Eane’s Introduction

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I am Eane, and I am a Berserker, a man of Odin. I am other things as well – a father, husband, friend, counsel, poet, firefighter, student, more. These are all parts of my whole, which is fitting – Eane means ‘one’ in a singular sense, rather than a number.

That wholeness has been long in coming. Growing up in a fundamentally religious house, I learned to not speak of the things that I would see, feel, dream. Dreams of running through woods, hills, valleys on all fours, feeling the cool earth and the clear air as I ran. The moons that bring this urgent, unignorable sense of wearing the wrong skin. The grim figure watching, observing… usually just out of sight, but sometimes there, his gaze measuring and weighing. The cold fury within that would at times rise like a red cloud, obscuring all. Beings that were not like us out there, away from the clamour of man.

Of not feeling entirely human and not understanding the ways and mores of mankind. Of internal laws, the Gaelic geasa, that made sense to me, where the rules and regulations of man felt unnatural and artificial.

Over the years, I found my way to Odin, that grim, omnipresent figure, and I consecrated myself to him. I do not trust him, for he seeks to trick, test, betray me… to make me worthy. The work is its own reward, and with each trial, I grow and learn. Odin is a hard master, but wise – after all, he has sacrificed all for knowledge and seeks to learn from all things and beings. And that is an important point – all. He does not discriminate, and those who would use our faith to do so, do so falsely. I actively work in championing diversity, equity, and inclusion, and I have no patience for bigotry. Like Odin, I seek wisdom and truth regardless of where it is found.

By chance I came across the works of Wayland Skallagrimson, with whom correspondence grew into becoming his student, learning more the ways and mysteries of Odin, the Berserkergang, the wolf. Under his patient tutelage, have I become, and will become more.

Bjorna’s Introduction

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Greetings all. You can call me Bjorna. I consider myself to be a modern-day berserker, and one of the few female ones. Here is some of my history, so you can see how I came to identify as such.

From a very young age, all of my emotions were STRONG. If I was happy, I over-reacted about it. When I was unhappy… boy howdy, I over-reacted about it. Other kids at school could tell something was “off” about me, but they quit bullying me when I started defending myself physically. They started to respect me. Unfortunately, the adrenaline overload from fighting became a “high” for me, although I was usually only angered by people who were doing some type of injustice. I was in and out of the principal’s office a lot.

I believe my first full berserkergang (that is, berserker trance) experience was me overpowering a violent family member because he had been trying to strangle my mother. This was back when some older relatives still had landline phones with cords and the relative had the cord around my mom’s neck. I don’t remember how I wrestled him away from Mom, but I do remember coming back to myself, very exhausted, and talking to some police. I think I was 11 years old at the time. Yes, the family member went to jail.

As I grew older, I had more experiences. Browsing the internet at school, I discovered an online forum for modern berserkers, founded by Wayland Skallagrimsson. My experiences were consistent with what other berserkers relayed about their own experiences. Like many, I also relate to a preditory animal.I have had repeated dreams about bears for years, especially one where the bear is chasing me. Though spirituality is not a must for a berserker, I ended up converting to Norse religion and dedicating to Odin.

At times, I would even have berserkergang experiences at random, seemingly unprovoked. I didn’t fight during these, but my skin went red, my muscles seemed to grow and my arm hair stood on end. I got boundless energy and was spotty memory of parts. My heart rate shot way up. One of these seems to have been a “healing gangr,” as they were called on the old forum, because it came about when I had bronchitis and it did seem to cure me. I was a teenager during that one.

As a teen and young adult, I found myself losing control and even hurting loved ones, and that is when I decided to try to reign in my berserker nature. As you will see later, suppressing it is not healthy. One has to harness it instead. When I began suppressing mine, I developed severe OCD and hypochondria among other things. I was recently even hospitalized for the OCD and hypochondria.

