Fabulous news – I have been back on my modified Everyman program since August 8.  I haven’t been able to keep it up since March, due to fairly severe work- and relational-stress.  Polyphasic simply does not work well, as a rule, in difficult personal situations.  I think PureDoxyk’s adaptation to Uberman is extremely unusual in that regard (she adapted well despite a major depression and sleep difficulties going on at the time).  This confirms my belief that a good night’s sleep requires peace of mind. 

Things are starting to look up, for several reasons.  My marriage has straightened out.  My internet business, WordPress Academy, is successful, and I have several other very interesting business opportunities.  I am gradually relaxing into the realization / certainty that it’s not possible for a smart and determined person to NOT make money in my sector, which is internet marketing, social media and product development.  I am actually creating a whole team to support these businesses, of people who are working for equity for the most part, and this is super-fun.  I am also engaging deeply with a transformational organization and a business network called Flawless Living, which is meeting my needs for personal transformation and affiliation, my core mission. 

So it’s not surprising that with all these exciting events, the quality of my sleep is improving.

I am not doing Everyman in any kind of rigorous way, and this seems to be working for me.  I am generally “intending” to get up around 3am and work for 3 hours, and I work a second shift of 3-4 hours from 10am to 1 or 2, followed by my main nap – but if I am too tired or not feeling well, I sleep in.  I do try and get to the gym every day, but that also I don’t force myself.  I have discovered that if I work the evening before (for instance I teach some evenings), I won’t get up for the first shift.  This occurred as something of an “Aha” experience – I don’t WANT TO work at night and be polyphasic, as I don’t really want to work more than 6-7 hours in a day – and the fact that this hadn’t been obvious to me from the beginning confirmed my workaholism, my lack of judgment and perspectives on issues of time-management. 

6 or 7 hours of work per day may not seem like a lot of work, but it is for me (especially highly focused creative work, which it is), and it leaves me all afternoon and evening free, which was my goal from the beginning.  To say I am delighted is an understatement.  I did have to give up coffee entirely, but I can tolerate (need?) one cup of tea in the early morning when I start my first shift.  I make a delicious Chai: black tea boiled in water, crushed green cardamon (buy it at any Indian grocery), milk and honey.  It gets me very high, and generally works.

I am going to update the rest of the content for this blog shortly as well.  This is actually my most popular blog, getting close to 700 unique monthly visits from organic search alone, and I am still pondering whether I can put this traffic to any use.  I am envisioning myself developing a series of web businesses, in partnership with others in many different areas, so this is a very interesting exploration for me. 

I am still recovering from a workaholic binge early this week (which was very instructive), but I am intending to start a modified Everyman schedule from Monday 3/15.  My schedule to look like:

• 2-6am: Work: mostly pure research and study (the thing that is the most difficult for me to fit in), plus a limited amount of personal email and writing (the thing that is most fun for me)
• 6-8am: Exercise and breakfast
• 8-9am: Sleep, or meditate/relaxation exercises
• 9am-1pm: Work: billable hours and general admin
• 1pm: Eat
• 1:30-3:30pm (or whatever): sleep until I am rested
• 4pm onwards – rest of my day as per my pleasure – but hopefully to include some music practice and reading for pleasure
• 9pm – in bed, winding down (spiritual reading and/or listening to music)
• 10pm-2am: sleep

This adds up to 7-8 hours of sleep or relaxation.  I am currently sleeping a lot more than this, so this would be a major breakthrough, in addition to the 8 hours of focused work and intellectual effort. 

I want to add, that it’s kind of new to me to publish a daily intimate journal for anyone on the web to see — hopefully not too many of my friends and business associates ;-).  I write a lot on my personal blog, and very revealing stuff, but only on about a monthly or bimonthly frequency.  This is different, more “raw” and in-the-moment, we’ll see if it works…

I was looking around for some simple way to track my time on a 24-hour cycle, found a few articles related to tracking time spent browsing the internet, but nothing for my purposes so I made a simple spreadsheet with automatic tabulation of results.  It’s fairly self-explanatory and looks like this:

How to use:

1. Download here (right-click > Download to your computer)
2. Open in Excel
3. Setup your time category labels in column R
4. Print out a copy.  Write your weekly schedule (or as close approximation as you can) in columns B, D, E etc
5. As you go through the day jot down the numeric code of each activity you do per half-hour time slot on the printout, and then later transcribe to the computer.  You can choose to record EVERYTHING you do for a week including sleep (I did – it’s quite instructive) or, just write down significant events you want to track (ie, work activity)
6. I suggest you follow the procedure in Your Money or Your Life at the end of each week for valuing / prioritizing your time / money use.  For each time category, decide if
   • You want to spend more time on that activity
   • You want to spend less time
   • Or, it’s about right

Additional resources

• Found this: Xpert-timer works well for timing project-related activity at the computer.  Especially nice is the activity timer, with start/stop clock, and project assignment.  I am buying it for work-related activity and automatic invoice generation, but for personal use I still need something on paper that I can fill-in during the day and transcribe
• The ODesk application may work well for this purpose as well, and be free.  I need to check it out
• Lots of tools available for the very popular David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology – see Zen Habits: 5 Simple, Effective GTD Tools and/or Google “GTD Tools”. 

