Yes, I know - the new post in Shift Happens is supposed to be here today, but as a result of my own procrastination and then some upsetting news, I haven't finished it yet. Don't worry about the series, it WILL be along as soon as I finish it (not going to wait for next Monday if I don't absolutely have to), but for now I just have some thoughts I feel the need to share.
Last night, a good friend of mine, and my employer in Second Life, lost someone very important and close to her in a shocking and unexpected way, and it's made me reflect some upon my own life and my relationships with others... and the fact that the unthinkable does happen.
Sometimes, when you lose someone, it's a long, drawn out occurrance and you have time to mentally and physically prepare yourself for the inevitable. But other times, such as the case of my friend (nameless here to protect her identity, both Online and Offline), it's sudden and horrible and unexpected in the extreme.
Like every encounter I've had with Death, be it personal, through dreams, or vicariously through friends and family, this has made me stop and think. My physical body isn't in the greatest of condition. I have joint problems, I have a bad back, I'm overweight, my brain chemistry isn't the most stable thing in the world, and I get migraines just from being outside in sunlight these days, without sunglasses on. (And I mean even a short walk out to my car to grab something.) But my friend's mate who departed the world last night, was in excellent physical condition (to my knowledge), and it would be far more likely to expect what happened to him to happen to a person in my condition than in his.
It just brings into stark relief that this world is not a fair place, and life and death can be just as arbitrary as the decision whether or not to have coffee in the morning.
I can't properly say that I am in mourning, for I never met or spoke to this man - but I am upset and supportive of my friend, and I hope she knows that. I'm there for whatever she needs me to do in Second Life, and if there's anything I can do in First Life for her as well, I hope she'll let me know.
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Monday, May 30, 2011
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Not Writer's Block... More Like Writer's Molasses...
I've been trying for nearly two weeks to write the next post in my Shift Happens series. The last three posts, each more than five pages in Word long, have poured out of me easily to the point that I was actually backlogged and just able to post them on their proper Mondays. But this latest post has been fighting with me.
It isn't that I don't have the information or the desire to write... it's that I'm writing it incredibly slowly. I don't have writer's block - I'm stuck in writer's molasses. Two weeks, and I don't even have a single page written. I've just gotten to the definitions of dream and astral shifting, and I still have SO much more to write... I just don't know for sure if I'll have it done by this next post deadline.
Still, I hope so. I've been doing so good with this series so far. I'm excited to continue it - I think there's only one more article after this one, even. Maybe that's why I'm stuck - I don't quite want it to end yet. Which is strange, because I haven't gotten a single (real) comment on the series at all - on my site, on Blogger, or on LJ. However, I feel that I really need to be putting this out. So hopefully it's helping someone.
Obviously, I CAN write, because, see here, I'm typing all of this right now! And I'm typing more here than I have on that article. This is just seriously weird. I don't think I've ever had molasses before - I've had block, I've had constipation, and I've had explosion... But molasses is a completely new experience.
Hopefully writing this is getting me unstuck from my writer's goo, and perhaps I'll be able to finish that article tomorrow. One thing's for sure, I'm done attempting it for today.
It isn't that I don't have the information or the desire to write... it's that I'm writing it incredibly slowly. I don't have writer's block - I'm stuck in writer's molasses. Two weeks, and I don't even have a single page written. I've just gotten to the definitions of dream and astral shifting, and I still have SO much more to write... I just don't know for sure if I'll have it done by this next post deadline.
Still, I hope so. I've been doing so good with this series so far. I'm excited to continue it - I think there's only one more article after this one, even. Maybe that's why I'm stuck - I don't quite want it to end yet. Which is strange, because I haven't gotten a single (real) comment on the series at all - on my site, on Blogger, or on LJ. However, I feel that I really need to be putting this out. So hopefully it's helping someone.
Obviously, I CAN write, because, see here, I'm typing all of this right now! And I'm typing more here than I have on that article. This is just seriously weird. I don't think I've ever had molasses before - I've had block, I've had constipation, and I've had explosion... But molasses is a completely new experience.
Hopefully writing this is getting me unstuck from my writer's goo, and perhaps I'll be able to finish that article tomorrow. One thing's for sure, I'm done attempting it for today.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Wolf At Your Door - Shift Happens 3
Emotions are something every human being struggles with keeping in check. We all have thoughts and feelings that, were they voiced to the world at large, might get us labeled as crazy, addicted to anger, or perhaps even some things that are worse. But in reality, these “extreme” emotions are simply a part of being human. Therians are no different, despite that we may think a bit differently that an average person from time to time, we still have powerful emotions that we must control. The difference is that powerful emotions can sometimes bring with them shifts – shifts that alter our perception of the world around us and even the very mindset that allows our human sides to coexist or overbalance with our non-human animal sides. These are known as mental and perception shifts.
I’ve chosen to cover the two together as one topic for the sole reason that they have a tendency to go together. I have experienced each independent of the other, but the majority of the time, they are complimenting shifts that can be quite overwhelming – even in their “lesser” occurrences.
We’ll start with a mental shift. This is described by most therians as a mental strengthening of their theriotype’s instincts, essentially. That which is always present as part of, or just beneath your human consciousness, becomes stronger and harder to ignore. This can manifest in a variety of ways, from (speaking from personal experience) a sudden powerful urge to be territorial, to a craving for raw or seriously bloody meat (and I love my steaks medium-well, to give you an idea how strange it is for me to order rare), to many other “symptoms” that are as wide ranging as the animals people have as theriotypes. Now, as I can only speak from my life, I’ll give you an example of a strong mental shift that I had fairly recently.
I hadn’t eaten in a very long time. I ate before going to a night class, crashed into bed upon coming home, got up and went back to school for a morning class, then stayed in the study center until mid-afternoon. I was broaching 22 hours since I’d eaten last. I go through a predictable pattern of hunger, usually. First, I’m hungry. Bearable, ignorable, normal hunger. Within a few hours it becomes impossible to ignore. I’m fantasizing about food. I can’t concentrate on what I’m doing. I’ve even caught myself drawing little cheese burgers and stuff in my margins when in this state. My mind might even disassociate to a point and one of my bonds have to come out to deal with control, but that’s another issue entirely. Usually, I eat when it gets to this point, because I hate what happens next. In the case of this day, I was in math class and couldn’t afford to skip out. The next stage is gut wracking nausea, which is only made better by the fact that I know there’s nothing in my stomach to come up. But if I reach this point, don’t talk to me, and don’t show me food – it’s the polar opposite of the previous stage. I CAN’T eat at this point, or my body will rebel and it’ll come right back up. Thankfully, it never lasts more than half an hour. By the time I was out of math class, I’d passed that stage. The next stage is acceptance, essentially – almost as if my stomach goes through the Kübler-Ross Model of grieving when I’m hungry. The initial stage of ignorable hunger is denial – I don’t really have to eat. The next stage is a combination of anger and bargaining, where my body is fighting violently to get food any way it can, trying to convince me to drop whatever I’m doing and get food NOW. Think of how wonderful these (insert different food cravings here) will taste, you should really eat now, you know… The nausea stage would be despair, my body giving up on the idea of me giving it food and is now violently rejecting the concept of eating entirely. And finally, I move into the acceptance stage, and literally STOP being hungry.
What does this have to do with mental shifting, you ask? Well… I went without food for so long that the wolf in my mind came alive with the realization that I may be in a famine situation. This is just a guess, mind you – Dire Wolf doesn’t think in human terms, even when she uses a human mind to do the thinking. And when I look back on how I’m thinking when I’ve mentally shifted, it isn’t like looking back on my memories when my body’s in the control of one of my bonds – THEY at least think like humans… Or something like humans, in the case of certain Time Lords who shall remain name and title-less, but I can catch the general drift. When I look back on memories accumulated within a mental shift, I find myself… utterly unable to translate it beyond its basest emotions and thoughts. Maybe that’s all that’s there, but that’s how it feels.
Anyway, on this day, having gone 22 hours without food, as I headed home (thankfully not driving this time), the famine-conscious wolf in my head came to the forefront and I regressed into a realization that I was going to be starving if I didn’t get food very soon, and food meant fresh, bloody, meat. I was human in thought enough that the first thing I remember saying to people when I got home was that I needed steak, and desperately. Now. Steak now. In my memories, I sounded kind of like a cave man, which is more than a little amusing. But it resulted in me getting a huge, bloody steak and eating the whole thing – which was more than anyone expected me to be able to eat. As I ate, a phantom shift came over me as well and I felt my muzzle, my teeth, tearing into the prey as I chomped down big bites of steak. As I got closer to the end of my meal and my ravenous hunger (which returned with the first SCENT of meat) was finally abated, the mental shift faded and I could suddenly think clearly and human-ly again. The phantom shift faded along with the mental, and I filed it away in my head that if I wanted an involuntary mental shift, I apparently needed to not eat for 22 hours.
Now, while I never lost my humanity in a mental shift, I have heard of some mental shifts that are so total that a therian can be a danger to themselves and others while under them. This is why my main focus in this article is not how to cause these shifts (they tend to be triggered by high emotions or bodily needs that your animal-side likewise feels strongly about) but how to control them when they happen. Also, not every therian experiences mental and/or perception shifts.
