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“If you have that soul fire, with the question of what is love, is it real, do I know it? – keep seeking.”
Dr Nicole Gruel
TRANSCENDENT EXPERIENCES ARE NORMAL, think of them as NOTEs to Self
Dr Nicole Gruel is adamant that we’ve all experienced transcendent experiences, experiences that aren’t considered normal in our current western culture, and her enthusiasm for explaining our connection to life force energy, clarifying our experience of love and for encouraging us to know love is undeniable.
You’ll love this conversation!
First we clarify the term Non-Ordinary Transcendent Experience (or NOTE) that Nicole discovered during her PhD studies. NOTE is term created by Dr William Braud who was a transpersonal psychologist. He believed that the fields of transpersonal psychology & exceptional human experiences & paranormal studies could be brought together to make massive contributions to understanding experiences of heightened human consciousness, beingness and awareness under the term NOTE.
Transcendent = through the self, beyond the self.
The NOTE umbrella can include over 500 different types of exceptional human experiences: such as dreams, falling in love, in the zone peak experiences in sport or music, healing experiences, spontaneous healing experiences, encounter type experiences, near death experience and plant medicine experiences, just to name a few.
By using this term we can avoid other terms that are heavily burdened by years of misinformation, words such as spirituality.
“I’ve had a really love hate relationship with the word spirituality over my lifetime.
At times it has been very useful and times when it hasn’t been the best term to use.
And, it can certainly alienate a lot of people.”
~
“Interestingly, what started to happen when I was using the term NOTEs
once we all got over the mouthful that it is,
is that people would self-identify within that or within a type of experience
even if they wouldn’t call themselves spiritual”
Dr Nicole Gruel
Dr Nicole Gruel shares her compelling love experience she had under 10 metres of water at 14 years of age where she was visited by her living grandmother and her first dog (deceased). She talks about how at 14 years of age that it didn’t occur to her, until well after her experience that we are not able to do that as human beings! This experience motivated her to dive deep into what we’re capable of as humans.
LIFE FORCE ENERGY & LOVE
NOTE experiences increase our connection to and experience of our own life force energy. Dr Nicole Gruel explains how she differentiates the difference between Life Force Energy, which we all need just to be alive, and love, which in her mind is an aspect of, a fraction of, a part of the experience of Life Force Energy.
I think that even if we use different words or terms, you will feel the truth in what she is explaining.
“When we’re around love, unconditional love definitely so,
but even a very genuine love, it’s incredibly peaceful,
there is a deep stillness that takes place within the core of our being.”
Dr Nicole Gruel
LOVE ENERGY IN EVERYDAY LIFE
“our hearts and our bodies are so wired for love”
Dr Nicole Gruel
This is a great part of the interview. I didn’t know Nicole had been a counsellor on a suicide hotline and how freely she could talk about this tricky topic with confidence and grace, in a way that could reassure us all that love is real and that we experience through our relationships. Having also experienced a NDE or compelling love experience she was able to clarify the similarities between coming back from ‘the dead’ and deciding to live.
The takeaway: it’s our relationships that gives us life and keeps us here.
“People don’t want to come back or want stay
on the planet for success or fame or accolades, that’s not enough to want to live,
that’s not enough to feed our soul and nurture us”
Dr Nicole Gruel
TRANSCENDENT EXPERIENCES (NOTEs)
- are they scary, is there support if we’ve had one?
This is a great part of our conversation. It’s so important because we live in a world that doesn’t know how to talk about NOTE experiences. All the traditional or indigenous cultures knew how to talk about these experiences and commonly had rituals to induce these experiences as a normal part of the structure of their community. Nicole explains that it’s so important because NOTEs are related to how we heal, how we find meaning and purpose and how we grow and evolve on this planet.
“There is nothing to fear in NOTEs or love, remember love is a type of non ordinary transcendent experience,
there is nothing to fear in them, but I think what is wonderful to have is a healthy respect, a very healthy respect.
This is life force energy moving through us, this is us opening up as conscious beings to much
bigger levels of who we are and what we’re capable of experiencing.”
Dr Nicole Gruel