Institute for the Study of Peak States
"Methods for Fundamental Change in the Human Psyche"
Support Newsletter #2, June 4, 2006
"Student Questions..."
Newsletter Spotlight
From the Editor Paula Courteau…
Taking a breather
The Next TeleClass
Updates
Participating in TeleClasses
Your Questions...
The answers to the questions you send us
Working with Diabetic Clients
About Misunderstood Gaia Commands
Stories for the Recent Brain Communication TeleClass
From the Editor Paula Courteau...
Hi Everyone,
We're taking a bit of a breather now... Grant and Tal have been in Poland, teaching workshops, and I'm starting my summer work season already, with more time spent at sea and less at home. We're taking a recess of two weeks on the Teleclasses, until June 17 (18 in the Land of Tomorrow)... Time to catch up on personal 'dirt time'?
I've just sent my Whole-Hearted Healing Workbook to be proof-read, and hope to have it ready to ship by early July. This is a very basic teaching tool for WHH, with a more do-it-yourself approach, in contrast to the Basic WHH Manual which is written for therapists. The new Workbook also takes into account the more recent discoveries, and has loads of examples from the sessions with beginning students. Some of you have seen various drafts of it already. One thing that keeps being reinforced for me is the need to balance all this trauma work with really positive things. I can get so focused on old traumas and spend so many hours in this deep past... but there's such a thing as overdoing it. So I try to remember to take time for fun and exercise, and to enjoy the wonderful states I've healed myself into; and to include other approaches, like the 15-Minute Miracle, which focus on the positive. So, catch up on your 'dirt time'... but make sure to take time to smell the roses.
Paula Courteau
The Next Teleclass
We're taking a recess from Teleclasses until June 17 (18 Down Under). We're preparing material for the 'No Skin' state process, though Grant M. might decide to try one of the new processes developed in Poland instead.
The 'No Skin' State is called that because of its dominant physical sensation. When you have this State, your skin doesn't feel like it has a definite boundary anymore - it feels like vapor. Some people just feel like they are vapor throughout; others still feel the insides of their bodies but without a definite boundary. The reason this State is so important is that, when you have it, other people's behavior doesn't feel personal anymore. It can occasionally *become* personal if a generational trauma is activated, and you can still run cords and project your issues on other people, but it's a lot easier to see through that as well. Relating to other people becomes immeasurably easier. Imagine the impact if you're a therapist! Some people feel very vulnerable when they first reach the State, because it involves letting go of what has always felt like a protective layer. Healing feelings of vulnerability strengthens the State.
Cost is $30.00US per 2 hour phone class (you also pay for the long distance charges to call Iowa in the USA). Most classes are typically two phone sessions spread a week apart. If you attend 4 classes, the fifth one is only $5.00US, making every five calls cost a total of $125.00US. To date, the classes have been on Saturdays at 6PM EST, 3PM PST in the US, and 8am Sunday in Sydney, Australia. To enroll, email . At that time, you will receive payment instructions. Space is limited and is on a first-come, first-serve basis.
Participating in Teleclasses
Invitations to participate in Conference Call Teleclasses are sent to students who have asked to be on the mailing list. These short classes are available for students who have already taken our Basic PeakStates Therapist training and want to keep up to date on new or updated peak states processes, or hear lectures useful for ISPS certification. If you would like to be added to the list please email us with the following details:
Email to:
Email Subject: INVITE REQUEST - ISPS TeleClass
Your Name:
Your Email Address:
Your Location/Time Zone:
If you are unsure about your time zone you may find the following website useful, http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/full.html follow your location right down and you will end up with your time zone information and its reference to GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) - email those.
In addition we ask each participant to provide our Student Relations Coordinator with the name and contact information for a “buddy,” who understands the type of work you are doing, agrees to monitor your emotional and physical well-being, and knows what to do in the event of an emergency. Email or call Monti at 843-588-1305.
Your Questions
Working with Diabetic Clients
I recently started working with a new student who has diabetes. She's interested in learning basic WHH to work on her own. Her diabetes condition is not straightforward, in that it is adult-onset (type 2) but she has to take a lot of insulin. It's unknown if her pancreas makes any insulin at all. She had had very many swings in blood sugar, so I warned her to check her blood sugar before attempting a session and to set a timer to remind herself to check again in 45 minutes to an hour. She thought I was being overcautious. Then she tried a first session on her own. She started the session with rather high readings, worked till she was CPL, fell asleep, and woke up hours later, almost critically low! The content of the session is worth noting. She worked on the impressions of waking up from insulin shock and finding herself surrounded by panicked people. This took her straight to a birth piece; she was born with her cord wrapped tight around her neck, in an operating room full of shouting people, and a nurse had to give her rescue breathing to get her started. While she read the training materials I'd sent her, she could also recognize that going into insulin shock, for her, is a way to go out of body and avoid difficult situations. It'll be very interesting to see how her condition will evolve as she works on herself. Here, then, is the caution I've added to my workbook. I checked this with Dr. Laura Chalfin, who specified that most people with diabetes will be fine with the mental/emotional workout. It's mostly the people who are very 'brittle' who are likely to have problems; but I'd much rather err on the side of caution, especially when it's so easy! Please keep this in mind if you work with diabetic clients, whether with WHH, breathwork or other modalities.