My issue with all of the above: they are great for work-related tasks, but I want a global solution that includes sleep and personal / recreational time, and that works when I am not at the computer.  I don’t want to run my life 24 hours as a project, but I do want to know where my time goes in order to perform a regular assessment / prioritization of my time usage. 

I also need (separate project) a tool to track work-hours and automatically generate invoice details for billable hours.  Still looking, will follow-up on this later.

About two months ago I wrote an article Polyphasic sleep, consciousness development and business development, in which I explained my fundamental motivation for doing this experiment, which is resolving my tortured relationship to time and money and then using this freedom for business development.  Since then, there have been extraordinary events in the development of our commune, and nice progress in developing my internet marketing and social media consulting company.  I have also created and am actively engaged in four high-power developmental groups: I have a half-hour every week-day Mastermind call with two friends, I have a group that is exploring synergies and developmental possibilities between the Waking Down in Mutuality and the Shalom Mountain communities, and I have a business development / study group for Project Mojave.  In addition I am coaching one-on-one with Saniel Bonder (who is an effin’ genius) and sometimes inviting other people to the call.  Despite all successes, it’s been an up-and-down process, polyphasic sleep has been irregular at best, and my coffee addiction is substantially unchanged.  I had therefore concluded in my previous article that polyphasic sleep had been an extremely valuable thing for my own personal (consciousness) development, but the jury was still out whether it would lead to any results in terms of business development.

I want to suggest that consciousness development is a fundamental goal for anyone who attempts a polyphasic sleep experiment, even if they do not declare it as such.  And that business development (prosperity) flows from that, but it may take a little time. 

Think of it.  Short of actually going to live in an ashram or doing an intensive meditation retreat, what could be a better consciousness experiment than polyphasic sleep?  It can be done at home in the midst of one’s everyday activities, it doesn’t cost anything, and it can lead to dramatic personal transformation.  In the case of the Uberman schedule, this is doubly true as it has pronounced consciousness altering effects as well – I really like Ka Ntru’s blog on this topic (search for “polyphasic sleep”). 

After 5 months on this experiment what is gradually emerging is that the leading edge of my own development is deepening and clarifying my relationship with my wife, Rebekah.  This is an awesome yet shocking realization – awesome in terms of the possibilities, and shocking in that this had not been obvious to me before.  In my usual masculine, goal-oriented, single-pointed consciousness, bulldozer style of being, I have been speeding forward without great awareness or concern for the people around me and their needs.  Perhaps this was developmentally appropriate and timely – and I can hardly complain about the results – but the time has come to get this handled.  It’s possible as well that “getting this handled” is a masculine problem-solving approach towards a situation that is likely to be a lifetime of work – oh lucky me to have such an interesting problem to solve, as the problem of relating lovingly and deeply and powerfully all the time to the person with whom I have chosen to share my life (and my business!). 

I am planning a major post on this topic to the Lifestyle Design blog soon. 

A few announcements:

