I don’t know a single therian who hasn’t dreamed of waking up one day in the body of their theriotype, myself included. This is with the knowledge that, in my personal case, I would be a creature out of time and out of place with my current surroundings, and yet the desire is still there. To be able to express on the outside that which we know ourselves to be on the inside is a drive that encourages strange practices among therians and otherkin – sometimes this expresses itself in the form of extreme tattooing and other body modification, but more often it’s just a secret longing. And again, I don’t know a single therian who hasn’t longed for that taboo phrase – P-shift.
P-shift has become the accepted therian term for that which we see in every classic werewolf movie and book, and in quite a few ancient stories… but never in real modern life. That is, the actual physical act of shifting into your theriotype, that your human body becomes that of an animal. The desire to be able to do this – especially to be able to do it at-will, is a huge part of therianthropy for most therians. Now, this is widely accepted in the therianthrope community as being impossible – but there are those who believe it not only possible, but claim to have done it. In the interest of political correctness, I’m going to treat this as if it were a viable possibility, though I admit that my own personal opinion is that it is simply impossible. As for what that says for those who believe they have done it, well… That is open to interpretation.
Generally, to claim to have successfully P-shifted is something that will get you ostracized from the therianthrope community. Yet people insist that it be believed without proof – these people usually prove to either be trolls, or delusional. Sometimes they simply drop off the face of the internet after making these claims, which always leads some people to believe that their claims were true – but perhaps the final transformation was one way. In general, though, even the term P-shift is looked down on in the communities – the unattainable mountaintop that all therians wish we could reach but know is impossible. So in general, unless the topic is more of a “what if” topic, you generally won’t see this kind of shift discussed.
So what if? What if I could become my theriotype – run as a dire wolf, or fly as a red-tailed hawk? Would I still retain my human mind? Or would the shift be a one way trip, and the decision have to be made before the shift was undertaken – do I want to never come back from this? I admit, there was a time in my life when the answer would have been yes. But I look around me now and… How many people could I help if I were fully wolf? How could I contribute to the world, be with the people I love, if I were no longer in this human form? The answer is that there’s almost no way – especially if the shift also involved me losing my human mind as well as my human shape. When I astral shift, I am aware that I am a physical and mental human that is allowing her more animalistic side to show through on the astral plane, and I’m still aware of time, and people, and everything – if I could speak, I would. And I always return to my body.
I’ve heard far too many therians scream in defiance that they would simply up and leave their human lives if only they could – and that worries me. What level of intolerance and misunderstanding must you be facing to be willing to turn your back on the body you were born into? No matter what we are on a spiritual level, one thing some therians don’t seem to give enough consideration to is that we are also human. It takes a human mind to even fathom the concept of therianthropy, or of a soul at all. It takes our intelligence, our very humanity, to conceive of being more than what we appear to be.
I used to be one of those therians who would wish to simply shift and fly away, or run away. But I’ve been through a lot in recent years and it’s changed my way of thinking. I realize now that I need more. I need my humanity, and my animal side to make me the complete person I am. I either chose to be this way in this life, or it was chosen for me by a higher power – for whatever reason, I believe there is a purpose to it. Perhaps the purpose is as simple as blogs such as this to help other people along in their discoveries of themselves. Or perhaps I haven’t even found my calling yet. All I know is that I don’t know – and that is a very human concept.
There are other, lesser known types of shifts as well, but in this series we have covered the most prevalent, and most of those lesser known types can be lumped in underneath these labels. For links to all previous articles in this section, please see the Essays portion of my site, or simply click the Shift Happens tag at the end of this post. Thank you all for reading my first blog series! Let’s hope for plenty more to come!
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Showing posts with label blog series: shift happens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blog series: shift happens. Show all posts
Monday, July 18, 2011
Monday, June 20, 2011
Lone Wolf Roaming - Shift Happens 4
When you’re in college, sometimes you take classes because they’re required even if you already know all of the information. That was why I wound up taking a class that was literally an introduction to the Windows Vista operating system. An operating system that I’d already been using and was well aware of the ins and outs of long before I took the class. I got an A in the class with no effort at all – however, not having to put out effort in a class isn’t a good thing. It means that I still have to attend the class, and be bored out of my mind. Therefore, I started finding other ways to pass the time. And when I realized that the teacher didn’t take role until the end of class, therefore I could never skip out at break and get out of the interminable boredom, I knew I would have to find some way to occupy myself.
Why am I telling this story in a blog where I’m supposed to be discussing astral and dream shifting? Well, the boredom I suffered in that Vista class inspired me to try something I’d never attempted before – astral travel while my physical body remained conscious.
