Not today.
Field Notes 20260814 - Friday
In the last three weeks, the quality of meditations and immersive altered states has degraded substantially or completely dropped off. I’m no stranger to these situations, as I’ve written about them at length when they come. Initially, I spent a lot of time and energy investigating just why this happens. I refused to accept that the same mechanism that expanded my experience of this reality would vanish, seemingly on its own, without any explanation.
In the last couple rounds of this “fallow period,” to borrow the term from pre-dynastic Egypt, I’ve begun to not only accept it but draw correlations. They might be true, they might not, but I do think there’s something to it all, and it’s not all doom and gloom.
For one, I know it’s fairly difficult to do most things when I’m ill. Why can’t that be true for non-physical access? I don’t normally catch a nasty virus, and that’s part of the issue and surprise. After our week-long vacation, both Kim and I fell ill, and the recovery has been long and absolutely not pleasant.
All of last week, I halted physical training (again) as I was in “the eye of the storm,” and not only did I not think about running, but I thought about shuffling from one end of the house to the other as a task that was both physically taxing and mentally exhausting.
I opened this week with a 10k run on an early Monday morning and felt amazing, until I didn’t later that day. The following morning, I got up early again and went to my garage gym and did a 90-minute strength training session; it was okay. Wednesday morning, I woke up at 4 AM and said, “Not today,” as I rolled over and went back to sleep. The rest of the week unfolded exactly like that Wednesday morning.
I’m still recovering; I’m not engaged in physical training that calms down my nervous system and gives me energy for non-physical access work. About the only thing I can do right now is practice long sits of stillness; that’s it.
We’ll see how tomorrow pans out, or not, but overall I’m just fine focusing on a proper recovery so as not to extend this period any longer than it has to. One other thing I’m tracking is a possible correlation between Mercury Rx and expanded immersive altered-state access, but this is a long process that I’ll write more about later this year.
