Some General Tips on OBEs
Mirrored from Ballabene's OBE and Astral Pages
Balancing Between Sleep And Awakeness
Depending from the body position - lying flat or sitting more or less upright - I learned to trigger the degree of awareness. Naturally the more flat the position was, the stronger was the tendency to fall asleep.
A second parameter on the awake-sleep scale, I recognized, is the body temperature. Coolness is activating, but if I got cold feet or a hot head, I stayed awake and got stuck in a long thread of thoughts. If the body was kept too comfortably warm, I tended to fall asleep.
A shift towards sleep at day or a shift towards alertness at night, could be accomplished by the degree of brightness of light. This can be balanced by using a dim lamp at night (as it may be switched on in REM-sleep to support LD's, as I have read in some reports and by blindfolding, when trying OBE´s in daytime. The latter procedure is less important for me since I got independent from daylight by turning my eyeballs upwards.
The time of day plays a role as well. If I am called to start exercises by means of an alarmclock, in the initial hours of sleeptime, I tend to fall asleep immediately, whereas conditions are better in the early morning. My first OBE's I had by chance, when I extended sleeptime on Saturday or Sunday into the late morning. This favoured obviously the occurence of LD's and OBE's. "Professionals" try to increase the frequency of OBE's and therefore want to train throughout the week. In this case they are to start OBE's in night time. Since one tends to fall asleep at that time, it is useful to counteract by taking a seat in an armchair. I have had good results with this kind of arrangement and can better concentrate at night.
Exercises Which Might Help
My OBE-ing does not always turn out as well as I would like. Success is going up and down. There are some reasons for this frustrating unsteadiness. These reasons are found in distraction and energetic constitution, in times of slipshod inner discipline. I won't state that inner discipline is absolutely necessary, but it helps. Anyhow, if I have some kind of inner electricity, OBE's are facilitated. To follow some advices listed below might be useful to others as well.
Control and guide of thoughts and emotions. Even a partial control is of good influence.
Practicing a selfmade European version of Yoga, I have found, that quite a lot of Yoga-exercises were supporting LD's and OBE's. Among the best ones are body-energizing, body-awareness and visualization. For OBE's in the sense of "stepping out", the best exercises, I have found, are those in which you are concentrated on body processes. This prevents you to drift away by any dreamlike pictures. Pictures very easily tend to consume your attention and they let you drop into ordinary dreams, whereas there is nothing of interest, which would distract you from exercising, if your attention is directed on slow motions or vibrations in the range of deep sounds felt in abdomen or breast. At present I prefer this kind of exercise. Several years ago, my central exercise was concentration on warmth-feeling, starting from the feet and going upwards or circling through the whole body (except the head). Besides warmth a second possibility was the imagination of energy circling in the body.
Another helpful exercise, as I have heard from friends, is Eutonie, a train of feeling-imagination-exercises concerning body inspection. These friends had their first OBE's spontaneously, when performing these exercises, without ever having heard about OBE's before.
As mentioned above, currently I prefer exercising on vibrations. In days I can´t feel vibrations, I try to produce body motions in the range of 0,5 to 4 Hz (cps). If I can´t produce them for any reason, I imagine rocking in the frequency of about 1 Hz. When using too slow body movements, I can´t keep up concentration and drift away very soon. Visualization helped to some extent to perform astral projection, but was of no use for etheric OBE's.