An astral shift is similar to a phantom shift, except that you are specifically changing the shape of your energy half fully into your theriotype, and then using that to move around independent of your physical body. The first step is a separation. I will not go through the process of how to separate your energy half from your physical have for a sheer matter of safety. If you know how to do it already, you know the risks and the situation you are putting yourself in while doing it. If you don’t know how to do it, then one blog post will not be enough to teach you. And this series was never meant so much as a teaching series, but as an informative series.
Once you’ve achieved enough separation that shifting your astral energy isn’t going to cause your physical body to ache because of the different shape, you can quickly apply the techniques mentioned in the first post in this series to shift your astral energy self into your theriotype. And now comes the fun part – explore. You can go anywhere within the physical and astral plane. I’ve noticed several times that people in the physical world will even react to your presence even though they quite obviously can’t see you.
On the night I was talking about, I went for a run around the campus. I shot past people, jumped over a bench, sniffed at the food I could smell coming from the Cafeteria and the Denny’s across the street. I didn’t have much to do, and didn’t dare go very far from the class or my body for fear that I would be called on to answer a question or something and would have to snap back to my body at a moment’s notice. I could still kind of hear with my physical ears, and therefore I was aware of the teacher continuing to lecture while I was running around. Thankfully, though, I wasn’t needed to snap back, and after I’d run around for a while and shaken off my boredom, I made my way back to the classroom, shifted back to human form and settled myself in my body again just in time for roll call.
As you can see, being able to astral travel can be a great blessing, but again, it is not something I’m here to teach anyone to do. It’s simply another type of shift – albeit the most freeing type, in my opinion, because you are as close to physically BEING your theriotype and running around with your human mind in total control of the animal’s body and instincts.
As for dream shifting, directed dream shifting is more like lucid (or controlled) dreaming. Most therians, or even non-therians, have experienced vivid dreams in which they are someone or something else. Sometimes these dreams are in the first person POV, other times they are in third person and allow you to get a very good look at what you are. In my case, dreams like this are how I know what my dire wolf self looks like, for the most part.
Triggering a dream shift can be very simple – just think about your theriotype and a normal course of action for it as you are falling asleep. This can be enough to trigger your dream shift. Sometimes, though, should you wish this to be a true lucid dream, a bit more is necessary in order to really get yourself to register that A) you are dreaming, and B) you can control it. Unfortunately, this technique is a bit more advanced than I find myself able to explain right now. It involves giving yourself some sort of trigger that your subconscious will insert into dreams to make you realize that you’re dreaming. It can take years to create this mental image – something that will be out of place enough to jar you, no matter what you’re dreaming about. My personal visualization is a full moon within a dinner plate. I’ve had this show up in the most random places in dreams – from sitting on a rock in the middle of a field, to flying up to me as if it was some sort of flying saucer. But when I see that image, a photorealistic full moon in the middle of a china plate, it jars my brain and I realize that I must be dreaming.
My earliest experience with a lucid dream is something that I’ll never forget, though it didn’t have anything to do with shifting, and it was years before I’d perfected my lucid dream trigger. I was walking through the apartment complex where I used to live (still did live, at the time), when suddenly a ninja dropped down from the roof and threatened me with throwing stars. I was terrified, my heart was pounding – and then somewhere in the logical recesses of my mind, I remember thinking, “A ninja? What is a ninja doing in my apartment complex? This can’t be real…” And I faced the ninja, stood up as tall as a twelve year old can stand, and said, “This is MY dream, and you get out of it NOW!”
And, just like that, the ninja disappeared. But I was still dreaming. I remember laughing, looking around, and deciding that I could control anything in this dream world – and I wanted to fly. Next thing I knew, I was flying around the neighborhood. I landed on roofs, flew around the park down the street, and eventually came home. I don’t remember if I made the decision to wake up when I came home or not, but I did. And to this day, that it still one of the coolest lucid dreams that I’ve ever had. Facing down a ninja and telling it to get out of my dream. It still makes me laugh.
Dream shifts and astral shifts allow you the freedom to change and move about the world in the form of your theriotype. In my final post in this series, we will discuss the only other way this could ever happen – a way which, unfortunately, is more than impossible, and yet I don’t know a single therian who hasn’t fantasized about it at one time or another. In the final post of the series, we will examine the forever elusive P-Shift, or Physical Shift… Actually turning from human to animal like the movie werewolf – the impossible dream of most therians and anyone who’s ever wished to become a bird that they could fly away from their troubles.
