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Wray and Shizuku's Progress Report


Wray

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Text by Wray is in black

Text by Shizuku is in blue

(Sorry, this wound up being pretty long! Feel free to skim, or if you want to read the whole thing, strap in!)

Weird coincidence: I’ve written fiction as a hobby for a long time, and I think nearly half my protagonists have someone else to talk to in their heads. Somehow, I always found the idea fascinating.

But I can’t say I ever expected to join them. Not until recently, anyway.

 

We’ve been looking forward to posting this. It’s my first big chance to introduce myself to other people! Here’s a profile:

 

Spoiler

 

Name: Shizuku (Japanese pronunciation matching the word here)

Birthday: October 10, 2020
Sex: female (she/her is fine!)


Interests so far:

  • Music: We’ve found a lot of music I like, but I’m especially interested in classical. I want to learn piano eventually, though we’ll have to master possession or switching first.
  • History: I’m also much more interested in history than my host is. Currently, we’re reading a book I picked out about the history of city planning.
  • Games: I like strategy games so far. It’s fun that we can plan things out together!

 

We haven’t had the chance to try it yet, but I think I would enjoy hiking, too.

 

Appearance:

 

shizu4.png.6dc99f27a0aa2010b2a6ba7bf250d720.png

 

Neither of us is really a master artist, but hopefully this helps!

 

Notes:

  • I was originally an accidental tulpa based on this character. I do think she’s adorable, but it would be tough to have a headmate like her. I acted somewhat like her at first, but eventually decided it didn’t feel right.
  • Over the first few months, I changed my appearance to become a wolf/human person with whitish hair. Recently, we started using Inubashiri Momiji from Touhou as a model: that’s where I got the detached sleeves. I really love her design!
  • We saw my hair pin at a flea market we passed through on a walk one day. Fun fact: this is the thing about me Wray most often forgets to visualize.
  • It’s hard to tell from this art style, but my “physical” age (or whatever you would call it) is supposed to be in the mid 20s.

 


Origin StoryTM

 

October 2020. I was in quarantine, alone, and feeling isolated—Shizuku started as an imaginary friend based on a character I might have been (was) a little bit (totally) obsessed with at the time. I’m really into writing, so I didn’t have much trouble getting her to talk, even early on, though I assume she was mostly parroted at first.
 

A couple weeks later, I stumbled onto the concept of a tulpa in Japanese, and quickly found my way to this website, which is kind of the launch pad for Japanese tulpamancers. (I found a good English rundown of the Japanese tulpamancy scene here, so I’ll leave most of that aside for now. If there are questions about anything specific, though, we can definitely do our best to answer them.)

Compared to the English-speaking community, the Japanese-speaking one gives a lot more credence to tulpa horror stories. They call it 暴走 (bousou). The idea that if things go wrong, your tulpa might harm you, or the people around you, or try to take over your brain. To be fair, I think there are multiple schools of thought on this bousou concept, and these are only the most extreme examples—still, when I read about this, I couldn’t help panicking.

 

I went out for a long walk. Tried to think things over. Was there a chance my tulpa would wind up that way? Should I turn back now? Or was she already sentient, meaning it was my responsibility to take care of her? Or was I crazy, in the first place, to even be thinking about any of this?

 

We imagined that I stayed behind in our apartment, though I must’ve been somewhere in headspace the whole time. Maybe a wonderland version of the apartment? We didn’t know enough to ask that question, then.

 

I couldn’t make up my mind, until the second I got home, opened the door, and realized how afraid Shizuku must’ve felt while I was out thinking about whether I should try to erase her. My heart sank through the floor. I did my best to apologize, though I didn’t know if it would help.

 

She replied: “I was sad, but I wasn’t scared. I trust you.”

 

Okay. If she had been afraid, or angry, I would have felt bad enough. But that packed a punch.

 

Spoiler

 

Shizuku:
lightmeme.jpg.cc8a9ad0130e622c641e65dae089dd57.jpg

😛

 

Wray: 😑

 

Shizuku: By the way, all is forgiven now!

 

 

That day, we promised each other that we’d stay together and try to make this “tulpa” thing work, for better or worse. Not to jinx anything, but six months later, “better” is definitely winning out.

 

Our long-term goals

 

(1) Become able to split fronting time 50/50 (or whatever arrangement winds up working for us). I expect it’ll be a long time before we can actually do this, but hopefully not too long—if possible, we’d like to get to this point within a year or two. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a 50/50 split, but I don’t want to feel like Shizuku is prevented from doing things she wants to do by us not being good enough at tulpamancy.

