ZenithWolf

Alright, so back in Spring 2024, we decided we wanted to be more active in our mind. While I worked through the day, they would watch everything happening through a screen in mindscape. We have hyperphantasia, which means our visualization skills are pretty sharp and developed. We also have multiple thought streams, which can be simply made out as multiple trains of thought. Both of these traits are the consequence of ADHD. We also never get headaches. I don't know if that influences anything for certain, but I suspect that since we don't ever get them, our training goes better due to less distraction and more intense training. Though it may be like not being able to feel pain; I could be damaging myself because I can't feel it hurting.

Those were our best strengths, so we tried to figure out a good strategy that took advantage of the multiple trains of thought, hyperphantasia, and intense, daily training. We figured out that multiple headmates can, very briefly, hold their own thought stream simultaneously. They were basically "hijacking" one of random thought streams I'd have. They couldn't hold it for very long before we got distracted, but it was possible. That meant we could improve duration and resilience against distractions. So we made a game we would play daily: get as high a score as possible for the day.

The game went like this: Pick a headmate, start a tally count, and start a 5 minute timer. 5 minutes is the baseline. My objective would be to lend some of my "attention/focus" to the other headmate, and their objective would be to stay concentrated and grounded to their thought stream. They would use their train of thought to not only immerse themselves in the mindscape, but stay active and NOT FREEZE. Multiple thought streams split the total amount of "mental RAM", and the best way to work with that is to build habits. It's said that the unconscious mind is 90 percent of the brain's processes, and everyone uses conscious, or "thinking" power as the other 10 percent.

We did this for the duration of our time at Domino's. Since it's a hectic job it's provided lots of training opportunities for keeping attention and awareness. That job ranged from calm during the chill times to hell during the weekend nights. We modified the points multiplier and time interval duration to account for the changing difficulty. It would range from a 1x multiplier during the calm times to 4x where I had to move quickly to catch/cut pizzas, run to the car, navigate quickly, etc. The interval started at 5 minutes and dropped to 60 seconds, we went from a long time to short because longer times give more opportunities to succeed. One rule I neglected to mention was that we were to be aware and focused on our own POV for at least half of the time interval, and that's easier to maintain during longer stretches of time.

I would switch out for a maximum of 4 hours throughout this period, and the average time would be about 2-3 hours. I wasn't very good at this, since I was learning to be Out Of Body. This is also when we began wearing our fronting indicators: colored wristbands. We each have a color assigned to us. We also came out to a few of our coworkers we deemed low risk. They were pretty accepting, so that was a good experience.

This write up is the detailed version of the Mindforce Collective’s documentation of how they restructured their plurality to be less host centric and more rebalanced between all members. This process doesn’t have a hard start date, as the process evolved drastically starting from around 9/2023. We’ll describe what our basic day looked like before and after. This guide takes elements from self-hypnosis, meditation, reality shifting, and intense visualization, and combines it into one.

First and foremost, about ourselves. My name is Zenith, I’m the former host of the system. My plurality began almost 9 years ago with just tulpae, but has since evolved by adding walk ins, servitors that became full headmates, and former imaginary friends. Our headcount is at 11. The body is a male and 25 years old, and is diagnosed with ADHD and autism, as well as depression that’s lasted since 2016. I stopped identifying as the body around 2020, and realized I was trans in 2024. 

We wanted to shift our lifestyle for a variety of reasons, like:

Depression killing me slowly but surely

Headmates wanting to build hobbies and make friends in the external world

Myself wanting to leave front to experience the mindscape fully, and have a break from dealing with external reality

