Why can’t I astral project?

Nothing is wrong with you

For years, letters have reached me from people who want to leave the body, and so many say the same thing. I have tried every technique: the relaxation, the visualizations, the affirmations, and nothing happens. Is something wrong with me? Nothing is wrong with you. Something is wrong with the way this subject is usually taught.

Crossing into the inner worlds takes energy. Even remembering a dream in the morning takes energy. I don’t mean physical stamina; a tired body can even help you pass through the stages of sleep. I mean attention: the clear, awake awareness you have available to give. Read a page at eight in the morning, then again at midnight after a day of screens and arguments. The words are the same. What has changed is how much of you is there to meet them.

Picture your mind as a vessel meant to hold water, full of small holes. The water is your attention. A colander cannot hold water no matter how much you pour into it, and no number of techniques poured into your evenings will fill a mind full of holes.

That is also the most hopeful thing I could tell you. The answer was never some talent you lack. The answer is to stop losing what you already have.

Seven common errors

These are the seven mistakes I see most often in the questions people send me.

• Chasing the vibrational stage. Vibrations don’t have to happen at all. Your awareness may skip the whole separation and you simply find yourself standing in your room, fully aware. Let your intent reach past the vibrations, to where you want to go once you are out.
• Taking the sounds of separation for monsters. Voices and strange visions at the edge of sleep are mostly tests from your own subconscious, to see whether fear will overwhelm you. Recognize them and carry on with your intention.
• Panicking in sleep paralysis. Fear and panic are the only things holding you down. Instead of struggling with the physical body, feel or wriggle your astral body and simply intend to get up. Every time I have had sleep paralysis, I have left the body.
• Thinking too much during separation. Leaving the body is simple and natural and needs no thinking. In the moment, only feel, the way you would only play the music or only dance. Thinking is the number one obstacle.
• Making rules about diet. What goes into our mouths will not awaken our consciousness; what comes out of them says far more. Look after your body, but don’t make food a reason you can’t.
• Believing you are not ready, or not worthy. “Next month” becomes a habit of its own. Neither guilt about the past nor busyness should stand in the way. This deeper part of life is everyone’s birthright.
• Trying to separate while wide awake. That is very advanced. For almost everyone, the body needs to be deeply relaxed and passing through the gates of sleep. The way out is surrender, not tension.

Watch the talk on YouTubeI Spent 100 Hours Trying Astral Projection and Found 7 Common Errors

It may already be happening

Many people wait for one dramatic event: the roar, the vibrations, floating up to see their own body below. That is one doorway among many, and not the most common. Countless crossings are made with no roar and no sense of leaving the body at all. And you may be having experiences already without remembering them. When you wake, don’t move, and let the night come back to you before the day’s thoughts rush in.

Trying too hard

A letter I have received in a hundred forms: when I was younger I left my body all the time; then I read about it, started trying, and it stopped. What changed is that wanting arrived. Hope and disappointment are both forms of tension, and tension is a locked door. You cannot force yourself to fall asleep either. The harder you try, the wider awake you lie.

When the sensations come, don’t grab at them. Surrender to them, let them grow, then simply get up. If you can’t, you haven’t failed; every attempt adds to your progress. Most sincere people quit between the third week and the third month, because they had secretly set a deadline. The empty nights were not a verdict. Even getting upset about them spends the energy you are trying to save.

Where the attention goes

Walk through an ordinary day. Before your eyes are fully open, your hand finds the phone. Over breakfast you replay yesterday’s argument. At work an anxiety runs in the background like an engine you forgot to switch off, and it runs on you. In the evening you reach for the screen until midnight finds you hollow and buzzing at once. Then you lie down, say the affirmation, and wonder why the doorway does not open.

We spend vast amounts of energy on petty things: arguments, bills, what others think of us, a breakup from years ago. Anger left unresolved by day is worked through at night as dreams of the day’s dramas, and then you are too invested in those dreams for a conscious journey.

Each of these is a leak: attention taken while you weren’t there to notice. The moment you catch yourself twenty minutes into the replayed argument and see “I am doing it again,” the capture is over. Seeing is the sealing. There is no second method behind it, and no reason for guilt; nobody was ever taught this.

The day is the preparation for the night

The night is not a separate compartment that begins when your head touches the pillow. It is the continuation of the day you just lived. Seekers were taught ten minutes of technique balanced on top of sixteen hours of chaos. But you cannot live scattered all day and arrive gathered at the doorway, any more than a river can run muddy for a hundred miles and turn clear at the last bend.

In a dream you walk on Mars beside a twenty-foot elephant and never ask whether you are dreaming, because you never trained your awareness to ask. Awareness exercised from moment to moment by day spills over into your nights.

Small practices to begin today

None of this asks hours of your day. These come from the seven gentle practices in Sealing the Vessel, and they are small on purpose.

• Three times a day, pause for one quiet minute. Arrive through your senses and ask gently: where has my attention been? Name it in a word (worry, the feed, an old argument) without judging or fixing it.
• Choose one subtraction, such as less scrolling or lighter news, and give yourself ten unhurried minutes of full attention on something living.
• Sit upright for ten minutes a day, attention on the breath. Every time it wanders, bring it back gently. The returning is the practice.
• Keep the last hour before sleep as an entrance hall: lights low, screens away. Watch the day replay backward as a witness, never a judge. Lying in the dark, lay down one soft intention, without strain: tonight, may I remember.
• On waking, don’t move. Let the night rise, then write whatever came in a notebook by your bed, even the honest word “nothing.” Date it, and keep it private.

Hold these for a few weeks and the vessel does what vessels do when the leaks are sealed. It fills. Small things, done softly, every day.

Where to go from here

I wrote Sealing the Vessel to answer exactly this question. It contains no technique for leaving the body. It is the work that comes before every technique: the leaks, the stolen imagination, the ten reasons sincere people fail, fear, and the hour before sleep. Several readers who had chased out-of-body experiences for ten years, one technique after another, wrote to tell me the door had finally opened, because of what they did during the day.

The methods themselves — intent, dream recall, meditation and leaving the body — are in my first book, Beyond Dreaming. Read slowly and try the practices sincerely. Walk, do not run.