So the time is now. No more suppressing the gangr for me. But I will not allow myself to hurt others, either. There is a third road to take. The bear will not go away. No wonder it chases me in dreams. So, I am learning let it out to play in safe ways. I dance, sing aggressively, and I work out. I wear the bear it out. I have learned some exercises to breathe out longer than in, to negate excess adrenaline from dumping into my system at inappropriate times, though the energy is still there somewhere because I end up still going off on my own to blow off steam. Lastly, to truly harness this, I believe I will need an initiation that teaches me to berserk at will. For more information on this, I truly recommend the book Putting on the Wolf Skin by Wayland Skallagrimsson. He explains this in a much more scientific manner than I could. Apparently learning how to enter the gangr teaches you how to exit it.

These things make increasingly more sense to me as I grow older. I have changed a lot. I want to continue to grow and update the berserker community on my journey. I was a slow learner and I still have a long way to go, but now, I finally feel like I am ready to take more steps on this path of discovery.

Hello Again

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Hello. Wayland Skallagrimsson here, back from my latest wanderings. These took me away for a lot of years, but that’s life as an Odin’s man for you. And, on a more practical level, recovering from Long COVID took up a LOT of my time and attention, as did cancer in the family and a lot of interpersonal drama. It didn’t help that, after so many years writing on this topic on my website, the original forum, and here, I had reached a point where I had said all that I had to say on the topic.

Lately, however, things have been changing. I have continued my studies and practices, and I have learned some new things about somafera, new things that I think I should share. I have been contacted by some members of the old forum. I have met an independent discoverer of the practice who has some interesting new takes on it that I hope to both share and learn more about. I have taken on a berserkergang student in Australia whose dedication to the art I have found inspiring. And I have realized that I still have the hopes I had for the original forum, and the old Pack that inhabited it: to create a community that doesn’t need me or anyone in particular, one that can provide a help and refuge for our people down through the generations. So here I am, trying to get something like that going again.

I know I have said this before. But this time, I have more time, a new resolve, and the help of others. A couple members of the original forum, that independent discoverer, and my student, who will all be contributing posts in addition to me. And helping me keep on track. I will shortly post introductions from a couple of them, with others hopefully to follow soon.

For new readers, let me briefly go over the history of this place, and of my history with the somafera community, such as it is. Toward the end of the 20th century, I started learning how to control the berserker state that had always come upon me when I was hurt, in danger, or in some other desperate need, ever since I was a child. I learned something of how it worked, how to trigger it deliberately, how to stop it, how to develop it. I wanted to find out if others, too, had experiences with it that they had shared, if they had advice to give, experiences I could learn from. So I got on that new internet thing and searched.

I found traces of other berserkers online. Some had written pages. One of them was a group of berserkers that had been in existence since the 70s. None of them left contact information. So I put up my own website on the subject, shared my experiences and theories, and left contact information. I heard from other practitioners of the berserkergang and other, similar practices from around the world. A maenad from New England. A scholar from Texas. An athlete from Australia. A madman from Canada. A German who had discovered that therianthropy had a martial aspect. Together, we formed an email discussion that soon grew unwieldy. So we made a forum to hold discussions more easily.

And so the original Pack was formed. That first iteration was an association of scholars. We all had experiences with it, had used it in sport, in fights, when exhausted, but we approached it all primarily from a scientific perspective. We made great strides in learning in those days, and gathered much useful data. Eventually, we decided we had to meet in person.

A bunch of new members of the forum came to that first meeting, but many of the original scholars had dropped out, as inevitably happens to internet groups. And so the second iteration of the Pack was formed. This was a Pack of fighters. It was primarily made of soldiers, especially Special Operations Forces soldiers, MMA fighters, and street brawlers. They brought a lot of practical experience to the table. That first meeting became an annual tradition, and the new generation really developed the gangr as a fighting art at these meetings, or Gatherings, as they were called. We held an annual no-holds-barred tournament at the Gatherings, and climbed cliffs, and held symposia on different aspects of somafera, and recited poetry, and drank into the wee hours of the morning. These Gatherings were a blast, and the forum during those years was huge, with hundreds of members from all over the world. We accomplished a lot of good, helping lost and desperate young berserkers and such, teaching them control and helping them heal. Giving them, so often loners or outcasts in the normal world, a sense of community.