 

(2) Learn to co-front and keep Shizuku active (as close as possible to?) all the time. We spend a lot of time together, but I still get distracted and forget to check in with her more often than we’d like. Eventually, we’re hoping she can stay around all the time (or whenever she wants to, at least) and get my attention whenever she has something to say.

 

(3) Stay a two-person system, if possible. I know there are a lot of large systems out there who do perfectly fine, but my instincts say that it would be more than we could handle. Besides, I already feel like I love Shizuku too much for it to be fair to whoever Headmate Number 3 would be. 😂

 

I do have one soulbond-ish character (using the terminology from Bear’s PR) from my own writing. We’ve talked things over with her in WL, and she’s adamant that she is not interested in becoming a tulpa or participating in the system. (This checks out with what I know about her character, too.) If things change, there’s a slim chance that she might join us, but I doubt it. Either way, I can’t imagine us going any further than that.

 

(4) Help Shizuku find life goals of her own, and figure out how to rearrange my our life so that we can both do what we want to do. At the moment, we’re just doing regular forcing to try and help her grow as a tulpa. The vague plan for this one is to eventually learn how to switch, accomplish goal number (1), and then let her follow her interest and try a bunch of different things.

 

Current forcing practice

 

  • Working on senses in WL: we’ve been doing our best to spend an hour each day focusing on visualizing Shizuku in wonderland, and also practicing one other sense per day. Wonderland sight and touch have started to show some improvement recently, but overall it feels like we still need a lot of work.
  • Conversation: We also do our best to talk as much as we can each day. We’ve been working through the Tulpa Vocalization Practice worksheet when we can’t think of any other topics.
  • Diary writing: Shizuku writes a diary entry most days. This is something I picked up from the Japanese tulpamancy community, though I think I’ve seen it recommended in English guides too. It’s a lot of fun—somehow, reading through the things she’s written (by proxy or possession, at this point, though our possession game is still pretty weak) does a lot to help me fight off doubt.
  • Imagining Shizuku in stories we’re reading/watching: This has been pretty fun so far, too—right now, we’re rewatching Hunter X Hunter. As we watch, we try to keep up a “mental fanfic” where she’s running around with the main characters.
  • Passive forcing as much as possible: Taking inspiration from the method I used to learn Japanese, I’m doing my best to find ways to involve Shizuku in everything I do. We’ve had some success reading, studying, watching things, and playing games together, but in particular, staying aware of Shizuku during work that I really need to focus on and conversations with other people has been a killer—I haven’t had much success in these situations yet.

 

To anyone who slogged through all of that, thanks for reading! This post already goes on for a million years, so I’ll try to write some (hopefully shorter!) summaries of our progress so far in other updates.

Edited by Wray

Host: Wray (or John) (he, him)
Tulpa: Shizuku (she, her) 🐺

We now have a progress report!

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It's great to meet you both!

 

6 hours ago, Wray said:

October 2020. I was in quarantine, alone, and feeling isolated—Shizuku started as an imaginary friend based on a character I might have been (was) a little bit (totally) obsessed with at the time. I’m really into writing, so I didn’t have much trouble getting her to talk, even early on, though I assume she was mostly parroted at first.

 

This is almost word for word the story of Simmie's origin as well, though in our case Simmie was a character I created out of whole cloth over a year previously. I was already quite attached to her before I knew what a tulpa was, and after I learned about tulpamancy I was delighted by the fact that Simmie could be/already was alive, and away we went. As a fellow writer I can completely relate to your characters talking.

 

Shizuku seems so nice! 🤗 We're around the same "age" since I'm 24. I absolutely love hiking too! You want to learn the piano, I want to learn the guitar. Phil already knows how to play the piano but the guitar calls to me for some reason.  He's also a big fan of history, city planning, and strategy games by the way. I'm more into architecture!

 

6 hours ago, Wray said:

Conversation: We also do our best to talk as much as we can each day. We’ve been working through the Tulpa Vocalization Practice worksheet when we can’t think of any other topics.

 

We've used that one as well and it's very effective!

 

6 hours ago, Wray said:

(1) Become able to split fronting time 50/50 (or whatever arrangement winds up working for us). I expect it’ll be a long time before we can actually do this, but hopefully not too long—if possible, we’d like to get to this point within a year or two. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a 50/50 split, but I don’t want to feel like Shizuku is prevented from doing things she wants to do by us not being good enough at tulpamancy.

