We would apologize for the pun, but we are not sorry.
Relevant Skills
This workshop will help you acquire the Pause your Feedback Loops and Become Very Alert and Calm skills, which will appear on our upcoming Skill Tree 2.0 release.
Introduction
We decided to merge these two skills into one workshop, as they work together very closely. You can think of this as a meditative exercise similar to the previous Relax all Your Muscles workshop, but instead of relaxing your body, you are doing a two-fold relaxation and activation of your mind. Where Pause your Feedback Loops wipes the slate clean, Become Very Alert and Calm takes it to the next step by giving you the ability to actually use that clean slate. Imagine a coiled spring. Pause your Feedback Loops disentangles the spring from any other junk, and Become Very Alert and Calm coils the spring so you can spring into action.
Furthermore, the first Felt Sense Introspection workshop, where we learned to pay closer attention to our physical sensations as they relate to our emotions, is what created the fertile ground upon which these subsequent workshops are building.
Pause Your Feedback Loops (30 minutes)
Source: Pause Your Feedback Loops
What do you get out of this?
The good.
Your mind and body can finally get some high-quality rest. It's not enough to dedicate time to resting, if you can't also reach the corresponding mind state. Even if you are pursuing maximum productivity, you will ultimately achieve more if you know how to rest well. You get an opportunity to reflect on your life from a distance. Big decisions are hard to make when you are constantly forced to react to all the issues and anxieties that keep coming up.
The bad.
It's possible to end up too far on the other side and become unproductive. Pausing all feedback loops, if done right, will also remove anxiety about resting too much. What matters then is to have some other reason than anxiety to go back to running one's life.
How to tell if you have it?
Note: this skill is in some sense very natural and easy, but tends to be unlearned by those who pursue high productivity. So if your life is in general successful and under control, it's quite likely that you've forgotten how to rest.
- You do some activities that don't have a clear goal. Being goal-oriented is good advice most of the time, but also forces your mind to rely on strong and persistent feedback loops. This is simply because humans have not evolved for sustainable, intensely goal-oriented activities. In order to pursue them, you need to keep your body and mind in a state of constant crisis (to some degree). A popular way to relieve this burden is to have some leisure activity, or "hobby". In particular, a well chosen hobby is something that you don't mind doing for a long time, but also don't mind interrupting and coming back to later.
- When you take a day off, you feel no pressure to get lots of other things done. If the opposite is true, the feedback loops that keep you productive are still on, regardless of whether you are supposed to be "resting" or not.
How does it work?
At any given time, your mind is probably keeping track of dozens of activities and issues, and struggling to keep all of them under control. This happens on each scale, ranging from "is my makeup OK?" to "am I doing something useful with my life?". You can recognize these feedback loops by the emotions which they consistently generate. What you are looking for is repeatedly having new thoughts and emotions about the same topic, often in changing directions depending on the situation.Another clue is what kind of thoughts automatically enter your attention, especially when you are idle.
The goal is to put all the feedback loops temporarily on pause. It's not about solving all your issues (that's impossible). It's also not about reducing the importance of some issues, relative to others. Pausing a feedback loop shouldn't feel like giving up on it. Each loop represents something you care about, and it's there for some reason. This reason might be good or bad, and stepping out of the loop might give you the perspective to consider it in a clear-headed way. However, this should be optional and separate from simply putting the loop on hold, while leaving it unchanged.
If you succeed, you will be rewarded with long stretches of refreshing freedom in your own mind. This naturally causes a tendency to focus on your body, and the things that are right in front of you. At the same time, your willingness to do anything at all will drop significantly. So it's wise to have some plan already in place to make sure you'll get back on track.
How to learn it?
Step 1. Plan your rest. For the sake of the workshop, that is now. It will be hard to relax completely unless you make sure that your life is still OK when you come back to it. So think about how long you can afford to rest, and how to make sure that afterwards you'll smoothly go back.
If it feels to you like your life is never OK enough to take a break, you probably need to backtrack and Tune Your Emotional Processing. Prevent all the usual distractions from reaching you, and pulling you back into the loops.
Step 2. Start some calming, grounding activity. It ultimately doesn't matter what it is, as long as it helps you reach a restful mind state. Activities that provide mild, pleasant sensory experiences tend to work well for this (e.g. walks in nature, tea ceremony, massage, or simply sitting comfortably).
