A BREATH-HOLD PRACTICE FOR FOCUSED INTENTION
THE STILL
POINT
Three stages. One anchor. No sign-up required.
This is a practice I've been using and refining for years. It combines a breath-hold technique from Robert Monroe's Human Plus (H-Plus) system with a visualization structure I developed on my own after reading Itzhak Bentov's Stalking the Wild Pendulum.
I'm not a scientist. I'm not a guru. I'm a systems engineer who found something that works, tested it in my own life, and kept doing it because the results were interesting enough to continue. That's all I'm claiming. Not that I understand the mechanism. Not that I can prove anything in a lab. Just that I've done this practice consistently, and it does something I can't explain away by coincidence.
The practice has three stages. Start with the first one. Give it a week or two before moving on. There's no rush. The anchor stage is doing real work even when it feels simple.
FREE / NO SIGN-UPBlack field. White ten.
Electric-blue clockwise trace.
Release on the exhale.
THREE-STAGE PRACTICE
STAGE ONE
The Anchor
PRACTICE DAILY FOR ONE TO TWO WEEKS BEFORE MOVING ON
You're training two things at the same time: your ability to hold a clear mental image and your ability to sustain a comfortable breath hold. The number ten is just the anchor. It's not the content. It's the target you're learning to hold steady in your mind while your body is in the breath-hold state.
See a black background in your mind. Pure black, like a screen that's off.
Put it in the center of that black field. White. Large. Bold. Like a clock face. Let it sit there until it feels stable.
Take a full breath through your nose, but do not force it.
As you hold, visualize an electric blue light, bright, neon, and vivid, starting at twelve o'clock at the top of the ten. Trace it clockwise: twelve to three, three to six, six to nine, then back to twelve.
Spin the blue light around a second time. Same path, same speed.
Exhale completely and let everything go: the image, the light, and the effort. Do not hold on to it.
Do this once or twice a day. It takes about fifteen to twenty seconds per cycle. After a week or two, the ten and the blue trace should come up easily, almost automatically when you close your eyes and take the breath. That's the anchor locking in. That's when you're ready for Stage Two.
STAGE TWO
The Swap
BEGIN ONCE THE ANCHOR FEELS NATURAL
Now you're loading real content into the slot the anchor built. The ten was the training wheels. This is where you start using the practice for its actual purpose: placing a question, an intention, or a desire into the breath-hold interval.
Close your eyes. Black background. Bring up the ten, same as before. Inhale, hold, and trace one full clockwise revolution.
Let the ten disappear. Put the thing you're working with in its place: a question, an image, a situation, a problem, or a desire.
Circle the new content with the same electric-blue clockwise path.
Exhale and let it all go. Do not chase it, answer the question yourself, or force an outcome. Release and move on with your day.
The release matters as much as the hold. You're not gripping this thing and carrying it around. You're placing it somewhere, lighting it up, and letting it go. Think of it like ringing a bell in a quiet room: the sound goes out. You don't need to keep striking it. Let it travel.
STAGE THREE
Let It Evolve
ONGOING
After weeks or months of using the swap, you'll notice the practice starting to change on its own. The ten might stop appearing. The blue trace might shift color or speed. The sequence might compress, so instead of a slow deliberate process, it becomes a quick flash. The breath hold might shorten because your mind loads the content faster.
Let this happen. Don't fight it. Don't try to keep doing it "the right way." The structure in Stages One and Two is scaffolding. Once the pattern is internalized, the scaffolding naturally falls away and what's left is yours, shaped by your own practice, not by anyone's instructions.
For me, the ten eventually became more like a screen. A quick flash of what I wanted, dropped into the same dark field, with the trace happening almost instantaneously. The breath hold stayed, but everything inside it got faster and more fluid. The structure stayed the same. The content delivery changed. That's natural progression.
Let the learned structure simplify on its own.
Preserve the hold, placement, and release rather than the exact imagery.
If the practice goes flat or mechanical, return to Stage One for a few days.
SOURCE / LINEAGE
Where This Comes From
The breath-hold-with-command structure originates from Robert Monroe's Human Plus (H-Plus) system, developed at the Monroe Institute in the 1980s. Monroe used Hemi-Sync audio to open what he called the Access Channel (Focus 11), then encoded short verbal commands, Function Commands, during a breath hold. The commands could be activated later without the audio.
The visualization and anchor structure, including the ten, the blue trace, and the swap, is my own development, built over years of daily practice. It was influenced by Itzhak Bentov's Stalking the Wild Pendulum (1977), which describes how the body's cardiac signal changes during breath suspension, and by the 1983 U.S. Army INSCOM memorandum known as the Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process (Wayne M. McDonnell), which adopted Bentov's model to explain how Hemi-Sync works.
The practice of pairing breath retention with focused intention is far older than any of these sources. Kumbhaka in the yogic traditions, tummo in Tibetan Buddhism, embryonic breathing in the Taoist lineages, and various Sufi breath practices all place mental content inside a held breath. I didn't invent the interval. I found a way to use it that works for me, and I'm sharing the method.
Bentov's physics, including the quantum mechanics and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle applied to the body, doesn't hold up under modern scrutiny. His observation, that the body enters a measurably distinct state during breath suspension, does. I'm interested in the territory, not the map. The practice works whether or not anyone has correctly explained why.
SOURCE TRAIL
Human Plus / H-Plus
Stalking the Wild Pendulum
Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process