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I'm keeping a weekly diary of stuff that happens as a result of being involved in this seemingly unusual kind of life on the esoteric side of the tracks. I hope you enjoy the blog.

ALSO: Check the Testimonials section of the site for student comments on the courses.

 

Monday 27th April 2009
Just over a year has passed and I've been involved in further research and doing a lot of writing, the results of which will appear in the shop section soon. Also elements of what's in the publications will appear on the site for you to read if you wish. The focus of the site has changed and I have finally cleared away the need to stick with the attractive but meaningless 'Psychic' angle. This helped many to join my classes initially as it is a term laden with useless meaning.

My aim has never been to stay within the realm of meaning dictated by the term 'psychic' and although it may be seen as cynical, I only ever intended to create courses that expanded my student's presuppositions. Unfortunately this has largely failed and most of those who came on my courses do not really want their presuppositions challenged or expanded to encompass possibilities other than those they already have.

This is great shame but was not unexpected. So now the gloves are off and I will only offer to train people in areas where it is unambiguous what I am offering. I have doubts about using the word 'Intuition' however. Again it is laden with meaning but allows just enough scope to only draw to my courses those who are not looking for the paranormal and supernatural.

We'll see how this goes in the near future! I'll separate up areas that dictate particular skill development such as Body-Mind Sensing and Distant Perception (Remote Viewing). Areas such as Future Signposts and Metaphor & Symbol need special consideration as they are mostly integrated into the standard levels of Sensitive Awareness Skills, yet present difficulties when we attempt to interpret their meaning.

Also I want to create an arena for individual development. Here I will be emphasising the fact that my method gives students practice at developing their innate abilities but they must get used to testing and re-testing their expectations within their practice so that complacency and stiffness of approach do not create limitations. There is always more work to be done for all of us and thinking we know the whole story about this field will destroy personal development and skills begin to atrophy.

Tuesday 26th February 2008
Well this is my first Blog update for 5 long months. A lot has taken place in that time. I have undertaken some new research and set up some new courses around this. The initial work I did on Healing (see new courses) suggested a few possible new avenues for research. I pursued these and did test runs with my students. The results were fascinating. It seems the Sensitive Awareness State can easily be used for a form of 'scanning' the body-mind system to find areas in need of healing. Obviously this is NOT diagnosis as that can only be conducted by trained and qualified medical practitioners. What it does produce, however, is a sense of something in need of attention. What we discovered is also that when 'sensing' some kind of disorder, we may be picking up information about a problem that hasn't yet reached the conscious mind of the person being 'scanned'.

Next on the list of new developments is Remote Viewing (see new courses). This is a fascinating ability recently shown on Richard & Judy during an interview with researcher Dr Chris Roe of Northampton University. The Ministry of Defence have been researching Remote Viewing also since 2001 and on my Home Page you will find a link to this research marked under articles. I've been casually doing Remote Viewing for a number of years and there are many uses that it can be put to once the basics have been learned. So it seemed appropriate to finally set up a One Day Special Workshop to teach people how to do it (see new courses).


Thursday 20th September
Well I've run two Next Steps courses. One 5 week and one weekend intensive course. Both went very well and comments during and after the course testify to the usefulness of developing Sensitive Awareness Skills for personal development as much as for desired 'psychic' development. A common factor in the experience of many is to be able to find a place of calm within where all pressure disappears and all that is needed arises naturally and without effort. I introduced a module on TRUST during the weekend course as a result of hearing repeatedly that students found it hard to know where to place their trust during the process. Trusting the process itself didn't seem good enough for most.

What emerged from this one exercise alone gave my weekend students and me one of the most amazing revelations about how we generate trust from within. This changed our perception of the meaning of trust and made each student aware of what becomes possible in a much wider way than we would expect, from within a 'state' of trust. It seems the realm of human potential once again is directed from within experiences available in memory.

Monday 4th June
Another successful course (First Steps - Sat 2nd June) also created some new questions as a result of the exercises. One of the things I like to do during the day is to get people to form questions that relate to issues in their life that they need to resolve or gain some kind of insight into. The Sensitive Awareness 'answers' that students formed seemed to relate to the nature of the question and the issue but not neccessarily an answer. This caused a lively debate.

The Tendency to want answers is a common behaviour. We all do it. What if part of our 'psychic' behaviour is to uncover what gives rise to the questions and therefore help us to gain more insight into our deeper motives. Often the question being answered is not actually the one written down, or being asked. Many times students have said that they were having questions answered that they had ommitted to ask usually because the issue was quite deep and challenging. It seems that our innate sensitivity is more geared to an agenda based on an unconsious 'hierarchy of need' rather than just be guided by our conscious questions.