"A special caution applies if you have diabetes: Whole-Hearted Healing sessions can use up a surprising amount of blood glucose! It's like an emotional and mental workout rolled into one. So if you are diabetic and tend to easily get hypoglycemic, please monitor your glucose levels carefully. I recommend that you set a timer during your first sessions to remind yourself to check your glucose every 45 minutes or every hour, until you've figured out the pattern. Please keep in mind that sessions can greatly differ in mental and emotional intensity; monitor a cross-section of them before letting your guard down. If necessary, have some juice or snacks on hand; you can take a few bites or sips from time to time without breaking the flow of the session."
About misunderstood Gaia commands
A student asked:
"Is it possible to misconstrue or misunderstand Gaia commands when you're in a pre-conception state, and as a result do them incorrectly? For some reason I always assumed Gaia commands were always automatically and properly carried out by the organism or pre-organism and that trauma was the result of an overwhelming and unpleasant outside force acting on the organism or pre-organism, but after the last teleclass, I started to question that assumption."
Paula answers:
Yes, one can misconstrue Gaia commands way back from the beginning. I think that if the commands came to a pristine, absolutely healthy organism, the organism would 'get it.' There has to be some other contributing factor, like for example the panic of oxygen deprivation as a result of stress to the parent.
Misunderstood Gaia commands are grievous injuries because the organism never stops trying to get it right. For example, there's a very common problem with the pre-birth command "Separate from the mother". If there's no injury, all the fetus has to do is give a tiny shrug to figure out where his mom ends and where his own body starts - just as if you've been sleeping with your sweetie and you want to sort out whose limbs are whose. If, on the other hand, there are adverse conditions that already have him in a panic, the fetus takes it the wrong way and tries to separate from *everything* and particularly from "The Mother" - Gaia. And worse, he forever tries to keep separating. Every time he's triggered back to the atmosphere of that moment, he makes sure he's really separated from Gaia... We want so badly to get it right. It's a mess.
The same principles apply to earlier commands, even very early ones. This is why, in order to heal, we identify and heal our resistance to the commands, and also tune in carefully to body sensations, so we can heal whatever physical injury contributed to the problem.
Makes one wonder how we can make it to birth at all. Our people who can tune in to Gaia have consistently reported that Gaia commands work well for simpler organisms, but many problems arise with the more complex ones. Asking why this is 'allowed' to be so, in the greater scheme of things, leads us to philosophical debates best taken up around a warm drink or a glass of wine, on a lazy afternoon.
Here's the student's reply, with a very clear example of the phenomenon he was asking about. Note how he simply cannot remember the negative beliefs that were so ingrained in him before he healed the misunderstood command. This is excellent healing work.
"Hi Paula,
Thank you for writing. My question arose while we were running the command "fuse" [during the Brain Communication process]. "Fuse" was meant to get all those tapioca balls together. As I tapped on that command, I got the impression that I was fusing with everything around me, not just the balls. I felt I was fusing with somebody else's thoughts and belief systems that happened to be in my vicinity at the moment I was fusing the tapioca balls. They weren't particularly positive beliefs and they made their way into the core of my being because I didn't just adopt them, I fused with them. I wish I could remember what they were now. That's what got me wondering if one could misconstrue a Gaia command as what I did all those years ago wasn't what Gaia intended. I also got the impression that my tapioca balls had a short black stripe on top of them. I don't know where that stripe came from but I am assuming it was something else I fused with."
Stories from the recent Brain Communication Teleclass
Here are some bits and pieces I noted down while people were starting to get communications from their brains at the end of the last Teleclass. This is to remind people how varied the modes of communication can be. Information can come through any of your senses; it won't necessarily be words. I included the inconclusive experiences as well as the clear successes. If you haven't done the process yet, these stories will give you a better sense of what to expect and may help you decide if this State is for you.
I'm reconstituting these quotes from hasty scribblings and hope I'm not seriously misrepresenting anyone's experience.
- Paula.
"I asked my brains how to communicate.... I got an image of a telephone receiver with dust on it. The impression is that the brains can talk all right, it's the receiving end that needs work..."
[After a few minutes of work:] "I asked about the dust, got "Fear" from my body brain."
"That was a very fun one... Buddha was the one who checked on all the other brains. Each line of communication has a different color... Everyone was talking at once. I had to do some filtering to hear individual brains."
"Oh, they talk, and I talk." (Laughs.) [This person had the State already.]
"I checked in with each brain. They're there... Each one has a different wavelength and light... I haven't met them all yet. They're very different from each other."
"Visuals of traveling along roads? I don't know what that's about." [Paula: neither do I.] [Later, after more work:] "I get the sense that my Buddha doesn't want to talk."
"It was hard to finish the last command... I was distracted by... all the brains talking!"
"I'd been listening to my mind brain all week. I had some sensations I was trying to heal, with no success, and now I realize that it was the sensation of someone's attempt to communicate."
"I've got fear and doubt about being able to do this... I'm doing EFT on it."
"There's a sense of movement, of relocation, of brains rearranging themselves. My brains seem to communicate by hissing, and there are, at different times, all sorts of hissings, that express a whole range of feelings."
"There seems to be a negotiation going on between my brains." [After more work:] "I checked with my sperm tail and sensed movement; with my body I sensed release, merging, light. Can't connect with Buddha; Placenta: solid and non-communicative; Mind: always difficult. Heart: a beautiful ride, very visual. I'm spending time working with my Buddha and Placenta."
"A fear of change is blocking the communication."
"Not all my brains are communicating... I got a sense of agitation from my sperm tail. I reflect what I get from it, and it calms down."
[One more person got the State, but had to leave before we checked in.]
Copyright 2006 by Grant McFetridge
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