A trick for controlling the shifts when you still have enough of your human mind left in focus to realize what’s happening is to focus on solely human things. Video games, TV, things your animal-side might not have any clue about. Meditation may also be useful, if you can give your animal-side what it wants in the dream-like world of a meditation rather than trying to find a way to translate it into the “real world.”
A perception shift can be controlled in much the same way – however of the two types, this is the more dangerous to the world around you (and also the rarest – I’ve only ever experienced full perception shifts while in a state of deep meditation or a dream, never in the waking world, and I can’t think of any instance that I’ve read or heard about that’s lasted beyond the jolt of realization that one is in a human body). This is a full shift in your very way of perceiving the world from your normal human perspective, to that of your theriotype. To see why this could be dangerous (I know, there are those who are probably thinking – “oh, but I’d LOVE to perceive the world as my animal side! To think like my true self, to see the world through the animal’s eyes” – believe me, I used to think like that as well before I reconciled my human and animal selves), allow me again to give you an example from my own life.
This was several years ago, back when I was regularly attending Howls (therian gatherings in real life) in my area. All the discussion was about therianthropy, the food was outdoor grilled meat, and one of the main activities was stretching out on the ground and napping. I was feeling very in touch with my dire wolf self at that point, and I relaxed into it completely. I fell asleep on a bamboo mat on the ground, beneath the shade of a large tree. In my dream, I was wholly wolf, at home in my Pleistocene environment. The dream felt like days, but my human perception of time was non-existent. I was me. Pack was family. Life. I was safe. There was food. I hunted. I killed. I lived. I was wolf.
And then my then best friend woke me up by shaking me awake. And I responded as any startled large animal would – I didn’t do the human thing of gasping or jerking or saying “What?!”… I lunged and snapped. She reeled backwards, and the ONLY reason I missed sinking my teeth into her arm was that my body wasn’t jointed the way I thought it should be, and my face did not actually protrude the extra foot into a muzzle that I could’ve snapped properly. Had I been laying in a more lunge-friendly position, I might have hurt her. With or without the muzzle. Thankfully, hitting the ground from my failed lunge snapped the human part of my brain back into full control. I’ve never allowed a dream perception shift to take over that fully again (and believe me, controlling it is something like lucid dreaming… it isn’t easy, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing).
However, that is why a perception shift is dangerous. You are, mentally and in your perception of the world, fully your animal type. For prey, this could mean suddenly leaping up and trying to run away – startling at loud sounds, etc. For predators, this could mean hurting someone who’s come to bring you a cookie. (Which was why she was waking me up.) Or even hurting yourself – what if I’d been head first aimed toward the tree I was napping under and had plowed into it’s trunk? I could’ve given myself a concussion.
The difference between the mental and perception shift is subtle – in the mental shift, you retain the ability to function in the human world, around your animal consciousness. But with a perception shift… that’s gone. The safety net that will stop you from biting a stranger, or going running out into traffic in a panic is nowhere to be seen. Analogously, a mental shift is like a horse being controlled by a rider. The horse might spook and try to react, but the rider is there to rein them in and reassure them, and keep them on the right path. But a perception shift is like a wild mustang being dropped in downtown Manhattan. It’s going to panic, it’s going to react – and anyone who gets in it’s way or tries to stop it is going to be run down or otherwise hurt.
For this reason, I warn to guard against perception shifts, and to carefully control mental shifts when you recognize that you’re having them. They can be wonderful, and tempting, but ultimately you have to force yourself to remember that you are, in physical form and mind, human. This is a necessity for every Therian who shifts regularly. Be on guard – or one day, the wolf at your door may be you.
In the next article, I’ll be examining dream and astral shifting – another topic that can get confusing. Until next time!
I’ve chosen to cover the two together as one topic for the sole reason that they have a tendency to go together. I have experienced each independent of the other, but the majority of the time, they are complimenting shifts that can be quite overwhelming – even in their “lesser” occurrences.
We’ll start with a mental shift. This is described by most therians as a mental strengthening of their theriotype’s instincts, essentially. That which is always present as part of, or just beneath your human consciousness, becomes stronger and harder to ignore. This can manifest in a variety of ways, from (speaking from personal experience) a sudden powerful urge to be territorial, to a craving for raw or seriously bloody meat (and I love my steaks medium-well, to give you an idea how strange it is for me to order rare), to many other “symptoms” that are as wide ranging as the animals people have as theriotypes. Now, as I can only speak from my life, I’ll give you an example of a strong mental shift that I had fairly recently.
I hadn’t eaten in a very long time. I ate before going to a night class, crashed into bed upon coming home, got up and went back to school for a morning class, then stayed in the study center until mid-afternoon. I was broaching 22 hours since I’d eaten last. I go through a predictable pattern of hunger, usually. First, I’m hungry. Bearable, ignorable, normal hunger. Within a few hours it becomes impossible to ignore. I’m fantasizing about food. I can’t concentrate on what I’m doing. I’ve even caught myself drawing little cheese burgers and stuff in my margins when in this state. My mind might even disassociate to a point and one of my bonds have to come out to deal with control, but that’s another issue entirely. Usually, I eat when it gets to this point, because I hate what happens next. In the case of this day, I was in math class and couldn’t afford to skip out. The next stage is gut wracking nausea, which is only made better by the fact that I know there’s nothing in my stomach to come up. But if I reach this point, don’t talk to me, and don’t show me food – it’s the polar opposite of the previous stage. I CAN’T eat at this point, or my body will rebel and it’ll come right back up. Thankfully, it never lasts more than half an hour. By the time I was out of math class, I’d passed that stage. The next stage is acceptance, essentially – almost as if my stomach goes through the Kübler-Ross Model of grieving when I’m hungry. The initial stage of ignorable hunger is denial – I don’t really have to eat. The next stage is a combination of anger and bargaining, where my body is fighting violently to get food any way it can, trying to convince me to drop whatever I’m doing and get food NOW. Think of how wonderful these (insert different food cravings here) will taste, you should really eat now, you know… The nausea stage would be despair, my body giving up on the idea of me giving it food and is now violently rejecting the concept of eating entirely. And finally, I move into the acceptance stage, and literally STOP being hungry.
What does this have to do with mental shifting, you ask? Well… I went without food for so long that the wolf in my mind came alive with the realization that I may be in a famine situation. This is just a guess, mind you – Dire Wolf doesn’t think in human terms, even when she uses a human mind to do the thinking. And when I look back on how I’m thinking when I’ve mentally shifted, it isn’t like looking back on my memories when my body’s in the control of one of my bonds – THEY at least think like humans… Or something like humans, in the case of certain Time Lords who shall remain name and title-less, but I can catch the general drift. When I look back on memories accumulated within a mental shift, I find myself… utterly unable to translate it beyond its basest emotions and thoughts. Maybe that’s all that’s there, but that’s how it feels.
Anyway, on this day, having gone 22 hours without food, as I headed home (thankfully not driving this time), the famine-conscious wolf in my head came to the forefront and I regressed into a realization that I was going to be starving if I didn’t get food very soon, and food meant fresh, bloody, meat. I was human in thought enough that the first thing I remember saying to people when I got home was that I needed steak, and desperately. Now. Steak now. In my memories, I sounded kind of like a cave man, which is more than a little amusing. But it resulted in me getting a huge, bloody steak and eating the whole thing – which was more than anyone expected me to be able to eat. As I ate, a phantom shift came over me as well and I felt my muzzle, my teeth, tearing into the prey as I chomped down big bites of steak. As I got closer to the end of my meal and my ravenous hunger (which returned with the first SCENT of meat) was finally abated, the mental shift faded and I could suddenly think clearly and human-ly again. The phantom shift faded along with the mental, and I filed it away in my head that if I wanted an involuntary mental shift, I apparently needed to not eat for 22 hours.
Now, while I never lost my humanity in a mental shift, I have heard of some mental shifts that are so total that a therian can be a danger to themselves and others while under them. This is why my main focus in this article is not how to cause these shifts (they tend to be triggered by high emotions or bodily needs that your animal-side likewise feels strongly about) but how to control them when they happen. Also, not every therian experiences mental and/or perception shifts.
A trick for controlling the shifts when you still have enough of your human mind left in focus to realize what’s happening is to focus on solely human things. Video games, TV, things your animal-side might not have any clue about. Meditation may also be useful, if you can give your animal-side what it wants in the dream-like world of a meditation rather than trying to find a way to translate it into the “real world.”
A perception shift can be controlled in much the same way – however of the two types, this is the more dangerous to the world around you (and also the rarest – I’ve only ever experienced full perception shifts while in a state of deep meditation or a dream, never in the waking world, and I can’t think of any instance that I’ve read or heard about that’s lasted beyond the jolt of realization that one is in a human body). This is a full shift in your very way of perceiving the world from your normal human perspective, to that of your theriotype. To see why this could be dangerous (I know, there are those who are probably thinking – “oh, but I’d LOVE to perceive the world as my animal side! To think like my true self, to see the world through the animal’s eyes” – believe me, I used to think like that as well before I reconciled my human and animal selves), allow me again to give you an example from my own life.
