The Qualities & Types of Body Training Conducive To Spiritual Success
We are getting pretty close to addressing actual body practices that I have experienced as helpful. In order to help you navigate why I choose these practices over others I will highlight the qualities of exercise that appeal specifically to hypnosis. These qualities are as follows:
Density & Efficiency:
When I talk of density, I talk about the ratio of benefits gained by a practice over time and effort spent on working with that particular practice. So a highly dense practice is one that has a high degree of benefits without the need for spending long amounts of time on it or feeling like you are a regular at Torture Rack City. As such, highly dense exercises are highly efficient, so in the matter of hypnosis, body practices should be highly dense and highly efficient.
Energizing:
In most exercise regimes, there is usually a constant that remains a hallmark of a “good” system: physical fatigue and exhaustion. If you are sore and exhausted by the end of a workout, then you have done “well” and should continue pushing like that in your fitness efforts. Well, that’s not the case here, physical exhaustion and physical fatigue is the absolute POLAR OPPOSITE set of qualities that we want to engender in perhaps any spiritual exercise. However, this is especially the case with hypnosis; engendering practices that feel like punishment couldn’t be further from the goals that a self-hypnotist tries to work for.
No, the quality of exercise sought after here is one that improves all bodily functions while leaving the practitioner feeling BETTER AND MORE INVIGORATED when the exercise is done. Being “hardcore” is completely unnecessary here, and actually reinforces ideals of struggle, “sacrifice”, pain, and toil to get good things out of life. This may be a perfect set of ideals for other forms of spiritual practice, but not hypnosis. Wanting a high-functioning body? Want a great-looking body? All of that sounds good and is perfect in terms of bodily goals, but here we take a route that is enjoyable and facilitates simplicity, ease, peacefulness, and happiness while remaining exciting, thrilling, and new.
Simple, Yet Challenging:
While I have been mentioning that the procedures of body practice should be seemingly easy, by no means do I feel they should not be challenging. When you are learning to do something new, the process of it being new itself presents what can be considered challenge. That’s what challenge really is; the process of getting in-tune with the various facets of something you are involved in. But this does not mean that it has to be hard, in fact many things that are hard present no challenge to people whatsoever because people are used to things being hard. So while body practice should be simple, it should present a great deal of room for mastery and investment, where the practitioner has various experiences to explore and learn from.
Flexibility:
Perhaps an overlooked, but extremely important aspect is the flexibility of the body practice you work with. Is the body practice adaptable to schedule, location, and space changes? This can be very important, because flexibility goes hand-in-hand with motivation: the more flexible a practice is, the more motivation remains intact. The less flexible it is, the lower the motivation. Now, in terms of practices like fasting, sometimes there is a basal rate of inflexibility. However, even fasting can be adapted to intermittent cycles, which almost anyone can do while maintaining a day-job.
Transformation Initiation:
The last of these qualities perhaps is the one true quality you look for: transformation ability. In terms of transformation, I am not simply talking about outside appearance of muscles, hair, or skin, but more so in terms of the practice’s ability to beneficially transform how your body operates as whole. How well a practice does this is based on it’s ability to induce the following:
Detoxification
Strengthening
Fluidity
These qualities are hand-in-hand; body practices that facilitate good detoxification also creating strengthening conditions in the body and promote fluidity throughout the body, both in movement of the gross bodily elements as well as the subtle bodily elements.
While the quality of challenge in body practice can be said to exist in any body practice, the other four qualities rule out a lot of stuff. Obviously, gym-routine types of exercise would be eliminated: Weightlifting, modern calisthenics, long-distance running and things of that nature are eliminated. The ability to perform any of these activities with skill, ease and power is a desired quality. But the practices themselves as methods of training are counterproductive to the qualities posted here: they are exhaustive, painful, time-consuming and, at least in many cases, are inflexible. Many people will injure themselves at least once in such training, and are often focused on muscular development with no awareness of trying to strengthen organs such as the liver, kidneys, intestines, spleen… at best the heart and lungs appear to strengthen because they are stressed.
What many people will choose to do in terms of alternative practice will be to go to one or several different Eastern practices for their body care. In fact, I will highlight a set of 3 exercises that are prevalent in that region, showing up as important in both Indian and Chinese-originated work. However, when it comes to things like Hatha Yoga and Qigong, I will not be highlighting these works as being the alternative source of body practice for hypnosis.
The reason for this is quite simple: they don’t satisfying most of the criteria I just laid out here. In terms of exposure to authentic and deep practice of these streams of work, the extreme majority of it is still hidden from the public. However, this really is of null consequence to the reason for exclusion. Rather, the reason for exclusion is that, even with the stuff that is normally available to the public, to practice the stuff at even 50% capacity of what is demanded is gonna take a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of struggle, and a pretty thin margin of flexibility. Moreover, the practices were designed with the goals that were set forth in those paradigms; they were complete systems of work all by themselves.
So trying to marry a body practice such as Hatha Yoga or Qigong with hypnosis is going to require a great retardation of the original outlined practices. As such, a person is not going to be practicing the work to it’s full potential, or at least they are working with an approach that goes against that. It would be a lot smarter to work with something that is performed to it’s best ability while still fitting into the criteria I wrote out above.
Thankfully, I have found sets of practices that do favor all the above criteria. So my next post in this thread is going to finally get into practice, first highlighting breath. I am starting here because the method I am using comes from William Walker Atkinson’s “Science of Breath”. Most everything in terms of breathing that I did and still do came from that book and my adaptations of the work there. Moreover, if you practiced only the exercises in that book, you would be set with a full-body maintenance system.
Each one of the books I am going to mention here could be stand-alone approaches to body maintenance. I will talk more about how I used them all, but remember that at the end of the day, you should be the one choosing your way of working. Many of these books are good enough that you could functionally turn the exercises in them into magic systems all of their own. So I am going post the titles and authors of the books here, and you will be left to acquire them how you need:
William Walker Atkinson/Yogi Ramacharaka:
Hindu Science of Breath
Hatha Yoga/The Yogi Philosophy of Well-Being
Frank Rudolph Young:
*Yoga For Men Only (Don’t worry, women can do these exercises, too)
Somo-Psychic Power
*Yoga Secrets for Extraordinary Health and Long Life
Dr. Stephen T. Chang:
The Complete System of Self-Healing: Internal Exercises
*I mentioned that I won’t be talking about Yoga, and despite those titles, I will certainly be holding true to that statement. Those books have rarely anything in them that resemble Hindu Yoga as we know it, although the exercises are true to the integrity of fulfilling the principles of Yogic exercise. They just ain’t nothing like Yoga, so I could never really put them in the same category as Surya Namaskar.
