I said I would provide an update about what it feels like for me these days when pause turns off. I'll provide that here as well as a few other thoughts on turning off pause. And I just want to reiterate that the experience of turning off pause varies from person to person. So don't assume your experience will necessarily be a lot like mine. JWH does provide some descriptions of what you can reliably expect to feel. Here is a good one (RFP, 2020, p. 363):
However, regardless of where one is in terms of muscle and nerve healing, every time that pause is turned off, the inhibition of dopamine release for motor function is instantly turned off. Turned off instantly. A person immediately feels subtly different. The chronic sense of impending doom, the need for wariness, and the other aspects of the Parkinson’s personality – a medically recognized syndrome – ease up. Dopamine for motor function flows freely, instantly, when it is supposed to… until such time, if any, that pause mode is mentally initiated again in response to an unexpected fear or from the long-installed habit of wariness.
Optimism is good for your health. And optimism, and positive thinking more generally, seems to give a boost to the Janice Walton-Hadlock (JWH) protocol. You could say positive thinking is grease for the wheels of the protocol. In my experience, progress is better and the daily practice of the protocol is more effective in the presence of a positive attitude.
Unfortunately negative thinking seems to go hand-in-hand with Parkinson's. It is in fact so common in PD that JWH describes it as a feature of the “Parkinson's personality” (RFP, 2020, pp. 202-203). She writes, “Over time, the use of the Parkinson’s personality creates habits of negative thinking that make it harder to turn off pause.”
This post updates and elaborates on a prior post in which I outlined some techniques I've used in an effort to deepen my response to the two core exercises of the Janice Walton-Hadlock (JWH) protocol.
Phrasings
These are examples of some of the kinds of things I've said during a session in dialogue with my “invisible friend.” My primary aim with all of these phrases, requests, etc. is to nurture feelings of safety and surrender. So these phrasings contain content about those and other related feelings.
That Robert Earl Keen song captures something of how this new phase feels!
I'm pleased to say my sense that I was back on track seems to have been accurate. And my feeling that I might have turned off pause again was accurate too. I can now say confidently that I have turned off pause four times in the last week!
My focus recently has been on nurturing my relationship with my invisible friend, with some emphasis on safety and surrender. As I mentioned in a recent post, my main invisible friend lately has been Divine Mother. A few days ago it occurred to me that I might still be complicating things too much, getting a bit too fancy in trying to say certain things that I thought would have just the right effects. That led me to the notion that perhaps the simplest way to nurture the relationship and a feeling of safety was just to abide in the loving, protective arms of Divine Mother.
This is essentially a variation on exercise #2. What was different this time was that instead of merely repeating a request such as “Let me feel you hold me,” I tried to have a more continuous experience of being held in her arms. That is, the aim was to rest there in her arms for as much of the time as possible. (This is possible even during activities like walking.) Talking was secondary. Much of the time was spent not really talking about much of anything, or just moving casually from one topic to another, whatever came to mind. I think you could say this was also an intensified version of the “companionable silence.”
See the pinned posts at the top of the page for “My journey so far,” a timeline I've added chronicling key points in my progress so far. I hope this might be of help, particularly to newer readers trying to get a general idea of what I've been up to.
Inspired by my reading of Yogananda, I have lately found it quite productive to talk some of the time with Divine Mother. I am the farthest thing from an expert on this topic, but based on some of my reading, I can say that the traditions of which Yogananda was a part view Divine Mother as the feminine aspect of God. She is seen as purely, unconditionally kind, loving, forgiving.
Now anyone engaged in the JWH protocol might say that your invisible friend should be all those things anyway. And that is absolutely true! The advantage of Divine Mother is simply that, for some, it may be easier to experience her immediately as all those things than might be the case with an invisible friend with a more masculine image. Divine Mother may be just a little easier to see as something akin to pure love. That in turn may make it easier to more quickly develop love for her. And it seems clear that the more emotional attachment you feel, the more love you feel, toward your invisible friend, the more potent that relationship will be in bringing about recovery.
It's clear enough in Janice Walton-Hadlock's writings that the various techniques and associated feelings she describes are not discrete, unrelated elements. Rather, they are, by and large, interrelated parts of one integrated package. For instance, consider the connections involved in these comments in SOP (2017, p. 218):
Remember, the thalamus is stimulated when you feel God. The feeling might be an expansion of your heart...
The striatum is stimulated when you talk to your beloved.
These two brain parts, thalamus and striatum, are a few inches away from the forehead end of the Du channel.
[Updated – 3/17/21: Several small revisions for clarity made in recent days.]
Following the last post providing any detail on what I've been doing, I can report that I believe I'm now turning a corner and getting back on track. After about 11 weeks that stubborn cough I'd had seems finally to have disappeared almost entirely. Whether or not it involved a virus that may have been blocking one or more qi channels, and so interfering with turning off pause, I can't say for sure. In any event, I think it may not help in the quest to turn off pause to think it's not going to happen! So it feels good to have that out of the way.