Current favourite practice for Wouter.
My name, Wouter, isn’t the easiest to spell nor to pronounce. I find a lot of amusement in the mispronunciations.
The NPC Man crew (now Viva La Dirt League) make great YouTubes about game (and computer shop) tropes. They did a kickstarter to fund their studio, and I asked them to make a video about saying my name.
They did not disappoint.
Thanks guys, that made my day.
(First and last pronunciations are correct)
With thanks to some suggestions Kasper van der Meulen of Mindlift (who gives a great Breathwork Mastery class) and by Robin (who made SoundSelf), I’ve been playing with breath and SoundSelf.
In the beginning the voice guidance guides you into setting up your space, settling in comfortably, letting go of tension, and generally feeling grounded and relaxed.
I find that a good way for me to go to that place, is to do a breath hold, and letting that go with a somewhat explosive pfffffffff via the mouth.
Then the tree launch sequence starts, where you set and SoundSelf learns the base rhythm for the later session. So I set the base rhythm there with an unhurried but deliberate, deep full-belly nose inhale (my natural rhythm seems ±5s, yours may differ) and long deep resonating ohhhmm tone out via the mouth (±30s).
This will be the rhythm I fall back to in the later process, the metronome that SoundSelf will also be repeating to you in your own voice.
The basis of supercharging the experience, is first some over-ventilation:
forced quick in- and exhales for a short period.
Although the details of the technique (in/out via nose or mouth) do not matter that much for this purpose, I suggest that you focus on the exhale via your mouth, and inhale 80% in via your nose.
This matches the rest of the breathing patterns, activates your system but does not panic it, and it is generally a good idea to prefer nose inhales.
Do these quick breaths to taste: to the moment where you feel more energised/tingling, a bit or even a lot further than that if you are more experienced with breathwork.
I end up doing 10-40 breaths usually.
Everyones’ mileage can vary, but the big trick with this experience seems to be what you do right after this power up breathing.
Think of going right back into toning (you may notice that you can exhale and thus tone longer because you have exhaled a lot of CO2).
But you can also immediately fully exhale, hold empty until you feel the clear urge to breathe in, nose inhale and go back to breathing.
This one is my current favourite.
This looks like this:
At the end, give yourself some time to get back to grounding. Lay down and let your body integrate, then take some grounding breaths like so.
I like anchoring this experience to a trigger, so that I can come back to the sensation with that word/gesture.
There are of course many further things to try, like making different sounds (I’ve started experimented with mantras), exogenous chemical influence, and tactile experiences like the SubPac/TacSuit (going towards EMDR?).
DMTtripBear showed how using the mantra “Om Mani Padme Hum” would work and I’m experimenting with mantras now too.
A power breath and Om Mani Padme Um:
For the (increasing) places where this is legal, apparently “indica dominant cannabis can dramatically heighten the SoundSelf experience“. Try it out, let me know?
Doing SoundSelf with psylocibin (“magic mushrooms”), LSD or other ‘real’ psychedelics… I doubt will be that interesting or smart at a dose that gives an internal psychedelic experience. Robin has tried that experiment and sweetly came to the conclusion that the internal experience from the psychedelics is more interesting. And that the magic goes away if you know how SoundSelf works like he does.
I’d also think that it is probably not a good idea to have a VR headset strapped to your head with a full psychedelic (not a great setting), and the visuals might be a bit extreme on a screen. To be clear: not advised.
Micro-dosing… maybe. Let me know?
Alcohol… pretty sure not.
More to follow I am sure…
SoundSelf play is both a very relaxing zone-out self-care moment for me, as well as a deepening tune-up of meditation and breath work. I’ve been starting my day with a cup of coffee and a 15-20 minute SoundSelf session, and often end the day with 40 minute one.
I feel relaxed and clear for the whole day from this, and it is nurturing something deep in me.
SoundSelf is labelling itself as “a technodelic” and that seems like the best way to describe this unique new experience (in the VR domain): somewhere between an old-school Winamp-like sound visualisation and a psychedelic experience.
I highly advised you try it, not in the least as it gives a taste of meditation and/or psychedelics, while keeping legal wherever you are ;-).
I’m a huge, long-time fan of SoundSelf: when way back in 2016 I heard about this VR-generated almost-psychedelic software being in its alpha stages, I bought a Kickstarter Oculus Rift CV1 setup just to experience this myself.
From that moment on I’ve been ‘playing’ SoundSelf from that “I’ve got something cool” demo phase, through the kickstarter phase in 2017, to a chance meeting with Robin in 2019 where I got to tell him I bought the Oculus for the experience and he told me he wrote it, to investing in Andromeda Entertainment to bring this to the world, to now the big launch into the wide world in April 2020.
