Interviewing Luigi Sciambarella, a modern day Consciousness Exploration Leader
Tell us about you and how you got where you are now Luigi.
I’ll give you the short version! Professionally, I’m a hypno-psychotherapist, a tutor of the National College of Hypnosis and Psychotherapy, and a residential trainer for the Monroe Institute. Personally, I’m a dual national, having been born in Blackburn, Lancashire to Southern Italian parents. I’ve been married for 12 years (and together for 20) with my wife Pamela, whom I met at Blackburn College, and spend most of my weekdays working with therapy clients and weekends either running personal development workshops or teaching trainee hypno-psychotherapists.
Since I was very young, I’ve been interested in psychology and consciousness, and so I pursued training in psychology academically and then professionally. While studying, I discovered the work of the Monroe Institute (namely, Bob Monroe’s books and later on audio-guidance technology) and started to experience many lucid dreams and out of body experiences at university. I could not believe that, so few people knew about this stuff and its amazing potential, so I eventually decided to become a trainer and teach people tools and techniques for exploring more of their total selves.
How interesting Luigi, I wonder what is what you most enjoy about your work?
Meeting wonderful people from all walks of life who come together to discover more of who they truly are. I am excited to observe and experience how people can take consciousness to places it has never been before. This is true both for the Monroe Institute and therapy work. Helping people to connect to inner resources which improve their life experience in some way is simply amazing and deeply rewarding and humbling.
How have you been doing during this pandemic time? What have you been able to develop more of you didn’t do much earlier?
I’m pretty introverted so the pandemic has been challenging but not psychologically abrasive. I have utilised this time to further specialise my psychotherapeutic training, deepen my meditative practice and do a ton of reading! Stress, anxiety and sleeping issues have grown exponentially during this period so I’ve been incredibly busy offering online therapy to clients suffering from these issues.
Sounds like you have had a busy time then! I wonder Luigi when did you started to experience a larger consciousness viewpoint?
I’m not sure that I can pinpoint a specific moment. Since I was quite young, I was aware that consciousness continues beyond death and I had direct and indirect experiences of that. I’d also experienced the occasional lucid dream which were both odd and exciting. I had my first self-initiated out of body experience in my first year at university and things grew consistently since then. So, for me, it wasn’t a single A-ha moment but rather a steady and consistent accumulation of evidence over a 5 or so year period in my late teens and early 20s that confirmed nonlocal consciousness.
Where you then able to discuss it with relatives, friends, etc... or were you keeping it a secret?
I kept my early experiences mostly to myself. My parents are Roman Catholic but were very open to Spiritualism so we talked about mediumship and afterlife communication. My mother in particular would comment about communication with deceased relatives in her dreams and this was normal, matter of fact information. So, yes, a few, immediate close relatives and then my girlfriend/wife who would often hear my experiences and thoughts about consciousness exploration whether she wanted to or not! She is incredibly patient and I’m forever grateful.
Glad you had a good support system at home. Luigi, what is the significance of having lucid dreaming (LD) and out of body experiences (OBE) in your life?
I teach a week-long course on both practises, so I will keep this very short! In two words: freedom and flexibility. Both experiences can be ego trips if done badly and their practice can become another trap of finding something else you are not good at. For me, and this is something that is evolved greatly over time, the main significance is in the awareness of who you are, right now, with the filters off. Thought-responsive environments will magnify your fears, anxieties, and worries and pretty much every habitual tendency. Thus, any rigidity of thought, emotion and behaviour will be displayed in exquisite detail. When I come to recognise these limits, I can reject them (which might mean that they just hide and return later) or I can gently change to embody a non-judgemental attitude with empathy and self-acceptance. This then carries over into my waking reality where the broader perspectives of those altered states allows me to notice more possibilities of expression.
In a few words, how do LD or OOB experiences fit in?
Essentially, they help to offer a broader life perspective and increase flexibility.
How personal are these experiences or are they partially created by our own expectations?