This was several years ago, back when I was regularly attending Howls (therian gatherings in real life) in my area. All the discussion was about therianthropy, the food was outdoor grilled meat, and one of the main activities was stretching out on the ground and napping. I was feeling very in touch with my dire wolf self at that point, and I relaxed into it completely. I fell asleep on a bamboo mat on the ground, beneath the shade of a large tree. In my dream, I was wholly wolf, at home in my Pleistocene environment. The dream felt like days, but my human perception of time was non-existent. I was me. Pack was family. Life. I was safe. There was food. I hunted. I killed. I lived. I was wolf.
And then my then best friend woke me up by shaking me awake. And I responded as any startled large animal would – I didn’t do the human thing of gasping or jerking or saying “What?!”… I lunged and snapped. She reeled backwards, and the ONLY reason I missed sinking my teeth into her arm was that my body wasn’t jointed the way I thought it should be, and my face did not actually protrude the extra foot into a muzzle that I could’ve snapped properly. Had I been laying in a more lunge-friendly position, I might have hurt her. With or without the muzzle. Thankfully, hitting the ground from my failed lunge snapped the human part of my brain back into full control. I’ve never allowed a dream perception shift to take over that fully again (and believe me, controlling it is something like lucid dreaming… it isn’t easy, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing).
However, that is why a perception shift is dangerous. You are, mentally and in your perception of the world, fully your animal type. For prey, this could mean suddenly leaping up and trying to run away – startling at loud sounds, etc. For predators, this could mean hurting someone who’s come to bring you a cookie. (Which was why she was waking me up.) Or even hurting yourself – what if I’d been head first aimed toward the tree I was napping under and had plowed into it’s trunk? I could’ve given myself a concussion.
The difference between the mental and perception shift is subtle – in the mental shift, you retain the ability to function in the human world, around your animal consciousness. But with a perception shift… that’s gone. The safety net that will stop you from biting a stranger, or going running out into traffic in a panic is nowhere to be seen. Analogously, a mental shift is like a horse being controlled by a rider. The horse might spook and try to react, but the rider is there to rein them in and reassure them, and keep them on the right path. But a perception shift is like a wild mustang being dropped in downtown Manhattan. It’s going to panic, it’s going to react – and anyone who gets in it’s way or tries to stop it is going to be run down or otherwise hurt.
For this reason, I warn to guard against perception shifts, and to carefully control mental shifts when you recognize that you’re having them. They can be wonderful, and tempting, but ultimately you have to force yourself to remember that you are, in physical form and mind, human. This is a necessity for every Therian who shifts regularly. Be on guard – or one day, the wolf at your door may be you.
In the next article, I’ll be examining dream and astral shifting – another topic that can get confusing. Until next time!
Sunday, May 22, 2011
The Perils Of Multiplicity
Last night, I watched a movie recommended to me by a close friend. The movie is called Sybil, and it's about a woman who developed a seriously advanced case of multiple personality/dissociative identity disorder due to serious abuse, both mental and physical, she suffered as a child at the hands of her paranoid schizophrenic mother.
Nothing has ever made me realize how lucky I am to be part of a "healthy" system. I don't have blackouts, I don't lose time. Everyone works together, and we can even switch in the middle of doing something like driving or walking and not even stumble (though there have been times where one or another of us have stumbled upon coming into control).
I've contemplated why my bonds are so different from classic MPD - and yet there's no doubt at all that that's what this is, essentially. Near the end of the movie when Sybil's selves become aware of each other and able to work together, I saw a very clear example of the way my system interacts. Whoever will be best at doing what needs done comes out to do it. Lately I've (I'm the primary, main, original in my system, BTW) been insisting that I personally do more - even those things I don't like doing or don't know how, because I'm determined to learn. The other members of my system are supportive, and honestly we're like a big extended family. It's really nice.
I don't have any bonds that will willingly make me behave absurdly in public - in fact, only those who are capable of "passing" for me are usually allowed out when I'm around people who don't know about us. The closest one I have an issue with is Winter, a giant white panther with the mind of a perpetually happy human five-year-old. And he's only allowed out in very specific situations. I've never had a black out, or lost time, thanks to the clock in/out system that we all have. Essentially we've worked it so the last few minutes of each person's memories get instantly "downloaded" into the next person to get control. So if control switches, even unexpectedly, while we're in the middle of something like taking a test, or driving, or any other task that requires more than sitting at a keyboard and typing, the person coming into control will be able to pick up seamlessly where the one before left off.
Now, when we were initially setting up this system, it didn't work reliably at ALL. But we never lost time - whoever was out always remembered what they'd been doing and could easily communicate to other system members what was going on within a few moments of control switching. And there's never been an issue with blacking out, since all of us are technically aware at all times, if not in my body's waking life, in our internal "apartment complex" where we all have our own rooms and our own stuff. Connections to other dimensions, if you will.
Usually, like Sybil, I share my life with three or four primary bonds, and we switch easily. Who's primary at the time has to do with a lot of different factors - but for the last year or so, the Doctor has been primary, and since I was sixteen years old, Spike has been a primary. He still is. Right now, it's mostly the three of us, with the system guardian, Will, occasionally slipping in when he's needed for anything as well. I might go into more detail later as to who these people are (I keep saying I'll do that... been saying it for years, and I still haven't done it... but here's yet another promise to remind me that I mean to do that some day. :P) Though they do have their own livejournal... However I don't think they've used it in years. I guess I'm really the only blogger in the system.
The next movie we want to watch is The Three Faces Of Eve - even older than Sybil, but still relevant. I'm in such a stable headspace these days that I want to finally learn more about what's going on that's resulted in us being as we are... No matter what that means. So far, though, it's only confirmed what I already knew.
Yes, I am the primary personality of a high functioning system. Yes, there are other people in the world who live as we do - and function in perfectly normal lives. Yes, there are advanced and horrifying cases of the same sort of thing.
And what I've come out of it with the realization of is that I... am pretty well adjusted, all things considered.
Nothing has ever made me realize how lucky I am to be part of a "healthy" system. I don't have blackouts, I don't lose time. Everyone works together, and we can even switch in the middle of doing something like driving or walking and not even stumble (though there have been times where one or another of us have stumbled upon coming into control).
I've contemplated why my bonds are so different from classic MPD - and yet there's no doubt at all that that's what this is, essentially. Near the end of the movie when Sybil's selves become aware of each other and able to work together, I saw a very clear example of the way my system interacts. Whoever will be best at doing what needs done comes out to do it. Lately I've (I'm the primary, main, original in my system, BTW) been insisting that I personally do more - even those things I don't like doing or don't know how, because I'm determined to learn. The other members of my system are supportive, and honestly we're like a big extended family. It's really nice.
I don't have any bonds that will willingly make me behave absurdly in public - in fact, only those who are capable of "passing" for me are usually allowed out when I'm around people who don't know about us. The closest one I have an issue with is Winter, a giant white panther with the mind of a perpetually happy human five-year-old. And he's only allowed out in very specific situations. I've never had a black out, or lost time, thanks to the clock in/out system that we all have. Essentially we've worked it so the last few minutes of each person's memories get instantly "downloaded" into the next person to get control. So if control switches, even unexpectedly, while we're in the middle of something like taking a test, or driving, or any other task that requires more than sitting at a keyboard and typing, the person coming into control will be able to pick up seamlessly where the one before left off.
Now, when we were initially setting up this system, it didn't work reliably at ALL. But we never lost time - whoever was out always remembered what they'd been doing and could easily communicate to other system members what was going on within a few moments of control switching. And there's never been an issue with blacking out, since all of us are technically aware at all times, if not in my body's waking life, in our internal "apartment complex" where we all have our own rooms and our own stuff. Connections to other dimensions, if you will.
Usually, like Sybil, I share my life with three or four primary bonds, and we switch easily. Who's primary at the time has to do with a lot of different factors - but for the last year or so, the Doctor has been primary, and since I was sixteen years old, Spike has been a primary. He still is. Right now, it's mostly the three of us, with the system guardian, Will, occasionally slipping in when he's needed for anything as well. I might go into more detail later as to who these people are (I keep saying I'll do that... been saying it for years, and I still haven't done it... but here's yet another promise to remind me that I mean to do that some day. :P) Though they do have their own livejournal... However I don't think they've used it in years. I guess I'm really the only blogger in the system.
The next movie we want to watch is The Three Faces Of Eve - even older than Sybil, but still relevant. I'm in such a stable headspace these days that I want to finally learn more about what's going on that's resulted in us being as we are... No matter what that means. So far, though, it's only confirmed what I already knew.
Yes, I am the primary personality of a high functioning system. Yes, there are other people in the world who live as we do - and function in perfectly normal lives. Yes, there are advanced and horrifying cases of the same sort of thing.
And what I've come out of it with the realization of is that I... am pretty well adjusted, all things considered.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Ghost Wolf - Shift Happens 2
The reason I’ve chosen to cover phantom shifts first in this series is that of all the types of shifts, these seem to be the most common for Therians. Even some non-therians with a strong sympathetic connection with animals and other creatures, even other humans, have experienced phantom shifts to a point.