Worth working on a little more I think. That's the beauty of teaching and exploring at the same time. My students often teach me more than I teach them. Interesting paradox....

Tuesday 22 May
At the the beginning of this blog I was concerned that my ideas and method would step on a few toes. Something that happened recently confirms that this is easily the case with some. One of the problems is that to give voice to my own ideas means insulting and possibly showing disrespect for other belief systems. I think it's all in the way it's expressed however. Having had friends and allies who work within their spiritual practice - a priest, a monk and a minister - I was aware that they were happy to have a more open and robust debate about the meaning of human experience and also happy to disagree yet not feel challenged. This isn't the case with the majority.

My research method means putting aside, as much as possible, beliefs, prejudices and preconceptions in order to keep the process of observation and enquiry as un-biased as possible while working. The meaning of the observations is however, a whole different ball game once this has to be explained or contrasted with other more 'established' ideas. I do however wonder why people bother to engage in enquiry into something if they think they have the answers already? I suspect the answer to this is that we do not realise how deeply rooted our beliefs, prejudices and preconceptions are. This may explain how vulnerable we feel when our existing paradigms are unwittingly challenged.

Keeping an open mind is more difficult therefore, than we imagine. This may explain why no-one has come forward to really engage in further research with me apart from my original colleague who is more than happy to enter a robust debate about the results. Similar to me, he is also willing to admit that we could be wrong about the meaning we derive from those results. You've got to start somewhere though.

Tuesday 2nd May
Having spent some time researching I have now hit on the path I needed to find. I'm putting a lot of time into developing 'real life' ways to use the skills and open our minds up to our other faculties. My Sensitive Awareness State™ is a doorway to some fascinating and extremely useful innate abilities. These are only the tip of the iceberg of what i'm currently working to develop.

A recent article in the Mail On Sunday reported on scientific research that has confirmed the fact that we can actually read the future. It seems to suggest that during experimentation the ability reads only a few seconds into the future. The work that I've done with the Sensitive Awareness State™ can project much further than this and testing needs to be done as to just how far, clear and accurate the recieved information can be. Several years ago I got hold of a scientific report that called this 'Retrocausal Effect' or 'Anticipatory Effect' and you can read an extract from one of these in the articles to download section.

Monday 1st May
The Isbourne Holistic Centre (www.isbourne.org) open day on Saturday 28th April went very well. Lots of interest and delivered an enjoyable talk. I'm looking forward to seeing some of the people I talked to appear on upcoming courses. I've now set up the Intermediate and Advanced courses (see Courses). My research has led me in a particularly interesting direction and following some 'hunches' (irony!) I made some very significant headway in the next evolution of the Sensitive Awareness Method™. Pretty soon there will be a whole range of new applications and exercises for my students to be guinea pigs for! I think that's why you need a sense of humour on my courses!

My co-researcher from the original testing (www.yourwayforward.co.uk) may well be doing some more work with me soon. This will be excellent for me as we had a lot of fun last time we got together to explore the edges of our map of subtle awareness. I'll keep you posted on what we do.

Tuesday 10th April
A few topics keep recurring during conversations about the Sensitive Awareness Method & Model. For me the big topic is 'are we asking the right questions about the nature and meaning of 'being psychic'? I think the types of questions we are used to asking relate only to the supernatural and fantasy pre-conceptions that we hold. These questions really don't get us any further.

What i'm proposing is that we stop asking questions that relate to these two largely useless historic and theatre based notions about what innate skills we have at a subtle level of mind, and start asking what USE does an enhanced awareness of subtle information and more developed perceptions, have in our lives. These are the real questions worth asking. These perceptions come from within us and are used very little in any kind of conscious way, in order to develop them. As they are innate and only take the lightest of 'tweaks' to reach our conscious awareness, it's about time we left the film, theatre and fairground version of 'psychic' behind and really got into the 21st Century.

The Victorian values inherent in 'spiritualism' and the experiments of Mesmer are really old stuff. Perhaps it's about time we went through a paradigm shift in our thinking and took on board some new questions and ideas about our innate abilities. It's time to stop restricting ourselves with outmoded ways of thinking and archaic, controlling ideologies if we are to stand any chance of moving forward and really explore what we have as humans that is part of our biology and a result of evolution.

An Invitation
For some time now i've handed out the invitation to anyone who would like to explore and do 'shoe-string' research with me. It works for scientist Rupert Sheldrake and at a workshop he held at his home in London, he openly encouraged people to do their own 'kitchen table' research. Any one out there up to the challenge? If you think you are, or might be, then email me colin@drawninward.com.