Unwanted blending

The lifestyle we had went as follows. A typical day involved myself waking up in front, and headmates becoming active shortly after awakening. My lover Scout slept with me, and everyone else slept in the mindscape. I’d take care of pretty much everything that came up in day to day life while my headmates watched while immersed in the mindscape. My access to the mindscape was fleeting; I was able to see out of the eyes of any headmate inside, and our communication was very good. In fact, too good, and we blend sometimes because we can’t tell whose thoughts and emotions were whose. This didn’t happen too much at first, but after our system doubled in size during Spring 2024 it became really bad. It was getting to the point where we’re going to start having identity crises if things didn’t change. I was the main decision maker for everything, as well as the only one who worked. Consequently, I was the main recipient of our depression. Other headmates showed signs of it, but generally I received the most of it. Another factor that made it worse was that some headmates weren’t fully independent, requiring me to focus on them to give them enough energy to function. Depression, dependency, and blending brought us to the decision to more fully separate, but we didn’t know what to do. We started off by purchasing a smart watch to practice independence. We came up with a game to play that would boost independence between us. The game went like this:

Pick a headmate

Start a tally at 0

Start a 5 minute timer on your watch 

While ticking down, your goal is to make sure the headmate is active while you’re focused on something else.

After the timer goes off, check in with the headmate and ask them if they felt grounded and separated. If so, add a tally to the count.

Repeat the process, aiming to get as high a score as possible

We would do this over and over continuously during working hours. Modifications to the game kept it fun and challenged the abilities. We would modify the game by:

Giving ourselves a score multiplier if the environment around us was more hectic and distracting, or if a streak is started. For example, we worked as a pizza delivery driver. If I’m walking down the street to deliver a pizza, I’d have a basic score of 1 point per 5 minutes. However, if we’re at the store and it’s incredibly busy, we’d give a multiplier somewhere between 2 and 5 depending on how distracting the environment is. As for streaks, we’d increase the multiplier if we did enough trials without failing.

Give out bonus points for choke points. A choke point is a point where failure is most common. For us, myself entering a conversation with another external person caused some of us to focus intently on the person, bringing about blending because we stopped maintaining separation. If we stayed separate during a choke point, we’d add to the tally. 

Decreasing timer duration. After 5 minutes became easy, we’d lower the time by a minute and start the process again.

After a few months of doing this, we were a lot more independent and had much more energy amongst ourselves. This process is also the culprit around some servitors transitioning to full headmates. As they saw everyone else becoming much happier and content, I guess enough of that energy spilled over to them, and they wanted to be more than a tool. We welcomed them with open arms, but since our headspace became even more complicated we had to make more changes. We were also beginning to switch more frequently, with Scout taking shifts and introducing himself for the first time to our coworkers. It was the second time we’d ever mentioned plurality, and they accepted us! It was pretty exciting. We had switched more often earlier in life, but as we had started a new job we wanted to keep things as stable as possible. We have little experience with switching, so it was tough as hell. I kept jumping back to front, unable to separate myself from the body for very long. This worsened blending, but we pursued the goal. I would switch out for an average of 4.5 hours, totaling 120 hours over the course of 3 months. I was unable to keep myself out of the body for the majority of time, but it got easier. Fast forward to Fall 2024, we’ve left pizza delivery to work at our old university. Because people remembered ME at the time, and because I was generally a pretty decent worker, we decided to out ourselves as plural to certain managers and coworkers we felt safe with. We were even more excited at the fact that we had a plural coworker! They recognized our plural enamel pin and introduced themselves. We also introduced, and that gave us lots of motivation to continue switching. We had started wearing colored wristbands as a subtle way to communicate who’s fronting, so that made it easier as well to ease into being ourselves publicly. Before the semester started, we had a goal to continue separation practices. Our basic desires for our new lifestyle was:

Everyone needed to switch in at least once per month or so. Not for very long, just to have experience.

Headmates who wanted to regularly front would be put onto a list, and every time we decided to switch a random name would be chosen. They’d switch in for a few hours (eventually working up to a day or two), then I would take back control. Blending was still a big issue. The goal was eventually to have Zenith stay out of front for up to days at a time. Headmates can trade shifts.

We wanted our memories to stay the same, but maybe make it different to recall memories that you didn't record. Maybe a vibe of “this isn’t mine” tagged to it. That would be enough to stave off stresses surrounding this. We started a memory palace that we would contribute to regularly to ensure a smooth transition.