All Golden Ages eventually come to an end, though. We had developed a practice of all new members voting on whether new applicants got admitted. As I realize now, what followed was inevitable, given this approach. Many of the most interesting, awesome members dropped out, because they had other interesting, awesome things to go do. People who turned out to be, shall we say, less than helpful, useful, or interested in the original mission, they tended to stick around, because they had nothing else to do. And, unlike the two older iterations of the Pack, this group had lost the mission. They no longer cared about helping pups in need. They no longer cared to develop the gangr as a martial art, or to pursue other aspects of somafera. They spent their time developing nicknames for themselves, making up ranks for members to go through, and slapping each other on the back about how awesome they were. They kept voting to admit other people like them, and actually refused to admit new members with mental health problems and other issues, people who needed help, because they were too “unstable.” And so was born the third, final, and least iteration of the Pack: the social club.

These useless new members filled the forum with so much useless, egotistical dreck that the remaining old members and potentially good new members were driven off the forum, for the most part. And then they turned the place into a cesspit. Anti-vax stupidity, anti-immigration rhetoric, borderline racist stuff, outright white nationalist bullshit, and so forth. Basically, the forum was taken over by people who would, a few years later, be wearing red hats. Some of them, who had become admins, tried to lock me out of the forum and seize control of the whole thing. They even tried to steal the land we had been purchasing for use as a somafera training center. So I basically torched the place and left. I tried to continue something of the original mission with this very blog, but that’s all it was, a blog. No community.

But now I am ready to try again. I will keep the blog format, and open it up to posts from this new group of people. Hopefully, through our combined efforts at posting, engaging with comments, and turning some comments into posts for more in-depth discussion, we may eventually form something like a new Pack.

So, welcome to this reborn blog. Now I’m going to go post the other introductions I have.

Empathic Berserkergang

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Hello everyone. Even though the somafera forum is long gone, I still talk to enough somaferans to keep learning new things about all of this. And one of the new things I have learned about in recent times is the combination of an empathic nature with a berserker one. And the guy I learned about it from has kindly agreed to write something on the subject. So here it is.

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Hello all! Wayland asked me to write something to give some insight into how i experience Berserkergang. The best way I can describe it would be to identify myself as a Berserker-Empath. I 100% identify as an empath, while i 100% identify as a berserker as well. I cant really say what came first but i remember as far back as a child having different experiences that could fall under either category.

The first time that i remember blacking out was in kindergarten. I had a problem with a bully on my school bus, who was much bigger than me, and I told my father. He said to me “You better knock his fucking block off.” I remember him being very calm, but adament about it. I have no recollection of what happened with the bully and I. I just remember that he didn’t mess with me anymore. When I got older my parents informed me that I really hurt him. So much that his parents came to our house. I don’t remember any of that at all.

My household had substance abuse and some domestic issues that led to my parents getting a divorce. During my younger years, without my father, I was a lot more timid and allowed kids to push me around to a certain extent. I still got into fights but I wasn’t as confident. While this was going on, my brother and I got to a point where, on different occasions, he might be thinking of a song and I would sing it and vice-versa. That was normal for us. I never thought anything of it until i got older and it started to happen with other people. It’s not something that i’ve mastered….i don’t even know if i want to master it. I just know when it happens with people, i have to really examine who they are so I don’t pick up negative things like habits and thought patterns. Some people have energy so good that just being in their presence is soothing…..but i digress.

