What’s Your Higher State? A Question That Can Change Everything

8 min. read | Mindset | Alignment

What does it mean to live in a Higher State? It’s not about perfection or achieving some mystical enlightenment - it’s about becoming more whole, integrated, and free to express your creativity and purpose without unmanageable emotional baggage holding you back. Your Higher State is yours alone. So, what does it look like for you? Let’s explore.

A lot of people spend their lives asking, “How do I fix myself?”

But what if you asked instead, “What is my Higher State?”

A “Higher State” isn’t some far away peak you struggle to climb your whole life. It’s a more aligned way of being that emerges naturally when you stop working against yourself. It can emerge naturally when you start integrating more aspects of your consciousness. It emerges naturally when you let the emotional noise, the self-doubt, the inherited beliefs and stories that aren’t really yours move all the way through you. It’s both shedding what’s not you, and bringing more of you online.

When you engage with this process of awareness cultivation and personal integration, something remarkable happens. You start living in alignment with what’s truly yours, and start embodying greater resilience, authenticity, and personal freedom. That’s where real, empowered transformation takes root - and your Higher State is the soil that allows it to take root.

Philospher-mystic G.I. Gurdjieff might have described a Higher State as waking up from “mechanical” living - the habitual, unconscious cycles that keep us from seeing who we truly are. Living in a Higher State is like this - a shift from automation to presence, from being swept along by old conditioning to more fully and consciously engaging with life.

The “Higher State” Paradoxes

There are those higher states of consciousness that truly elevate us beyond our daily “normal” - bliss, wonder, awe, etc. Then there are those really transcendent higher states that can be so powerfully catalytic in our lives - mystical experiences, ‘peak experiences,’ psychedelic/entheogenic experiences, etc.

These profound experiences offer direction and can absolutely guide us, like bright, navigational stars for oceanic voyagers - but living on any of those stars is clearly impossible. There’s more to it. Living in a Higher State is more about engaging with all of life with more of us, so we can better integrate the whole range of our experience, whatever it is.

This means that living from a Higher State paradoxically includes our very lowest states. In fact, they can be absolutely vital to our growth when they’re understood from the vantage of our Higher State, when we recruit deeper aspects of our awareness, the subconscious, unconscious and even superconscious. Your Higher State is this viewpoint that allows you to digest and integrate the wisdom that life’s challenges can bring, and allows you to face them with more grace, ease and resilience. Suffering and “lower states” are, after all, a seemingly unavoidable part of our life experience.

Your Higher State may very well feel aspirational or something you strive for. As humans we do have goals, ambitions, and desires - and that’s ok! Enter the famous paradox of desire, where we work against ourselves with a desire not to desire, as Buddhism (and life) teaches us that clinging to desire leads to suffering. And neuroscience does back this up too - our brains are wired to anticipate rewards more than enjoy them. But desire itself isn’t the problem, it’s how we relate to it.

The work isn’t to suppress desire, but to understand what it’s truly pointing toward and how best to fulfill it. Often, when we do, the surface-level cravings dissolve, along with the distracting behaviors that have never really satisfied. Hypnosis can help us realize these kinds of connections. You don’t have to cling to desire, or overindulge it, or resist it, or kill it - if you’re more fully engaged with the process - and if the desire resonates through all of you as truth - you just have to ride it all the way into presence. (And hypnosis can help here too.)

We’ll dive into more ideas of what your Higher State may be like, but first, to help you engage it for yourself, I have some important questions for you.

Engaging Your Higher State: Three Hypnotic Questions

1. If all the noise and baggage lost its power over you, who would you be?

Imagine waking up tomorrow feeling free from old patterns, past wounds, or limiting narratives. What would you create? How would you show up in the world? What decisions would you make differently? What would your energy level be like? Your Higher State is already within you - it may just be buried under the weight of the past.

In his masterpiece Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious, social psychologist Timothy D. Wilson explains that much of our behavior is shaped by unconscious patterns running beneath awareness. The mind is a vast system of automatic, associative responses, many of which don’t serve us. But here’s the key - those patterns aren’t permanent. Hypnosis can help reveal them, rewrite them, and open up new possibilities.