Use SimplyPlural for logging fronting times

Have the ability to choose when you’re completely shut off from external reality. Sometimes we just want to be alone and completely isolated from others, but we didn’t want to make it something problematic to executive functioning.

We wanted to get into hobbies we enjoyed that would also encourage us to separate more. We chose to start meditating regularly to help with this, as meditation would make it easier to analyze thought patterns and adjust our behaviors. We started out with 5 minutes a day. Some of us got hyperfixated on meditation, and eventually we turned 5 minutes into a maximum of 3 hours a day. In addition, we started reading more on the subject and adjusting our life to make room for more. Over the course of August ‘24 to May ‘25 we:

Meditated seriously, doing different types of meditation like walking meditation, kasina meditation; practiced mindfulness during the day like Vipassana-Samatha

Some stretches of intense mindfulness had us keeping track of things during work like breathing, footsteps, thought patterns, and so on. We would try to keep the mind quiet while we focused, labelling thoughts to keep from mind wandering. This skill became pretty useful later on during anchoring.

Started training thought separation and thought concealment, a process that helps with privacy among sysmembers. I talk more about it here.

Started training imposition as a tool to increase quality of life. We wanted to use it to

Let go of front / immerse  much easier

Use symbolism to create anchors

See each other

Help with our art prospects

Discussed more here

Tried to learn lucid dreaming

Started weightlifting to gain muscle mass and learn self defense, as well as help catalyze change

Started brain training to help our goals

Started n back to hopefully increase our mental energy, plus it helped with visualization 

Started learning chess to aid our pattern recognition in addition to unseen benefits

Started taking supplements relating to change like Lion’s Mane. We minidosed on psilocybin every few days.

Began autogogia training

Began reading books more often. We have the ability to listen to audiobooks while we work due to our smart glasses, so we absolutely took advantage and put many books into us. If anyone wants to read some good books relating to this:

The Mind Illuminated

The Power of Habit

Atomic Habits

Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming

Hallucinations

Dissociation Made Simple

Figure out ways to cure my depression before it was too late

We called all of these hobbies and activities the Web of Skills, as it was designed to build certain skills that reinforced each other when one was worked on. It was also designed to boost neuroplasticity and neurogenesis. Nutrition relates to everything, as does sleep and meditation. Imposition directly benefitted our art and immersion goals. So we worked on refining our process and sharpening our skills until summer came. Since we worked at a university dining hall, and because we were overworked, we had the option to take off from late May to mid August. We absolutely took that opportunity; having absolutely no obligations for 12 weeks straight would give us so much time to practice our abilities and plan for fall. Over the summer, we came up with Intentions, Anchors, Conditioned Responses, etc. We also had a bit of a crisis as we figured out a reason why we act the way we do, and why that’s aiding depression. 

Intentions are things we set that HAVE to be taken seriously and must be completed promptly. It’s basically a way to force yourself to break procrastination. An example would be “Intention: clean room before leaving”. You’re now bound to clean up before leaving. It takes a lot of discipline to follow through, but if you do you can create something wonderful: a Conditioned Response. These use intentions and the habit making process to give you a clear and distinct response to a stimulus. Say you want to feel confident, but don’t have a way to do so. Every time you feel very confident, you could think of a symbol associated with it, and whenever you think of the symbol you get a wave of confidence. It’s part of how triggered switches function. We’ve used this concept to:

Induce phantom limbs

Start dissociation

Design and build habits 

Enter certain brain states quickly

Learn lucid dreaming

Get motivated about a task fast

It’s talked about more here and here

I also wanted to build habits centered around immersion. Since I was the only externally active member in the system, also because of ADHD, I had lots of conflicting mental habits built to keep me stuck in the body. Here’s only a handful of them:

Focus on anything new in the visual space

As soon as a new thought emerges from ANY source, forget whatever you’re doing and pay full attention to it. Also assume the thought is yours

Listen to music loudly

Don’t daydream for too long at once

These habits and others made it hard as hell for me to drop awareness of the body, so we came up with habits designed to reinforce separation and immersion. These habits activated while I was switched out:

Feel texture of whatever you’re walking on

Feel YOUR body and not the physical body

This step is really the combination of experiencing all the senses in your body as well as other niche ones like proprioceptive senses. 