1. I have setup the “Marc’s Life” list and blog as its own blog, as it isn’t logically part of any of the other businesses that I am creating.  The archive of old posts is still available here.
2. I have been using the Polyphasic sleep site also for generic personal check-ins – understandably as I have been using polyphasic sleep essentially as an experiment in personal development (consciousness research).  But from now the site will be limited to my experiences specifically in polyphasic sleep, that has been ongoing on-and-off for 10 weeks now (wow, can you believe it I have been doing anything consistently for 10 weeks :-).
3. As excited as I am about Saniel Bonder and his teachings, and other models of development that we are creating at Trellis and testing in our new Relationship Coaching practice, these things convey best by direct contact rather than email.  Also the “Marc’s life” subscribers signed-up as my friends rather than as students of this-or-that guru or transformational practice.  So I am upping the phone calls and decreasing the emails and posts to Marc’s Life going forward.  If you are wanting to stay tuned-in to my developmental philosophy and practice, please subscribe to Lifestyle Design School which is the new forum for these types of things.
4. There has been substantial progress in terms of my life-work and business.  I am starting an online training company for blogging, internet marketing, internet business development strategy, and personal productivity (David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology), under my current wonderful domain name Tranquility Consulting.  I have some trial clients right now and I provide training both on-site and via Windows remote desktop.  I will be marketing through my network, eBay and strategic partnerships.  This idea has been a long-time in gestation and it’s time to get moving.  I will share more later.
5. Rebekah has resigned her job.  She was unhappy there and the personal cost was too high, not to mention lost opportunity for energy healing clients, relationship coaching, weight-loss coaching, and developing Trellis.  I fully anticipate she will make up her lost salary in two weeks time.
6. I am back on polyphasic sleep and it’s going well.  I don’t know what I would do without it and in many ways it’s the lynchpin of my personal development program.  I am attempting to do all my research and business development in the first polyphasic shift (2-6am), and my calls and billable hours in the morning (9-1).  Then I have a long nap and I am free for the rest of the evening. This is my ideal schedule.  It’s not fully operational and I don’t feel I am working effectively yet, but there has been so much changes and personal transformation in other dimensions lately that I am not too worried about it.  It’s an ongoing process.  Getting clear on my business vision was huge, and the David Allen / Getting Things Done (GTD) stuff is also huge.

So – I won’t say that the “consciousness revolution party” is over – after all Saniel and Linda are coming this weekend and I am so excited I can hardly breathe (I will be spending four days with them) – however, it’s becoming more grounded and concrete.  And while this is too long to get into right now, let me just say that my historical distress and obsession around issues of money and time-management is my core personal work (core wound), and is being addressed by the work I am doing with the Bonder’s and Waking Down, in addition to the what I am doing with Tranquility Consulting.  All this is an aspect of what Saniel calls “hypermasculine dharmas”, I will just leave you a little nugget:

The fundamental intention [of hypermasculine dharmas] is to dissociate from perceived limits of who we are and what we can or can not do… In order to accomplish the necessary dissociation, extrication, or liberation, the hypermasculine force of being first analyzes the limits it perceives and then deduces, by both intuitive and deductive means, strategies of thought and action that will achieve the desired goals.  The hypermasculine impulse then works to superimpose these strategic formulas of thought upon the living human mind and body.

Chew on that one for a bit (particularly in terms of the potential costs of such a system to one’s psyche), and if you want to go deeper with me around this I invite you to subscribe to Lifestyle Design School.

There have been some pretty extraordinary events recently both for me and for my community (Trellis House), of which the most significant is my encounter with spiritual teacher Saniel Bonder. It’s too long to tell in a single mail, and so I am writing a three-part series about it:  To skip my narcissistic ramblings and jump straight to the info about Saniel and Linda’s tour to Philadelphia and New York click here.

• Part 1 (this mail) is about my developmental journey over the past 7 months, which has involved a chain of events, both internal and external, for which I feel deeply blessed and grateful.
• Part 2 is going to be about Saniel Bonder and his developmental philosophy (that is called Waking Down), that has completely swept me away and created a kind of coagulation of all the different facets of my thinking around issues of development, and clarified the nature of my being-in-the-world and my work. I will describe the basic concepts of Waking Down and the impact they have had on me.
• Part 3 is about the changes that have occurred in me, particularly in how I am bringing this work into the world and also taking myself back into the "marketplace", or the real-world exchange of goods, services and ideas. In other words, it’s about how I am able to hold onto an experience of "awakening" (of sorts) and still pay the bills.

Part 1: My Story

Over the past 7 months (since September  of last year) I have been on the most exciting developmental journey of my whole life. It began with a virtual "explosion" of my writing (the blogs: Adventures in Relationship and Community, Lifestyle Design School and Polyphasic Sleep Blog),  and research on various spiritual teachers (Andrew Cohen, Swami Rudrananda, Swami Kecharanatha / Michael Ott), and then continued with getting laid-off from my job last December, and embarking on a series of  lifestyle experiments including polyphasic sleep, juicing and raw foods.  We successfully produced our first Morehouse course (Basic Sensuality) just under three weeks ago, and took three extremely transformational trips to Shalom Mountain. Plus there are all the usual tasks of "riding" a commune and keeping three women happy (a big one and two little ones).

Some of you were quite worried about me, as I haven’t appeared to be overly concerned about paying our mortgage (which is actually a misperception – I am extremely concerned, just not panicking about it; and am thinking more strategically about the situation than is apparent from my writing). Others have let me know that they thought I had "gone off the deep end," that my writing was showing signs of hypomania, and that, essentially, I needed professional help.

