How to Sustain a (Spiritual) High

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In his book The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen describes “coming down” from a literal high, a two-month pilgrimage in the remote reaches of the Tibetan Himalayas. But the lower in elevation he went and the closer to the world he left behind, the more irritable he became.

In other words, he experienced what every seeker before and after him must eventually come to: the challenge of bringing an expanded state of mind back down into daily life and anchoring it there, integrating and sustaining what the psychologist Abraham Maslow called peak experiences. These are spiritual awakenings, epiphanies, revelations, encounters with transcendence or awe or even infatuation, and highs of any kind, whether mystically or mycologically inspired. As the Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield puts it, “After enlightenment, the laundry.”

Anyone can get high, but bringing the wisdom of your highs into ordinary living on Mulberry Street is where the real pick-and-shovel work of growing and evolving happens. This is where we encounter the usual agents of decay and distraction—habit and routine, fixed ideas, and the stubbornness of the ego—which relentlessly conspire to break the spells of enchantment.

Nor are these agents merely waiting for us when we get home. We bring them with us to the mountaintop. Emerson once said of travel,

“At home, I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern Fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. My giant goes with me wherever I go.”

I once sat in on a weekend trapeze class at a retreat center in Texas, designed, like fire-walking workshops, as a fear-fighting tool—"If you can do this, you can do anything.” On the last day, I overheard a participant say to one of her classmates, “Well, I’ll be fearless for a week.” (Which would, of course, be precisely the week to take some long-needed risks.)

Similarly, during the pandemic, I heard people talk about the awakenings and revelations they had around interconnectedness, work/life balance, and parts of themselves that were normally overshadowed but suddenly given an entrance cue. As the pandemic began to recede into the rearview mirror, though, I began hearing their anxiety about how to sustain their new normals.

It’s one thing to part the curtain and get a load of the grander scheme of things and the truth about what really matters or what’s possible, but it’s another to make it stick, to keep your visions and awakenings before you and let them truly change who you are and how you live.

Consider the following advice from Hasidic rabbi Abraham Heschel:

"We are trained in maintaining our sense of wonder by uttering a prayer before the enjoyment of food. For daily wonder, we need daily worship: three times a day, we say, ‘We thank You for Your miracles which are daily with us, for Your continual marvels.’”

And this, I think, is the crux of it. We sustain wonder and the wondrous the same way we sustain spiritual traditions—with regular discipline and worship. So you’ll probably need a practice of some kind to sustain it and remind yourself of it.

Some suggestions:

• Give yourself quiet time and rest after an awakening to let it sink in, and don’t just distract yourself (the word means to be pulled apart) with busyness-as-usual.
• Focus on anything that helps you remember it, such as rereading the journal notes you took during your retreat or vision quest or regularly reciting a new intention.
• Don’t reject whatever resistance arises in the face of a new truth. Honor it, embrace it, dialogue with it. Resistance is part of the path, not opposed to it.
• Join with like-minded others to give yourself power in numbers. After a particularly transformative workshop, I attended years ago, the facilitators encouraged us to join what they called “I groups,” monthly integration groups to help us assimilate what we’d learned.

And here’s a potent insight I gleaned from a fellow named Robert Greenway, who taught eco-psychology at Sonoma State University (SSU) in the ’60s (in fact, coined the term) and developed the first graduate program in “wilderness therapy” training in the U.S. During his 22 years at SSU, he took over 1,500 students into the wilderness for anywhere from two to four weeks at a time, and sometimes went there by himself for up to three months.

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Similar to what research on meditative and psychedelic experiences have revealed, Greenway found that “the wilderness effect” involves dropping below cultural mindsets into a deeper experience, a non-goal-oriented awareness, and that the many forms of pleasure that tend to get numbed by especially urban living—bodily, perceptual, aesthetic, and spiritual—also tend to come back to life in natural settings and contribute to an expanded sense of self.

But the wilderness effect, he discovered, also tends to either dissolve upon returning to the ordinary world or put you in direct conflict with it. Over half of his students reported becoming depressed within two days of getting home. “I think the depression is an important clue. The connection with nature greatly raises your energy level, but obviously, this connection is broken or blocked in the human-created world to which we return, the world that splits us off from nature to begin with. And when you feel your opened self closing back up, it’s painful. I began to realize I was inadvertently creating a drama of profound conflict.”

Once, for example, he was summoned by the manager of a local supermarket to do “an intervention” with one of his students, who, a few days after returning from one of Greenway’s wilderness journeys, was found slumped on the floor in the paper-products aisle, babbling incoherently about the absurd number of brands of toilet paper, the sheer consumptive overload of it all, and the terrible economic disparity in the world that it represented.

As a result of observing people’s frequently fiery re-entries back into the world—which does not change in their absence—Greenway began requiring yoga and meditation practice not only as part of his students’ preparation for the wilderness experience but also during and after. He found that it almost entirely eliminated homecoming depression. These regimens, he believes, help stabilize the wilderness effects of expanded, goal-less awareness and “non-dual frames of mind,” which can ameliorate the sense of split.

Yoga, after all, means to unite.