So, in the 4th grade, 5th grade, 6th grade i would get into altercations with other kids while just trying to stand up for myself. 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th grade i got into full fledge violent fights. I actually bit a another kid in the 7th grade on the face because i so mad that he hit me with a brush. 9th grade is what really stands out though. I was terrified of being bullied in highschool because i knew how mean kids could be and i knew that i probably wouldn’t be able to handle it.

It was the first time that i noticed that i blacked out during a fight. i had no recollection of what happened but I was covered in the other guys blood and my knuckles had cuts from punching him in the teeth. I only remember him getting within three feet of me and then i was being held against a wall being told to calm down by the biggest guy in the room. I’ll never forget the look on his face, like something was wrong with me. I thought the other guy got the better of me until people were telling me that I won the fight. i don’t remember throwing any punches at him at all. I do remember the teacher getting between us, though. I think that is because she was innocent, but it was very brief and that is the only thing I do remember.

The next year, I got into a fight with another guy who was a bully. He had been just talking $hit to me for over a year. One day, i woke up and decided that that was the day that if he said anything, i was going to do something about it. i got off at his bus stop and overwhelmed him, very easily.  When i walked back to my neighborhood him and his friends were waiting on me. In my memory they, jumped me but didn’t hurt me…according to my brother and my neighbor, they could not overwhelm me. To this day, I’m not 100% certain what happened.

My senior year is when I had my first of what I would call a ” jedi moment” . I think that would be the equivalent to your Dagaz moment, if im understanding it correctly. During the summer after graduation, some friends from school were playing tackle football at our old middle school field. It was something they did and i came that day. I remember one guy was blatanly tripping people. i was nrevous because i knew that if he tripped me, i would hit him and then i would have an issue with the other guys because they were from the same neighborhood. On the next play, i was running the ball and while i was scrambling, the guy was on my side and i FELT when he was going to try and trip me and I jumped over his foot with perfect timing.

During my years in college is when I really noticed things, mostly things that involved ESP and the such. I’ll try to keep it short but basically, i noticed that i was sensitive to my surroundings and people, the energy, the vibrations. This is also when i started to learn martial arts. My first trainer opened my eyes to how little i knew about fighting, i eventually was able to get the better of him. This also continued with a friend who had been practicing martial arts since he was a child. Even though my technique wasn’t as clean, i could hang with him and even hurt him (on accident) on different occasions.

During my time in college, i noticed that when i would have these anxiety attacks but they would be beneficial. on one occasion, i got challenged to a foot race and i was so nervous that i had one of these attacks. Afterwards, i beat the guy that challenged me and even a member of my college track team. At the time, i was a smoker so it took a lot of people by surprise. I knew that there was something there but i couldnt identify it until now.

Through the years, i had started to go to combat sports gyms: boxing, mma, kickboxing and could hang with and even outlast people that had been there longer and even beat some of the more seasoned guys. After going through Wayland’s research, I have demonstrated quite a few of the special traits of berserkergang, such a being able to reset and outlast people who were supposed to be in better shape. i train and work out often but i have also had my bouts of exessive smoking and drinking do to my own mental health issues and still would be able to overwhelm opponents and sparring partners.

Being energetically sensitive, i would be set off very easily by things in my environment or people. One situation is when someone had an anxiety attack next to me and i ended up having one but i could see his WHY behind his attack. He confirmed when he spoke. I had developed a way to use this during fighting. It is a meditation called the hakalau. It is a visual mediation where you engage your peripheral vision with your central vision. You all call it Wide angle vision, if I’m not mistaken. (Wayland, you have a lot of good research.) The purpose of the hakalau is to hold this vision for as long as possible. After my own research, i’ve come to find out that this meditation can help induce a trance. Originally, i learned it to see auras lol….and i thought that the better i got at using my peripheral vision the more control i could get over my peripheral nervous system, which houses the sympathetic nervous system, which controls the fight or flight response.

