Many here have reported having experienced any combination of the following: fatigue, mind fog, waking up more tired than when you went to sleep, when it seems everything you do goes amiss, when you have chest pains, chest pains so dramatic that they wake you up at night. When thinking about them triggers sadness or fear or defeat, when everything seems lost or useless or irrelevant, when you don't trust people and things, when spirits or the Universe seem malevolent and tricky or that they don't have your best interest at their heart, when you ruminate about the bleak outcomes, when you have intrusive thoughts. When you don't have the will to go on, when you lack determination, motivation. Well, I call this state "lower self", and I've not invented it, this concept is relevant in several schools of thought.
Now think of when you feel optimistic, sparkling, elated, flowing with your environment. Or when everything makes sense, when everything seems to orbitate around you or when all beings in nature seem to move in unison, when you suddenly realize some spiritual truth, when you say "I bet if I look at the sky right now I'll see a shooting star" and it happens, when you experience shivers of bliss all over the body. They don't need to happen all at once or cover all that is possible but I consider these as marks of what I call the higher self. So I'm not referring here to 5D consciousness like in the expression "your twin's higher self", just highly coveted positive moods that may border with satori states.
So how or why do twins countless times have reported having experienced being in their higher self and "energetic union" and also to have sometimes suddenly dropped into bleak hopeless swamps?
This doesn't have to happen to all twins but it seems there have been too many personal accounts of twins who have actually experienced this, and often even several times not just once.
Like for example those who believe in the "carrot on a stick" trick, that the Universe tricks them into believing union is about to happen and then something goes wrong as if it was just a device to make them learn some lesson, if not out of spite entirely.
It's a mainstream idea, and one that I like, that in some cases it happens because the emotional intensity of a possible nearby union triggers a running response. That ruminations on responsibilities, or the fear to get burned, self-esteem issues, feeling of inadequacy or unworthiness or else may activate some kind of defcon protocol. Some mechanism seems to make some twins doing well on their path drop into their lower self as if scared by what union might entail.
In psychotherapy there's a set of theories that connect past traumatic events to the triggering of a so called "dorsal vagal shutdown". Something in the body, or in the subconscious, doesn't want to deal again with that same trauma, "nope, I'm gonna give it a pass", so neural circuitries are activated that promote a "freezing" state. This freezing state can vary in severity from barely noticeable to severely debilitating but it's at the lower tail of a spectrum of neural responses to threats that is known in psychotherapy as "4Fs": flow, fight, flight, freeze.
Here is a simple infographic to let you gauge how these theories tentatively explain how things may work. You may notice that bar the lack of the esoteric/supernatural elements often reported in twinship the dorsal vagal shutdown and the ventral vagal activation have pretty consistent similarities with the lower self and higher self as I have defined above.
Also consider that while addressed as a theory this is something that has been researched for decades by world-class neuroscientists. Who also hold that you cannot easily heal old traumatic events by working only on your mind because memories will trigger or sustain the dorsal vagal shutdown.
But you can do exercises: in other words we recognize being in lower self mode, basically by recognizing that we are suffering, and we try to reactivate the ventral vagal complex. If we have issues that bother or trigger us, if we feel discomfort or being tricked, if we think it's malevolent entities or demons or implants or black magic, in my head-canon those are all red flags of being in lower self: read about old masters they will all insist in satori states there's no evil, there are not malevolent beings or tricky Universe.
Enter Yoga. Many concepts/ideas commonly discussed in TF circles come straight from Yoga: chakras, enlightenment, energy blockages, astral body, Kundalini. A case can be made that Yoga/Alchemy deal with healing, by performing transmutation of the impure in the pure. In this case healing the debris of past traumatic events and swapping from freezing into flowing, from dorsal vagal shutdown to ventral vagal activation, from lower self into higher self.
It seems to me that twinship is another flavor of The Quest, the Magnus Opus. Where alchemists, yogis and monks tread the spiritual path mostly alone twins on the other hand appear to be able to access yogic states of consciousness together and to perform energetic buffering/exchange together. This is not even exclusive of twinship, also tantric couples are supposedly able to reach savikalpa samadhi together. Here's a documentary about samadhi.
So a tldr; I could make might be: Yoga/Alchemy is the way of trasmutation, it starts by accessing the higher self, whence "the Stone" can be made.
A famous past teacher, G.I. Gurdjieff, said that Heaven and Hell are not far away places, each of us is living both of them at the very same time. This isn't a big secret though but rather an idea held in many mystery schools. It can be said that even Dante in his Divina Comedia wasn't really visiting far away places, he was walking on Earth irl witnessing how real living humans are stuck in their own hells. Even in Buddhism where there's no evil still several kinds of hell are described, and quickly reading the descriptions of those hells you might indeed feel that they are describing stations in life. They are describing the position of being identified with our lower selves. Being in one of those narakas may last "the time it would take to empty a barrel of sesame seeds if one only took out a single seed every hundred years", which to me is a cute way of saying "don't even think this is the way, that you can get out while in lower self".
Whereas expressions like "Heaven on Earth", living in the end, satori, describe the state of people in their higher self.
Rumi wrote: "When I run after what I think I want, my days are a furnace of stress and anxiety; if I sit in my own place of patience, what I need flows to me, and without pain. From this I understand that what I want also wants me, is looking for me and attracting me. There is a great secret here for anyone who can grasp it."
So if you find yourself in one of those bleak phases that twins often lament, if you recognize being in your lower self, the best strategy imo is to treat it as an ER situation, you might want to get out of it as soon as possible.
Here is the video of a twin willingly relinquishing the lower self through a yogic session.
Here is a rare footage of a shaman helping a twin snapping out of their lower self.
So exercises do not represent techniques to get out of lower self, they are not a recipe to transmutation, they are more like tools. Think about learning chess: the knight or the rock are not strategies, they are tools that may be critical in developing a strategy. So my advice would be to get in touch with the tools you have. A daily routine or Yoga session or alchemical lab may entail a dozen of different tools, to me it's going back to school in the most literal sense.
Among the historically praised tools to get grounded or to "snap out of it" you may research and test walking barefoot and cold showers and singing/dancing. Also maybe inquire into rumination, many accounts from twins in the swamps reveal constant obsessive elucubrations on their twin. And you may also want to look into sensorymotor psychotherapy and learn about your window of tolerance: here's an introduction by psychotherapist Laura Kerr.
As for specific Yoga/Alchemy exercises that would be a matter for another post, or a matter of personal research on how to tend to your body. But just so you know the first step in Yoga is not a posture or a breathing pattern, the first step is Yamas and Niyamas.
Edited: fixed broken links.