 
I thought I'd show you two students from a half day course undertaking the 'What's In The Envelope' test. There are several variations to this test and everyone gets a result. The last half day course in Cheltenham (Sunday 1st April) produced some quite dramatic and accurate information that quite shocked one student when she realised what she'd just done. I don't think people expect the process to be so successful or so easy!

 

Wednesday 4th April
I've introduced the intermediate courses to The Isbourne Foundation in Cheltenham. Currently, i'm working on the Advanced Sensitive Awareness Skills courses. The possibilities are beginning to open up as to new directions to take the applications and i'm experimenting and testing applications regularly. I spoke to my old R&D colleague, Tim (www.yourwayforward.co.uk) and we agreed that giving people a real taste of what they have inside themselves makes profound changes at a very subtle level. Our perception of our 'sense of self' begins to change.

Monday 26th March
The five week course was very successful and student feedback was excellent. One of the difficulties on ending these introductory style courses is: Where Now? This seemed to be the universal question. My answer was 'I'm working on it!'. In fact i've been working on new developments for a while. The trouble with my model and constructing a new paradigm in thinking about our subtle awareness, is that we need new applications for the skills not a re-hash of the old ways that these skills are applied.

As a colleague said to me several times "I don't want to carry on doing 'end of pier' work with this stuff!'. The tendency is to remain a 'psychic sideshow', and that was never my intention. When I began doing NLP training I quickly decided that Personal Development was the most important thing that was being offered by learning NLP skills and processes. Personal development can take many forms and I am focusing my attention on just how opening channels to our subtle senses, can be used as a distinct tool for self development and increased wellbeing.

Wednesday 14th March
Busy time since my last blog entry. I moved home to somewhere quieter and more congenial to the work I do giving myself more of a chance to reflect and work on new projects. The 5 week course at the Isbourne Foundation in Cheltenham has been going well and the students have reached the point where they are now struggling to come to terms with what they believe and what they need to trust. This reflects my own experience when first exploring subtle awareness and is a good though challenging point to get to.

The element of personal development in all it's guises comes up at this stage and people begin to discover just what stops them from moving forward. To have complete faith and trust in one's self is extremely difficult as we are taught that this is something that should be given to a force outside ourselves. The paradigm shift brings most to the threshold of their understanding and that's where the greatest room is for new ideas and skills to emerge. Some in the class would like to join a regular development group and this will be extremely interesting to set up for me. I've wanted to do this for some time and look forward to getting it going.

Wednesday 24th January
Quite a long gap since my last update. I've found some new and fascinating information that comes straight from the science camp. It seems science is catching up with my Sensitive Awareness State and the race is on to find out what else you can do with this unique and useful shift in conscousness. A key researcher in this race has discovered that the subtle shift in consciousness that I modelled in psychics and mediums can be used to enhance performance while dancing, playing music and learning. In a lot of ways it's not news to me as I'd started to branch out in my search to find out what else can be done with the State. My invitation goes out to all you Psychonauts to join me in finding some new applications using the Skill Set I have developed and some wholly new skills that are as yet untested but need to be explored.

Thursday 7th December
I started recording the first section of my Sensitive Awareness Skills CD. This will form a key component of the 'Starter Kit' for those who want to study at home. It should be a lot of fun to work through. I'm not taking it all too seriously because I think if you have fun when you learn then it makes learning that much easier. The Starter Kit will help people who aren't sure whether this kind of thing is for them. I steer clear of mysticism at every turn, which for some may be a problem. But if people are more of the Derren Brown persuasion when it comes to things of the mind, then I think the Starter Kit will be a good introduction.

Monday 27th November
The never ending trail of ideas and directions has lead me to look more closely at current research into 'consciousness'. The work of Susan Blackmore, Susan Greenfield and Psychologist Paul Brocks is particularly interesting in light of the work i've done so far. Sue Blackmore and Paul Brocks spoke at the 2006 Cheltenham Science Festival and they have some fascinating ideas about the nature of consciousness and our current understanding and possible mis-understanding. If you want to hear scientist Susan Greenfield speak on the subject, you can download an MP3 recording of her lecture at the Hay Literature Festival in their archive at Hay Festival Archive

Also, i'm once more reading about metaphor and symbolism. Both feature consistently in the interpretation of information gleaned using my method. David Gordon is a particularly good writer on the subject, as are Penny Tompkins and James Lawley who put together an extremely detailed model of the process used by therapist David Grove. Read about their work on their website Cleanlanguage

Friday 17th November
I managed to get a variety of courses for 2007 set up at The Isbourne Foundation in Cheltenham. Some years ago when I was involved in doing therapy work, I represented a training organisation at their open day. They're a great bunch and work extremely hard to get courses up and runing in all areas of personal and spiritual development.

