𖦹 whiskers 𖦹

⠀a lengthy shifting guide

why is it so hard to shift from your cr to your dr but not so much vice versa? you’ve spent the first large chunk of your life believing this reality to be the full extent and foundation of existence. even if you now logically understand this not to be the case, the years spent curating and deepening a mental, emotional, and physical anchor to this reality has warped your perception of reality and instilled in to you the subconscious idea that your cr is the default. and in treating it as the default, the end all be all, and in compromising with it, you reinforce the idea that you are attached or stuck here—that it is even a place to get stuck in in the first place. not only do you trap yourself in this reality and grant it power over you that it does not actually have, you start viewing your cr as the “starting point” too, and shifting as some form of transportation from point A to point B. accompanying this belief is an imagined distance created between your current reality and desired reality. you might’ve already recognised this in yourself; the feeling that your dr is somehow faraway, a place that needs to be travelled to.

it’s important to make and internalise the distinction between a shift in realities as an act of metaphysical travel, and a shift in realities as a shift in focus. imo the former is a much better descriptor for what shifting actually is in essence. i will go into more depth later, but a byproduct of being raised the way you were, growing up knowing nothing but your cr and rooting & centring yourself wholly (confined) within it, is the over identification you end up developing with your cr self. you are not living reality, you are watching it. but after years of the constant unbroken immersion, the two become almost impossible to distinguish. you define yourself by and take on as if they were your own the thoughts and identity and feelings of the “vessel” you are observing, and let them dictate how you experience reality. the lines begin to blur between you; your cr self, and you; your awareness/the observer.

feel your hand. don’t touch it, but notice it’s weight and temperature, or the air around it. now feel the feeler. can you feel yourself? or your body, maybe? now go a step further and feel the one feeling. you probably aren’t fully able to, but this is the observer. “the observer”, or the state of being after breaking the immersion, is you in your natural or purest state. it has also been described as pure awareness, the void state, ego death, sakshi, the self, anatta, and interpreted in different ways across a multitude of different religions and branches of spirituality & philosophy, all used as a means to an end for different things. fyi—i’m not saying you have to completely forsake your cr identity or start ignoring/dismissing your senses or thoughts to shift, just understand that those things don’t define you or your reality. the means to the end here is just getting a point across and hopefully helping improve with the approach you take to shifting. all of this to say, you’re not travelling from point A to point B. point A and B are not places you can (technically) even travel to or exist in, because you’re just watching/observing/being aware of. shifting is not the transportation of a self from one location to another. shifting is simply changing what is focused on/experienced; from one stream of experience to another. a shift in focus.

to summarise, you as in your ego, the you in this cr as you know it, your body, your brain, your thoughts, your identity, don’t actually go or shift anywhere. you, your awareness, in favour of perceiving you, your cr self, the one sat at your computer or phone or whatever reading this right now, starts perceiving a different you/ego/self—one that could have the exact same personality, memories, and thoughts, just in another realty, or one that is a different person entirely. there is only a change or “shift” for the observer, not the cr self or ego. so stop trying to feel your dr with your cr senses. you’re not going to. you’re so immersed in your cr and cr self that you automatically rely on this reality’s bodies’ senses to gauge your success when you try to shift, waiting for your cr self to get a cue that it’s never going to get. the surroundings your cr self feels aren’t going to go anywhere. nor are your senses going to shut off. your cr body will continue to receive sensory information, because that’s what bodies do. so don’t lie there expecting your bedsheets to disappear or magically warp into your dr surroundings or something and feel like you’ve failed when they don’t. shifting is not about somehow willing your surroundings to change or lying in your room forcefully convincing yourself that your senses are feeling something else, it’s about acknowledging what’s beyond those senses. feeling and connecting to what your dr self feels.

if you can still feel your cr, it’s not you feeling it, it’s your cr self. and you are not your cr self.

i tend to see their s/o as two completely different individuals. it’s just the way each shifters describe their own person and how they perceive them. the styles never match. every shifter s/o always has something match to them personally. maybe a personality, a quirks, the styles and the vibes. it always differs from one another