i didnt think much of the parasympathetic nervous system except for healing and recovery. I didnt understand how they could work together until recently. I brought to Wayland’s attention, the site that spoke about the Flow State and how similar it was to the gangr. One of the aspects that were really interesting was using the same peripheral exercise to induce a flow state and that helped me as well. I started to do more research on it’s function and uses. As i learned more about using this peripheral vision meditation, i also learned that my perception of time could be altered this way. One thing i did was a clock exercise, where i would get a digital clock, unplug it and plug it back in and while it was flashing, i would try and change the rhythm of this. i became successful and good enough at it where i could do this while fighting. i like to think that this was a Madspace initiated gangr and as emotional content became higher, the more i would get into it.

I havent gone all the way into it to be honest due to fear of really hurting someone. Spritually, i feel like the spirit of deceased fighters, coaches and warriors are with me when i train and when i fight or spar such as Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Robinson, Cus Damoto, Bruce Lee. I like to follow simple priniciples in my training: Strength, speed and right action. Same as you all. I try to stay consistent with my conditioning. My thinking is that if im in really good shape, when i elevate then i will be even sharper, stronger and have more stamina in that state. When i elevate and i use the hakalau, i will see colors around objects. Things look brighter. Having more control over my sense of time, i do believe that this puts me in a low level Warfetter and training so much in right action helps excecute to the point where i can overwhelm a seasoned fighter.

I’m still trying to find a balance between being empathic and being a berserker. Being so easily triggered doesn’t help because i get enraged easily if i don’t police myself.  One occasion, i felt another berserker (he didn’t know, but he understood the power of the adrenaline) energy when they were in an aroused state enough that i elevated as well. There is so much more that i could add but i don’t want to write a novel unless anyone wants to know more or have any questions.

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In some ways, a story any berserker can relate to. There are certain things most of us share in common. I find the empathic angle to be particularly interesting. It’s not something I ever ran across in the Pack days. I do keep coming back to the connection between having an empathic experience and the hakalau. Why does engaging wide-angle, peripheral vision trigger an empathic state? The systems do not seem connected, on the surface. Understanding why could unearth useful information about how all of this works.

Anyway, thank you for sharing this all with us.

How to Break Through the Berserker Amnesia

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Hello everyone. I was recently talking to a psychologist of my acquaintance about the psychological elements of the gangr, and in the course of the conversation we touched on a subject I realized I need to post about here. That subject is memory and blackouts.

Every berserker is different, of course. But there are a lot of things we tend to have in common. One of these things is the blackout that comes with the change, in the early days. Young berserkers, when the change first starts coming over them, tend to black out when it happens, and to be unable to recall anything that happened in that state afterward. It was that way for me, and for at least half of the other berserkers I talked to, and that’s hundreds.

Some of us figure out why this happens, and how to stop it from happening. After that, we can transition from normal state to berserk state without any blackout or loss of memories. It is the first step in the process of achieving control.

Back in the days of the old Pack, and the forum, we had a huge store of information for new berserkers to benefit from. Since the loss of the forum, that storehouse is unfortunately lost. It really should have occurred to me before now to post on this subject, for the benefit of any young berserkers dealing with this issue.

The key to remembering is the fact that memory is state-dependent. When the beast is in the driver’s seat, your mind is working VERY differently than it does when the human’s in the driver’s seat. The key to recovering your memories after a gangr is trying to get into a similar state of mind. You do not, fortunately, have to actually go berserk to do it, but you do need to take a step or two in that direction.

Now, the blackout doesn’t usually start until you’re fully berserk. So you should have some memories of how you felt in the moments leading up to it. Try to remember how those moments felt. Think about the things that triggered the gangr. Start hyperventilating a little. Play with the memories. Look at them from different angles. Switch back and forth between them. It is important to stay relaxed, with an open, questioning mind while you are doing this. Ask for the memories, but don’t try to force them. Just try to imitate the state of mind you were in, a little, and wait expectantly but patiently. In time, memories should start coming back. They’ll likely just be flashes at first, but with diligent effort, you can learn to recall the whole event.

