Defining Peak States
Revision 1.0
Have you ever
noticed that some people just seem to be happier,
healthier, more successful, able to weather life’s
ups and downs more easily than you do? I think we all have,
and of course there are a variety of reasons. In the
current psychological paradigm, it’s believed these
people had better childhoods, had fewer traumas, better
genetic backgrounds, better friends, and so on. In this
model, it boils down to two factors - better genes or a
better environment. And recently a third element has been
added, better prenatal care. But wait - our cultural ideas
about why some people are better off has a flaw that was
discovered when a longitudinal study of children ‘at
risk’ because of bad early environments were studied.
Twenty years ago these studies, quite against expectations,
found that a small group of ‘at risk’ children
lived through their terrible childhood experiences and yet
flourished anyway. They became known as ‘invulnerable
children’. The existence of these children caused a
tremendous furor, because some people interpreted the data
as saying that trying to help ‘at risk’
children was pointless, since clearly the environment
didn’t make any difference. Of course that argument
was ridiculous since only a very few children could be put
in that category, but it was definitely a puzzling result.
One might suppose that they were just fortunate in
life’s genetic lottery, but even more puzzling was
that occasionally some of these invulnerable children as
adults would suddenly stop being invulnerable. To explain
this, conventional theory decided that there must be a
threshold of accumulating trauma, the straw that broke the
camel’s back idea. But this was a clearly a pretty
weak explanation, as a number of these adults were living
in pretty good situations by that time.
Let’s turn our attention from those amazing adults we
know or invulnerable children we’ve heard about and
look at something in our own lives that might give us the
answer. Have you ever had a moment in your life where you
felt very, very different and wonderful? Everything seemed
to be exceptionally perfect, time slowed down as if you
were a child again, or some other aspect of what was going
on was so remarkable and unique you’ve never
forgotten it? Wouldn’t it be amazing to be able to
live your life in that state every day, and not just for
the short time you had it? These moments are called
‘peak experiences’, and if they last for a long
time they’re called ‘peak states’.
What if many of those amazing adults or invulnerable
children were in just such a type of nearly continuous peak
state? That would surely cause them to seem more resilient
and happier than the rest of us, although unless you had
some sort of test for it this explanation might be easy to
overlook. And sure enough, it turns out that a small
percentage of the population do live in nearly a continuous
type of peak state. Although there are several types that
can occur spontaneously, the most obvious and significant
of the naturally appearing kind we call
‘Aliveness’. This state has several
characteristics, but one of the most important for this
discussion is that the person who has it feels that their
past was not emotionally traumatic. They experience the
present with an underlying sense of calm, peace, and
lightness that exists even when they feel their feelings.
Such a state does tend to make ones life drastically better
no matter the past or present circumstances. And certain
types of circumstances can take this state away. Just as in
the case of the invulnerable children who stopped being
invulnerable.
We now turn our attention to what conventional psychology
have to say about the existence of peak states.
The
historical development:
In the 1960’s, Dr. Abraham Maslow, one of the
founders of Humanistic Psychology, popularized a phenomenon
he’d noticed he called ‘peak
experiences’. These were those moments where life
just became an amazingly wonderful experience. They might
spontaneously occur while being surrounded by exceptional
beauty, or during a physical event like running a race, or
for a variety of reasons or no particular reason at all.
Humanistic Psychology was formed partly to look at this
phenomenon. Though an incredible amount of techniques,
methods, practices, and therapies came out of this
movement, the bottom line was that they still did not
understand what caused peak experiences, why some people
experienced them and others not, or any way to rapidly and
permanently have them for oneself. In fact, the idea that
these experiences could be had permanently as a state of
being was doubted.
The confusion on what was really occurring got worse as the
years went on, as more and more data from various
spiritual, religious, psychological, and shamanic groups
was accumulated. Spiritual groups talked about spiritual
states, but they often disagreed about what they were or
even which ones were the best. Too, as techniques such as
meditation for exploring these states came into the popular
culture, a number of people where starting to have a whole
variety of unusual spiritual and other strange experiences.
Because of all this, another branch of psychology called
Transpersonal Psychology was formed to study these even
more unbelievable experiences and states.
The seventies and early eighties saw a huge burst of
enthusiasm for this work, but by the nineties a change
occurred. The initial enthusiasm for understanding and
having peak experiences was waning, with the pioneers
feeling they’d gone as far as was possible. The hoped
for results had not materialized. From the
Institute’s perspective, this was because the early
models that were developed were fundamentally flawed, and
could not be used to solve the basic problems.
By the 90’s a change outside of these areas was
taking place involving radically effective emotional and
physical healing. A group of therapies, all invented
independently, were starting to become available. Dr.
Charles Figley of Florida State University (the creator of
the term Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) forced the
acceptance of some of these therapies into mainstream
psychology in 1995 and gave them the name of ‘power
therapies’. The field is still in turmoil around this
topic, as conventionally trained therapists and academic
psychologists resist these new processes - for the simple
reason that they’re too good to be true from a
conventional perspective.
These power therapies have created a change in what people
believe is possible in the professional field of physical
and emotional healing that humanistic and transpersonal
psychology never did. These tools are unbelievably fast,
simple, and effective, and people are starting to question
their cultural assumptions because of stunning personal
experience. This change in expectations has also effected
our Institute, as it’s created a climate and group of
therapists and other healers who are willing to look at
what our Institute’s Whole-Hearted Healing technique
can do - and who then feel comfortable in using it when it
lives up to its claims.