Why am I telling this story in a blog where I’m supposed to be discussing astral and dream shifting? Well, the boredom I suffered in that Vista class inspired me to try something I’d never attempted before – astral travel while my physical body remained conscious.
An astral shift is similar to a phantom shift, except that you are specifically changing the shape of your energy half fully into your theriotype, and then using that to move around independent of your physical body. The first step is a separation. I will not go through the process of how to separate your energy half from your physical have for a sheer matter of safety. If you know how to do it already, you know the risks and the situation you are putting yourself in while doing it. If you don’t know how to do it, then one blog post will not be enough to teach you. And this series was never meant so much as a teaching series, but as an informative series.
Once you’ve achieved enough separation that shifting your astral energy isn’t going to cause your physical body to ache because of the different shape, you can quickly apply the techniques mentioned in the first post in this series to shift your astral energy self into your theriotype. And now comes the fun part – explore. You can go anywhere within the physical and astral plane. I’ve noticed several times that people in the physical world will even react to your presence even though they quite obviously can’t see you.
On the night I was talking about, I went for a run around the campus. I shot past people, jumped over a bench, sniffed at the food I could smell coming from the Cafeteria and the Denny’s across the street. I didn’t have much to do, and didn’t dare go very far from the class or my body for fear that I would be called on to answer a question or something and would have to snap back to my body at a moment’s notice. I could still kind of hear with my physical ears, and therefore I was aware of the teacher continuing to lecture while I was running around. Thankfully, though, I wasn’t needed to snap back, and after I’d run around for a while and shaken off my boredom, I made my way back to the classroom, shifted back to human form and settled myself in my body again just in time for roll call.
As you can see, being able to astral travel can be a great blessing, but again, it is not something I’m here to teach anyone to do. It’s simply another type of shift – albeit the most freeing type, in my opinion, because you are as close to physically BEING your theriotype and running around with your human mind in total control of the animal’s body and instincts.
As for dream shifting, directed dream shifting is more like lucid (or controlled) dreaming. Most therians, or even non-therians, have experienced vivid dreams in which they are someone or something else. Sometimes these dreams are in the first person POV, other times they are in third person and allow you to get a very good look at what you are. In my case, dreams like this are how I know what my dire wolf self looks like, for the most part.
Triggering a dream shift can be very simple – just think about your theriotype and a normal course of action for it as you are falling asleep. This can be enough to trigger your dream shift. Sometimes, though, should you wish this to be a true lucid dream, a bit more is necessary in order to really get yourself to register that A) you are dreaming, and B) you can control it. Unfortunately, this technique is a bit more advanced than I find myself able to explain right now. It involves giving yourself some sort of trigger that your subconscious will insert into dreams to make you realize that you’re dreaming. It can take years to create this mental image – something that will be out of place enough to jar you, no matter what you’re dreaming about. My personal visualization is a full moon within a dinner plate. I’ve had this show up in the most random places in dreams – from sitting on a rock in the middle of a field, to flying up to me as if it was some sort of flying saucer. But when I see that image, a photorealistic full moon in the middle of a china plate, it jars my brain and I realize that I must be dreaming.
My earliest experience with a lucid dream is something that I’ll never forget, though it didn’t have anything to do with shifting, and it was years before I’d perfected my lucid dream trigger. I was walking through the apartment complex where I used to live (still did live, at the time), when suddenly a ninja dropped down from the roof and threatened me with throwing stars. I was terrified, my heart was pounding – and then somewhere in the logical recesses of my mind, I remember thinking, “A ninja? What is a ninja doing in my apartment complex? This can’t be real…” And I faced the ninja, stood up as tall as a twelve year old can stand, and said, “This is MY dream, and you get out of it NOW!”
And, just like that, the ninja disappeared. But I was still dreaming. I remember laughing, looking around, and deciding that I could control anything in this dream world – and I wanted to fly. Next thing I knew, I was flying around the neighborhood. I landed on roofs, flew around the park down the street, and eventually came home. I don’t remember if I made the decision to wake up when I came home or not, but I did. And to this day, that it still one of the coolest lucid dreams that I’ve ever had. Facing down a ninja and telling it to get out of my dream. It still makes me laugh.
Dream shifts and astral shifts allow you the freedom to change and move about the world in the form of your theriotype. In my final post in this series, we will discuss the only other way this could ever happen – a way which, unfortunately, is more than impossible, and yet I don’t know a single therian who hasn’t fantasized about it at one time or another. In the final post of the series, we will examine the forever elusive P-Shift, or Physical Shift… Actually turning from human to animal like the movie werewolf – the impossible dream of most therians and anyone who’s ever wished to become a bird that they could fly away from their troubles.
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!
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.
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