As you get used to doing this, you will no longer even black out in the first place. You will find yourself transitioning from normal to berserk state and back again with continuous experience.

Well, I hope this helps. Good luck to you.

Something New

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I love that, even after all these years delving into somafera stuff, even after talking to literally hundreds of somaferans, there are still new and surprising things to discover.

Back on the old forum, we had noted there were, in general, two main classifications of somafera. One provides mostly physical enhancement, and is primarily of benefit in fighting and hard labor. This kind we termed “the berserkergang,” after the most well known example of the type. The other provides more of a mental and spiritual enhancement, and is primarily of benefit in seeing patterns, solving problems, and having spiritual experiences. This kind we termed “madspace,” a term from a work of fiction, because the person who named it was a Lokian and Lokians love using pop culture references for more serious things. We always knew there was a certain degree of overlap. Berserkers did have a greater tendency to have spiritual experiences when in the state. People in madspace tended to accidentally break things in that state, and could sometimes slip into a gangr if aggravated enough in it. But, for the most part, we had very distinct examples of the two types.

Recently I learned that it’s more complex than that. I have recently been in contact with a martial artist. And he has an altered state that he uses as an integral part of his martial art. The state does seem to be somaferan. It involves many of the telltales, such as incredible endurance, the ability to reset to fresh for a bit no matter how far down he is, fast healing, and exceptional reflexes.

He is not a berserker, though. He does not experience transcendental rage. In fact, his altered state seems to be supremely calm. He does lose himself, and become something else. His state does not seem to boost strength. Instead, it seems to be a madspace type of somaferan state. It raises his awareness, heightens his sensitivity, and in a way becomes united with his opponent, able to feel and anticipate what his opponent is doing. This kind of spiritual experience and heightened mental capacity is typical of the madspace kind of somafera. But he uses it as a fighting style.

I find this fascinating! Most madspace types, like the maenads, Isawiyans, and (at least some) vodouisants use the state for religious purposes. Some use it to aid in their practice of science, to produce more eureka moments. I have never before met one who used it to fight. Most somaferans who get into fights find the state produces a gangr, but he does not. Clearly wired differently. And that means that there is a whole other facet to the somafera stuff that I and my old Pack knew little to nothing of.

I would love to study it further. Unfortunately, this guy is the only one of his type he knows of. So let me put this question out there: anyone else have experiences like this, or know anyone who has?

Flow State

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I was recently asked to weigh in on the flow state, and what relationship it has to the gangr, if any. The person asking the question gave me the following website as a reference for the concept: https://www.thebioneer.com/achieve-flow-states-heightened-awareness-wide-angle-vision/. This site describes the flow state this way:

“A flow state is a mental state that is discussed in neuroscience in which an individual focuses all of their attention on a single task, to the point where they seemingly lose awareness of everything else going on around them and even of themselves… In flow, time seems to slow down, self-doubt melts away and we perform at our very best… Neurologically, flow states are close to the fight or flight response. Here, activity in the prefrontal cortex and the default mode network seems to shut down, putting us in a state known as ‘temporal hypofrontality’. The brain meanwhile produces a neurochemical cocktail of norepinephrine, serotonin, dopamine and anandamide. In short, it’s like stress + bliss.”

The site further goes on to list some of the triggers for flow state:

“These include:

  • Intensely focused attention
  • Immediate feedback
  • Clear goals
  • Challenge/skill ratio
  • Risk
  • Control
  • Rich environments
  • Deep embodiment

With a whole bunch of ‘social triggers’ in there for good measure.”

