<p></p><p></p><p>One
of the first published attempts in bridging the two fields of clinical psychology
and neurotherapy was made by a researcher named Anna Wise. Wise was mentored in
EEG by an Englishman named Maxwell Cade. Cade was a scientist, a yogi, and the
father of biofeedback in Europe. Cade discovered a brain state that was common
in meditators, which he dubbed “The Awakened Mind” (see Figure 10). Wise expounded
upon Cade’s theories, and also did much therapeutic work with Jungian symbolism
(J. Pennington, personal communication, May 17, 2015).</p>

<p>After
departing Europe and leaving Cade, her mentor, Wise carried on his work, moving
across the Atlantic and the continental United States to California, where she
wrote <i>The High Performance Mind</i>
(1995) and <i>Awakening the Mind</i> (2002).
She was very interested in meditative states and devised a method of training
individuals to reach the Awakened Mind state (J. Pennington,
personal communication, May 17, 2015). Wise hypothesized that the awakened mind has
access to the unconscious empathy, intuition, and radar of the delta waves; the
subconscious creative storehouse, inspiration, and spiritual connection of the
theta waves; the bridging capacity, lucid imagery, and relaxed, detached
awareness of the alpha waves; and the ability to consciously process thoughts
in beta, all at the same time. One of the major prerequisites for an awakened
mind, she felt, was to have an open flow of information between the conscious,
subconscious, and unconscious mind (1995, 2002).</p>

<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<img src="@@PLUGINFILE@@/Awakened%20Mind.png" alt="Awakened Mind" width="500" height="317" class="img-responsive atto_image_button_middle">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
 
 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 
 
 

 
</p>

<p><i>Pierson, G. (2010) The Awakened Mind, as determined by studies of yogis, monks,
and enlightened masters.<span>&nbsp;</span></i></p>

<p>Wise
was not a neurodiagnostician, but while alive she was the only voice in the
field of EEG and neurofeedback laying the bridgework between psychodynamic
psychotherapeutic perspectives and brainwaves. In her publications of <i>The High Performance Mind</i> (1995) and <i>Awakening the Mind</i> (2002), Wise laid a
groundwork for the communication between the two fields in her interpretation
of EEG frequencies delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma, and accompanying
psychological states. She was different than her peers in the neurotherapy
community in that she used EEG to “neuromonitor” her subjects, observing
changes and evaluating progress in individuals under a prescribed meditation, mental
exercises, and lifestyle program, as opposed to the traditional methodologies
of training the brainwaves via operant conditioning using neurofeedback
equipment. She had an intuitive grasp of EEG and when neuromonitoring, would
use the EEG state of an individual in session for assessment purposes, while
using visualization, meditation, relaxation, and counseling work to understand
their reactivity and response to different topics and visions. The subjects
Wise worked with reported profound breakthroughs and insights in their lives. In
personal communication, Wise’s good friend and my mentor, as well as 2014
President of the Biofeedback Society of California and Quantitative EEG
Diplomate, Jay Gunkelman, has said that Wise was one of the brightest minds in
the field.&nbsp; </p>

<p>Wise
was unique in that she understood that a greater complexity of the psychological
form that underlay the EEG. She believed that: </p>

<div class="editor-indent" style="margin-left: 30px;"><div class="editor-indent" style="margin-left: 30px;"><div class="editor-indent" style="margin-left: 30px;"><p><i>"Each
state that you experience entails a symphony of brainwaves, with each frequency
playing its own characteristic part. Out of these symphonies come the art of
Picasso, the dance of Martha Graham, the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright,
and the theories of Einstein." (Wise, 1995, p. 3)</i></p></div></div></div><p>Here is a video of Anna from The Neurotechnology Forum in Seattle, 1992:&nbsp;<a href="https://youtu.be/l0PbIAqxJKo">Anna Wise Speaking about the Mind MIrror</a></p><p>And here is Part 2 of the same talk:&nbsp;<a href="https://youtu.be/8DD4QZTrDqU">Anna Wise Part 2</a></p><p>And here is Part 3 of the same talk:&nbsp;<a href="https://youtu.be/OkiP4TI2giE">Anna Wise Part 3</a></p><p>And here is Part 4 of the same talk:&nbsp;<a href="https://youtu.be/Zr5AtKPTFSc">Anna Wise Part 4</a></p>