Step 3. Notice what you are ruminating about. Almost invariably, when you start a relatively slow and low-pressure activity, your mind will gravitate towards all the feedback loops that are still active. Try to notice each time when your thought stream turns to something unrelated to what you are currently doing. Each of these thoughts corresponds to some feedback loop, which means that there is something your brain wants and there's also something that your brain is trying to use to get what it wants. Think about how you'll certainly go back to processing that issue later, because you already made plans to that effect. Also reflect on the fact that getting rest will make you be better equipped to deal with the issue. And if you keep being anxious about it now, you'll not rest and ultimately get less of what you want.
Step 4. Pause the loop. This is a specific mental motion that is hard to describe, and you'll have to explore how it feels in your own mind. Both ease and speed of doing this can be greatly improved with practice. Your clue that you got it right is that for the time being, your thoughts no longer go back to that particular issue. Of course, there are probably other loops which have been waiting for their turn, and will pop up as soon as your mind has enough space for them. Repeat steps 3 and 4 as necessary; this will likely be an iterative process.
Further progress At some point you will find that you can directly access the mental motions of noticing and pausing mental feedback loops. This means much less need to do any special preparations to get rest. When working through psychological issues or other difficult problems, it is often helpful to do it from a fully calmed mind state as a starting point. From there, it's much easier to bring up one particular issue, and work on it without being overwhelmed or anxious.
Become Very Alert and Calm (30 minutes)
Source: Become Very Alert and Calm
What do you get out of it?
The good.
It allows you to Tune Your Motor Cortex, which will be the final skill in this chain. For most people, this will be the main purpose of acquiring this skill, and it's a worthy purpose indeed!
This is a great technique for getting into a Flow State, or just generally Doing The Thing You Want To Do. Those times when you can't muster up energy to do a task? This will help!
Your whole body will be more sensitive. Experiencing detailed sensations seems to be intrinsically pleasant, though don't ask me why.
You will be more likely to notice when something is wrong with your body, and interpret it correctly (e.g. illness).
You will have interesting mental experiences, and learn something about how your brain works. Among other things, you'll have a chance to watch new neural connections form in your brain in real-time. Normally, this process is too slow to notice anything interesting about it.
The bad.
Developing the skill takes a bunch of hours of pretty tedious mental work.
Depending on your starting point, it could be a few days up to a few months of persistent effort.
Afterwards, you'll need to continue training with some regularity, or it will regress.
How to tell if you have it?
Note: this skill requires effortful training. It is extremely unlikely that you already have it without also having clear memories of having trained it.
You can hold your focus on each individual small patch of skin, on the whole outside surface of your body.
You started clearly experiencing sensations in your body that you have never felt before, and didn't even suspect were possible. (e.g. at some stage it's common to have a number of revelations about breath and heartbeat)
The diameter of your sharpest spot of attention has gradually decreased over time.
To judge your progress, try to keep track of the smallest diameter you can maintain depending on the body area and your state of mind. (e.g. if at the beginning you could focus only on your whole mouth, and after a week you can focus separately on the left half of the upper lip, that's progress!)
How does it work?
Your brain is naturally capable of getting all sorts of detailed signals from the body. It's in fact doing this all the time, only it's mostly subconscious.
Neural connections decay when they aren't being used, and grow when they are. That's a basic property of your brain, and is necessary for its efficient functioning.
We can make neural connections grow by conscious effort. Loosely speaking, if you want more neural connections that do something, try hard to act as if you already had them. Soon enough, your brain will catch up with the game.
The rate of growth is the fastest when 100% of your attention is on a particular subject. The brain reads this as a signal that the matter is very important, and reacts vigorously.
Some circumstances make it easier to keep unwavering attention on the body for long hours. By switching your body and mind to the right "gears", you can apply much more sustained pressure than is normally possible, and form completely new neural structures in mere hours.
How to learn it?
Instructors: Read through all the steps before proceeding with doing them
Half-hearted attempts are not likely to succeed! Be prepared to fail for many days, if not weeks, before you make any of this work. If you give up, you can always change your mind and go to a meditation retreat. However, some people are at an advantage, and are likely to make progress very fast. This includes e.g. yoga practitioners, dancers, gymnasts and other people who work a lot with their own bodies. In these cases, going to a retreat might be an overkill.