I shared my reaction to this in a previous post, which is that I am always deeply grateful and appreciative of negative feedback, since it makes me listen more to other people (always a good thing in my case) and, even when I feel it’s "off," it will tend to nudge me in the direction that I should be going in anyway. Hypomania, narcissism, and grandiosity / ego-inflation are tendencies that I need to keep a close watch on.

Of course many of you thought it was all wonderful. Positive feedback is good too :-).

Despite everything, I was very clear about several things…

Despite the wildness of the "ride," I was always very clear on one thing: that this ecstatic creative process that I was going through was for real, and that it was going to give some result as yet unseen but far beyond anything I could imagine. There was a pre-rational, instinctive kind of "knowing" about this. I was feeling throughout the whole experience (and continuing now) that I was living an acceleration of my own personal development and evolution, a kind of coming into my own and into my power, perhaps even a "spiritual awakening." And I felt hugely grateful. It was truly a tremendous gift, an unexpected grace, a variety of "divine madness." It was very, very cool.

The second thing that I was clear on, was that my own "shadow side," or psychopathology (which is hypomania and narcissism), was involved, and was obvious for all to see. I am nothing if not transparent, and by some good fortune (for which I blame my parents) I don’t seem to have much in the way of shame or embarrassment about who I am and how I occur. I was pretty upfront about all this, too: to the extent that the central drive of my life is the exploration of consciousness and of pathways to enhanced states of being, feeling and perception, the chief subject of my research is myself. And therefore I will be scientifically rigorous in sharing the results of my investigation, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Third thing I knew is that all work-life and financial issues were going to resolve themselves. This is the really the crux of the matter: where is the money coming from? How do I take an "awakening" experience and ground it in the marketplace? Given my (and human being’s in general) infinite capacity for self-deception, it’s a very legitimate question. I cannot fully answer that question yet, but there has been much progress and I am satisfied with the answers I am getting so far. Please understand, I am not at all a "woo woo, Law of attraction / think positive thoughts and everything will be alright" kind of guy. I am a computer scientist and a Physicist by training. At the same time, I have made (and lost) hundreds of thousands of dollars at different times in my life, and I know by now that money is a manifestation of consciousness. Meaning that, to paraphrase one of Murphy’s laws, "Money expands or contracts to fill the need that created it" (Ok to quote me on that :-). Failure of this communal experiment is not an option. Money is bound to come.  And come it has from unexpected places like new couples coaching clients, Yoga Transformational Bootcamp and a variety of workshop leaders approaching us to use our space. 

I also believe (and I give part-credit for this to Timothy Ferriss The 4-hour workweek) that almost all of us are very confused about money. We tend to pursue money as the gateway (or required access) to certain experiences (ie love, freedom and adventure). But the truth is that love, freedom and adventure are much cheaper than we imagine, once we start to think seriously and creatively about having those things. I have found in my case that it is much better to pursue the underlying needs first, and once that comes clear to find the way to fund the vision. I have written an entire website about this, Lifestyle Design School, in case you are interested.

Into this fertile soil, Saniel Bonder comes into my life…

While at a Shalom Couples retreat, our friend Pat Parisi says, "I"ve started working with these really cool people, Saniel and Linda Bonder.  They are looking to expand their community when they come East this Spring, and I thought of you guys."  First Rebekah checks out their website and says "These folks are right up our alley, let’s do it."  I check them out and am blown away.  Next thing I know, Saniel Bonder called us to talk actual plans. Before I can say "shakti," we are hosting Saniel and Linda Bonder for 3 of their 4 Philadelphia events. This is an awakened master who is going to be spending 2 days in my living room!

Saniel and Linda Bonder are actually going to be in Philadelphia for four events in early April (Thur 4/2, Fri 4/3, Sat 4/4, Sun 4/5) and also in New York City (Mon 3/30 and Wed 4/1) and Albany (4/10). If you are anywhere in the neighborhood (and even if not – this is worth traveling for) I hope you will join us. For details click here.

Waking Down is the most practical, effective, revolutionary information I have ever come across for anyone on the spiritual path – or for anyone who wants to have love in their life while engaging joyfully and passionately with the world. It’s also not some woo-woo spiritual teaching. Saniel was a founding member of Ken Wilber’s integral institute, has been teaching for 17 years, and there are hundreds of documented cases of spiritual awakenings through contact with him and with this work. I know him personally now, along with his life-partner Linda, and I have found him extremely down-to-earth, practical and humble. He also answers email and can be booked for sessions at a reasonable cost, which makes him attractive as a teacher of enlightenment :-).