A phantom shift is the sensation of possessing a body part that you do not actually have, i.e. a tail, wings, ears atop your head, etc. The terminology comes from the psychosomatic phenomena experienced by victims of amputation who have actually lost a limb. And because their brain is still so certain that the limb should be there that it still reacts as if it’s there, even feeling sensations like pain or itching, which can drive the person experiencing it a bit crazy because there is no way to alleviate the pain or itch in a limb that you no longer possess. This translates into Therianthropy in that while we are all physically human, there’s a part of our brains that is aware that some part of us is not. That part of our brain is searching for the “missing parts” it expects to find when taking stock of our bodies.
Normally, this would be where I’d talk about a poignant moment in my own relationship with the type of shift I’m discussing. However, the truth is that I’ve had a partial phantom shift as long as I can remember. My tail has been present since I was at least five – I don’t remember much before that but I have to assume that it’s simply always been there. My ears as well have been present since I was very young. Therefore it’s hard for me to define a specific moment when I realized that I was having a phantom shift. Instead, though, I very clearly remember the first time I realized that what I experienced wasn’t normal.
I was sitting sideways in my mom’s chair, watching her do… something I don’t remember. For some reason, folding clothes is coming to mind. I shifted again, trying to find a comfy position, and my mom asked me why I was fidgeting so much. I complained that I kept sitting on my tail and couldn’t get comfortable. My mom thought at first that I meant my tailbone. She said something along the lines of that’s what I was supposed to be sitting on. I made a face at her and shifted again, saying, “No, my TAIL. It’s all squashed.”
She stopped what she was doing, looked at me, and told me to stop pretending to be an animal. I was, I think, about 12 years old at the time, and that discussion was one we’d already had many, many times. I constantly wish that she could’ve understood… I still wish she could. But that isn’t a topic for this blog. My point is that I’ve been having phantom shifts for most of my life, if not all my life.
Turning for a moment from the scientific and going to the spiritual. Spiritually, I hold to the belief that phantom shifts are caused by our natural astral form. The astral realm is something that most people have probably heard of – it’s a realm of non-physical that exists in and around all of us. Another way to think of it is a dimension that is slightly out of phase with our own, and we exist within it as an energy being that shares the space with the physical being that is on our natural plane. The astral realm can be manipulated, and a person with a strong mind can control the appearance and form of their energy half for the most part. However, for most people, your astral energy form defaults to your “true form.” In the case of therianthropes, this is usually their animal type. When people astral project, they are disconnecting their energy self from their physical self and transferring their consciousness into the energy form. While they are projecting, they can do all sorts of things because their bodies now behave as energy, rather than a physical form. Shape shifting is possible, and fairly easy. Travel becomes a matter of thought. Flight is a matter of perception. Not to say that this other world is not dangerous – like any world, it has its predators, its prey, its monsters, and it’s heroes. But most people never venture deep enough into the world to encounter these beings or even other people, and their interaction with the astral realm remains nothing more than phantom sensation and the occasional feeling of someone “walking over your grave,” which I believe can be caused by someone or something passing through you in the astral realm.
All of this culminates in the fact that a therian may look human in the physical, but in the astral they very well are not. And this gives you exactly what you need to tap into in order to induce a phantom shift.
As I mentioned earlier, my tail and ears are pretty much a constant. I know enough about human and animal anatomy that I’ve been able to rectify their placement upon my human body in a way that’s mostly comfortable. However when I have an unexpected full phantom shift, it will completely catch me off guard. I wrote in the first blog in this series about an annoyingly timed phantom shift that took over my body as I was driving, making the common human act of maneuvering a car very difficult. Shifts like that don’t happen very often, but usually when they do it’s in response to something I’ve done or am going to do. That particular one was an eye-opener that I needed to write this blog series. Most of the time, full phantom shifts are something I have prepared for and initiated on purpose. Which brings me to the next section.
The scientific part of phantom shifting has to do with fooling your brain into believing that a part that isn’t there actually IS there. So the easiest way to trigger a partial or total phantom shift is to put yourself into a meditative state and carefully focus on the body part you wish to feel. For most, the tail comes the most easily. However, before even getting there, you might be wondering how to put yourself into a meditative state.
A simple way of doing this is to sit somewhere in a comfortable position, upright if possible (with the knowledge that if you are still training yourself to meditate, you very likely will fall asleep during this process the first few times – your body isn’t used to being THIS relaxed without being asleep, and it will attempt to return to what it feels is the natural state that accompanies this level of reaction), with pillows around you in case you do doze off and tip over while working on this exercise. Do your best to minimize outside noise and distractions. In time, you will likely reach a point where you can put yourself into the meditative state easily and comfortably no matter what is going on around you. I’ve heard of people using this to calm their minds immediately before taking an exam in college, or while on the way to a family gathering that they know will be stressful. Meditation has quite a few applications that have nothing to do with therianthropy, but in this case, we’re focusing on the topical application of the meditative state.
Once you are in your quiet, comfortable place, close your eyes. Now, there are many different ways of taking the next step into the meditative state. I’ll outline two that I have had success with in the past, both for myself and others.
The first method is physical relaxation. You focus on each body part in turn, starting at your feet or toes. Flex the muscles slightly, and then relax them. Move on to your calf. Tense the muscle, and then relax it. Slowly move up your body to your thighs, your abdomen, your chest, your arms, your hands, your neck, and finally your head. It IS possible to be completely relaxed and still remain upright, though it may take some work to find your personal center of gravity so you don’t tip over. Don’t be frustrated if this doesn’t work the first time. However, if successful, you should be sitting comfortably, and yet feel as relaxed as if you are hovering in that space between asleep and awake that most of us enter just before our alarms go off in the morning. You may feel as if you are floating – this is normal. Don’t worry – you won’t fall any further than your body tipping over, and that’s why there are pillows and cushions around you in case that happens. You also may feel a slight sensation of spinning in one direction or another. This is your inner ear trying to compensate for the fact that you are in a state of consciousness you don’t usually enter unless you are lying down to sleep – therefore your brain might think you’re laying down and try to compensate for it, resulting in the spinning sensation because you are physically sitting up.
The second way of entering the meditative state, I call “light cleansing.” You enter your comfortable position and close your eyes as normal, then envision the space surrounding your body filled with a color of light that you don’t particularly like. I tend to use pink for this. So in my own mind, I imagine me sitting comfortably, surrounded by pink, soft glowing light. Now, begin to take deep breaths through your nose. Imagine this light is entering your body with each breath. Envision the colored light moving down through your body until it reaches your feet. See it swirl through the inside of your feet, and then exhale just as slowly. When you exhale, the light has now become your favorite color – in my case, a mid-range blue. It will exit your body and float within the other colored light that still surrounds you.
You repeat this, over and over with each breath, breathing in one color, using it to cleanse another part of your body, moving up your body in a similar pattern to the physical relaxation sequence. Your feet, then your legs, then your trunk, then arms, then neck, and finally your head. When you exhale the last bit of light, the aura around you should have completely changed color to your favorite color, and you are now relaxed and in a meditative state. The same physical sensations may occur once you have reached the state – part of the trick of a meditative state is to remain calm and relaxed despite the odd physical sensations that might get through from your body. You are now in the perfect state to begin attempting to trigger a phantom shift.
I’m going to describe how to trigger a partial shift, but by expanding the method to the rest of your body, you can trigger anything up to and including a total phantom shift. However, I DO recommend that if you enter this with the decision to trigger a full phantom shift, then make sure you are in a physical position that your animal form will find comfortable – otherwise you have the chance of breaking your meditative state because of phantom pain and (in extreme cases) possibly becoming “stuck” for a time with the effects of the phantom shift. That can be quite annoying and in some cases even painful and horribly inconvenient, so I don’t recommend doing anything that might cause it to happen.
Now, you are ready to begin your phantom shift trigger. I may talk later about using vague phantom shifts to help you find your theriotype, however right now we’re going under the assumption that you at least have some clear idea who the beast that lurks in your soul is. I’ll continue to use myself as an example – I am going to describe triggering a phantom shift of my dire wolf’s fur.
I start with a mental picture of my dire wolf self – built from my knowledge of paleontology, as well as of biology and modern wolves, I know what I look like. Most therianthropes know exactly what they look like to a point, so this should not be difficult. Now focus in on the part that you wish to shift (even when doing a full body shift, it’s easiest to do it one part at a time until you become experienced at this). In my case, I am focusing on my thick, insulating fur. I see it ripple in a breeze. I imagine the differences between the dire wolf self I see in my mind, and my physical body. I imagine the feeling of my hair blowing in a breeze, and I ‘sync’ that image and feeling with the dire wolf’s fur blowing in a breeze. Then I start focusing on other parts of my body – usually my neck or back. And I imagine the fur covering my body, visualizing it spreading across my skin like one of those time lapse films of grass growing or something. I’m not sure how long this takes, as once I’m in the meditative state, I lose all track of time. I’ve done these and been certain that I was locked away for hours and it’s only been about fifteen minutes. Contrariwise, I’ve thought I was only gone for a few minutes and it’s been as long as three hours. So it’s important to clear a block of time in your schedule before attempting meditation of any kind for that very reason. However, after some time, you should be able to feel the phantom part as if it’s part of your physical form.