I've been working on setting up a more unique example of the skills applied to some new untested context. I think the limitations of what has been done with 'psychic' skills has led to stagnation in what people involved consider possible. I don't have those limiting beliefs and i'm quite happy to experiment. I'm also turning my attention to healing work and what type of new features may appear as extensions to the model when doing healing work. Professor Irving Kirsch in his part of the talk at Cheltenham's Science Festival earlier this year said that he had undertaken tests where there didn't even need to be a healer present for healing to take place.

Something of an anomaly there. It makes me wonder about what preconceptions healers have about what they do that might not match what's happening, and what does. Curiosity's got the better of me to find out.

Friday 10th November
I've been getting more xlnt feedback from the course participants in Marlborough, and the first testimonials are coming in. They'll be posted on the Testimonials section as soon as I have given everyone a chance to email me. I'm glad to now be able to take the course up a notch and start more advanced work as soon as I get the 2007 venues booked. I'm also researching a new way to use the Sensitive Awareness Skills that so far has not been tried using, so called, 'psychic' skills.

Once this new testing ground has been investigated it should provide a way to use the skill set that falls outside the norms of psychic work, and then we really will have a new field to study. So far, I've tried to break the stranglehold on human sensitivity to subtle information that has rested too long in the hands of esoteric practitioners and parapsychologists. Everyone can do this and they don't have to be deluded with bizarre beliefs and arcane 'knowledge' in order for it to work. Also there's no pseudo-science involved.

I'm going to video a few 'talking head' sessions where I describe the process and talk a little about how I arrived at my conclusions. Though i'm not that keen to plaster my ugly mug on the web I suppose people need to see and hear me not just read about it. I'll post these on the site as either viewable or downloadable Mpeg videos depending on whether I can get my head around how to do either or both! Over time I'll video real sessions by students and myself so that there's evidence of some element of what actually goes on when the process is applied.

Monday 6th November
The first training day of the Sensitive Awareness Model went really well. I was really pleased by the response and got some excellent feedback from all the students. Everyone got results from the practical test sessions and want to come back for the next part - Distant Perception. Having people willing to engage with the process gave me a great chance to test it out and I learnt a great deal about the preconceptions that people bring to anything 'psychic'. I'm hoping for testimonials soon from the participants on the first training.

There's still a lot of work to do to develop new ways to use the Sensitive Awareness State. I'm currently trying to break the mould of what types of work are expected for so called 'psychic' skills and find a whole new way to put my work to use. Watch this space...

Tuesday 31st October (Halloween)
Strangely auspicious day for a blog entry on Psychic matters! Had some really nice comments from a few 'Psychic Skills' students coming on the training on Saturday 4th Nov. They're very excited about the day and the excitement is infectious. If I wasn't excited enough as it is! I spoke to my friend and violin repairer, Christopher Monk (Cheltenham Violins) earlier. He trained in philosophy in his younger years and we have long conversations over a lunchtime coffee every couple of weeks. He's very enthusiastic about what i'm going to do and can't wait till I produce my book. I've begun gathering material for it but it's a bit daunting. Everyone may have a book in them but I just hope it'll be worth reading if I write it.

There's a lot of interest in things Psychic i'm being told and therefore probably quite a large audience for the book. It'll take a while, however, to get the research and anecdotes together. That's where my students come in. I'd really like those who've tried out the skills to give me the benefit of their stories. I've got plenty of my own but it's taking my word for it and it would be better if the tales came from other lips than just my own.

Sunday 29th October 2006
I've begun to realise that what I'm about to begin teaching could be deemed very controversial by many. My work seems to step on a lot of toes i'm told. What interests me more is what people can do with what I teach them. All i've done is to create a means by which anyone can learn to develop their innate 'gift'. If after that point of departure the individual wants to apply a range of beliefs about what's happening then that's up to them

Why anyone should feel that my opinion and method is a threat to their beliefs and way of doing things seems strange to me. There's room for everyone and I wouldn't dare suppress the opinions of others in order to maintain my own. For some time I've believed that this work enhances life and is life affirming. If I didn't I wouldn't do it.

I'm looking forward to teaching the first course in Marlborough. It takes me back to the area where I first learned NLP with my old Friend David Rowan. He inspired and help me set up this first course so i'm glad he and his wife will be joining me. I'm a bit nervous but pretty excited about the day. I'm looking forward to getting feedback about what happens when the method is put to the test. People's own stories will really add to the body of information for everyone to share.

I hope all goes to plan...