The description of flow state is very much like what most berserkers experience in the gangr. Hyperfocus on a single goal, loss of awareness of the world and the self, psychetachia, heightened confidence, exceptional levels of performance, activation of the fight or flight systems, decrease in activity in the prefrontal cortex (the “human” part of the brain), and neurochemical changes. Even the “stress + bliss” description rings true, echoing the way the gangr involves simultaneous activation of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, the fight and flight one and the relaxation and healing one. The triggers the site describes are also typical of the berserkergang, especially the high risk situations and the high challenge to skill ratio. The site even hypothesizes that there is more than one kind of flow state, with a second kind enhancing creativity, and this is true as well.

However, the term seems to be used in some ways that are rather simpler than this definition. Elsewhere on the page, the author says that the flow state is “mind without mind,” which can give a martial artist the ability to “move on instinct and without thought.” Now this is a much broader concept than the gangr. This “mind without mind,” or “mushin,” is a deep meditative state of mind, but it is not the same thing as the gangr. Rather, it is one of the steps on the way from the mundane state to the gangr state.

The major difference that I see between the terms “flow state” and “berserkergang” is the fact that “flow state” seems to be applied to a whole range of altered states, and includes things like meditative openness and what we would called “raised wod” in addition to the gangr, while our tradition differentiates between all of those states.

A fascinating read. Glad to see others investigating the state.

Breathwork, False Thoughts, and Elevation

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I have been working on this blog post for months. It’s been rather difficult to find a way to communicate these ideas clearly. But I think that I have finally figured it out.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, I am coming to feel that developing proper breath control is one of the most important skills for any somaferan who wants to develop their practice as much as they can.

In order to present my ideas on breath control, though, I need to first go into some background.

One of the most important things to realize about the somafera state, whether it is expressed as the berserker battle trance or anything else, is that it is limited by Shadow and false thoughts. Shadow should be an idea familiar to anyone who has studied Jung. It is that part of the self that contains all of the things the personality is not. It is a sort of dark reflection of the personality, the negative space the self evolves into. Well, to generalize that concept a bit, every concept has its own Shadow. Sorrow is the Shadow of joy. And fragmented, disunified thinking is the Shadow of the unitary state of somafera.

The subconscious is a simple thing, associative rather than reasonable. So whenever you focus on something for too long, your subconscious mind starts to become aware of all the stuff associated with the thing you are focusing on. That awareness includes the Shadow of that thing. With a powerful enough focus, the Shadow thoughts become strong enough to start breaking into your awareness, creating ideas and images that Buddhist yogis call “false thoughts.” These false thoughts distract and interrupt, ruining your focus.

And there’s the dilemma for any somaferan, but particularly for berserkers: the somafera change is effected through powerful, sustained focus on the kinds of thoughts that lead to elevation. In a fight, the greater the focus is, the greater the gains in strength and speed. And so the very things that make a powerful gangr possible are the things that, shortly later, ruin the state of mind you need for the gangr.

One way to handle that is to simply get the job done quickly, so that by the time false thoughts ruin your state, you don’t need it anymore. However, because the gangr is often used in fighting and hard physical labor, that strategy may not always work. If you use the somafera state for more spiritual purposes, you may not have accomplished them in the limited time you have, either. So what else is to be done?

Well, you can learn to extend your state through proper breath work. You see, the breath is the key to the mind. As the breath moves, so your mind moves. On the physical level, the breath carries oxygen to your brain, which it needs, so the breath supports the mind that way. On a more esoteric level, breath (or ond, in the Old Norse) raises wod, which fires up and inspires the mind. Here are the basics of how it works:

  • When you inhale, you build up your mental power.
  • When you exhale, you spend whatever mental force you have mustered, strengthening your focus and whatever it is you are doing at the moment.
  • When you do not breathe in or out, as happens for a moment between inhalation and exhalation and between exhalation and inhalation, mental activity drops to a minimum. Your focus winds down when this happens.

So, knowing these three facts, you can time your breathing with your mental and physical activity to effortlessly manipulate the interplay between focus and Shadow so that the effect of focus is maximized and the effects of false thoughts are minimized.