<p><br></p><p><b>Here is Anna's biography in more intimate detail, written by her student, Judith Pennington (2020), who has carried on Anna's work.</b></p><p></p><div id="cc-m-12307330657"><div><div id="cc-m-textwithimage-12307330657" data-name="text" data-action="text"><p>Anna Anderson Wise, born on July 13, 1950 in Selma, Alabama, to the mayor’s daughter and a future two-star Air Force general, was one of the most influential practitioners of instrument-assisted meditation in the world. She followed a hybrid east-west approach which married the timelessness of contemplation with the precision of technology. Her great love and destiny was the development of her Awakened Mind Program. She devoted her life to it.</p><p>Growing up on Air Force bases throughout North America, Anna had wings on her feet and a heart built for spiritual transcendence. A series of near-death experiences sparked her need to understand and master altered and higher states of consciousness. Her first NDE&nbsp;likely occurred when she was five years old and underwent open heart surgery. Looking back, she realized that she must have opened the portal to the other side at that time. “That portal was very familiar to me,” she told her a group of practitioner trainees decades later.</p><p>At age 16, while attending high school in Golden, Colorado, Anna was looking at a Bible in her Christian church and asked God to prove his existence. “The sky opened up and a golden light came down,” she told this writer. “There were celestial choirs and I completely blissed out. I was in the evolved mind pattern. It started at 2 a.m. I came back at 6 a.m., still holding the Bible. I heard a voice from far away saying, 'Faarrrr out.' I felt my face, and there was gum stuck to it. The voice was mine."</p><p>The next year, while she was tubing on a rain-swollen river with a friend, her inner tube got caught on a fallen tree branch, submerged her, and water streamed into her mouth, drowning her. Leaving her body, she said goodbye to her personality and flashed by a series of events that would have occurred had she died. She saw her parents mourning at her funeral and a newspaper article with the headline, "Coed Drowns."</p><p>"I had a brief moment of remorse, where I saw that my death was a waste and I would have to come back and start over," she told a practitioner training group. But then she found the light and heard the same celestial choirs. "I can't describe that sound. It's mind-boggling. I was floating toward the light&nbsp; and suddenly, the guy I was with pulled my head out of the water, and I snapped back painfully into my body." Anna cursed him.</p><p>"There's no pain in that state," she said a soft, musing voice filled with longing. "The body is painful, hard, cumbersome. Part of me feels that I should be able to point over there to what I want – that my body shouldn't be gravity-bound and heavy." Not long after that, she nearly drowned in an ocean.</p><p>What Anna wanted more than anything else was to re-experience that state of consciousness without having to die first. Her opportunity came in 1975, when she visited her friend, Elizabeth St. John, at The Franklin School in London and met Max Cade, who was teaching classes in meditation and mind expansion. “Max got me there, to higher states, through guided imagery and Zen,” Anna said fondly. Her teacher taught her “to get into deep, peaceful, blissful states,” she said. “His guidance took me back to a state of bliss."</p></div></div><div></div></div><div id="cc-m-12308480157"><div><div id="cc-matrix-3523368457"><div id="cc-m-12308480757"><p>Anna was a student of Max’s when he and electronics engineer Geoff Blundell invented the Mind Mirror in 1976. She attended their experiments with psychics, healers, yogis and swamis, and with her friend Elizabeth, began to conduct EEG-led meditation sessions for others. Anna was a fascinated student of the yogis who visited London and a dedicated meditator who had a powerful and sustained kundalini awakening. Decades later, that kundalini energy remained so strong that she was able to point her finger at her young son’s remote-controlled car and move it around the room.