Ending a meditation is as careful as beginning one. If you have triggered a phantom shift that has ‘changed’ the base shape of your physical form – such as legs or head – then you need to reverse the process and disconnect from the phantom shift before ending the meditation. You don’t have to reverse it completely – just reverse it to the point that your human physical parts feel stronger than the animal parts. I feel wolf legs overlaying my legs a lot of the time, but that’s a phantom overlay, and not a phantom shift. Phantom shifts can cause cramps in muscles as your body tries to mimic the “proper” pose of whatever part you have shifted. Keep in mind that most animals have digigrade legs – meaning they walk on their toes and the part of their leg that some people believe to be a backwards bending knee, is actually their heel. When a dog sits, it’s sitting flat footed, and when it stands, the paw is actually the tip of the toes. You can probably tell that a human foot cannot stretch that far. Likewise, your shin bones cannot shrink to compensate for the larger foot bones and give you proper digigrade proportions, but if your mind is strong enough, you might get muscle cramps and be seriously uncomfortable until you are able to reverse it enough to get your human “form” back.
I don’t warn of these things abstractly – I’ve experienced them. The shift I talked about before that happened while I was driving was a full phantom shift – and the body of a wolf is not designed to fit in the pose of a human being that’s driving a car. I was cramped and in pain. I’ve also woken up from having shifted in a dream, and it’s taken me a good hour of stretching and focusing to regain the feel for my human body. Ironically, the more you know about animal and human anatomy, the worse this problem is. When I was a child and didn’t realize that crawling on my hands and knees didn’t mean I was properly imitating the posture of a dog. I’d have phantom shifts and the parts of the body that didn’t line up just didn’t matter. But as I grew older and learned more, I remember the day when I actually broke down in tears when I realized that my body just cannot stand or move like a canine. I was inconsolable, and because of the “pretending to be an animal” discussions, I couldn’t even get comfort from my mother for it. It was not a fun day for me, and I really remember it to this day.
The whole point being that you essentially reverse what you did to get into the shift and the meditative state in order to get out of it. When you open your eyes, you should feel as if you’ve just taken a bit of a nap. You might have a lot of energy, be awake and alert, and ready for whatever comes next in your day. Some people use meditations like this to draw energy from their astral selves into their physical bodies so they don’t need caffeine to get through their days. Though, also, the first few times you do this, there’s a possibility you’ll come out of it exhausted. Especially if you’ve never shifted before, never connected to the astral realm before – it can be an energy drain on your body. Another reason that your schedule should be cleared when you choose to do this, because until you’ve done it, you don’t know what your body is going to need to recover from the experience.
And this concludes the second post of this series, on phantom shifts. My next post will be on mental and perception shifts, which can be considered the same thing, and we’ll see how to cope with moments when your animal mind comes to the forefront and you all but lose access to human thought. It can be a frightening and potentially dangerous thing, but it’s still part of the shifting experience, and has merits all in its own right.
Until the next post!
A phantom shift is the sensation of possessing a body part that you do not actually have, i.e. a tail, wings, ears atop your head, etc. The terminology comes from the psychosomatic phenomena experienced by victims of amputation who have actually lost a limb. And because their brain is still so certain that the limb should be there that it still reacts as if it’s there, even feeling sensations like pain or itching, which can drive the person experiencing it a bit crazy because there is no way to alleviate the pain or itch in a limb that you no longer possess. This translates into Therianthropy in that while we are all physically human, there’s a part of our brains that is aware that some part of us is not. That part of our brain is searching for the “missing parts” it expects to find when taking stock of our bodies.
Normally, this would be where I’d talk about a poignant moment in my own relationship with the type of shift I’m discussing. However, the truth is that I’ve had a partial phantom shift as long as I can remember. My tail has been present since I was at least five – I don’t remember much before that but I have to assume that it’s simply always been there. My ears as well have been present since I was very young. Therefore it’s hard for me to define a specific moment when I realized that I was having a phantom shift. Instead, though, I very clearly remember the first time I realized that what I experienced wasn’t normal.
I was sitting sideways in my mom’s chair, watching her do… something I don’t remember. For some reason, folding clothes is coming to mind. I shifted again, trying to find a comfy position, and my mom asked me why I was fidgeting so much. I complained that I kept sitting on my tail and couldn’t get comfortable. My mom thought at first that I meant my tailbone. She said something along the lines of that’s what I was supposed to be sitting on. I made a face at her and shifted again, saying, “No, my TAIL. It’s all squashed.”
She stopped what she was doing, looked at me, and told me to stop pretending to be an animal. I was, I think, about 12 years old at the time, and that discussion was one we’d already had many, many times. I constantly wish that she could’ve understood… I still wish she could. But that isn’t a topic for this blog. My point is that I’ve been having phantom shifts for most of my life, if not all my life.
Turning for a moment from the scientific and going to the spiritual. Spiritually, I hold to the belief that phantom shifts are caused by our natural astral form. The astral realm is something that most people have probably heard of – it’s a realm of non-physical that exists in and around all of us. Another way to think of it is a dimension that is slightly out of phase with our own, and we exist within it as an energy being that shares the space with the physical being that is on our natural plane. The astral realm can be manipulated, and a person with a strong mind can control the appearance and form of their energy half for the most part. However, for most people, your astral energy form defaults to your “true form.” In the case of therianthropes, this is usually their animal type. When people astral project, they are disconnecting their energy self from their physical self and transferring their consciousness into the energy form. While they are projecting, they can do all sorts of things because their bodies now behave as energy, rather than a physical form. Shape shifting is possible, and fairly easy. Travel becomes a matter of thought. Flight is a matter of perception. Not to say that this other world is not dangerous – like any world, it has its predators, its prey, its monsters, and it’s heroes. But most people never venture deep enough into the world to encounter these beings or even other people, and their interaction with the astral realm remains nothing more than phantom sensation and the occasional feeling of someone “walking over your grave,” which I believe can be caused by someone or something passing through you in the astral realm.
All of this culminates in the fact that a therian may look human in the physical, but in the astral they very well are not. And this gives you exactly what you need to tap into in order to induce a phantom shift.
As I mentioned earlier, my tail and ears are pretty much a constant. I know enough about human and animal anatomy that I’ve been able to rectify their placement upon my human body in a way that’s mostly comfortable. However when I have an unexpected full phantom shift, it will completely catch me off guard. I wrote in the first blog in this series about an annoyingly timed phantom shift that took over my body as I was driving, making the common human act of maneuvering a car very difficult. Shifts like that don’t happen very often, but usually when they do it’s in response to something I’ve done or am going to do. That particular one was an eye-opener that I needed to write this blog series. Most of the time, full phantom shifts are something I have prepared for and initiated on purpose. Which brings me to the next section.
The scientific part of phantom shifting has to do with fooling your brain into believing that a part that isn’t there actually IS there. So the easiest way to trigger a partial or total phantom shift is to put yourself into a meditative state and carefully focus on the body part you wish to feel. For most, the tail comes the most easily. However, before even getting there, you might be wondering how to put yourself into a meditative state.
A simple way of doing this is to sit somewhere in a comfortable position, upright if possible (with the knowledge that if you are still training yourself to meditate, you very likely will fall asleep during this process the first few times – your body isn’t used to being THIS relaxed without being asleep, and it will attempt to return to what it feels is the natural state that accompanies this level of reaction), with pillows around you in case you do doze off and tip over while working on this exercise. Do your best to minimize outside noise and distractions. In time, you will likely reach a point where you can put yourself into the meditative state easily and comfortably no matter what is going on around you. I’ve heard of people using this to calm their minds immediately before taking an exam in college, or while on the way to a family gathering that they know will be stressful. Meditation has quite a few applications that have nothing to do with therianthropy, but in this case, we’re focusing on the topical application of the meditative state.
Once you are in your quiet, comfortable place, close your eyes. Now, there are many different ways of taking the next step into the meditative state. I’ll outline two that I have had success with in the past, both for myself and others.
The first method is physical relaxation. You focus on each body part in turn, starting at your feet or toes. Flex the muscles slightly, and then relax them. Move on to your calf. Tense the muscle, and then relax it. Slowly move up your body to your thighs, your abdomen, your chest, your arms, your hands, your neck, and finally your head. It IS possible to be completely relaxed and still remain upright, though it may take some work to find your personal center of gravity so you don’t tip over. Don’t be frustrated if this doesn’t work the first time. However, if successful, you should be sitting comfortably, and yet feel as relaxed as if you are hovering in that space between asleep and awake that most of us enter just before our alarms go off in the morning. You may feel as if you are floating – this is normal. Don’t worry – you won’t fall any further than your body tipping over, and that’s why there are pillows and cushions around you in case that happens. You also may feel a slight sensation of spinning in one direction or another. This is your inner ear trying to compensate for the fact that you are in a state of consciousness you don’t usually enter unless you are lying down to sleep – therefore your brain might think you’re laying down and try to compensate for it, resulting in the spinning sensation because you are physically sitting up.
