This is a reblog from my DW. I’m happy to have somewhere I can post it publicly, finally. If you copy this to send on, please include a link to this entry. Thanks!

(Also: See this entry about the title of this post. It’s probably not what you’re thinking XD)

(Updated: Here.)

(Updated again: Here.)

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I’ve been wanting to write this for a while, and have just been gathering ideas… I think today I’ll just post up a general outline of my thoughts on this, and I might fill in a better one later with feedback. I hope I don’t offend anyone (not my intent) and I’m really open (encouraging) of comments both good and bad. It’s also really important to point out that this can be different for different people and different systems. But basically, I want to make a guide for people who have head-people (or close-to-head-people) to make the leap to letting them front, if they haven’t been able to.



This really strongly assumes people who have always been the only fronter for most or all of their lives, to the point where they really assume that they’re the body, and their head-friends are the ones “in there”. This is about helping you change that balance on purpose.



Why would you want to do this? Well, if you like your head-friends like I like mine, maybe you want to let them interact with the world more directly. Also it can work around communication troubles that happen in-head. It’s like telling someone how to move a pair of gloves vs putting them on, or trying to see a world through eyeholes of a mask 2 feet away instead of just putting on the mask so that it effectively goes away. I think it can help you understand yourself. Finally, I think this is a kind of “crazy” that we need to see more of in the world; it’s been an honored spirit-worker thing for millenia, and it’s only become pathologized in the last thousand years or so in the western european world.



Without further ado…







1. Make contact – you’ll need to be able to have some sort of conversations with the friend you want to help forward. This means you can talk to them, they can talk to you, and their thoughts are not coming from your expectations of what they’d say. You’ll need to have a pretty clear way to make sure that you’re hearing their thoughts, and you can identify them vs personal mirror images or imposters… some people don’t seem to have as much trouble with this to begin with.



2. Take a step back – instead of you being a flesh and blood body in this world, you want to step back just a small step. You’re just watching this body of yours move around and talk, and you’re directing it about what it should do, but you realize that you yourself are a being apart from it. You’re spirit, or fae, or wolf, or whatever you truly see yourself as, using this body as an avatar. I call this mental space the control room.



3. Invite your friend into the control room – For me, my people have a physical presence, even if it doesn’t translate well onto euclidean space or normal physics. They can be “out there” or they can be “standing next to me”. Standing next to me feels like we can talk at a conversational level and understand each other. That their energy field is touching mine, and I could reach out with an arm and touch their arm, open my eyes and see them. So you’re sitting there controlling this human-bot (or whatever you want to call it), and your friend is standing next to you watching it happen, maybe commenting on things you both see or do, and sometimes you do something for your friend… type some words or touch some interesting object.



Read the rest of these directions with your friend there, along with them.



4. Do you trust your friend? I mean, really trust your friend? If you’re like me, there’s a part of you that hangs back always and watches over things, but it’s a dodgy thing sometimes… and even if it’s not dodgy for you, unless you’re comfortable letting them pretend to be you (because that’s how other people will see it) then you’re going to want to hold back, yourself, and this won’t work so well.



5. Do you trust your environment? This is an important corollary to the last point: if you are weirded by the idea of what friends or roommates will think about all this, you won’t allow yourself to let go enough and enjoy the experience for the wonderful strangeness that it can be. It’s worth being very serious on this point, because people get severely mistreated for this sort of thing still. >_<



6. Go zen – this is the crucial, key step, for you. I’m sure it’s different for different people, but this seems like a good workable way to do it. Have you heard of “zazen”? It’s a state of “no mind”. Stare at one point; for me, it can’t be a blank wall, but it needs to be some stationary object like a desk or a lamp. You’re staring at this object, but you’re not staring, because that would be doing. You just are. You’re not registering the colors and symbols of what you’re looking at, because that too would be doing. You just are, the thing you’re looking at just is. If you could look at a hi-def security tape of your life, it would look like this: no thoughts, no judgements, no meanings. Just is. You, yourself, are not part of this picture.



7. Let your friend play – for me, when I’ve reached that state of zazen, I still have my hand on the control stick, so to speak, but I’m moving out of the way. Your friend will have a separate but congruent process to learn, to step in and take the control stick from you. It’s like handing an object from one person to another: you can hold out your hand, but someone else has to take the thing. I like thinking of the control room metaphor literally – you’re standing up from the chair and they’re sliding into it. You can both help this process along by having your friend say mantras like “I’m B”, “B is here”, both in-head and from the body. Both of you should try to feel and imagine what it would, what it will be like for this person to be present in the world, clothed in the same body you have been using as your avatar. Instead of them being your head-friend, you will be their head-friend (literally). B will need to actively pull that conscious, first-hand awareness of the body all around themselves, too, and will themselves to see through it and act through it.



I find (and apparently many others do early on as well) that a peculiar feeling accompanies this motion (switching). It’s almost like a turnstile flipping over.. ka..Chunk. Or changing channels on the TV. When it happens, it’s pretty unmistakeable because that part of you that’s left in the body, that you’ve imprinted on it from being in it for so many years, is going to marvel that someone else’s thoughts are now inhabiting it. Not just thoughts, but energy, emotions, feel, everything. This person will (probably) be able to go back and recall your memories almost as well as you do. So there’s a weird discontinuity there: the memories in the body are saying “I’m A” with first-person clarity, still, but the consciousness in the body knows that it’s B. This is a crucial moment because it’s easy to snap back and undo the switch if either of you lets the relative weirdness of the situation take over. It’s also why it’s important to continue doing these “I am B” mantras while B is in front; it reinforces who’s there. Looking in mirrors, staring at the body itself too much, all of this is a bad idea. It’s going to be very disorienting for B, and for someone who hasn’t moved out of front much, it’ll probably throw A back in.



Incidentally, that “remaining part of you” becomes what I like to call BodyOS – the minimalist consciousness of the body itself that assists with memory recall (useful for things like being able to know how to use the microwave, or where to find dishes, yadda yadda) and assists with switching. As time goes on, I find that it becomes more distinct, and more minimal.



Don’t stress too much if it doesn’t go totally well on the first try or two. For me, I had to spend hours of time typing for them, in first person as they spoke to me, before we could do any purposeful switching. (It’s good practice for the body to follow their instructions and act on their behalf, even if it’s through your direct will.) But again it’s a conditioning and a mantra thing – for it to work, you have to believe it will work, and have some idea of what it will feel like. Both of you. Having a specific goal or purpose in mind helps with this, too, e.g. giving them their own tag on your DW or their whole own DW, so they can get some thoughts out, interact with people, and give more motivation to get out front. (It’s work for everyone at first!) Give them their own user pic and everything; it sounds a little cheesy, but providing a home for them and a place to be and do “out here” really helps.