2. What brings you alive?

A Higher State involves feeling more fully engaged with life, not necessarily achieving an external ideal. When was the last time you felt deeply present, passionate about something, or just completely at ease? What activities, environments, or ways of thinking make you feel most like yourself? Pay attention - this is part of the blueprint to your unique Higher State.

Whether it’s with our work, our passions, or the people around us, a Higher State is an experience of deeper connection and engagement, where we stop treating life as a checklist and start meeting it fully, moment by moment. Existential philosopher Martin Buber captured this essence in I and Thou, describing how we don’t come alive in isolation - we awaken in engaged connection.

3. What’s one small shift that could move you closer?

Big changes don’t always come from radical leaps. Sometimes, they emerge from a single shift - a new habit (big or small), a moment of self-kindness, or an inner decision to release something that no longer serves you. So what’s one thing you can do today that aligns with your Higher State?

Fritjof Capra, a pioneer in systems thinking, reminds us that life is inherently regenerative. In a living system, transformation is emergent - it arises from small, interconnected changes. A Higher State isn’t something you force into existence; it unfolds naturally when the right conditions are set. Even a small shift in thought or action can create momentum that reshapes your entire experience of life.

The Role of Hypnosis in Accessing Your Higher State

Hypnosis is a direct line to the subconscious - where patterns are stored, where beliefs take root, and where real change happens. We live out the stories that our subconscious believes, and if those stories are outdated or counterproductive, we stay stuck. Hypnosis helps us update our understanding of these stories.

If you’re carrying beliefs that say you can’t or you’re not enough, hypnosis can help rewrite the script. If fear keeps you stuck, hypnosis can soften the grip. Your Higher State isn’t built on effort alone; it’s built from these inner shifts that allow effort to flow naturally.

By accessing deeper parts of our consciousness in a safe, guided way with hypnosis, we can bypass resistance and step into expanded states of awareness and deeper resourcefulness. Hypnosis helps us realize our true needs and how we can best meet them in our life. And when the subconscious aligns with conscious intention, we stop chasing and naturally embody a Higher State.

Wisdom traditions from east to west, from Taoism to Hermeticism, have taught us how external reality mirrors internal states. Shifting one’s inner world - clearing limiting beliefs, deepening love and wisdom - reorganizes not only perception, but life itself. In other words, our reality isn’t something we just experience; it’s something we actually generate from within. This principle is foundational to hypnosis, where altering subconscious patterns creates profound shifts in behavior, emotions, and even external circumstances.

Higher State = Your Unique Expression

How can we understand what “your unique expression” really means? Here are a few perspectives I appreciate.

German neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger points out that “the self is not a thing but a process.” So your Higher State is kind of a process, one that hypnosis can help you step into.

And the eminent Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung described the key concept of individuation as the process of integrating all parts of yourself into a cohesive, authentic whole. So your Higher State emerges from engaging with this dynamic process of individuation.

And further, the famed American psychologist Abraham Maslow described the concept of self-actualization as the growth of an individual toward fulfillment of their highest needs. So your Higher State may emerge in an ultra-clear, hyper-distilled form within ‘peak experience’ moments of self-actualization.

But whether your Higher State emerges from the ongoing process of individuation, or emerges from the punctuation marks of self-actualized ‘peak experiences,’ we know it is definitely not constructed from comparison thinking or invented from scratch. It’s uniquely yours, and it’s already here now, waiting to emerge more fully.

Your Higher State is your true nature and your deepening awareness of your true nature. It’s engaging in the process of becoming truer to yourself and meeting your deeper needs. It’s the fuller, natural expression of who you really are, and who you’ve always been beneath the layers of conditioning (plus all the wisdom you’ve integrated from all this conditioning!).

There is really no singular definition of a Higher State because it’s different for everyone. For some, it feels like creative flow; for others, it feels like deep peace. It might feel like confidence, presence, a sense of being in the adventure of life, or the ability to love without fear. The point is, you decide - the present you that is here right now, not the imaginary past you or aspirational future you.

So, what’s your Higher State? What does it feel like? What does it free you to do?

Take a moment. Close your eyes. Imagine stepping into it.

Now, let’s make it real.