This is a topic I had trouble with when I first started working with psi. Starting out, there are so many different things you’re told, and many of them conflict to a degree, particularly the issues of belief and discipline. There are lots of different viewpoints, and none of them are necessarily wrong; it just depends on how you like to practice, and really just what kind of person you are. But having gotten frustrated, disheartened, and disinterested with psi quite a few times (and, obviously, having returned), I’ve gotten a bit of insight into what is a healthy attitude for me to have towards how disciplined I need to be, and how I should practice.
MeditationFirst of all, I firmly believe that meditation is important to psi. This is a belief you will see hugely prominent on communities like Veritas, but many communities barely touch on it. Notice that I say important, and not necessary; I practiced psi for a little while before I started meditating, and I did get results, but I know the few times where I meditated, I felt much less easily frustrated, and I was able to gather more psi, more quickly. Meditation can be boring, and if you really hate doing it, don’t; but I would strongly suggest giving it a fair chance first. PsiPog has a good article on trancing (
http://www.psipog.net/art-trancing.html) that would be a decent intro into meditation, as well as an article I personally love on synergistic meditation at
http://www.psionicsonline.net/article/synergistic-meditation-shadowmindlc-upc (although you should note that if parts of it get too unconscious, like counting backwards, to make them a little more complex, like counting backwards by 2s from 20). You might also want to consider *obtaining* brainwave entrainment technology (which I personally like, but many people don’t) like Neuro-Programmer or LifeFlow.
DisciplineDo your own thing. I used to try and follow a strict training program, but I only ended up getting frustrated in situations where I made myself practice when I didn’t want to, or when I missed practice. Personally, I’ve dropped all my structured training regimens (weights, drums, piano, etc.), and I just do things when I feel like them. Because most of what I do can be done with little preparation, I can practice on a whim, go for as long as I want, and then go back to what I was doing. This spontaneous method of doing things tends to make me practice fairly regularly -with weights, it’s often multiple times per day that I train on a whim- and I would attribute it to the fact that I don’t feel pressure, but just sort of a happy symbiosis with whatever I’m supposed to be practicing. If you can practice on a rigid schedule and feel fantastic every time, that’s great. If not, no big deal, just practice when you feel like it (although note that you won’t always think “I want to practice
{thing to practice}!” sometimes you have to cajole yourself a little (but don’t force yourself if you really don’t want to; just make up for it another time).
Closely related to discipline is goal-setting. Goal-setting is good, it’s great. But you don’t have to make a whole detailed list of what you want to practice, how long you want to spend on it, and what you’re going to practice after that. I’ve tried doing that, making huge lists of articles to keep bookmarked for things I’ll be doing in the future. The thing is, goal lists can lose their appeal even after a day. I’ve often gone back and thought “well, maybe that article isn’t worth reading” or “maybe I should switch these two goals”, and ended up just continuously modifying the list. It’s easier for me to just have a goal or two, and casually work towards them. When I can accomplish them, I can look up the article again and go to the next step, or get a new article for the next step, or I can pick whatever goal I want, rather than being stuck to an idealized goal list of many articles covering the same topics, to make sure I get all the information. Your approach to goal-setting can be as casual or as strict as you like, but as long as you have some sort of goal (even if it’s just vague or abstract, like “I want to make my psi ball a little stronger”), that’s all that’s really necessary.
Emotions and frustrationFourth, emotions. This is a big one for me, as I tend to get sort of bipolar when I’m tired. And I’m school. Hence I’m always tired. And always bipolar. That being said, I tend to feel angry and tired and not want to practice. And if I really don’t, I won’t. It’s that simple. I just make sure to tell myself that I will practice when I’m a little of a better mood. That’s all there is to it. If you feel overloaded or not up to practicing, just don’t. Specifically with regards to psi, though, if you feel frustrated by psi a lot, or feel doubtful because you’re not really progressing (I’m just pulling these examples from the air. I definitely didn’t have these problems. At all. Nope. Not me), then just remember that it’s just another study like anything else. Just like if you read through your science textbook a little every day, you might not remember much after the first few days, and you might not feel like you’re remembering more, but if you keep it up, you’ll start remembering (and that’s how I studied for my biology exam). Even so, making little or no progress is actually
still a good thing! Just like working a muscle, keeping it from atrophying is an important part, so working it a little, just to keep it up, is still something you have to do.
HopesI hope that helped somebody, and that not everybody TL;DRd it.
By the way, if you have a comment, LEAVE IT! It's good for me to know if I repeated something too much, went on for too long about something, or didn't explain enough!