The second way of entering the meditative state, I call “light cleansing.” You enter your comfortable position and close your eyes as normal, then envision the space surrounding your body filled with a color of light that you don’t particularly like. I tend to use pink for this. So in my own mind, I imagine me sitting comfortably, surrounded by pink, soft glowing light. Now, begin to take deep breaths through your nose. Imagine this light is entering your body with each breath. Envision the colored light moving down through your body until it reaches your feet. See it swirl through the inside of your feet, and then exhale just as slowly. When you exhale, the light has now become your favorite color – in my case, a mid-range blue. It will exit your body and float within the other colored light that still surrounds you.
You repeat this, over and over with each breath, breathing in one color, using it to cleanse another part of your body, moving up your body in a similar pattern to the physical relaxation sequence. Your feet, then your legs, then your trunk, then arms, then neck, and finally your head. When you exhale the last bit of light, the aura around you should have completely changed color to your favorite color, and you are now relaxed and in a meditative state. The same physical sensations may occur once you have reached the state – part of the trick of a meditative state is to remain calm and relaxed despite the odd physical sensations that might get through from your body. You are now in the perfect state to begin attempting to trigger a phantom shift.
I’m going to describe how to trigger a partial shift, but by expanding the method to the rest of your body, you can trigger anything up to and including a total phantom shift. However, I DO recommend that if you enter this with the decision to trigger a full phantom shift, then make sure you are in a physical position that your animal form will find comfortable – otherwise you have the chance of breaking your meditative state because of phantom pain and (in extreme cases) possibly becoming “stuck” for a time with the effects of the phantom shift. That can be quite annoying and in some cases even painful and horribly inconvenient, so I don’t recommend doing anything that might cause it to happen.
Now, you are ready to begin your phantom shift trigger. I may talk later about using vague phantom shifts to help you find your theriotype, however right now we’re going under the assumption that you at least have some clear idea who the beast that lurks in your soul is. I’ll continue to use myself as an example – I am going to describe triggering a phantom shift of my dire wolf’s fur.
I start with a mental picture of my dire wolf self – built from my knowledge of paleontology, as well as of biology and modern wolves, I know what I look like. Most therianthropes know exactly what they look like to a point, so this should not be difficult. Now focus in on the part that you wish to shift (even when doing a full body shift, it’s easiest to do it one part at a time until you become experienced at this). In my case, I am focusing on my thick, insulating fur. I see it ripple in a breeze. I imagine the differences between the dire wolf self I see in my mind, and my physical body. I imagine the feeling of my hair blowing in a breeze, and I ‘sync’ that image and feeling with the dire wolf’s fur blowing in a breeze. Then I start focusing on other parts of my body – usually my neck or back. And I imagine the fur covering my body, visualizing it spreading across my skin like one of those time lapse films of grass growing or something. I’m not sure how long this takes, as once I’m in the meditative state, I lose all track of time. I’ve done these and been certain that I was locked away for hours and it’s only been about fifteen minutes. Contrariwise, I’ve thought I was only gone for a few minutes and it’s been as long as three hours. So it’s important to clear a block of time in your schedule before attempting meditation of any kind for that very reason. However, after some time, you should be able to feel the phantom part as if it’s part of your physical form.
Ending a meditation is as careful as beginning one. If you have triggered a phantom shift that has ‘changed’ the base shape of your physical form – such as legs or head – then you need to reverse the process and disconnect from the phantom shift before ending the meditation. You don’t have to reverse it completely – just reverse it to the point that your human physical parts feel stronger than the animal parts. I feel wolf legs overlaying my legs a lot of the time, but that’s a phantom overlay, and not a phantom shift. Phantom shifts can cause cramps in muscles as your body tries to mimic the “proper” pose of whatever part you have shifted. Keep in mind that most animals have digigrade legs – meaning they walk on their toes and the part of their leg that some people believe to be a backwards bending knee, is actually their heel. When a dog sits, it’s sitting flat footed, and when it stands, the paw is actually the tip of the toes. You can probably tell that a human foot cannot stretch that far. Likewise, your shin bones cannot shrink to compensate for the larger foot bones and give you proper digigrade proportions, but if your mind is strong enough, you might get muscle cramps and be seriously uncomfortable until you are able to reverse it enough to get your human “form” back.
I don’t warn of these things abstractly – I’ve experienced them. The shift I talked about before that happened while I was driving was a full phantom shift – and the body of a wolf is not designed to fit in the pose of a human being that’s driving a car. I was cramped and in pain. I’ve also woken up from having shifted in a dream, and it’s taken me a good hour of stretching and focusing to regain the feel for my human body. Ironically, the more you know about animal and human anatomy, the worse this problem is. When I was a child and didn’t realize that crawling on my hands and knees didn’t mean I was properly imitating the posture of a dog. I’d have phantom shifts and the parts of the body that didn’t line up just didn’t matter. But as I grew older and learned more, I remember the day when I actually broke down in tears when I realized that my body just cannot stand or move like a canine. I was inconsolable, and because of the “pretending to be an animal” discussions, I couldn’t even get comfort from my mother for it. It was not a fun day for me, and I really remember it to this day.
The whole point being that you essentially reverse what you did to get into the shift and the meditative state in order to get out of it. When you open your eyes, you should feel as if you’ve just taken a bit of a nap. You might have a lot of energy, be awake and alert, and ready for whatever comes next in your day. Some people use meditations like this to draw energy from their astral selves into their physical bodies so they don’t need caffeine to get through their days. Though, also, the first few times you do this, there’s a possibility you’ll come out of it exhausted. Especially if you’ve never shifted before, never connected to the astral realm before – it can be an energy drain on your body. Another reason that your schedule should be cleared when you choose to do this, because until you’ve done it, you don’t know what your body is going to need to recover from the experience.
And this concludes the second post of this series, on phantom shifts. My next post will be on mental and perception shifts, which can be considered the same thing, and we’ll see how to cope with moments when your animal mind comes to the forefront and you all but lose access to human thought. It can be a frightening and potentially dangerous thing, but it’s still part of the shifting experience, and has merits all in its own right.
Until the next post!
Monday, May 9, 2011
Wolf Driving - Shift Happens 1
Shifts sometimes happen at the most inopportune times. One of the worst times to have a mental shift for any therianthrope is when driving a car. Your mind goes more animalistic and less human, and unless you have a good "instinctive" ability to drive, it can be down right dangerous.
I've had shifts while driving before. One I remember very strongly was a totemic shift to horse that occurred while I was driving home from work when I still lived in Texas. And the reason it was so memorable is that it was a FULL mental and perception shift simultaniously. I was running with a herd, and I sped up to keep up with the herd. The herd is life, the herd is safety, family, and home. Keep with the herd. That is as close as I can come to translating the equine thought process to one that humans can understand (or even one I can understand, looking back on it. It wasn't so much thought as... instinct).
I was completely caught off guard by the shift. Normally, even with totemic shifts, I feel them coming on and can hold them off or get somewhere safe before I allow them to come over me. But this one just slammed into me and swept me away as if I'd been picked up into the very herd itself.
Near as I can tell, the shift remained for about five miles. Maybe ten minutes at the freeway speed I was currently going, then disappeared as quickly as it came. Suddenly I was human, driving again. I had cramps and pain in my hips and thighs as if my legs had been trying to run like the horse that had taken over my mind. My shoulders and arms were stiff - I was hanging on to the steering wheel hard, but my body was still trying to run like a horse. And one of the first things I noticed was that I had sped up to almost 80 mph, and was keeping up with and passing other cars - just as I was keeping up and passing other horses in the vision that came with the shift.
As I thought about it later, I realized that the horse totem was taking advantage of where I was and what I was doing to show me what it had to show me. The cars on the freeway became other horses, the freeway became an open, hilly grassland. To this day, I'm not sure what Horse was trying to teach me with that experience - but it's very possible that it was just giving me this hyper example of how powerful a totemic shift can actually be.
What's brought this to mind and the reason for this blog today, is that I had a strong dire wolf shift this morning while trying to park and get in to class. This wasn't a mental shift, or even a perception shift, but it was a full phantom shift. Which means, essentially, I FELT as if I had the full physical body of a dire wolf, jammed into the position I was stuck in to drive my car. My tail was crushed behind and beneath me. My legs were cramped in an uncomfortable position and I shifted so I could control the accelerator and brake with my toes rather than the flat of my foot which felt completely different. My hands didn't want to grip the steering wheel, so I pressed the pad of my hands against the steering wheel and steered via pressure.
Thankfully, my positivity was holding out, and my amazing parking place of the day was waiting for me. I parked, got out of the car and shook myself, hard, leaning against the side of my jeep while my body tried valiantly to force me onto all fours. I stretched my back, I shook myself, I stretched my arms and legs and opened and closed my mouth, feeling my muzzle move. The wind whipped through my hair and my phantom fur, and I laid my phantom ears back in frustration. Shifts are frustrating when I don't have the TIME for them, but I should've guessed that something would happen when I left the house trying to figure out what I was going to blog about today.