So you could say I’m quite invested and experienced in SoundSelf.
‘Play’ is simple: start SoundSelf, sit or lay back, and tone (drone ‘ooooohhhhhmmmm’).
A SoundSelf session is both a very relaxing zone-out self-care moment for me, as well as a deepening tune-up of meditation and breath work. I’ve been starting my day with a cup of coffee and a 15-20 minute SoundSelf session, and often end the day with 40+ minute one.
I feel relaxed and clear for the whole day from this, and it is nurturing something deep in me.
If I go more meta, games like these are of course a way to enjoy an experience and a story, but also a way nurture and grow something inside me (Robin is saying similar things in interviews). This one is teaching me to take time for myself, to do active breath and toning meditation, and surrender into quiet one-ness.
There is research showing SoundSelf helps go into medium altered states [1]. My experience is not a full blown psychedelic experience, but there is definitely a losing my default mode network/ego, and relaxing into the quieting down from the toning and breathing (vagal nerve stimulation).
It definitely is also a good breath exercise.
I’ve been making recordings using the Muse as brainwave measurement device, but it is quite a bit of data so I’ll analyse them later.
Quick and dirty measurement using the Muse in normal meditation mode does show way more neutral and calm then in normal state, and obviously more activation than in the Zen no-mind meditation that Muse aims you towards.
A frequent question I get from people wanting to experience SoundSelf, is whether you need to have VR goggles?
The answer is simply: no.
But… the more immersive you can make it, the better.
So ideally you set yourself up such that:
The visualisations are fairly CPU and GPU intensive, so even though it works on MacBook, it really needs a recent high-end one.
Currently there is a strange quirk with the microphone and the access control on it by MacOS. This means that if SoundSelf does not ‘hear’ your microphone, try not starting it via Steam but directly start the application. You can tell you are starting it the right application if you see SoundSelf green eye icon, not the blue Steam gear.
On the MacBook you’ll want to disable the ‘strobing’ feature, as the lower frame rate makes it look bad.
(more to come) More here
I travel quite a bit for work and pleasure, and have for a few decades. Here are some practical tips I have for you.
I have a check-in/carry-on suitcase (currently Samsonite B-Light 3 with 2 wheels) ready for travel nearly all the time. The week before a trip I have it open in my bedroom and fill it with the specific items I need for an upcoming trip as I bump into them (Getting Things Done style inbox filing ;-)).
I also have my daily-carry/designated carry-on backpack (currently North Face Kaban (older model)) which is always ready for day to day meetings and for air travel (fluids only in an external pouch, no sharps, etc).
That carry-on backpack also contains a change of clothes, just in case my check-in goes missing for a few days (rare) or I get caught in rain/manage to dirty my clothes (less rare). I’ve packed, in waterproof ziplock bags, wrinkle-free business casual clothes:
Lately, I’m getting questions on “how to invest” income beyond direct living costs.
Just like with GTD systems, I find it very important to have a financial system that one can relax into fully. Not having concerns about money frees up a lot of mental and emotional energy, and can shift one from a scarcity to abundance mindset.
My advice and practice is go implement this once the daily living costs have been covered, in the below stated order:
After the above, you can put the remainder into further tweaking of your financial growth and stability, with your choice of:
And whatever you have left and are entirely ok with losing completely, gamble that by:
I hope this view helps you decide wisely where to put your money.
For the growth!
Wouter
One of those small hacks that I enjoy a lot, is to set the playback speed of podcasts or audiobooks to 1.5-2x the normal speed. Modern players such as the iOS podcast Overcast app and Audible app will keep the pitch normal.
So the effect is similar to giving the speaker a cup of coffee, not a hit of helium and making him one of the chipmunks. Especially with speakers … who … speak … with … … profound … … silences … like Osho, this speed up saves me a lot of will power to keep listening.
The Overcast app has a more granular setting for the speedups. Not only can you select speedups in 0.25 granularity, you can also vary the speedup per podcast (so usually slow speakers can get even higher speedups). In the speedup it also removes the pauses, which gives another 0.25-1.50x speedup without any loss of information.
The Overcast app has a few other features that make life easier: downloading of new episodes is reliable (iOS app is crap at this), skip forward button step is configurable, it automatically plays the next priority episode (iOS app stopped doing this for unknown reasons). And they are very well aware of the impact on our mental well being:
Podcast speed is to the left of the play buttons:
I like Audible for audiobooks, and quite a few of the speakers have this profound … silence … speaking style that I’m not really interested in anymore, so this works well for me. Tapping on the lower left corner brings up the Narration Speed menu.
Even more ideal would be removing the silences automatically, similar to how my videos are edited, but I’m not aware of something that does that.
Hoping I saved a few hours of your life with this,
Wouter
