To derive meaning from our exceptional anomalous experiences so they empower us as full-blown DT-EHEs, we must first be able to see their value or importance within the context of our personal lives.   Historically these exalted events have been difficult to integrate and to benefit from because up to recently the overt public regard for EEs/EHEs, particularly in first-world [e.g., Europe, USA, Russia, etc.] societies, has been nil to negative -- emphasis on the negative.   As a consequence, most of us who have had these glorious moments of epiphany have either tended to suppress them or let them slip away like dreamstuff.    Too often, our lives didn't prepare us to have a clue what they could mean in any larger sense or how they might benefit  us except insofar as we let them nourish us as a closely guarded secret.   Generally, we were afraid others would belittle them and think we were either crazy or lying, though intuitively we knew they represent special if not pivotal moments in our lives.   So as a rule, we dared not tell them to anyone.

What follows is an example of how suppression of such events can profoundly compromise our quality of life.   A number of years ago, one of my biofeedback clients, "JoAnne," who was seeing me because of relentless, debilitating back pain, utterly and instantly repressed a dramatic near-death experience that had occurred during her third major back surgery that took place four years earlier.   She later learned that she had indeed 'died' on the operating table for a few minutes.   When she regained consciousness for the first time after the surgery, her beloved grandfather was with her, and still glowing with that vision fresh as a new dawn before her, JoAnne told him what she had experienced.   He startled her by downplaying the incident and told her in a careful, low voice that it would be best if she didn't mention it to anyone.   Maybe he was worried  what other people might think about her sanity or that it somehow threatened people's religious views, who knows.   But the result was, her magnificent NDE went the way of forgotten dreams.   

If you haven't been forced to contend with relentless, crippling pain, especially in a situation where you are told ' you'll just have to learn to live with it', you just can not know what you are missing.   Neither surgery nor (potent enough) medication were viable options any longer for JoAnne.   She was a strong and enduring person in her mid-thirties, the kind who will never give you a glimmer of a clue about her depths of suffering and despair.   She had an imperturbable yet warm, gentle nature that attracted to her a wonderful support network within her family and community.   Consequently, she was the last person you could imagine seriously considering suicide.   Yet behind the closed doors of a clinical setting she was able to admit that the option was occasionally a compelling one.   

I've always been fascinated to note that the clients who are the most desperate are inevitably the ones who excel in all that biofeedback training has to offer, especially in the case of pain patients.   This woman was easily one of the most disciplined and successful people I had ever been privileged to work with in terms of making biofeedback work for her.   

In one of our final sessions, we were reviewing her progress to see where she was with the training.   JoAnne gave me a thorough rundown of a number of benefits she had gained from her practice, which had been frequently apparent in our sessions together.   She had in fact acquired a very high skill level over a mere two-to-three months that appeared to serve her well toward keeping stress levels down and helping her to circumvent or 'erase' much of the pain.   

She hesitated for a moment, and finally with a sigh, she said, "But there is this one core pain I can't seem to reach" and to which she felt bound as if chained to a stake.   This one constant glissando of torture just never went away.   Wondering where we might go from here, conversation ceased, and a weighted silence filled the room like a third presence.   Then, I don't know what impelled me to let these words fall out of my mouth -- I had never imagined to talk of such things with my clients -- but that awful silence drew me to ask, "JoAnne, have you ever had a near-death experience?"

And this stoic, salt-of-the-earth woman who I never once witnessed giving voice to any of that oppressive pain burst into tears!   For suddenly the NDE from her surgery four years previously came back to her in all its glory!   She relived that inexpressible moment and tried to describe it to me.   In the midst of her radiant, emotional retelling of her moving toward the Light, I suddenly thought to ask, "JoAnne, how's your pain?"   Staring at me with stupefaction, she whispered, "It's gone!"    The incredible benefits from her NDE finally began to catch up with her.   

Together we taped a relaxation exercise leading to a narrative of her experience for her to take home.   Anytime the pain became problematic, she could listen to the tape or simply relive that experience of the Light, the hope being the continued reinforcement of reliving that exaltation would provide a reliable tool of strength and renewal.   

As things turned out, I didn't see her for close to a year.   My office was in the bowels of a major teaching hospital, and all the times I had seen her before, she had been pushed from her car to my door in a wheelchair.  In fact she never even got out of the chair to sink into an available plush recliner for any of the sessions.  Even if she had been driven right up to the front door of the hospital, she still had a quarter mile to go to get to my office.   In any case, one day those many months later, JoAnne showed up --- on two canes!   And she was glowing with vitality, and I dare say, with a light all her own!  

I asked her how all this came to be!   She said, "It was the near-death experience.   Every time the pain would get me down, I'd listen to the tape, and the pain would subside.   Then I discovered all I had to do was close my eyes and feel what it was like moving into the Light, and the pain would go away."   

Through her remembrance and new perceptions of the NDE's value and meaning for her, JoAnne allowed it to heal and revitalize her not just once more but again and again.   As is certainly evident in her case, our vulnerabilities, especially concerning issues of questionable acceptability within our society, can be a limiting or liberating factor of great significance.  Even our own belief in ourselves and in our experiences can sometimes be seriously compromised by the merest unbelief of a confidante, no matter how kind their intentions.   Just to have someone to hear us without judgment is sometimes all that is needed to help us find our way.

Rhea A. White, who coined the term exceptional human experience, says, " It appears that each [EHE] is potentially life-changing in its significance.   It depends on how the person receives it and responds to it.  ...   (E)ach one really offers the experiencer (and to some extent, those who read or hear about a given experience) a window with a new view, and they provide an opportunity to choose between belief and doubt.   (This is an opportunity of unparalleled importance.)   One must decide whether to provisionally trust the experience or explain it away or dismiss it.   Those who choose to believe find they have opened a door leading to additional experiences that provide entrance to a world where their lives become charged with meaning.   Those who doubt stay outside the gate, surrounded by the familiar inhospitable and even abusive arms of the worldview that has been with us since the Enlightenment, and which we were taught was reality.   Their lives are chaotic and bereft of meaning, and many turn to drugs, [etc.] not to embrace the world but to forget it."