Mental posture is how we engage the parts of the mind that move energy. It’s what makes the difference between imagining energy and actually using it.
For beginners, I teach a single mental posture to engage their energy. But that’s a bit like having a physical posture for doing sports. Sure, pretty much every sport wants you to be standing up and ready to move, but there are lots of differences too.
For intermediate mental posture, we’re going to learn to adopt one mental posture for ethereal communication, another for building energy, another for reading energy, and so on.
That is, we’re going to learn to match our mental posture to the task at hand.
This is an intermediate post, written for longtime readers and students for completing my level 2 class.
How specialized mental postures help your practice
Different muscles in your body perform different tasks — your biceps aren’t very helpful for running, for example.
Similarly, different ethereal muscles perform different tasks. Three of the most common are for making connections, working with energy signatures, and ethereal communication.
The key to success is to use the right muscle for the task.
By making each posture match the task, we ensure that the correct ethereal muscles are receiving our intent. And that’s what intermediate mental posture is: Engaging individual ethereal muscles.
By focusing on the ethereal muscles we need, it helps us ensure that each muscle is fully engaged and that we haven’t left part of a muscle dormant or inattentive.
But it’s more than that. I’ve talked before about the difference between visualizing and consciously guiding your ethereal muscles, and the importance of feeling how your ethereal muscles respond to your intent.
This shift, from visualizing to consciously guiding, is key to intermediate and advanced techniques. And I can’t be sure, because I made that shift more than a decade ago, but I suspect that engaging individual ethereal muscles and tuning in to a single ethereal muscle is a key part of learning to consciously guide your ethereal muscles.
How to engage individual ethereal muscles
First, remember that mental posture happens naturally. For example, after a long session communicating with ethereal software, your communication muscle will be particularly engaged. Mental posture is about consciously engaging these states.
The first step to intermediate mental posture is simply being aware of it. After doing some practice, just notice how your mind feels. Tune in to which ethereal muscles are most engaged. Just start to notice this stuff.
With experience, you’ll develop a sense of how your mind feels for ethereal communication vs sending energy vs reading energy, and maybe the difference between reading energy in general vs reading energy with a sensory connection. Those are the main mental postures for my level 2 students.
Just like you did for your default mental posture, make visualizations for these mental postures. Learn to consciously engage them as you do your work.
Once you’re comfortable with that, here are the next steps. We’ll use the communication muscle as an example, but this applies to any muscle:
Feel the ethereal muscle. Ask if there is more of it. That is, have you only engaged a portion of your communication muscle, and there’s more of it that you are not aware of? Just trust your intuition, get a sense of it. Then, if there is more, think about extending your awareness into it.
If that additional muscle engages easily, awesome. Just practice engaging it, practice holding it engaged as you do ethereal communication, and update your mental posture visualization to include it.
If the additional muscle is difficult to engage, congratulations, you’ve found a dormant part of an ethereal muscle. This seems to happen when you have an ethereal muscle that’s been installed but not been used for years, they atrophy and shut down.
I spent several years learning to awaken dormant muscles. Here’s the first technique for awakening them:
Feel the dormant ethereal muscle, or portion of muscle. Get a sense of how big it is, where it is in your mind, what you’re working with. Don’t worry about making it perfect, you will almost certainly miss large portions of it on your first try. But what matters is to try getting a sense of it, and try extending your awareness into it.
Build some energy in your body. Your default energy should be fine, when I did this work I didn’t put a lot of thought into the signature of energy that I wanted to use, I just used my default energy and it worked. So build some energy in your body. Then move it into the dormant ethereal muscle. Not just into your head, but actually into the dormant part of the ethereal muscle. Just bring your awareness there, same as you do when you’re moving energy in your body, and bring the energy there. It might take a few tries, but this is something your ethereal muscles should already know how to do, so you should be able to do it just by intending to.
Hold the energy there for a few minutes. If you feel a shift in the muscle, that means it has accepted the energy and it’s time to rest. If you don’t feel a shift, that’s OK, just hold the energy there for a few minutes and then rest.
Depending on how dormant the ethereal muscle is, this may take a few sessions, or it may take more. You’ll know it’s working when it becomes easier to engage these additional parts of your ethereal muscle, that’s how you tell they’re no longer dormant.
You may have a few dormant parts of ethereal muscles, or many, or none at all. I had many, and took close to a decade awakening them all, and developing techniques to awaken them more quickly and in larger groups. We can cover those in the future.