Stay tuned for the next article in this series: Awakening into Relationship and Community, Part 2: Saniel Bonder and Waking Down.

Life has been really wild here since Rebekah and I came back from Shalom Mountain and since I started my Yoga Transformational Bootcamp a week ago.  Rebekah and I are totally in-sync again, which is a beautiful thing when it happens.  With 3 Morehouse teachers visiting for the Basic Sensuality course, life has become even more intense and chaotic than it was before – a bit too much even for me, I must confess.  All normal scheduling and life-predictability has fallen by the wayside, polyphasic sleep is off, job-hunting is off… it’s a little scary actually.

And yet I feel so much energy (Shakti) flowing right now that I know deep-down everything is Ok.  Producing our first Morehouse course has given me an excuse to get in touch with a lot of people, and even though I am getting mixed response to the invitation to come to our courses (the Evening with Vic and the Basic Sensuality), I have been having really excellent contact with people, which is deeply nourishing to me, so much so that I am determined to make this kind of reaching out a regular part of my life.  I feel I have been quite self-involved lately, and that stage is coming to an end.  Opportunities for service and contribution are sprouting up all over the place.

As if running Trellis and producing the courses were not enough, I have started four other personal transformational businesses in the last month (either alone or with Rebekah), of which two are already generating some income (albeit small amounts): we had new Relationship Coaching clients here on Saturday; the Yoga Transformational Bootcamp I am organizing has been going very strong, in less than a week it has become the core of my personal development program; and I have  research clients for both Lifestyle Design Coaching and Polyphasic Sleep Coaching, which I am doing on a gift offering basis for now.  In addition, there have been some important conversations and meetings regarding both possible work opportunities and our financial situation, which I am not going to share here (it’s a bit premature).  I feel pretty confident that these conversations will give fruit within another few months, so I just need to find a way to bide my time until then.  This has been deeply settling for me.  I am thinking for now of short-term contracts that I can pick-up on the freelancer marketplaces (Guru.com, Elance etc.) and from my network – see Web Technology Guru (that’s me :-). I just need to put some attention on that, which I am planning on doing from next week.

Two other very important connections to note as well.  Given the success of Yoga Bootcamp, I have wanted to get a Yoga Teacher certification, and I am going to take the teacher training at a place called the Yoga Life Institute which is quite near here.  This is more than your average yoga teacher training, it’s essentially a year-long program in Yoga and Vedic studies.  I can begin right away, it’s open enrollment.  I am thrilled at the thought of having this kind of structure and discipline in my life, including being mentored, service and community-building opportunities at the school, and a supervised individual practice.  An entire year of yoga and meditation daily are bound to have a profound positive impact on me.  Secondly, I have made contact with a spiritual teacher in Swami Rudrananda’s (”Rudi”) lineage, his name is Swami Khecaranatha (previously Steven Ott), who has agreed to meet me in Berkeley at an intensive he is doing in July to see about working with him.  This is the first time in my life I have ever considered taking a “guru”, but I have been so profoundly impacted by the Rudi teachings (described in John Mann’s book “14 years with my teacher”) that I feel very drawn to this. It takes a minimum 3-year preparation to be considered for the teacher training (and no guarantees!), and the training itself is 4-6 years, so this is not something to go into lightly. I will write more about this, including the nature of the practice, another time.  Just  to say that Rudi was an American born (Brooklyn Jew!) enlightened being who taught all of his life out of his Manhattan art-dealer storefront and never charged a dime for it.  He died in 1973.

Given all this, you can understand why I may be feeling a bit overwhelmed.  But it’s a good overwhelm.  This afternoon, I spent some very good time with my step-daughter Ariana, who is 9, and it was the perfect thing to do in the midst of “a crisis.” :-).  Truthfully there is no crisis, just a bit of work to do.

Despite many ups and downs, I am still deeply happy and confident about this radical experiment in passionate living that I am involved with.  The experiment is defying traditional wisdom, even scaring me at times, but I am being moved by some great wave of life and I have given up resisting.  It has been ongoing at this level of intensity now since last September (6 months and counting) and shows no signs of stopping; I have never experienced anything like this before.  My writing has slowed down a lot, which is a good thing, as my energy is starting to move more outwards.   I feel in many ways that the last six months have been a preparation for this next thing that is coming now, that I have been building-up self-confidence and some kind of internal structure during this time.  I am anticipating that March and April are going to be an extraordinarily eventful and fulfilling time for me and for all of us here at Trellis, and that many gifts are going to be offered.  I am happy and grateful beyond belief for all this.