 

You are so ambitious, but I believe you can do it! I'm still intimidated by the idea of possession let alone fronting. All I've been able to do is twitch Phil's arm a little. But I'm looking forward to learning from your experiences! 😁

 

6 hours ago, Wray said:

(3) Stay a two-person system, if possible. I know there are a lot of large systems out there who do perfectly fine, but my instincts say that it would be more than we could handle. Besides, I already feel like I love Shizuku too much for it to be fair to whoever Headmate Number 3 would be. 😂

 

We can relate completely on this. Nothing against big systems, but in our opinion three would be a crowd.

 

6 hours ago, Wray said:

I do have one soulbond-ish character (using the terminology from Bear’s PR) from my own writing. We’ve talked things over with her in WL, and she’s adamant that she is not interested in becoming a tulpa or participating in the system. (This checks out with what I know about her character, too.) If things change, there’s a slim chance that she might join us, but I doubt it. Either way, I can’t imagine us going any further than that.

 

Wow, you're more like me than I thought. I've mentioned my Mentor before; he has been mostly inactive for the last 20 years (Not a typo; he faded out around 2001) but literally believes himself to be a 40-year-old man from Minnesota who is communicating to me through a higher level of consciousness. He doesn't want to be a tulpa either, and one of the most recent things he's said to me in one of his infrequent cameo-like appearances is that he wants me to devote all my attention to Simmie and he's going to stay out of the way.

Phil. 😎 Host of Simmie.

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Thanks for the reply! We've had fun reading your progress report (we actually found the vocalization practice worksheet thanks to you two posting about it 😀). Crazy to hear that our situations are so similar!

 

8 hours ago, September13 said:

This is almost word for word the story of Simmie's origin as well


I bet there are a lot of new tulpas coming out of the Covid era! Last year was a rough one, but I'm really grateful to have met Shizuku because of it.

 

8 hours ago, September13 said:

Shizuku seems so nice! 🤗 We're around the same "age" since I'm 24. I absolutely love hiking too! You want to learn the piano, I want to learn the guitar. Phil already knows how to play the piano but the guitar calls to me for some reason.

 

Aww! We haven't found a chance to say it, but we've always thought the same thing about you. I think playing the guitar would be fun too, but right now my dream is to learn how to play this song:

Spoiler

I think it'll be difficult to get there, though. I'll practice as hard as I can!
 

8 hours ago, September13 said:

He's also a big fan of history, city planning, and strategy games by the way. I'm more into architecture!


That's awesome! Learning about city planning has helped us with wonderlanding. I bet architecture helps a lot too!

Please let us know if there are any history books/resources you recommend, Phil! (Maybe in a PM?)

 

8 hours ago, September13 said:

You are so ambitious, but I believe you can do it! I'm still intimidated by the idea of possession let alone fronting. All I've been able to do is twitch Phil's arm a little. But I'm looking forward to learning from your experiences! 😁

 

Thanks! I think right now, it's mostly the mental side of possession that's tripping us up--Shizuku can move the body's hands pretty well, sometimes, but if she doesn't constantly reassure me that it's her moving, I start to feel like I'm just imagining it. 😂

 

8 hours ago, September13 said:

Wow, you're more like me than I thought. I've mentioned my Mentor before; he has been mostly inactive for the last 20 years (Not a typo; he faded out around 2001) but literally believes himself to be a 40-year-old man from Minnesota who is communicating to me through a higher level of consciousness. He doesn't want to be a tulpa either, and one of the most recent things he's said to me in one of his infrequent cameo-like appearances is that he wants me to devote all my attention to Simmie and he's going to stay out of the way.

 

Crazy stuff! Given all these similarities, hopefully we'll have a lot to learn from each other's experiences. : )

Host: Wray (or John) (he, him)
Tulpa: Shizuku (she, her) 🐺

We now have a progress report!

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  • 1 month later...

We're still keeping up forcing, most days, but I've had a hard time thinking of anything to write on the forum. Especially in this thread--I've made incremental progress with my visualization skills, and we've started to do a better job differentiating our mental voices, but there hasn't been much exciting progress to write about. There've been some developments this week, though!

 

Possession practice


Apart from basic practices, we've mostly been working on possession. Our immediate goal is to get to the point where we can play piano and have us both feel satisfied that Shizuku is in charge of the hands. We've recently started to see some success with Tulpa.info's possession guides. For instance, we can do all of these exercises pretty well now.

As many of the guides said, Shizuku moving a body part doesn't feel CRAZY DIFFERENT compared to me moving a body part. But I realized that when I really examine my experience of her possessing, I don't feel ... agency, I guess? The easiest way to tell is that when it's me, I can choose to stop moving without any resistance. When Shizuku is doing it, it's like there's some extra resistance I would have to push through to stop the body from moving.