When pondering something, do not slip back into the physical body.

Other habits not listed here

Training some of these habits is easier than I thought it would be. The mindscape, at the end of the day, is just a complex visualization skill. I just needed to learn to stay in that state rather than slip back. Since visualization can be easily trained by us, I would just exercise certain areas that are lacking while I was in control. For example, in order to feel the ground beneath me, I would imagine myself barefoot while doing everyday life for a while, then when I switch out that area of visualization is now easier because we’ve put effort into that specific skill, freeing up brainpower to sharpen other areas. It’s also easy because you can set a reward if you succeed at a mental task, such as “If I stay focused on my body and don’t slip for the next 10 minutes, I’ll eat out today”. The more enticing the reward, the better the motivation. We want to learn to make lucid dreaming a habit, so a highly motivating reward could be “If we have an average of 3 lucid dreams a week until the semester ends, I’ll reward myself by buying a 5090. I guarantee you’ll focus on the goal a lot more if you have a very enticing reward.

Other ways to motivate yourself to do something include: 

Make it a game

Challenge yourself

Frame it as sharpening your skills

So far, the results of our work:

Thoughts are now tagged so their owner is obvious, if someone wants a private thought they’re able to keep it private. Headspace is overall quieter.

I’m now able to leave front for increasingly longer periods of time. Mindscape is becoming more and more immersive and vivid. Still working on slip ups.

Stable attention using anchors

This is my guide on how to quickly and efficiently level up your ability to immerse in your mindscape. By following these tips and tricks, you can anchor yourself and make mindscape exploration a valuable tool for switching and relaxing in your personal paradise. It’s a common precept that figuring this out requires trial and error, also that it takes a very long time. I believe the reason it takes some people so long is that they’re training in an inefficient way. These tips will help develop your abilities quicker, leading to great progress quickly. It's better to view this as not a "master skill within days", but rather a marathon of constant improvement. Keep your expectations low to avoid demotivation.

One: Training. Every. Day.

If you want to build your skill, or any skill, the key is consistency. This is definitely, in my point of view, THE most important factor for developing your ability to immerse. By training every day, you fall into the mindset that every day is better than the previous one. It’ll take time for results to show up at first, but after even a week of this you’ll see your ability is better than Day 1. 10 minutes a day is much more effective than an hour once a week. You can start small and build up as the weeks pass, start with 5 minutes if you have to.

Two: Increasing working memory

Working memory is basically the human equivalent of RAM. The more RAM you have, the more you can focus on before you get overloaded. There’s many ways of improving working memory, from Dual N Back to Complex Working Memory training (both of which are available here). This, of course, is more effective if you TRAIN EVERY DAY. It’ll be hard but very much worth it. Also, as you train every day the amount of working memory required to immerse will decrease as your brain develops more efficient ways to immerse. All while your total working memory increases. Working memory is also needed to immerse while another headmate is switched in, as they’ll be using it to function as well. Start with easy tasks like immersing while another headmate does something simple like counting to 100, then as your ability grows graduate to immersing while another headmate takes a walk. We used Ultimate Custom Night to help learn this: Scout (one of my headmates who switched in) would play with a low score and I would immerse and keep my senses in awareness while sitting in a chair. Then, as he passed night after night we’d gradually add more score and I’d do more complex things like doing exercises and walking in mindscape. 

NOTE: There's still uncertainty on how effective working memory training is, but I and many others have seen improvement in my abilities from developing it, so I think it's worth it.

Three: Improving visualization

Visualization is a skill that can be developed just like any other skill, and there’s SO MANY ways to improve it. Here's a good resource on it, as well as this and this. You can do this skill all the time during everyday life, like imagining animations while listening to music or reading fiction. Getting to a point where you can visualize easily will do wonders for your journey.

