Better Receiver.
Field Notes 20260525-20260531 - Retrospective
The week opened with the fastest 10k I’ve ever run and closed with the decision to stop running entirely. That isn’t the contradiction it looks like. The body took the wheel, and the smartest thing I did was let it.
Monday started with the morning ritual I’d been circling for months: thirty minutes in F15, the place without time, observing the run before I took it and living in the wish fulfilled, closing with “Now, I am that.” Then gratitude, gear away, drum & bass in the ears, and a 10k at my fastest average pace yet. It worked exactly as designed.
By Friday the wheels were wobbling. I overslept past my starting window and missed the long run, the same way I’d missed Wednesday’s, the same way I’d been quietly picking off strength sessions for a couple of weeks. This is wildly out of character. I usually wake up between 4 and 4:30 and just move, no thought. The body has been blaring its overuse alarm and I’ve been powering through it, which is the move that normally works for me and the exact wrong move here.
March is the real culprit. The sickness that opened the month ate the de-load weeks I’d otherwise have taken, and fighting an infection is not resting, it’s repair under fire. It just took until now to catch up.
So next week is a full stop: de-load, recalibrate, rebuild, reload, reset. I write a lot about enforcing the will over the ego and the physical body, but I’ll concede the scales sometimes tip the other way, and the ego moves to preserve the thing it lives in. It cut a strength session here, a run there, and it was right to. Complying isn’t the same as recovering, though, which is the whole reason I’m taking the entire week rather than calling the missed runs a wash.
The practice has been giving the same reading. Friday’s afternoon session reached F12 and stalled out, weak, spacing and clicking out, energy plainly spent. Saturday I cast “Show me what’s in the cups” into F12, got more hypnagogic activity than usual, then rolled over to threshold hunt and got ambushed by stomach cramps instead of an opening. I woke up frustrated, a little from the nap and mostly from the strangeness of fumbling at things I used to do with zero effort. Body down, practice down. Same instrument, same reading.
What’s interesting is where the de-load points on the meditative side. Not forward, back. Back to the Gateway Program staple tracks to refresh my own register of each focus state, back to the NVC practice I let lapse, back to Sutphen’s Better Receiver. Move down through the foundational layers I first learned from and reinforce. Persistently persistent, as I put it to myself. Roll up my sleeves and get annoying, and I have a long record there: it’s how I registered at CSU Fresno when the paperwork said I couldn’t, and how I left with the BFA and the honors. Annoying persistence masquerading as perseverance. The instrument responds to the same thing.
And then Thursday did the thing where the week quietly reframes itself from underneath. I’d been carrying the foundations as training wheels, something you use, learn from, and ditch, and the program never teaches you how to ditch them, by design, because a practice that tells you when to stop goes out of business. But sitting with the Gospel of Thomas, I landed somewhere else. Stillness was never the destination. It’s the door, and a door only matters for what’s on the other side of it. The now isn’t hard because it’s far away, it’s hard because it’s too close, nearer than the thoughts I keep using to go looking for it.
Which means going back to the foundations isn’t regression. The sitting was always the work. I put together a Presence Companion this week, the eternal-now sayings from Thomas gathered into movements I can sit with instead of read past, and I don’t expect to finish it. Finishing would miss the entire point.
So the week holds two things that look opposed and aren’t. Get annoying, persistently persistent, pursue with moxie. And: let go and flow, the work is the sitting, the destination is one I was never meant to reach. The body is forcing the surrender and the practice is asking for the persistence—going back down to the foundations on purpose, loosely, without pretending it’s a step backward.
Closing the week depleted but clearer than I’ve been in a while. Next week I stop pushing and go back to the beginning, which is turning out to be the same direction as forward. As above, so below.
Afternoon
Meditation
- 50 Minutes.
- Dick Sutphen, self-hypnosis, Better Receiver.
I’ve got my schedule locked-and-loaded for next week’s recovery and The Gateway Program reinforcement through key tracks from all the sets that I’ve completed. So, today was as good a day as any to unofficially kick next week off with one of Dick Sutphen’s “Better Receiver” self-hypnosis tracks.
I remembered what that course was about but forgot many details of the actual session. That’s good, it means I retained the overall message but forgot the details enough (and over a long enough period of time) for it to sound almost new. This is excellent because the best sessions are the brand new ones where you go in completely blind. This is the next best thing to that.
I won’t go into the details of each and every part but I will shed some light on the structure. Sutphen walks you through some mental exercises before the actual session begins, which is a very short past life regression meant to bring the lessons together as a final demonstration.
He makes a fantastic point that I’m afraid is misunderstood often: if nothing comes to your mind when prompted, make it up. He’s not saying to make it all up, but he’s saying that you stand to benefit from doing the first step yourself and then sit back and watch the rest roll in completely unprompted. I know this works, it works very well… but you must remember what you’re doing and have enough discernment to understand the process so as not to fall for your own bullshit (so to speak).
This is the kind of lesson that is incredibly valuable if you sit with it long enough to understand it properly. It’s also the kind of lesson that is instantly dismissed by lazy handwaving. It’s easy to ridicule without even attempting to experience the process, it’s also very easy to try and see for yourself. The best part? It really does make you a “better receiver” in trance states where you don’t need to jump-start imagination or visualization. Think of this tape/track/lesson as a recalibrating tool for that HAM radio that’s between your ears.
I highly recommend it.
Through The Week of 20260525-20260531
- https://perceptindex.substack.com/p/show-me-whats-in-the-cups
- https://perceptindex.substack.com/p/the-wheels-are-starting-to-wobble
- https://perceptindex.substack.com/p/the-destination-you-were-never-meant
- https://perceptindex.substack.com/p/now-i-am-that
