Weekly SPARK - Experiment 160
If it is not okay to feel afraid you may have trouble going to sleep.
SPARK EXPERIMENT
Specific Practical Application of Radical Knowledge
SPARK- Experiment 160
If it is not okay to feel afraid you may have trouble going to sleep.
(Matrix Code SPARK160.00)
Notes: Having difficulty falling asleep is more common than most people realize. Let’s take a look at why this might be so, and what you can do about it.
In order to fall asleep your conscious mind must relinquish control. Why might the mind want to stay in control? Perhaps because long ago you developed a survival-motivated habit of clinging to alertness so as to protect your mother, or avoid your uncle, or evade your father or one of your siblings. Maintaining alertness so as to take care of yourself or your loved ones as a child is a noble commitment. However, as an adult woman or man, insomnia may be seriously interfering with your life.
Try to imagine not staying alert to your surroundings, not intensely listening for movements or sounds that hint at approaching danger. What feeling arises? Probably fear.
It may only be 3% intense fear, but it is fear that something bad may happen to you or to someone you love. By staying alert you have the chance to take actions that prevent the bad thing from happening, whatever that might be.
By maintaining alertness you can avoid the fear of not seeing something bad coming but you can’t fall asleep because you have to stay attentive.
By releasing control you can stop being alert but then the fear comes that something bad will happen so you can’t fall asleep.
If you go online to research insomnia you will find that using sleeping pills is rarely questioned. In fact the sales of both prescription and over-the-counter sedative hypnotics (sleeping medication) is increasing. People even borrow sleeping pills from their friends’ prescriptions. Over ten million Americans and roughly one-in-ten British use sleep medications. The popular online concern is more about finding “Which sleeping pill is right for you?”
Polls find that wealthier older white women are the most common users of sleeping pills, even though sleeping medications increase the likelihood of Alzheimer’s and dementia. Interestingly, using public mental health services is one of the factors most strongly associated with using sleep medications for insomnia.
What else is possible?
Experiment: These experiments help you shift to a new relationship with the fear of losing control when your conscious-mind fades out at night and you fall asleep.
1. First, be sure you are using the New Thoughtmap of Feelings in which fear is one of the four neutral adult feelings that provide the energy and information for leading your life. Exchanging thoughtmaps is not a concept-shift that happens in your mind and changes what you think about. It is a thoughtware-shift that happens in your energetic body and changes who you are by changing the distinctions and models you think with. (You will find much more about this in my book Directing The Power of Conscious Feelings.)
2. Rewire fear in your mind. It is common to use an old and forgotten automatic connection between the experience of fear (a chill down your back, tight chest, rapid breathing and heartbeat, sweating, hair on your arms standing up) which is as neutral as eating an apple, and what that experience means to you. Leftover from childhood may be the wiring that connects the red wire of the experience of fear with the black or grey wire of the meaning “BAD!”, “dangerous,” “I will be hurt or abandoned,” or “someone is about to die, maybe even me…” You can spend a moment now to rewire your connection. Close your eyes. Reach into your brain with both hands. Gently find the red wire of fear. See which other color wire it is soldered to. Cut the connection. Hold onto the red wire but put the other color back in your brain. Feel around for the other loose end of the red wire. Gently twist the two ends of the red wires back together. Solder them. Make sure the connection is solid (if it breaks, simply solder it again). Then test your connection. Get a little afraid and notice that with the new connection the red wire equals the red wire. The meaning is: Fear is fear. With the new connection you can use fear as energy and information to discern, be precise, be careful, take intelligent risks, etc. Elegant, neh?
3. Stellate fear. To stellate means to change from a planet to a star. Stellating fear is an archetypal adulthood initiation that happens in a held and navigated space (usually at a Possibility Lab or the Feelings Practitioner Certification Program) where you are guided to consciously navigate, step-by-step, into 100% intense archetypal fear as a completely neutral experience for as long as you want for no reason at all. The initiation is loud and intense and changes your body’s nervous system forever into its adulthood configuration. Once you stellate your own fear you can help others stellate theirs. This may become your new profession…
4. Practice consciously entering the territory of fears in your daily life to become a better creator or decision maker. Here is how:
a. Make it a practice when you sit down at a restaurant to consciously enter the territory of fears so that you order and eat something you never tried before.
b. Make it a practice when calling someone on the phone to consciously enter the territory of fears so that you bring more radical honesty into your conversation than you ever could before.
c. Make it a practice when beginning to write a sentence or a page to consciously enter the territory of fears so that your words deliver more clarity and power than you ever dared unleash before.
d. Make it a practice when meeting your partner to consciously enter the territory of fears so that every word and gesture comes from a new place in you, a place they cannot already predict so that more love can happen.
e. And so on… make it a practice to consciously enter the territory of fears during your daily life so that you become familiar with staying in the unknown and exploring. Notice what arises in terms of useful new insights and nonlinear possibilities. Then when you lay down to sleep at night you just keep going. Yes it is scary. This is normal life. Release control. Welcome fears. Enjoy.
5. When you sleep you dream, even if you do not remember your dreams. By now you know that good dreams can give you as much trouble as bad dreams. Here is a new decision you can make before you fall asleep each night. It is an adventurer’s decision, someone who loves Back to the Future, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Mission Impossible, or Avatar movies. It goes like this. Take a deep breath, sigh, and decide, “I can relax because I know trouble is coming.”
SPARK - Experiment 160 in other languages!
If you want SPARK in your own language, join the SPARK Translator Team by contacting Clinton Callahan at clinton(at)nextculture.org.
Enjoy the mission, should you choose to accept it,
Your random SPARK Generator.