Want to learn more about Non-Ordinary Transcendent Experiences? ‘The Power of NOTEs’ will help you understand and work with them as a source for transformation. Read on!
NOTEs are an important aspect of the human experience that help point towards and awaken the desire, curiosity, and courage to explore more of what life could be.
from The Power of NOTEs by Nicole Gruel PhD
Nicole Gruel PhD
Have you ever experienced something that felt out of the ordinary, super-charged or transcendent, that changed your life in some key way?
Many of us have, yet it’s an area of human experience we tend not to talk about. Often this is because we don’t quite understand what happened. We keep quiet, often for years, as we try to make sense of it and what it meant. It’s frequently a solitary, and sometimes, painful journey. But more people are beginning to talk about these non-ordinary transcendent experiences however they manifest. They are emerging as sources of positive transformation and personal power if we pay attention, talk about them and work through them.
Dr Nicole Gruel’s new book, ‘The Power of NOTEs: How Non-Ordinary Transcendent Experiences Transform the Way We Live, Love and Lead‘ is an important, research-based contribution to the field of spiritual psychology and transformation.
After a near-death experience and the sudden loss of family members, Nicole found herself deep in the realm of non-ordinary transcendent experiences. In particular, she learnt their power for positive change.
Nicole has gone on to explore NOTEs deeply including via PhD studies. Her Doctoral Dissertation focused on “AfterNOTEs: Non-Ordinary Transcendent Experiences and their Aftereffects Through Jung’s Topology”. This involved interviewing people who had experienced NOTES and working through the psychological dimensions of their response. This deep qualitative and quantitative research, combined with personal experience and NOTEs community connection, provides the rich source material that this excellent, practical book is woven around.
So what are NOTEs?
A non-ordinary transcendent experience is a rare and unfamiliar event that takes you beyond your regular understanding of yourself and the world.
from The Power of NOTES
An acronym created by transpersonal psychologist William Braud, ‘NOTE’ captures experiences at the intersection of “paranormal research, exceptional human experiences, and transpersonal psychology.” (p3). Well-known examples include near-death experiences and paranormal encounters, but the scope of NOTEs is much wider and more inclusive than this.
In the opening chapter, Nicole explains that she groups over 500 potential NOTEs into nine categories, such as Death-related experiences, Encounter experiences, and Mystical experiences. Nicole describes each category of NOTEs, helping the reader to connect with their own personal database of experiences.
What is the power of NOTEs?
The power of NOTEs is realising their potential for our growth and insight. Nicole explains the ability of NOTEs to take us out of ourselves and our habitual ways of being:
For many experiencers, tasting our core self is the greatest gift of a NOTE. (p7)
It is a type of disruption forcing our attention in new ways and often taking some time to integrate. This is often because societal and cultural contexts make it hard for us to talk about them. Nicole explores this with examples from the lives of experiencers. She shows too that NOTEs offer wisdom and insight that has implications beyond the individual.
Greater wisdom calls for us to access the insights of NOTEs as best we can, for these experiences provide a necessary lens into other ways of seeing and being in the world. (p9)
Research shows that when people share NOTEs, it has many benefits for individual wellbeing, such as reducing stress. Nicole has made it her mission to help people share and understand NOTEs as part of the human and collective experience.
The landscape of NOTEs
I had the pleasure of attending the online launch of Nicole’s book recently, where we had a virtual tour through the book. We also heard from leaders and writers in the NOTEs community. These experiences, alongside reading the book, have helped me better understand the landscape of NOTEs.
The book explores NOTEs from all perspectives including the dark and light sides of being an experiencer and from the viewpoint of neuroscience. Nicole scopes neuroscience perspectives and evidence that shows we are hard-wired to experience NOTEs.
A fellow personality type practitioner, Nicole also looks through the personality lens at the gifts of NOTEs:
NOTEs are powerful because they put us on the fast track toward a fuller expression of who we most naturally and uniquely are.
Research shows that the specific content of a near-death experience, its impact and significance is influenced by people’s personal psychology.
Connecting NOTEs experiences with Jung’s eight psychological types, Nicole explores eight gifts or transcendent dimensions of personality using James Graham Johnston’s model of the Gift’s Compass™. For example, Introverted Thinking (Ti) connects with The Conceptual Gift.