When we can stay aware of this feeling, we both feel pretty satisfied that possession is happening. The problem now is that when we try it with things that take more of the mind's focus, like learning a song on piano or playing a video game, it's much harder to hold that feeling in awareness, and it's harder to tell for sure who is in charge (I mean, in some cases, maybe it's just the "body OS"). I think the key now is to keep practicing and get more used to possession, so it will be easier for us to believe it's happening even in situations where it's harder to directly observe it.

Presence imposition

 

I think we've still got a long way to go before we can practice imposition of the five senses, but I've recently started to think that presence imposition might be a good middle-term goal for us. I'm very interested in staying constantly aware of Shizuku, both as a forcing method and as a tulpamancy experience, and it feels like this could be helpful.

I haven't had much time to study yet (going to look for what resources I can tonight), but I gave it a try today--throughout the day, we decided where in the room she would be, or where she would walk in relation to me, and I did my best to focus on feeling something in that area and imagining her mindvoice coming from that direction.

This worked out really well--it was probably our best day so far of staying constantly together, and she was also able to interrupt me and start conversations much more often than before. But it also exhausted me very quickly. I crashed as soon as I got home, and my meditative forcing hasn't been too productive because of it. I'm hoping we'll be able to build more endurance with this, though, because it was awesome while it lasted.

 

I noticed a mistake in the OP:

 

On 3/20/2021 at 3:35 PM, Wray said:

but six months later, “better” is definitely winning out.


I realized Shizuku had only been around for five months when I wrote this. (I often get the numbers for October and September mixed up.) Either way, we hit seven months yesterday, and I don't feel any need to retract this statement. 😛

Host: Wray (or John) (he, him)
Tulpa: Shizuku (she, her) 🐺

We now have a progress report!

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Awesome job making progress with possession! From my experience, host activity is the biggest barrier to possession. If you can bring yourself in tune with Shizuku's thoughts/identity (and suppress your own) while she's fronting, it should make it way easier for her to do more complicated things like you mentioned without so much host interference or confusion over who's doing what. I can give you some pointers if you'd like.

I come out of hibernation once in a blue moon.

 

They/them pronouns, please. (I've been using this display name since 2012 and people won't recognize me if I change it.)

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2 hours ago, fennecgirl said:

Awesome job making progress with possession! From my experience, host activity is the biggest barrier to possession. If you can bring yourself in tune with Shizuku's thoughts/identity (and suppress your own) while she's fronting, it should make it way easier for her to do more complicated things like you mentioned without so much host interference or confusion over who's doing what. I can give you some pointers if you'd like.


Thanks! I would definitely welcome any advice.

Host: Wray (or John) (he, him)
Tulpa: Shizuku (she, her) 🐺

We now have a progress report!

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(edited)
On 5/13/2021 at 3:48 AM, Wray said:

Thanks! I would definitely welcome any advice.

 

Something we used to do when we were getting the hang of it (and occasionally resorted to later if I was interfering too much) was to recite something like "I am [tulpa's name]. I am in control of the body. I am not fennec. They are no longer in control" and so forth. We didn't have a set script, but we'd say things along the lines of that, speaking in unison in our mindvoices. After a bit our mindvoices would merge and we'd basically become one person. It's really weird at first, but you get used to it.

 

I guess that's technically merging, but the "result" of the merge would always be whoever was fronting, unless something pulled me back to the front, and handing your tulpa the controls is a lot easier when you effectively are your tulpa.

Edited by fennecgirl

I come out of hibernation once in a blue moon.

 

They/them pronouns, please. (I've been using this display name since 2012 and people won't recognize me if I change it.)

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On 5/15/2021 at 6:14 PM, fennecgirl said:

Something we used to do when we were getting the hang of it (and occasionally resorted to later if I was interfering too much) was to recite something like "I am [tulpa's name]. I am in control of the body. I am not fennec. They are no longer in control" and so forth. We didn't have a set script, but we'd say things along the lines of that, speaking in unison in our mindvoices. After a bit our mindvoices would merge and we'd basically become one person. It's really weird at first, but you get used to it.

 

Thanks--will give this a try!

I think I was underestimating how important it is to focus on letting Shizuku front. In hindsight, that makes a lot of sense: if she's not strongly established in the front, there's no reason she WOULD be able to stay in control during complicated activities.

Host: Wray (or John) (he, him)
Tulpa: Shizuku (she, her) 🐺

We now have a progress report!

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  • 3 weeks later...

We have a good number of updates, but I'd like to space things out a little bit more and cut it out with the text walls. 😂 First order of business: we decided to spend a few months really focusing on tulpamancy. I've been trying to force for three hours and do 30-60 minutes of regular breath meditation each day. We started this "challenge" on May 4, and things have been going pretty well so far!