I told the universe that I got the idea - today's blog would be about shifts. And almost immediately, the shift faded. I got back in my car (still had an hour before class) and closed my eyes, putting myself in a meditative state with the ease of practice, and thought about what I should include in the blog. The horse experience, the experience of this morning, and advice for anyone who wants to deliberately trigger different kinds of shifts.
SO! This is the first in a series of blogs about shifts that will be being posted here over the next few days and weeks. This one is my own experiences, though they will slip into future blogs as well, and the next blog will be about triggering a phantom shift - either partial or total.
So welcome to the first series I've written in this blog, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I'll enjoy writing it.
I've had shifts while driving before. One I remember very strongly was a totemic shift to horse that occurred while I was driving home from work when I still lived in Texas. And the reason it was so memorable is that it was a FULL mental and perception shift simultaniously. I was running with a herd, and I sped up to keep up with the herd. The herd is life, the herd is safety, family, and home. Keep with the herd. That is as close as I can come to translating the equine thought process to one that humans can understand (or even one I can understand, looking back on it. It wasn't so much thought as... instinct).
I was completely caught off guard by the shift. Normally, even with totemic shifts, I feel them coming on and can hold them off or get somewhere safe before I allow them to come over me. But this one just slammed into me and swept me away as if I'd been picked up into the very herd itself.
Near as I can tell, the shift remained for about five miles. Maybe ten minutes at the freeway speed I was currently going, then disappeared as quickly as it came. Suddenly I was human, driving again. I had cramps and pain in my hips and thighs as if my legs had been trying to run like the horse that had taken over my mind. My shoulders and arms were stiff - I was hanging on to the steering wheel hard, but my body was still trying to run like a horse. And one of the first things I noticed was that I had sped up to almost 80 mph, and was keeping up with and passing other cars - just as I was keeping up and passing other horses in the vision that came with the shift.
As I thought about it later, I realized that the horse totem was taking advantage of where I was and what I was doing to show me what it had to show me. The cars on the freeway became other horses, the freeway became an open, hilly grassland. To this day, I'm not sure what Horse was trying to teach me with that experience - but it's very possible that it was just giving me this hyper example of how powerful a totemic shift can actually be.
What's brought this to mind and the reason for this blog today, is that I had a strong dire wolf shift this morning while trying to park and get in to class. This wasn't a mental shift, or even a perception shift, but it was a full phantom shift. Which means, essentially, I FELT as if I had the full physical body of a dire wolf, jammed into the position I was stuck in to drive my car. My tail was crushed behind and beneath me. My legs were cramped in an uncomfortable position and I shifted so I could control the accelerator and brake with my toes rather than the flat of my foot which felt completely different. My hands didn't want to grip the steering wheel, so I pressed the pad of my hands against the steering wheel and steered via pressure.
Thankfully, my positivity was holding out, and my amazing parking place of the day was waiting for me. I parked, got out of the car and shook myself, hard, leaning against the side of my jeep while my body tried valiantly to force me onto all fours. I stretched my back, I shook myself, I stretched my arms and legs and opened and closed my mouth, feeling my muzzle move. The wind whipped through my hair and my phantom fur, and I laid my phantom ears back in frustration. Shifts are frustrating when I don't have the TIME for them, but I should've guessed that something would happen when I left the house trying to figure out what I was going to blog about today.
I told the universe that I got the idea - today's blog would be about shifts. And almost immediately, the shift faded. I got back in my car (still had an hour before class) and closed my eyes, putting myself in a meditative state with the ease of practice, and thought about what I should include in the blog. The horse experience, the experience of this morning, and advice for anyone who wants to deliberately trigger different kinds of shifts.
SO! This is the first in a series of blogs about shifts that will be being posted here over the next few days and weeks. This one is my own experiences, though they will slip into future blogs as well, and the next blog will be about triggering a phantom shift - either partial or total.
So welcome to the first series I've written in this blog, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I'll enjoy writing it.
Monday, May 2, 2011
Another Life Goal Reached!!
We can't tell you who we are. Or where we live. It's too risky, and we've got to be careful. Really careful. So we don't trust anyone. Because if they find us... well, we just won't let them find us..
The thing you should know is that everyone is in really big trouble. Yeah. Even you.
These words drew me into a world in the late 1990s that has come to be one of the major parts of my life, my history, and my future as an author. It is, of course, the back-of-the-book introduction that is featured on the back cover of the first fifty books in one of (in my opinion) the very best children's/young adult series' that' has been written, to date.
I'm talking about Animorphs.
The series was a rollercoaster of emotions. Sometimes a single book could make me laugh, cry, or even bite my nails and clutch the book in fear, reading rapidly to find out what happened next. Each book was a self-contained story, within the larger, ever-present story arc of the hidden war between humanity and the greatest threat that has ever come upon this planet - the Yeerk empire.
To give you an idea how into this world I still am, to this day, this excerpt, describing the situation, and the primary alien species involved in the books, isn't from one of the books: It's from a fanfiction I wrote in the voice of the books.
The rundown: aliens are real. They’re invading earth. They’re all around you, and you don’t even know it. Assuming you’re still YOU.
They’re called Yeerks. Parasitic slugs that infest human beings by crawling in through their ear canal and wrapping their disgusting, slimy bodies around your brain. They sink into all the little crevices and wrinkles, tapping into your memories. Your motor skills. Your voice. They take over your life. You’re trapped in a small area of your own skull, unable to do anything but scream and cry. And the worst part? No one around you can tell the difference. You can still see, you can still hear, but your life isn’t yours anymore.
You’ve become what we call a human-controller.
Other species are Controllers, of course. Species the Yeerks have already taken. The Hork-Bajir: 7 foot tall walking salad shooters of death. The Taxxons: disgusting, cannibalistic worms. The Gedds: a monkey-like species from the Yeerk’s own home planet.
And one Andalite.
Andalites are the good guys of the galaxy, for the most part. They’re the enemies of the Yeerks. Imagine a Greek centaur, but with a lower body that resembles a deer more than a horse. Now put on a long, whip-like scorpion tail with a huge blade at the end that can whip around faster than you can blink. Make the upper body a little more delicate than a human’s, and add a couple of extra fingers to each hand. Remove the mouth completely; Andalites eat grass by absorbing it through their hooves as they run or walk, and they speak with thought-speak. No need for a mouth. The nose becomes three slits, and you add two extra eyes on stalks atop the head, and the ears get a bit pointy. Finally, cover the whole creature with light blue and tan fur. That is an Andalite.
Visser Three is the only Andalite-Controller. I’ve often wished that I knew the whole story behind his infestation, but our resident alien, Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, (or Ax, for short), is very closed-mouthed (so to speak) about certain stories from his species’ history. I think it’s Andalites as a whole, but I can’t be sure.
The books were written in the first person perspective, with the narrator changing every book and cycling through the series' main characters - the five human Animorphs, and the aforementioned Andalite, Ax. As the name might indicate, the Animorphs can change their bodies into animals - but it isn't magic. It isn't some trick, and this isn't Harry Potter. It's Andalite technology, and Ax's big brother broke a serious Andalite law by passing it on to the humans who would come to save the planet.
He made a good choice.
I could go on for pages, extolling this series, but this is really all you need to appreciate the life goal that's the point of today's post.
Recently, they've begun re-releasing the series in commemoration of the ten year anniversary of the series' end. As a result, the authors are being pulled back into the spotlight a bit. I've been following Michael Grant on Twitter for awhile, (he co-authored the books with his wife, K.A. Applegate), and thanks to that, I became aware of the fact that the two of them were going to be at this year's LA Festival Of Books.
I knew at that moment that I HAD to get there to see them. K.A. Applegate and her writing had a huge impact on me as a kid, and I just... meeting her was a huge deal. So I decided that I needed to get there, however I could.
My sister-by-love Nyxie came with me, ultimately, and we took my Jeep on it's first trip to LA. I had a so-close-but-not-enough-time-today encounter with the Natural History Museum, as we were trying to find parking. We parked on the sixth floor of the parking structure finally, and took a crowded elevator down.
A helpful volunteer was able to help us figure out how to read the event map that we had, and thanks to a post on Michael Grant's website, I knew the booth numbers where they'd be. However, thanks to traffic and how long it took us to park, we were half an hour before the end of K.A.'s last signing.
And I don't move very quickly.
We found the right booth, but we were too late. The parking place was just too far away from where the correct area was (and there wasn't any other event parking that was closer, even if we HAD known). I was exhausted, hot, tired, and dehydrated. We went and found a shady spot and sat down on the ground, leaning back against the wall of a building. We listened to R.L. Stein tell a ghost story, and we listened to Megan McDonald, the author of the Judy Moody series tell some amusing stories. Nyx went and got us a couple of bottles of water, and I got my spirits back up again.
After all, K.A. and Michael Grant are married - logic dictated that she might be somewhere near his signing, which was in about an hour. We rested for awhile, then headed over to find HIS booth, which was fairly easy to find and back toward the car a ways as well. Then we sat on some stairs and waited.