Most healers using power therapies are not searching for a
peak state - in fact, most probably don’t believe
it’s possible. The dominant model in the profession
at the present time is that people will feel better as more
and more traumatic material is healed, and usually there is
truth to this. Yet, these techniques are often causing
people to feel dramatically better for various lengths of
time, more so than can be accounted for by removing their
current pain. During or right after finishing the healing
session, a significant percentage of clients also report
having all sorts of spiritual and shamanic experiences that
they had never heard of before or don’t believe in.
Still these wonderful moments almost always soon pass.
From our Institute’s perspective healing trauma is a
lot like pulling pitchforks out of people who are in hell -
when you’re done, you’re still in hell,
you’re just more comfortable there. Don’t
misunderstand - the work these paradigm pioneer therapists
and healers are doing is vital and necessary to millions of
people. But what we’d really like is a way to change
people so that they’re in a peak state - after all,
it didn’t take years of therapy so that you could
have that amazing peak experience of yours, did it?
A
New Approach
At this point, I’m (Grant McFetridge) going to give
you a little personal history so that you’ll better
understand the approach we took. I was one of those
fortunate people who seem to have a generally good life no
matter what awful stuff was going on. In hindsight, I was
in a peak state (called ‘the Beauty Way’ or
sometimes 'Aliveness') about three quarters of the time.
But I didn’t know it. The differences between me and
other children were not really very noticeable to me or to
others, and it wasn’t till my twenties that I could
clearly see that I was somehow different than other people.
But, not knowing any better, I assumed whatever it was that
I was seeing must be cultural. All this changed at age 29
when I moved back to normal consciousness during a very
traumatic time in my life, and stayed there. To me, it was
like going to hell. People just don’t realize how bad
their situation is, as they have almost nothing except
perhaps a momentary glimpse to compare it to.
This started a quest to get back what I had lost. I had
several advantages in this search. First, I knew exactly
what the differences were, and could explain them clearly
in English. Second, I knew you could have it as a state of
being, since I’d had it 29 years. Third, I knew that
working to become a good person or using spiritual
techniques or therapy wasn’t the key, as I’d
had this from the cradle, and anyway I certainly
wasn’t a perfectly nice, spiritual little kid even
though I had that state. To my intense puzzlement, the
spiritual teachers I sought out had no idea what I was
talking about. The spiritual practices that I used with
fanaticism did not take me to the state I wanted. During
this period, by using a number of techniques, I had a whole
raft of different peak, spiritual, and shamanic
experiences. Which puzzled me further, as they were amazing
but not what I was looking for, and I couldn’t
understand what was really going on in my psyche. I was a
successful electrical engineering consultant and University
lecturer during this period, and finding and understanding
the underlying model was what I was trained to do. I
learned virtually every model, belief, and practice I could
find. Yet clearly none were on the right track, as my
personal experience contradicted them all.
I also started getting sick during this period, and came
close to death. This pushed me into learning physical and
emotional healing techniques also. I nearly died before a
friend of mine healed me using a modified version of
Holotropic Breathwork™. It turned out that the cause
of my illness was tremendous despair I’d experienced
at age 29, along with an unconscious decision that I could
never have what I wanted in life, and that there was no
point in continuing to live. This experience made me
realize emotional healing was important, so I decided to
heal everything that was in my psyche. To do this, I
invented the Whole-Hearted Healing technique, as there were
no available effective, fast and permanent healing
techniques at the time that I was aware of.
As I eliminated traumatic material, I eventually realized
the triune nature of the brain. Later, I found that a brain
biologist in the 1960’s named Dr. Paul MacLean had
discovered this also, yet this fundamental breakthrough in
understanding the real underlying biological dynamics in
the psyche never made it to the psychological profession.
And still to this day it’s virtually unknown.
Briefly, our brain is divided into parts that each operate
independently in an average person. Although they have
scientific names, we know them as the body, heart, and
mind. There is also a forth brain that is less familiar to
people. With this insight, I realized that many (but not
all) peak states were caused when the brains merged
together into one unified organism. And that the state that
I had lost was due to several of the brains merging
together relatively continuously.
Even though now I understood what was necessary to regain
the ‘Beauty Way’ peak state, I still
didn’t know how to do it. And there were a lot of
loose ends in my understanding, involving all those other
spiritual and shamanic experiences. So, I figured that by
healing all my traumatic material I’d eventually find
out what was causing my brains to stay separate by sheer
elimination. Not an elegant approach, I admit, but I was
baffled. I also had the assistance of a number of very
courageous volunteers acting as experimental subjects in
the course of the work, and it couldn’t have been
done without them. And we finally cracked the core problem.
Six months later we found a solution to this core problem.
This lead quite quickly to realizing how everything
I’d ever experienced or read about fit together in
the elegantly simple 'developmental events model'. This was
one of the peak periods in my life! I finally understood
what caused all those other states and experiences, and how
to go about efficiently regaining them. And that my goal of
recovering my ‘Beauty Way’ was far, far short
of what I could really have.
Building on this fundamental breakthrough has lead to all
sorts of discoveries in the area of healing, spirituality,
and other fundamental questions of mankind.