Our mind is the filter so of course, our personal consciousness interacts with the raw data. Do these experiences have an independent reality? I believe in some cases, yes Out of Body (OBEs) and others not so much, Lucid Dreaming (LD), and there are certainly many grey areas in between.
Will they contribute to the change in humankind consciousness and if so, how do you see this unfolding?
If people take themselves a little less seriously and give themselves permission to be “work in progress”, and to treat others in that way too, then something significant will shift. A lot of problems in the world are due to rigidity as I mentioned above. We struggle to sit with uncertainty and so we latch onto incomplete answers masquerading as truth. We don’t like to say “I don’t know” and gravitate to those that seem to offer quick fix answers. The experiences in lucid dreams and out of body experiences alone are not enough to change that...they can cement that we are part of an in or out group, that we are different from those who don’t consciously have such experiences, and worse, that we are somehow better than them. So, if the practice can help to cultivate greater empathy, compassion, and acceptance of ourselves and others, all the time embracing that others can be different and that is perfectly fine, then we can reach a different level of humanity than the one that gravitates towards polarities right now. Judging ourselves and others, having to proclaim oneself as right and the other wrong, is one of the greatest disservices and limiters to growth that we face today.
This is profound and compelling Luigi. What can we then do to enhance consciousness or awareness?
I think the main thing is guiding individuals to redirect their focus inwards. The resources that are needed to thrive can be found within each individual. Life is not a problem to fix. Joyful expression is your birth right and then a ton of messages bombard us, practically from birth, telling us that we are not enough and we need to do and be more. This is illusion. When you return to the safety, acceptance and appreciation of your core being, life becomes simpler, joyous and full of wonder. The therapy work and Monroe courses that I facilitate help to take people out of their immediate problem spaces and show them a different way of being.
Tell us more about the programs you are offering and how they support individuals, organisations/enterprises
I mostly offer residential programs which mean that people take almost a week out of their busy lives to enter a retreat setting, away from external world distractions, where they can focus exclusively on their inner development. The Monroe Institute’s flagship program is Gateway Voyage which has been stirring excitement recently due to the conversations on TikTok about the declassified CIA documents. Simply, we utilise audio sounds to guide your brainwaves into optimal states of experiencing expanded states of consciousness. Within these states, we develop tools and techniques which further enhance your abilities and perceptions within these altered states and also benefit you cognitively, emotionally and physically in your waking life. The residential programs then build on the foundations laid during Gateway into various directions, be that increased inner guidance and intuition, or healing and soul retrieval and shadow integration explorations. Together with US trainer, Allyn Evans, we have even been teaching people how to focus energy to influence matter in our one-day, online spoon bending workshops. I find these particularly fun because some people are simply stunned by the results – usually those who are most sceptical! Shattering limiting beliefs and developing inner knowing are two of the many goals/outcomes of our workshops.
How do you see the world evolving in the next 10 years regarding consciousness evolution?
Though question. I think in the short term, things will seem worse since the polarisation has not reached peak levels. After that, there will hopefully begin a bridging of the polarities which ultimately serve very few. The advances in technology will mean that the drive for inner development will increase and be ever more present in people’s pockets, and the communities will continue to increase and broader in their perspectives. It is an exciting time (perhaps not always fun) where we’re part of the creation of something that’s really new. We have front row seats!
Finally, how do you think Conscious Enterprises Network could support your work and The Monroe Institute?
Support from conscious organisations is helpful. It will help to connect people who are looking to develop a more compassionate and empathic world.
Luigi Sciambarella is a consciousness exploration leader, hypno-psychotherapist, a tutor, an outreach and residential trainer at the Monroe Institute.
Luigi specialises in sleep and dream disturbance which has led him to a deep understanding of the waking, dreaming and sleeping mind, the mind-body connection, and the phenomena of lucid dreaming and out of body experiences. He has had out of body and lucid dreaming experiences from an early age and has been methodically documenting and studying them for 18 years.
Luigi is also involved in experimental research to develop new applications for the Monroe Institute’s sound technology, and he has also co-created residential programs. He can be contacted at https://www.dayandnighttherapy.com
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