I was determined to get there.
I wanted to conquer my brain and find a way to not listen to the lies it was internally screaming at me as I was dripping sweat on the gym floor.
My body was experiencing an earthquake.
It was shaken like it was about to break into a million pieces.
“You need to stop.” my brain told me, then it proceeded to say “You can have a stroke from pushing yourself so much.”
I was attempting a sixty-second plank.
Yup. That was all, and my brain was telling me I was going to die there and then.
The floor was hard, there was no forgiveness from it.
Nothing could move to help me make it to that one minute mark.
I was only 20 seconds in.
Then I decided to try something that I have been doing when I am meditating.
I decided to leave this reality that was giving me so much physical discomfort and go inside my consciousness.
I had created this mega beautiful door inside my mind where I go from this reality to another without the physical laws that govern this one.
At around 25 seconds I see myself inside my mind walking towards this beautiful door.
At first, I am running there because my body is in such turmoil keeping me in this tough floor position.
As I am entering this door, I still open my eyes to see the clock on my phone.
I am still at 30 seconds in.
I need to let go more, I need to let go more.
I go further in and go through the door and onto the other side.
I look to see what is there.
My brain keeps wanting to look at the clock but my mind wants to see what’s beyond the door I just entered.
I see a sky full of stars.
The stars start to descend towards me and I feel this sense of joy.
My body is starting to shake even more holding the plank.
And for a second I come back here.
The clock says 45 seconds.
I am shifting back into the other reality and start to run again.
The stars descend even further and a deep thought says slow down.
In that moment in time, I hear the drums I normally listen to when I journey there. Thump…thump…thump… and my whole sense of reality shifts.
I can hear my trainer say “55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60.”
And I drop on the ground.
I feel euphoria.
And this sense of doing something my brain told me I could not do.
I broke through the barrier.
For the first time.
I did a plank for a whole minute and the only reason I made it was because I left my body and went somewhere else.
Where did I go?
I went to a place between worlds.
Where our consciousness is free to create an alternate reality outside of limitations.
One of my favorite humans and one of my favorite writers is Steven Kotler.
He writes about consciousness, flow states and superhuman abilities.
He is talking about all of our abilities we have somehow forgotten we have.
In his book The Rise of Superman he says that “most people live in a very restricted circle of their potential being.
They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.”
And he is so right.
We all sit there trying to conquer this reality from our weakest parts.
I am not saying we should all go into journeys every day and never come back.
I am asking you to access the depths of your consciousness and shift your reality here even for a plank.
Even for a sixty-second plank. Why?
Because this is how we start to push our limits.
The limits we don’t question because this three-dimensional reality looks so real.
Steven goes on to say that “our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness.”
I was one of those people going through life not even knowing about these other forms of consciousness.
If I wasn’t looking for the ‘afterlife’ after my husband died, I would not have stumbled upon the fact that we have access to many states of awareness.
I would have stayed in my small house of 3D and played with my ‘toys.’
The toys I am told to play with are all physical, empty of real complex dimension and quite predictable.
They don’t move.
They don’t play with us and they don’t interact with our minds because we don’t think this reality is malleable. Shiftable. Movable. It is.
Alan W. Watts was one of my husband’s favorite authors, this guy knew something we did not know.
And he did everything he could to let us know.
He tried to wake us up.
With every word he shared.
“We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.”
Unfortunately, when we are born we are given the keys to this reality by our teachers, parents, family members.
Since day one they tell us what to see, what to say, what to think.
Millions of people have died not knowing that all of their thoughts and feelings did not come from them.
The pain that I feel doing the plank on the gym floor is the pain I was told I was going to feel.
And my body and mind make that a harsh reality.
Unlearning what we have learned from day one is not an easy quest.
This is why I am asking you to try doing small challenges like a plank on your floor.
At first, it will feel strange.
Almost silly. You will judge it. Like your brain judged some of this letter.
Alan knew of this conflict so well, he talked about it often, one of my favorite things he said was this: “Jesus Christ knew he was God.
So wake up and find out eventually who you really are.
In our culture, of course, they’ll say you’re crazy and you’re blasphemous, and they’ll either put you in jail or in a nut house (which is pretty much the same thing).
However if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, ‘My goodness, I’ve just discovered that I’m God,’ they’ll laugh and say, ‘Oh, congratulations, at last you found out.”
Now, don’t you give up on this letter because I mentioned your God like presence.
The hardest thing to believe is that we are the universe witnessing itself, we are the miracle creating miracles.
We are the player playing the game we invented.
So since you are still reading you must be as crazy as I am, as crazy as Alan was and as crazy as Steven is and continues to be and thank goodness for that.
Steven Kotler and his co-author Jamie Wheal go even further in their new book “Stealing Fire” and say “There’s one final caveat worth keeping in mind.
Namely, there’s no escaping the human condition. We’re born, we die, and figuring out the in-between can be brutal. As Hemingway reminds us, “the world breaks everyone.”
And the plank can break our bodies.
And yes we die.
And yes we fear this reality.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. (Click to Tweet!)
Maybe we can’t escape the human condition all together but we can escape it for 60 seconds on the harsh gym floor, finding the door to another dimension that lives inside of your human potential.
Plank away, my friend.
60 seconds in this reality is eternal and timeless and at the same time non-existent somewhere else.
Go there and find the God you were born to be.
Christina
Christina Rasmussen is the creator and founder of The Life Reentry Institute, Second Firsts, The Life Starters and Star Letters. Christina is on a crusade to help millions of people rebuild, reclaim, and relaunch their lives using the power of their own minds. Christina’s work has been featured on ABC News, NPR, The White House Blog, and MariaShriver.com. She is the bestselling author of Second Firsts: Live, Laugh, and Love Again, which has also been translated in Chinese and German and is currently working on her second book on expanding the mind in ways that allows co creation with the forces of the universe. She is also writing her first work of fiction: a science fiction story about a woman on a quest to start over and begin a new life.