Inhale on thoughts you wish to strengthen, such as the object of ritual focus.

When your attention begins to waver, exhale forcefully. If you are fighting, this is the moment to make your move, and time the exhalation with the move. The act of exhalation will strengthen the move.

If you have timed this right, when you finish exhaling will be about the moment when your mind starts to be overwhelmed or distracted by Shadow and false thoughts. If you hesitate before inhaling, or shift to light, slow, shallow breathing (which has much the same effect), these false thoughts will be weakened, and have little effect.

Practicing timing your breathing with your ritual focus, when doing ritual, and timing it with your movements and intents if fighting, will eventually produce a far more effective form of elevation, one which is not as prone to running down and scattering.

Rrrgh. I am still dissatisfied with this description. I feel I am only hinting at what I really mean. But really explaining it is like trying to explain to someone how to wiggle their ears. This is as close as I can get for now.

Proper Breathing for Exercising Berserkers

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Although I’m pushing 50, I keep training in the martial arts, and that includes doing periodic research. Well, in the course of my recent research on aerobic exercise and breathing, I finally solved an old mystery about the gangr.

Something that I and the other members of the old Pack had always noticed was that the traditional advice for proper breathing during exercise did not work for any of us. You see, you’re supposed to breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth, and all of us complained of not getting enough air this way, so we all breathed deeply in through the mouth as well as out.

According to the exercise guru whose work I recently read, the reason people are told to breathe in through the nose is to prevent hyperventilation. You see, in most people, hyperventilation leads to feelings of nausea, dizziness, an inability to think straight, and a paradoxical feeling of suffocating, so it is something to be avoided. That’s not how it works with berserkers, though. Because our bodies work on overdrive in this state, we need all the oxygen we can get. Because we metabolize it as quickly as we take it in, it doesn’t disrupt the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the blood and it does not produce the unwanted symptoms of hyperventilation. For berserkers, hyperventilation is a feature, not a bug. Fortunately, we all followed the old adage that you should never fight the breath, and just did it the way it felt best.

The Battle Trance and Ordinary People

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I have recently come across the writings of Joseph Jordania, an autodidact and polymath (that is to say, self-taught in a wide variety of disciplines, for all of you not as old and pretentious as me). In one of his writings, he examined the battle trance from the perspective of an outsider, and I found what he had to say to be quite fascinating. He wrote about the occurrence of the battle trance in ordinary soldiers, people who are, for the most part, not natural berserkers.

I had always wondered how normal people who are not, as berserkers are, prone to going into the trance at the drop of a hat, enter the state. More specifically, I wondered how soldiers’ conditioning helps then effect the deafferentation of the Orientation Association Area (the posterior superior parietal lobe) the sine qua non of going berserk, a thing most people have a very hard time doing.

Jordania argues that the key lies in the push for extremes of group identity that the military fosters, that one of the purposes of this push is actually to create conditions that make shutting off the OAA a lot more likely. More specifically, the absorption into a group identity involves losing the self, to some extent, and that involves shutting off the part of the brain that keeps track of it, which is the OAA. This is in contrast to born berserkers, who tend to lose their sense of self by merging with their alters, such as the wolf or the bear. I found the idea an intriguing look into a side of the gangr that is rarely discussed.

In the old days, when there was still a somafera forum, there was a debate about whether people who were not born berserkers could deliberately enter the state. We knew it could come over anyone in a moment of danger, but opinions were divided as to whether people not born prone to entering the trance could learn to do it deliberately. We knew of one person who tried. He came to our forum because he wanted to learn to do it, even though he had no gift for it. After years of studying with us, he tried. He ended up coming to the opinion that it was horrendously difficult, and the results kind of drove him mad. I think I can now venture an informed opinion that yes, even those not born with the gift can learn to bring it about deliberately, but that they must use the techniques suited for normal people, while born berserkers need those techniques best suited to our natures.