Step 0. Become Very Alert and Calm. This is absolutely crucial. Otherwise, you won't be able to keep up the consistent focus, and without it the process takes too long. You'll get bored to death and give up before you see any results. A reliable indicator of being ready to start is that the prospect of sitting perfectly still for at least 1 hour, and doing nothing else but focusing on your body, does not seem horrible.
Step 1: Find a quiet place where you won't be interrupted. You'll probably need at least around 1 hour at a time to move forward, though at first it might make sense to try short times (e.g. 5 minutes) just to get used to it. This is what we will do for the workshop. Concentrating your effort into a short period of time is better than spreading it out. (e.g. consecutive days are preferable, and multiple sessions on each of the consecutive days would be even better.)
It doesn't matter how and where you sit, however... If you are too comfortable, you'll likely relax too much and drift away. If you are too uncomfortable, you'll likely not be able to focus on anything.
Step 2. Sit motionlessly for the whole allocated time, to the best of your ability. This is not strictly necessary, but tends to help, and especially at the beginning you'll need all the help you can get. It's very useful for concentration to keep your back straight, held firmly in place by the muscles around it. Keep your eyes closed. Again, not necessary but helps you focus completely on the internal world of sensations. It's OK to let your eyeballs move behind closed eyelids, tracking your attention. Pick some consistent order of going through all the external surface of your skin. Doesn't really matter what it is, as long as you cover your whole body and it's simple enough to not be distracting. This way, after several repetitions, you won't have to think about what to do next.
Step 3. Focus on each individual patch of skin, according to your consistent order. Try to feel the minute sensations on the very surface of the skin. It's very important to really reach for something that you couldn't have guessed before, before you move on to the next patch. Otherwise, it's very easy to slip into just going through the motions, without using any of the neural connections that bring in new information.
For example, if you sit in a warm room, you'll easily guess that your arm is going to feel "warm" in general. But you can't predict all the subjective-experience detail that comes with realizing what it's like to feel that a particular patch of skin on your arm is warm at a particular time. Find your way to those detailed, raw sensory experiences, which in daily life you'd ignore as unimportant.
Initially, it might be the case that even with a lot of effort you aren't able to reach the sensations. I describe this feeling as having a "soft cotton padding" on the inside of your skin, and many people resonate with this metaphor. However, genuine trying also counts, and makes the padding gradually "burn away". Smaller patches are better than big. But don't stress about it too much! It will improve with time. If you have trouble, start with whole big areas (e.g. right upper arm, right forearm, ...).
Accurate and slow is better than quick. If you can't feel anything, you can stop in that place and keep trying for a few seconds. However, don't stop for more than 10 seconds or so, because your brain will get bored and give up.
At the beginning, if working on the whole body feels too difficult, you might do better if you put all your effort into one particular area. Ultimately you'll want to do the whole body, but it can be hard to keep going when you don't see any results. Using a smaller area will make your progress faster, and you'll have more chances to correct your technique.
Whenever you get distracted by thoughts about other matters, notice that it happened and return your attention to the body. Resume from the last place that you clearly remember. Don't deprecate yourself for failing. Unless you have significant experience in meditation, your attention will likely keep on doing that. Be patient, and keep up the work.
If you have lots of trouble with some personal issues that constantly come up and grab your attention, you might want to Tune Your Emotional Processing before continuing.
Repeat the cycle as many times as you manage.
That's it, really. If you keep up the pressure, your brain will definitely respond. The only problem you are likely to encounter is that for this or other reason you can't exclusively focus on your body for long enough. This problem can be solved by regulating your life, body, and brain before you start executing the steps above. Using more willpower is useful on the margin, but unlikely to help if other factors are working against you.
Further progress
The instructions above focus on the outside surface of the skin, because it's the easiest. Later, you'll have fun discovering that the process also works for other components of your body.
Assignment
Now that you should have some activation energy, go put it to use! Go tackle that task you’ve been procrastinating on, or refer to the Bug List that you’ve created while in the Guild. Share what you did in the Discord chat!