks like “It made me fearful” or “It made me angry.” A more appropriate way to think of it would be to say “I felt fearful” or “I felt angry.”

There are two basic ways to deal with an effect you don’t like (anything from anger, nightmares, bouts of fear, depression etc):

1. Resist the effect you’re getting, and worry over it; assume that something has gone wrong.
2. Become interested in the effect and what it might mean for you.

I won’t bother dealing with the first method of dealing; you don’t need to teach people about that. However, it does take time and effort to learn how to respond to a “negative” effect of Holosync. Here’s a good example. My friend decided he wanted to try Holosync and listened to it for a few weeks before he came back and said he had to stop because he felt very afraid while listening.

“What were you scared of?” I asked. “Did you find out why you felt so much fear?”

He said he didn’t know, but he’d just stopped listening because it was going wrong. I thought it was fantastic to get such a powerful reaction, and something worth investigating. This is the key to surviving Holosync and getting it to work for you. My common reaction is to have spells of what seems to be depression. I realised that feeling depressed meant I was trying to avoid feeling something that bothered me. Once I became aware that I was trying to avoid something, it became easier to find out what the feeling was. Oddly, once I felt it, it was released.

Holosync is all about awareness, and increasing it. The more aware you are, the more curious you become about why you react the way you do, the more effectively it works. The quicker you learn how to stop resisting what happens and start getting curious, the more easy Holosync becomes. It isn’t just a process where you sit back and life becomes magical, so unless you’re already Buddha, you’ll probably have a bad reaction at some point or another. It helps to ask yourself questions. If, say, you have nightmares, you could remember what the nightmares are about, whether they have any pattern or meaning that might suggest you’re bringing up something to be released. If you find you get randomly angry, you could look into what specific things you react to, what really makes that emotion come out when you’re dealing with people or events.

Basically, Holosync becomes a process of growth, whereby listening brings up issues for you to investigate and resolve. In this way, it’s a bit like therapy. Monitoring how you react with a diary or journal is highly recommended, and something I started doing last year. I still keep one for each level I do. I do pay more attention to how I respond to events and people and rather than blaming them for causing my reaction, I try to work out what it is in me that makes me react in the way that I do. This is an absolute must for Holosync, as well as keeping the “Managing Evolutionary Growth” manual around so you can re-read it whenever necessary.