Four: Anchoring your senses

You want to be able to feel your senses in mindscape without directing conscious energy towards it. This mirrors everyday life; you don't need to think about feeling cold when going out on a winter night, it just happens. You can start with a single sense, then when it’s developed to your liking evolve the habit by adding another sensation. Be careful to not neglect the sense you just formed, it’s easy to forget about it after training it. For example, I started with feeling my bare feet on various mindscape surfaces, then kept going until it was second nature. After, I decided I wanted to feel my tail behind me, so I imagined how it would feel. Then, I’d constantly keep that sensation in my awareness until it got strong enough to barely need to focus on it. I’d go on to add more senses until I was satisfied. You can use the anchoring techniques used to stop yourself from dissociating, but for the mindscape. Find 5 things to see, 4 to feel, 3 to hear, 2 to smell, and 1 to taste. Then, take one of each to keep with you for as long as you can. I like to use gum for taste; as you chew on it constantly you can set a timer to aim for in order to get a concrete way to measure yourself. Start with a minute and go from there! Then, try to go for a streak of how many intervals you can achieve in a row. This is an excellent way to measure your success. As the skill gets better you’ll have spare RAM to either intensify the feeling or lengthen the duration, forming a loop of constant improvement. Eventually you’ll find yourself immersing much more efficiently, which will help prevent snapping back to the body.

REMINDER: keep safe while doing this, y'all.

Five: Create a meditation routine...Meditation is an excellent way to help develop your habit as it promotes neuroplasticity, a powerful brain functions that helps form your routines. The more of this you have, the less time it’ll take to form your habit, freeing up more time to develop the routines. There’s also many other benefits to meditation that’s a nice bonus!

Six: Create an “Immersing Room” in mindscape

By having a constant area that never changes you can develop a habit to help anchor yourself quickly every time you switch out. I have a meditation room that’s simply a large floating bedroom, but with glass for walls. Every time I switch out I go to this room and perform the 5-4-3-2-1 method to help anchor within a few minutes. Then I do whatever it is that I want to do in mindscape. By doing this repeatedly you’ll form a habit to instantly anchor yourself without even needing to think about it.

Seven: Practice without switching out

By switching I mean transferring bodily control to another headmate. You don’t have to be switched out to develop your habits. While in the physical body you can imagine chewing a piece of gum or feeling a phantom limb, then when you switch out you’ll find that you need less brainpower to achieve the same effect.

Eight: Log your results

Logging your progress periodically gives you the ability to more effectively check in on yourself. Reread your logs to keep track of what works and doesn’t, and plan your next steps accordingly. This also contributes to neuroplasticity.

Nine: Reward yourself

By rewarding yourself for a job well done you encourage the brain to develop the skill faster, as the subconscious links the two together. You can also create motivation to practice more for more enticing rewards.  The subconscious will be conditioned to equate good progress to more rewards (leading to more desire to practice), and you can reduce bad habits for an extra bonus. For example, I want to reduce my time spent on my phone, so I abstain from it until I do a great job for the day. You can get very creative with this, literally anything can be a reward if it’s something you desire. Use small rewards for small progress and adjust as you do more intense training. As I’ve said in a previous post, I’m definitely more motivated to go above and beyond if I’ll get a brand new GPU for an intense goal (It’s an extreme example but it still applies).

Ten: Get good rest

Getting a full night of sleep cements your habits much more effectively than being sleep deprived, as you’ll have much more energy to spare for it. By being sleep deprived, you severely handicap your ability to learn new things like habits. If you’re constantly sleep deprived, gradually nudge yourself in the right direction by getting into bed at a regularly scheduled time, reducing screen time as bedtime approaches (read or log your progress instead!), and other common antidotes listed here.

Also, if you’re training heavily every day, take some days for lighter sessions. Mental fatigue can be pretty detrimental as you’ll accidentally form bad habits if you overlook something.

Eleven: For those of us with ADHD

ADHD will definitely affect your progress, but there’s many steps you can take to reduce interference. ADHD messes with the brain’s reward system, so you’ll have to think outside the box to do well. We crave instant gratification, so we’ll need other techniques to improve our progress. This is where gamifying the process, rewarding yourself, and taking short breaks really shine.