REWired What if everything you knew about self-help and personal development was not only wrong but was the very thing keeping you stuck? REWired reveals the keys at the cross-section of ancient wisdom and modern neuroscience that bring about easy and permanent transformation.
Why Peak States Are a Trap
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Hey friend, I chased a meditation experience for three years. It happened on a retreat in 2019. Somewhere around day four, the usual mental noise just stopped. Not quieted. Stopped. What remained was this open, spacious awareness that didn't need anything. No striving, no commentary, no sense of a "me" observing it. Just presence, borderless and still. It lasted maybe six hours. And then it faded. The thoughts came back. The self-referencing returned. The familiar sense of being someone with problems and preferences reassembled itself like nothing had happened. But I remembered. And for the next three years, I structured my entire practice around getting back there. Longer sits. More retreats. Different techniques. I read books about the experience, talked to teachers about the experience, adjusted variables like I was debugging code. All in service of returning to that summit. I didn't realize I'd turned freedom into a goal. And goals, by definition, keep you reaching. The Spiritual Version of the Same Problem Peak states feel like truth. The clarity, the dissolution of self, the sense that you've finally broken through to something real. When the ordinary mind drops away, what's left feels so obviously right that you assume you've found what you were looking for. But then it fades. And now you have a new problem: you've tasted something, and you want it back. This is dopamine in spiritual clothing. You're not chasing money or status anymore. You're chasing the memory of that high, the certainty that came with it, the relief of not being your usual contracted self for a few hours. You tell yourself it's about awakening, but the mechanism is identical to any other craving. Something felt good. You want more. You start optimizing your life around returning to that feeling. I've watched this pattern in myself and in dozens of clients. The content changes but the structure doesn't. Same chase, different object. Why the Brain Can't Help You Here Peak states involve real neurological shifts. Dopamine surges. Reduced activity in the default mode network, which is the part of your brain responsible for self-referential thinking. Increased coherence across large-scale brain networks. The experience feels expansive because the machinery of "me" temporarily quiets down. That's not imaginary. Something is actually happening. But here's the problem: your nervous system adapts. It recalibrates. What once felt transcendent becomes baseline, and now you need a stronger stimulus to reach the same place. Longer sessions. More intensive practices. Higher doses, if that's the path you're on. This is the hedonic treadmill applied to consciousness. You're not getting closer to freedom. You're getting more dependent on specific conditions to feel okay. The peak becomes the standard, and everything else becomes "not it." The High Performer's Version of This Trap If you've trained your whole life to optimize outcomes, you will try to optimize awakening. It's almost inevitable. You'll approach consciousness the way you approached your career: bigger breakthroughs, more powerful insights, measurable progress toward "higher" states. I did this. I tracked my meditation sessions like workouts. I compared experiences, ranked them, tried to reverse-engineer the good ones. I turned stillness into a metric without realizing that the moment you measure presence, you've left it. Awareness isn't hierarchical. It doesn't have levels you ascend through, no matter how many maps suggest otherwise. Only experience has levels. Awareness is the constant in which all experiences, peak and ordinary, appear and dissolve. Trying to optimize it is like trying to improve the space in a room by rearranging the furniture. The space doesn't change. Only the objects do. Where Freedom Actually Lives The quiet truth nobody wants to hear is that freedom isn't in the peak. It's in the ordinary. Not in the ecstatic dissolution of self, but in the unremarkable Tuesday afternoon where nothing special is happening and nothing needs to. Peak states are experiences. Vivid, memorable, sometimes genuinely transformative. But you are not an experience. You are what experiences arise within. And that doesn't fluctuate. It doesn't need retrieval. It isn't somewhere you go and then lose access to. When I finally stopped privileging certain states over others, the whole game relaxed. I stopped dividing my life into "practice" and "not practice," into "breakthrough" and "ordinary." The meditation cushion stopped being a portal to somewhere else and became just a place to sit. The present moment, whatever its quality, stopped being a stepping stone to a better present moment. This was less exciting than the peak. And far more free. The Practice Next time you catch yourself longing for "that state," notice the craving itself. Feel where it lives in your body. There's usually a pull forward, a leaning toward something that isn't here. A subtle rejection of what is in favor of what was. Then ask yourself what you believe that state will fix. What's missing right now that the peak would solve? Really look. Is this moment, unremarkable as it might be, actually lacking anything essential? Or have you just been trained to assume that ordinary means insufficient? Stay with that question. Not to generate an answer, but to see the assumption underneath the craving. The belief that you need to be somewhere else, in some other state, to be okay. You don't. You never did. The Ordinary Sacred Chasing peaks keeps you subtly dissatisfied with the present. It's a refined form of the same restlessness you were trying to escape. Just because the object is "spiritual" doesn't mean the mechanism has changed. You're still reaching. Still ranking. Still somewhere other than here. You don't need a better state. You need to stop grading them. When you do, the baseline becomes enough. Not because you've lowered your standards, but because you've stopped confusing intensity with depth. The fireworks were never the point. The sky they explode in was. —Nic PS. Want to be clear about who you really are? Join the Neuroscience of Change - an online program rewiring what’s really running you. Name your own price (Pay What You Can) to get your hands on this powerful program. |
Nicholas Kusmich
REWired What if everything you knew about self-help and personal development was not only wrong but was the very thing keeping you stuck? REWired reveals the keys at the cross-section of ancient wisdom and modern neuroscience that bring about easy and permanent transformation.
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