Polyphasic (Uberman / Everyman) Sleep Blog

As I am heading into 3 months of my on-and-off experiment with polyphasic sleep a short retrospective (and prospective or forward-spective :) seems in order.

First off, my situation is a bit unusual as the type of polyphasic sleep that I am doing, essentially biphasic (Winston Churchill’s schedule!), has the tremendous advantage of allowing one to switch back and forth between normal (monophasic) sleep and polyphasic.  So if I need to stay up late one night I will just skip the next early morning polyphasic shift and start again the following night.  There is a lot of discussion on the boards about the challenges of the Uberman schedule to one’s social life, and the impossibility of skipping naps while on Uberman.  I don’t need to worry about this – nor do I want to have to worry about it.  I fundamentally believe that good quality sleep and rest is one of the greatest pleasures that is available to us, and I am not prepared to risk sacrificing that for the sake of 2-3 extra hours of work per day (while on biphasic I sleep around 6 hours daily and feel fabulous).

The flip-side of this, however, is that my current biphasic schedule does not enforce discipline.  So, I have been going on-and-off, and I am still dealing with my caffeine addiction.

Despite this I can say that my initial 3-month experiment with polyphasic sleep has been a smashing success in terms of consciousness development, and as yet uncertain in terms of business development.

What do I mean by “consciousness development”?

Well, my initial stated goal (which I wrote about in Fundamental motivation and preparation and My Manifesto) was to resolve my [somewhat tortured] relationship to time and money.  Resolving my relationship to time (ie, coming to peace with the way I spend my time and how I live my life) is more of a consciousness-development goal, while resolving my relationship to money (ie, generating a comfortable income in a way that fits my mission and values) is more of a business development goal.  However, these are really different sides of the same issue.

Given all that has been going on in my personal life and the tremendous insights and changes of the last 3 months, that are well-documented on Polyphasic sleep blog, I can say that the experiment is a great success.  Polyphasic sleep was my gateway into these experiences and into this new life, in a way that is still a bit mysterious.  In some ways, I think that creating the intention to live a richer, fuller and more spirit-connected life was the fuel of this awakening, and polyphasic sleep was one of many vehicles that brought me there.  These vehicles include, among others, my personal coach Nancy Froio, my spiritual teachers Saniel and Linda Bonder, and my amazing wife Rebekah.

What was missing in all this however was the money part. There has been huge progress in that area in the last 2 days.

Polyphasic sleep gives me about 5 hours a day of very focused time in the early morning shift (2-7am).  What to do with this time has been the issue, where to focus that energy, how can I be in the world in my passion and getting paid for it.  It occurred to me very recently that I could use this time to develop information products (training videos and ebooks) on creating websites and developing internet businesses.  And I still have the second morning shift (8-12am) for client work and direct billable hours.  Developing information products is something that I love to do – I have two programs already in the works, Create your own website for free (or cheap) using Wordpress and The one-hour guide to online video marketing.  Has this been done before?  No doubt.  However, in a worst-case scenario, these products will build my credibility and bring me clients to my online training business.  In a best-case scenario, I can sell them via affiliate marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) or even organic search-engine traffic.

Is this a no-brainer? Duh.

Can anybody do it? I think you must be able to support yourself working half-time for the duration that it takes to develop your information products.  I am fortunate right now that I have this possibility, due to circumstances that I did not create but which, ironically, are acting in my favor now.  Alternatively, you can gain a few hours a day with polyphasic sleep and use your time for that purpose.  So yes, one way or the other, anybody can do this.  I intend to develop training products that show you exactly how.  Anybody with specialized knowledge can do it – lawyers, accountants, coaches, whatever.  The fundamental idea is that at worst you develop your consultancy (gain clients and increase your rates), and at best hit that elusive  and sought-after passive income.

Very simple idea, very powerful concept.

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.

Continue reading Awakening into Relationship and Community, Part 1: My Story

I slept for most of 48 hours after the Morehouse course.  Started the polyphasic sleep with the early morning shift today, which feels good.  It seems that even when I get "crazy" and fall off my schedule for weeks, I return to it. Also getting back on track with diet and exercise. 

Which is a  good thing, as there is major work to do.  Work, finances, taxes, housework, networking and community-building… same old, same old.  I am grateful to have the exciting life that I do :-). 

Two things of importance. 

First I believe I have my caffeine addiction handled.  It’s really very simple, I made a 30-day "sobriety contract" with my house-mate Jason, and committed my motor-scooter to it – in other words I gave him the authority to sell my scooter if I fall off the program.  It’s corny, but it works – plus it amuses me.  Going strong for 3 days now.  I needed a compelling reason to quit that was outside of myself.  For better or for worse, something in my personality, "good intentions" alone don’t work for me.

Second, we’ve been contacted by Saniel and Linda Bonder to host two events in early April.  Saniel is the originator of the "Waking Down" movement and in terms of spiritual teachers, he is the real thing.  Friends of mine have studied with him, and others I have sent to his website and have been blown away.  This is a huge step for our community, and for me personally in terms of my search for a spiritual teacher.  The synchronicity of it is also striking – I had been seeking a teacher in Swami Rudrananda’s lineage (Rudi), and Saniel studied 17 years with Adi Da who was a student of Rudi’s.  Seems like I won’t have to go to Berkeley to study under Nathaji after all.

Several weeks ago, I had predicted that March and April were going to see a major upsurge in interest in our community, in people coming towards us and new housemates, and also that I would see a resolution of all work and financial problems.  I had written this when I was "high" (on coffee) but it makes no difference – I am still convinced that this is true.  I just feel it.  There continues to be a high-level of energy flowing in my life and in my community.  Producing a Morehouse course here was also huge.  I am now starting the 7th month of this amazing ride that I’ve been on, and which I now feel has been a preparation for what is coming next.  I am ready. 

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.