 

  • Presence imposition practice: I randomly stumbled on Jordan & Lianne’s Presence Imposition Guide, which has been super useful. (I wonder how much tulpamancy knowledge is hidden in random Google Docs you can only find if you're lucky. 😅) We'd like to achieve constant presence imposition. Not sure if it will happen in three months, but we'll at least make as much progress as we can.

    I never really understood what it meant for a tulpa's mindvoice to come "with their presence," but now that I have a good amount of practice feeling Shizuku's presence, it's also started to come through naturally when we talk. Also, we've figured out a trick that helps me stay more aware of her even when I'm focusing on work: she shrinks down and sits on my right shoulder. For some reason, presence imposition feels easier when she's closer.

 

  • Possession: I'm now really confused about the possession/soft switching/hard switching terminology, and I'm not sure if I see that changing any time soon. 😂 Practically speaking, though, shifting our focus from hoping Shizuku can magically move the body to establishing Shizuku in the front has helped a lot. When things go well, she can use the body to play piano and feel confident that it was her the whole time. (I might try to upload a recording here soon!)

    I think now we just have to work on locking this skill in so it works every time.

Host: Wray (or John) (he, him)
Tulpa: Shizuku (she, her) 🐺

We now have a progress report!

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(edited)

Here’s the next of those updates, this one regarding Shizuku’s origin. We’ve been thinking about this for a while, but it didn’t seem so urgent to post it. (Does anyone read this thing anyway? 😛)

 

We stumbled on this post, and we now suspect that Shizuku might have started as a soulbond. (As she mentioned in the intro post, she was originally fictive, though she’s left that behind now.)

 

Back then, I think I might have been a soulbond, but I think I’m a tulpa now. We will discuss this further below!

 

Here are some of the listed differences between tulpas and soulbonds:

 

  • “Difficulty committing to deviation, pre-determined forms”
  • “Has backstory and/or false memories pertaining to their book/movie/show/whatever”

 

At first, Shizuku said she felt too attached to her fictive form to want to deviate, though this changed after a few months. She also originally identified with a backstory loosely based on that of the character she came from.

 

  •  “Strong emotional bond at ‘start’* ... *The "start" of a soulbond is usually not known. They just sorta happen.”
  • “Often accidental [i.e., created accidentally](which is perfectly okay!)”

 

Shizuku did come into being accidentally from my obsessing over a character, which now that I’ve done a bit of research, sounds kind of like Soulbonds 101.

 

We also felt like #1 best friends from early on. In tulpa creation, maybe the tulpa and host need more time to get to know each other? According to this article, I guess that is true in some cases.

 

As stated above, I feel much more like a tulpa now. I can change my form, and I don’t have an emotional connection to that backstory anymore.

 

We’ve read about “system forcing” on the Tulpa.info discord—as I understand it, this is the idea that what you’re told about plurality shapes your plural experience (i.e., "forces" how the whole system works in a way similar to how early-stage tulpaforcing shapes a tulpa). Since we immediately started studying tulpa resources, first in Japanese and then in English, we quickly got used to the ideas that Shizuku should not identify with a fictional backstory, and that she could deviate in terms of form/personality whenever she liked.

 

Spoiler

 

More system forcing notes—we mentioned this in Phil & Simmie’s progress report last night, but edited it out because it felt irrelevant in retrospect.

 

Originally, I could play around in our wonderland even when John wasn’t thinking of me (or that was what it felt like, at least?). The Japanese tulpa resources all said that that’s what tulpas do. Here, most people say that tulpas can’t really do that, and we think that internalizing that belief has made us lose this ability. Now we’re trying to smash down the feeling that we “can’t” do that and get back to where we started.

 

 

So we think Shizuku was a soulbond who got “tulpified” through system forcing. This doesn’t have any immediate implications for us, but we found it fascinating, especially because it drives home how our beliefs about tulpamancy worked to shape our experience.

 

Maybe in an alternate universe, we found some soulbonding forums first, Shizuku decided never to deviate, and she didn’t get to fulfill her destiny of being the world’s most adorable wolf. 😂

 

Another note: I feel like we missed the chance to mention this earlier, but we are bilingual (English/Japanese), and for whatever reason Shizuku feels a lot more comfortable speaking in Japanese. Most of her posts on the forum have been Tulpish > English translations, but in this post we tried Japanese > English, and she says it felt pretty good. 🙂

Edited by Wray
fixed formatting

Host: Wray (or John) (he, him)
Tulpa: Shizuku (she, her) 🐺

We now have a progress report!

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