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Testimonials for the Silent Mind Technique™


Below are testimonials written by people with various degrees of voice hearing and or schizophrenia who have used our Silent Mind Technique™ (SMT).

Sunset in Scotland
Most people don't understand that many schizophrenics have an extreme form of something we all consider quite normal - simple mind chatter. A typical person only finds their random thoughts an annoyance during activities like mediation. Schizophrenics are not so fortunate - they can't suppress the background chatter nearly as well. In fact, our SMT is useful for nearly everyone - even people who don't normally notice any background thoughts are surprised and pleased by the change. Many describe the silent mind state like suddenly standing in an empty auditorium, or having the air conditioning suddenly shut off. It is a far greater gift for schizophrenics, as you'll see in the testimonials below.


Gina's Story


"Imagine about thirty drunk students camped out in the lounge room of your mind, yelling at each other while watching bad daytime TV"

[Editor's note: This testimonial was written a year after the Silent Mind Technique™ (SMT) treatment. The client heard obtrusive voices but was not 'delusional' in any other way. This person is an excellent example of the range of the problem, and our misconceptions about it. Most people have it to some degree or another, but we just think of it as 'random thoughts'. After the SMT is used, even a typical, 'healthy' person finds that their mind becomes permanently quiet]

"So you’re wondering about the silent mind process?

Before I had the process done I had no idea how badly I needed it. Sure I couldn’t meditate if my life depended on it, and my internal life was very chaotic, but wasn’t everyone like this? I talked to myself a bit (ok, a lot) (ok, all the time) and sometimes my whole day would somehow vanish in a stream of endless conversations, all in my head, but they were lucid conversations. They just never stopped. Ever.

The inside of my mind was noisier than my 1988 university lodgings. Imagine about thirty drunk students camped out in the lounge room of your mind, yelling at each other while watching bad daytime TV, with the stereo blaring at the same time. Oh yeah, and they’re all chewing pizza with their mouths open. Loudly. Imagine trying to study, work, live, love, relate and sleep in the middle of that.

Welcome to the first thirty six years of my life.

Getting to sleep was torment. I‘ve been an insomniac since I was a small child. My mind would race, churn and wind back, chattering to itself all the way. It would talk itself into countless loops. I’d eventually drift into a broken half-sleep and wake heavy, listless and unrested. It got so I’d postpone going to bed, later and later, anything to avoid lying there not sleeping, talking to myself again. I read literally thousands of books, as this was the only thing that ever shut the voices up (ok, kids, it’s storytime!); I read until I was so tired I’d fall asleep with the book open.

The thing is, I didn’t know any different. It’s just always been like that.

I’d tried to meditate many times, without success. ‘Just let the thoughts rise, and fall away,’ the meditation teacher would say. Yeah, right. My thoughts didn’t fall away, ever. They’d start their own commentary on the teacher, the technique, and then they’d be off rehashing old conversations, creating new ones until it was the thought olympics instead of zen silence... ‘…guys, pay attention, I’m s’posed to be meditating…’ I’d mentally hiss. There’d be order for about two seconds, then they’d start again, the unruly, undisciplined buggers. I think I managed to meditate once for about seven seconds, before the kindergarten chatter started. World record. Gold medal. Woo hoo.

It had been like this my whole life. I thought it was normal, and I was just a bad meditator, wasn’t trying hard enough, wasn’t focusing.

Because I didn’t know any different, the voices were just background noise to the soundtrack of my life. They never told me nasty things, or were hostile or particularly mean. They were just…talkative. Helpful. Cheerful. Incessant.

I am a bodyworker, and anyone in the healing arts will tell you that being present is an important part of the healing process. But for me being present meant hanging out with the noisy students in their non stop party. So I developed an ability to split the awareness of my mind and body so my mind could chatter away to itself while my body got on with doing the work. I am still amazed my clients achieved any results, considering I was barely there most of the time. My body seems to really know what it’s doing (after twenty years of practice, I guess it’s figured a few things out) and sometimes I’d ‘come to’ at the end of a session and think ‘oh, no, that must have been terrible, I don’t even remember it’ only to have the client thank me for the best session ever. Go figure.

However there was a limit to how deep I could go with people, and I knew there was more, just had no idea how to get to it.

An intensive healing search brought me to a Peak States 1 workshop in Jan 2006. On the eighth day, I achieved Silent Mind (with much-needed help from Tal… my voices weren’t too thrilled with the idea of losing their identities and created havoc while I was trying to run the process. Apparently I had a stubborn version of this problem.)

The process worked.

I cannot even begin to convey what it was like to lie there with my mind echoing to a beautiful cathedral-like silence. For the first time in my life, I could hear the radiant emptiness of peace. I wept. ‘They’re gone. They’re gone.’ I wept some more.

Buddha statue in the garden
I didn’t want to believe it at first in case it was a cruel trick, but no matter how hard I searched the corners of my mind, there were no voices. The students had been evicted. All that was left were a few empty pizza boxes.

I walked around in wonder, listening to the silence outside, the leaves whispering against each other, so distinct, so clear. I reckoned if I listened long enough I could hear the moon.

I haven’t stopped smiling, and it was a year ago.

The quality of my life has completely transformed. I am unrecognizable.

I sat a 10 day vipassana meditation course and meditated beautifully. My yoga practice has deepened. The healing work I’ve been doing has changed profoundly; not only have I incorporated some of the whole hearted healing and EFT techniques, but the level of presence I bring to each session now is solid and silent. Clients are achieving results I couldn’t dream of a year ago. I am achieving results in my own healing that have never been possible before.

I sleep. Oh, goodness, how blissful is it to say that and mean it. I sleep.
My relationships have changed for the better with everyone, including my family. I am calm pretty much all the time, and the manic edge which fueled every waking minute has eased. I am much easier to be around, according to everyone I love. I am sane (well, I think I’m sane. Sane-ish?)

I love the silence. I adore the quiet. I cherish the stillness. I won’t watch tv, listen to the radio or play cd’s. I don’t want to break this beautiful, blessed silence. Sometimes I lie under a tree and listen outward in concentric circles, seeing how far I can hear. As I write this the only commentary I hear is the fridge, humming away. No voices.

This change has affected every single aspect of my life in a positive way. I was in prison in a straitjacket looking through a window at freedom, with no way of touching it. Now I’m walking around in that freedom, still pinching myself that it’s real.

Every single day I am grateful to Grant and Tal and the whole peak states team, to everyone who has contributed to this body of knowledge, to those who have sacrificed everything to bring this level of healing to us.

Thank you for the precious gift of silence."

~Gina Chick
February, 2007

[Editor's note: Gina followed up with the following comments a year later.] “The silent mind technique completely transformed my life. Before the process my mind would race, churn and wind back, chattering to itself all the way. It would talk itself into countless loops – I’d been an insomniac since childhood and looking back, I don’t know how I survived. After the process, I cannot even begin to convey what it was like to lie there with my mind echoing to a beautiful cathedral-like silence. For the first time in my life, I could hear the radiant emptiness of peace”.


Lars story

I did the silent mind process over two times. The first time was probably only 50% result, even so my head felt calm and quiet. My meditations improved 100%.

Then after completely entering the silent mind state, so many voices and thoughts have gone, and instead a wonderful peace have spread. I do not anymore have these unnecessary incomplete projects existing in my mind. Meditation still gets better.


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Revision History
1.0 Sept 29, 2009: First draft.