Good Morning All,
Rex here. Greetings from Northeast Thailand.
I have been practicing with Alive! (also HeartMath and Wild Divine) the past few months. This is my first chance to make a contribution to the community here. One of the Alive Workshops "Zoom out" employs some images from a process I discovered in 1995 called "Open Focus" that I tried for a bit back then, but have been practicing regularly for nearly one year now, six months before I started exploring HRV & Coherence. => http://www.openfocus.com . Open Focus was developed by biofeedback-neurofeedback pioneer, Dr. Les Fehmi as a means to facilitate synchronous alpha which is (supposedly) very desirable. Open Focus Training involves learning attentional flexibility between narrow and diffuse attention styles, including more and more content of awareness into a wider-and-wider diffuse panorama of awareness. Training begins by gently, effortlessly imagining space; big spaces, little spaces, the various spaces in our body, that our body occupies, between, around and through things, inside us and outside us, the space which comprises and flows between atoms, and the vast spaces between planets, stars and galaxies. This may sound like a lot of babble, but it is easy to understand if you try it, and you can get interesting results immediately. There are sample MP3's of some of the exercises on the website which you can download free. The entire set of 18 recordings is less than $200 bucks, I think. But the individual exercises themselves can be ordered separately, and are not costly, so it it is easy to explore without making a big investment in the beginning. Well worth checking out. All you have to do is sit quietly, listen to the recordings which are 20-30 min long, and effortlessly, with your multi-sensory imagination, imagine the "objectless images" which are described during the recording. One objectless image might be: Can you imagine the space between your eyes?"
It is frustrating, however. While these recordings are intended to work without neurofeedback, I am quite sure that neurofeedback greatly accelerates and enhances the process. While the recordings are cheap, neurofeedback is unfortunately still quit costly, and not readily available in all places. I can't get it in Thailand, which is a pisser!
The other thing that is interesting is trying to determine the relationship, if any, between synchronous alpha and HRV & Coherence. And of course, without any ability to measure alpha, all I can do is speculate subjectively.
When I use emWave with any of the three systems, I have learned to get high coherence at mid-range difficulty quite easily using soft, lengthened heart-centered "belly breathing" and adopting feelings of appreciation. However, when I do Open Focus exercises w/out attending to breathing, et al, coherence goes right in the toilet! My uneducated guess is that this should work from the top-down as well as from the bottom-up. That is, thinking about spaces and generating alpha "ought to" produce greater HRV and coherence . . . and that greater HRV and coherence ought to generate alpha. But without neurofeedback, I am not playing with a full deck, and can't begin to answer that question outside of speculation.Anyway, sorry for this ramble, but I find this stuff fascinating, and I did want to share about Open Focus which I think is a little-know gold mine of possibility for self-regulation. Sooner or late, one way or the other, I suppose I will get some better sense of how Open Focus and HRV relate.
Rex
Khon Kaen, Thailand
[email protected]