Using this lens of personality, Nicole explains that:
Experiencer stories show that the more the natural or true self is made available through NOTEs, the more a person’s dominant personality preferences take on transcendent aspects. (p40)
This ground-breaking perspective, informed by conversations with NOTEs experiencers, helps provide psychological insights into these transcendent events.
Working and transforming with NOTEs
The second half of the book explores NOTEs as clues to our natural flow states; ways to work with NOTEs during and beyond experiences; and how NOTEs can be a transformative power in how we live, love and lead.
Each chapter provides practical tips and practices for working with NOTEs as a transformative power source. Nicole shows how we can create a NOTEs biography and Well-being Wheel, with these tools based on recent, pioneering research and experiences of people actively working on integrating NOTEs into life stories. The self-leadership framework highlights the importance of validating and appropriately sharing NOTEs.
Ultimately, no one is a better coach and guide for you than you. (p62)
The power of love and legacy are keys to the self-leadership experience of working with NOTEs in a personally transformative way.
The experience of reading The Power of NOTEs
I encourage you to read The Power of NOTEs. It is beautifully and clearly written, full of lived and researched wisdom. As Katie Mottram puts it so well in her foreword:
This is not just a book; Nicole has gifted you an experience.
I couldn’t agree more. As if to highlight this, I had a transcendent experience during my reading of the book.
I realised my experiences of NOTEs are mostly in the Encounter experiences category: a kind of synchronicity related to “something wondrous or awesome, like a spectacular view or moving music...” Many years ago, I had a series of astounding synchronistic events with rainbows at a peak time of change and transformation. They had a profound effect on me as rainbow after rainbow connected in an ongoing narrative.
I started Nicole’s book in the early morning hours of a sleepless night two days away from Christmas, the first anniversary of my mother’s death. A few hours later, still restless, I got up early and headed out to the deck. There the most stunning rainbow greeted me in the sky. Rainbows are something I connect with my mother and also my father. I chose songs and poems with the symbolism of rainbows for both their funerals as a way of continuing to connect with them.
My experience of reading the book, reflecting on my own NOTEs symbolism, seemed to open up this connection. It would have been so easy to miss this rainbow.
Connecting with the power of NOTEs
Reading this book will help you connect with the power of NOTEs in your life. As the ‘Praise’ upfront in the book, the Foreword and the online book launch all show, there is a groundswell of research, interest and support in the area of non-ordinary transcendent experiences.
Organisations such as the International Spiritual Emergence Network (ISEN), American Center for the Integration of Spiritually Transformative Experiences (ACISTE), the International Association for Near Death Studies (IANDS) and the Near Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) provide a touchpoint for experiences and research around them. You can find further links and information here.
More authors are stepping up to write their stories and gather, honour and structure the experiences of others as Nicole has done. You might like to read my book review of Mystical Interludes II – a Collection of Ordinary People’s Mystical Experiences, collected and edited by Emily Rodavich. The Power of NOTES and Mystical Interludes II came to me in a synchronistic way, at the same time from unique connections but covering similar terrain.
Read Nicole Gruel’s book to recognise, honour and structure such experiences in your life and also in the lives of those you love. If you have had a NOTE, this book can help others share in and understand your experience. Likewise, if you think someone you know may have experienced a NOTE, this book is a useful way to open the conversation or quietly support them. For counsellors, coaches and other professional people, this is an important resource to open up thoughts about spiritually transformative experiences in practice.
And as I finish writing, I hear the sounds of the children next door playing under the water sprinkler in the Sydney midsummer heat. One excitedly shouts: “There’s a rainbow!”
Thought pieces + footnotes
Dr Nicole Gruel is an author, speaker and transformational coach. Descendant from a long line of samurai, she has spent over two decades exploring human potential. You can connect with her at DrNicoleGruel.com.
The Power of NOTES was provided as a review copy by the author in return for a fair review. I am grateful to Dr Nicole Gruel for sharing this book with me.
To purchase, you can use the below link.
For Amazon.com.au:
Image 1 (feature image), 2 & 5 provided by Nicole Gruel and used with permission and thanks.
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This is so interesting, Terri! I have had some ‘encounter’ experiences and continue to have them each time I visit Italy. A great book to explore this further. It’s on my list to read!
Thanks for your thoughts, Colleen! It’s a very interesting book, very well-written and researched. It’s fascinating you have had encounter experiences in Italy – but not surprising. Enjoy the read when you get to it!