I was determined to keep my positive - we were here, and everything was good. At the very least, I WOULD get to meet Michael Grant, and he'll probably pass on anything I say to his wife if it interests him enough. I hoped I would be interesting. I was nervous, but again - I was staying positive. I was going to be fantastic.
I decided to head over about 15 minutes early to see if I could find them - thanks to Michael Grant's twitters of earlier in the day, I knew what both of them were wearing. I found them right outside the booth. I was nervous, I almost didn't approach, but then I did. And I have never been more thrilled with a decision.
I actually got to TALK to them. We talked about ebooks, about the series, about the impact it had on me, why The Encounter remained my favorite for all these years. And K.A. SIGNED my original copy of The Encounter, AND the new rereleased copy of The Visitor (I brought that one and not The Invasion, because The Visitor was the first Animorphs book I ever read, so having her sign THAT one was poigniant for me). We talked awhile longer, Nyx came over and talked to them as well.
The most awesome part is that they recognized me, because I HAVE talked to them via Michael's twitter before, and most people remember "Tygerwulfe" as a username. I stand out. And I've never been happier about that.
So not only did I meet two of my literary heroes, but they recognized me. This was more awesome than when I met Rachel Vincent and she recognized me - not because the Grants are better authors, but because they were childhood heroes and I've only recently gotten into Rachel Vincent's books. This was... an amazing day, ultimately. I don't think I've ever been happier that I drove a long way and hiked a long way in the heat.
And if they come back, I WILL make a point to go see them again. I did make a point of giving Michael Grant my business card, so he has my web address and everything (which might mean that they're reading this blog right now.... 0.0 that just occured to me. *waves*), and that's just awesome.
So, one of my life's goals has been met - another one, actually... I've met a lot of them at this point in my life. However... I don't think I've ever been as excited about one before.
Thank you, K.A. Applegate and Michael Grant, for everything you've done in sharing the world of Animorphs with me and the world at large. You've probably effected more people than you will ever know - but know this: part of the reason I am who I am today is because of your books. So thank you. Both of you. And thank Scholastic, both for the original release and this new re-release. And I leave you with the quote that has stuck with me for about fifteen years now.
Be happy for me, and for all who fly free.
The thing you should know is that everyone is in really big trouble. Yeah. Even you.
These words drew me into a world in the late 1990s that has come to be one of the major parts of my life, my history, and my future as an author. It is, of course, the back-of-the-book introduction that is featured on the back cover of the first fifty books in one of (in my opinion) the very best children's/young adult series' that' has been written, to date.
I'm talking about Animorphs.
The series was a rollercoaster of emotions. Sometimes a single book could make me laugh, cry, or even bite my nails and clutch the book in fear, reading rapidly to find out what happened next. Each book was a self-contained story, within the larger, ever-present story arc of the hidden war between humanity and the greatest threat that has ever come upon this planet - the Yeerk empire.
To give you an idea how into this world I still am, to this day, this excerpt, describing the situation, and the primary alien species involved in the books, isn't from one of the books: It's from a fanfiction I wrote in the voice of the books.
The rundown: aliens are real. They’re invading earth. They’re all around you, and you don’t even know it. Assuming you’re still YOU.
They’re called Yeerks. Parasitic slugs that infest human beings by crawling in through their ear canal and wrapping their disgusting, slimy bodies around your brain. They sink into all the little crevices and wrinkles, tapping into your memories. Your motor skills. Your voice. They take over your life. You’re trapped in a small area of your own skull, unable to do anything but scream and cry. And the worst part? No one around you can tell the difference. You can still see, you can still hear, but your life isn’t yours anymore.
You’ve become what we call a human-controller.
Other species are Controllers, of course. Species the Yeerks have already taken. The Hork-Bajir: 7 foot tall walking salad shooters of death. The Taxxons: disgusting, cannibalistic worms. The Gedds: a monkey-like species from the Yeerk’s own home planet.
And one Andalite.
Andalites are the good guys of the galaxy, for the most part. They’re the enemies of the Yeerks. Imagine a Greek centaur, but with a lower body that resembles a deer more than a horse. Now put on a long, whip-like scorpion tail with a huge blade at the end that can whip around faster than you can blink. Make the upper body a little more delicate than a human’s, and add a couple of extra fingers to each hand. Remove the mouth completely; Andalites eat grass by absorbing it through their hooves as they run or walk, and they speak with thought-speak. No need for a mouth. The nose becomes three slits, and you add two extra eyes on stalks atop the head, and the ears get a bit pointy. Finally, cover the whole creature with light blue and tan fur. That is an Andalite.
Visser Three is the only Andalite-Controller. I’ve often wished that I knew the whole story behind his infestation, but our resident alien, Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, (or Ax, for short), is very closed-mouthed (so to speak) about certain stories from his species’ history. I think it’s Andalites as a whole, but I can’t be sure.
The books were written in the first person perspective, with the narrator changing every book and cycling through the series' main characters - the five human Animorphs, and the aforementioned Andalite, Ax. As the name might indicate, the Animorphs can change their bodies into animals - but it isn't magic. It isn't some trick, and this isn't Harry Potter. It's Andalite technology, and Ax's big brother broke a serious Andalite law by passing it on to the humans who would come to save the planet.
He made a good choice.
I could go on for pages, extolling this series, but this is really all you need to appreciate the life goal that's the point of today's post.
Recently, they've begun re-releasing the series in commemoration of the ten year anniversary of the series' end. As a result, the authors are being pulled back into the spotlight a bit. I've been following Michael Grant on Twitter for awhile, (he co-authored the books with his wife, K.A. Applegate), and thanks to that, I became aware of the fact that the two of them were going to be at this year's LA Festival Of Books.
I knew at that moment that I HAD to get there to see them. K.A. Applegate and her writing had a huge impact on me as a kid, and I just... meeting her was a huge deal. So I decided that I needed to get there, however I could.
My sister-by-love Nyxie came with me, ultimately, and we took my Jeep on it's first trip to LA. I had a so-close-but-not-enough-time-today encounter with the Natural History Museum, as we were trying to find parking. We parked on the sixth floor of the parking structure finally, and took a crowded elevator down.
A helpful volunteer was able to help us figure out how to read the event map that we had, and thanks to a post on Michael Grant's website, I knew the booth numbers where they'd be. However, thanks to traffic and how long it took us to park, we were half an hour before the end of K.A.'s last signing.
And I don't move very quickly.
We found the right booth, but we were too late. The parking place was just too far away from where the correct area was (and there wasn't any other event parking that was closer, even if we HAD known). I was exhausted, hot, tired, and dehydrated. We went and found a shady spot and sat down on the ground, leaning back against the wall of a building. We listened to R.L. Stein tell a ghost story, and we listened to Megan McDonald, the author of the Judy Moody series tell some amusing stories. Nyx went and got us a couple of bottles of water, and I got my spirits back up again.
After all, K.A. and Michael Grant are married - logic dictated that she might be somewhere near his signing, which was in about an hour. We rested for awhile, then headed over to find HIS booth, which was fairly easy to find and back toward the car a ways as well. Then we sat on some stairs and waited.
I was determined to keep my positive - we were here, and everything was good. At the very least, I WOULD get to meet Michael Grant, and he'll probably pass on anything I say to his wife if it interests him enough. I hoped I would be interesting. I was nervous, but again - I was staying positive. I was going to be fantastic.
I decided to head over about 15 minutes early to see if I could find them - thanks to Michael Grant's twitters of earlier in the day, I knew what both of them were wearing. I found them right outside the booth. I was nervous, I almost didn't approach, but then I did. And I have never been more thrilled with a decision.
I actually got to TALK to them. We talked about ebooks, about the series, about the impact it had on me, why The Encounter remained my favorite for all these years. And K.A. SIGNED my original copy of The Encounter, AND the new rereleased copy of The Visitor (I brought that one and not The Invasion, because The Visitor was the first Animorphs book I ever read, so having her sign THAT one was poigniant for me). We talked awhile longer, Nyx came over and talked to them as well.
The most awesome part is that they recognized me, because I HAVE talked to them via Michael's twitter before, and most people remember "Tygerwulfe" as a username. I stand out. And I've never been happier about that.
So not only did I meet two of my literary heroes, but they recognized me. This was more awesome than when I met Rachel Vincent and she recognized me - not because the Grants are better authors, but because they were childhood heroes and I've only recently gotten into Rachel Vincent's books. This was... an amazing day, ultimately. I don't think I've ever been happier that I drove a long way and hiked a long way in the heat.
And if they come back, I WILL make a point to go see them again. I did make a point of giving Michael Grant my business card, so he has my web address and everything (which might mean that they're reading this blog right now.... 0.0 that just occured to me. *waves*), and that's just awesome.
So, one of my life's goals has been met - another one, actually... I've met a lot of them at this point in my life. However... I don't think I've ever been as excited about one before.
Thank you, K.A. Applegate and Michael Grant, for everything you've done in sharing the world of Animorphs with me and the world at large. You've probably effected more people than you will ever know - but know this: part of the reason I am who I am today is because of your books. So thank you. Both of you. And thank Scholastic, both for the original release and this new re-release. And I leave you with the quote that has stuck with me for about fifteen years now.
Be happy for me, and for all who fly free.
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