Gary is certified in Awakened Mind Coaching and has taught at Esalen Institute with Anna Wise, the originator of this practice, for two years, as well as international workshops, private neurofeedback counseling sessions and classes in many healing modalities. Gary is a BCIA Certified Biofeedback/stress management practitioner and taught stress management, biofeedback, neurofeedback and meditation at Columbia Community College for two decades - currently retired.
He also certified in EFT and NLP, and is a student of Core Integral. Currently Gary is one of the few personally designated by Anna Wise to teach others how to become Awakened Mind Parctitioners.
The Awakened Mind brain wave pattern, or state, is the state achieved continuously by yogi's, swami's, Taoist masters, and Zen masters, with eyes open or closed. It is the access state to all states of higher awareness, creativity, and healing regardless of ones spiritual practice.
There are many different forms of meditation, contemplative prayer, mantra, breath following, chi gung, or simply sitting and watching the garden grow for example. All of them eventually will produce an Awakened Mind brain wave pattern, but it can take months or years to get there.
Integral Awakened Mind brain wave training can teach you how to enter this long sought after state in a matter of a few hours. Most people will experience this Awakened Mind state with as little as twelve hours training. This is not guess work! You are monitored continuously using the Mind Mirror EEG system and guided with imagery designed specifically to elicit the Awakened Mind pattern.
We owe the original discovery of the awakened mind brain wave pattern several decades ago to the brilliant British psychobiologist, biophysicist, and zen master C. Maxwell Cade . Cade measured the brain wave patterns of many healers, spiritual teachers and advanced meditators as well as 300 of his own students. He found a pattern that he identified as a step beyond meditation that exhibits the "lucid awareness" of meditation "coexistent with thought processes". Cade presented his remarkable breakthrough discovery in his book "The Awakened Mind: Biofeedback and the Development of Higher States of Awareness", which he co-authored with Nona Coxhead (Dell, 1979).
For almost three decades since then Anna Wise, Max Cade's protege, has measured the brainwave patterns of people whose states of consciousness one would wish to emulate – spiritual masters, meditation teachers, and people of optimum creativity in all walks of life. The brainwave pattern that she found, named the Awakened Mind, is a combination of all four categories of brain waves – beta, alpha, theta, and delta – in the right relationship and proportion.
BETA brain waves are the fastest frequencies ranging from 14 cycles per second up to 38 cycles per second. Beta is your normal thinking state, your active external awareness and thought process. Without beta you would not be able to function in the outside world.
ALPHA brain waves are the brain waves of relaxed detached awareness, visualization, sensory imagery and light reverie. Ranging between about 9 cycles per second and 14 cycles per second, alpha is the gateway to meditation and provides a bridge between the conscious and the subconscious mind.
THETA brain waves are the subconscious mind. Ranging from about 4 cycles per second up to 8 cycles per second, theta is present in dreaming sleep and provides the experience of deep meditation when you meditate. Theta also contains the storehouse of creative inspiration and is where you often have your spiritual connection. Theta provides the peak in the peak experience.
DELTA brain waves are your unconscious mind, the sleep state, ranging from about 4 cycles per second down to 0.5 cycles per second. But when present in combination with other waves in a waking state, Delta acts as a form of radar – seeking out information – reaching out to understand on the deepest unconscious level things that we can't understand through thought process. Delta provides intuition, empathetic attunement, and instinctual insight. It is also the brain wave most associated with energy healing.
GAMMA brain waves are the fastest brain waves, over 40 cycles per second, and when they occur in the frontal lobes of the brain they correlate with focused attention. This is often seen in long term meditation practitioners and people who can easily enter lucid dreams.
"The AWAKENED MIND brainwave pattern combines the intuitive, empathetic radar of the delta waves, the creative inspiration, personal insight, and spiritual awareness of the theta waves, the bridging capacity and relaxed, detached, awareness of the alpha waves, and the external attention and ability to consciously process thought of beta waves, (and the focused attention of gamma), all at the same time. It is a brainwave pattern shared by people in higher states of consciousness regardless of their philosophy, theology or meditation technique. This brainwave(EEG) pattern can be found during "peak experience" and in all forms of creativity and high performance. The awakened mind is also the "ah-ha," appearing at the exact instant of solving the problem, or getting the insight." Anna Wise
It incorporates guided imagery, traditional mindfulness, loving-kindness, and compassion meditations with bio-monitoring of brain waves(EEG), heart coherence(Heartmath), electrical skin conductivity(EDR) and techniques adapted from energy psychology(EFT, BSFF).