</p><p>In London, Anna became the director of the Franklin School of Contemporary Studies and, with her future husband, James MacRitchie, formed an international dance troupe, The Natural Dance Workshop, which toured Europe and used Awakened Mind principles to help dancers attune to their creativity.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><em>The radiant Anna Wise in her youth: dancer and mind researcher</em></p></div></div></div><div data-display="cms-only"><div></div></div><div><div id="cc-matrix-3523368557"><div id="cc-m-12308480257"><figure><img srcset="https://image.jimcdn.com/app/cms/image/transf/dimension=281x10000:format=jpg/path/s79204ff9f69421c8/image/ib8be602455f20780/version/1588948076/image.jpg 281w, https://image.jimcdn.com/app/cms/image/transf/dimension=320x10000:format=jpg/path/s79204ff9f69421c8/image/ib8be602455f20780/version/1588948076/image.jpg 320w, https://image.jimcdn.com/app/cms/image/transf/none/path/s79204ff9f69421c8/image/ib8be602455f20780/version/1588948076/image.jpg 373w" sizes="(min-width: 281px) 281px, 100vw" id="cc-m-imagesubtitle-image-12308480257" src="https://image.jimcdn.com/app/cms/image/transf/dimension=281x10000:format=jpg/path/s79204ff9f69421c8/image/ib8be602455f20780/version/1588948076/image.jpg" alt="" data-src-width="373" data-src-height="556" data-src="https://image.jimcdn.com/app/cms/image/transf/dimension=281x10000:format=jpg/path/s79204ff9f69421c8/image/ib8be602455f20780/version/1588948076/image.jpg" data-image-id="7881991457"></figure><figure><br></figure><figure><p><em>The photo at left shows a birthday party Anna threw for Max, who is wearing a light-diode headband. She crowned him "the king of biofeedback."&nbsp;&nbsp;</em><em style="font-size: 1rem;">From left to right, first row: Isabel Cade, Max Cade, and Helen Stapleton, wife of Geoff Blundell. Second row: Barbara Siddall, long-time supporter, the lovely Anna Wise, and Geoff.</em></p></figure></div></div></div></div><div id="cc-m-12308481457"><figure><img srcset="https://image.jimcdn.com/app/cms/image/transf/none/path/s79204ff9f69421c8/image/i49b036d6a3826f5b/version/1588969230/image.jpg 292w" sizes="(min-width: 292px) 292px, 100vw" id="cc-m-textwithimage-image-12308481457" src="https://image.jimcdn.com/app/cms/image/transf/none/path/s79204ff9f69421c8/image/i49b036d6a3826f5b/version/1588969230/image.jpg" alt="" data-src-width="292" data-src-height="232" data-src="https://image.jimcdn.com/app/cms/image/transf/none/path/s79204ff9f69421c8/image/i49b036d6a3826f5b/version/1588969230/image.jpg" data-image-id="7881992457"></figure><div><div id="cc-m-textwithimage-12308481457" data-name="text" data-action="text"><p>Anna's 11 years in England, studying and researching with Max, Geoff and Isabel seem to have been among the happiest of her life.</p></div></div><div></div></div><div id="cc-m-12307330957"><div></div></div><div id="cc-m-12308479557"><p>A graceful and talented dancer, Anna married her dance partner, the English acupuncturist Jim MacRitchie. When they moved to Boulder in 1981, she boarded the plane with Max Cade’s blessings and a Mind Mirror in hand.</p><p>Jim later said that Anna’s work with the Mind Mirror immediately “took off like a rocket.” Soon she was teaching corporate CEOs how to become more productive, helping rap groups unblock their creativity in recording studios, and traveling to distant shores like Taiwan to monitor the brainwaves of meditation gurus.</p><p><strong>Researching Masters, Horses, Mothers and Married Couples</strong></p><p>Anna told Geoff that her most exciting teaching trip was to Taiwan, “where I taught in five different locations with translators for different dialects.&nbsp;One seminar was held at the University of Taipei and—the most thrilling of all—was teaching in a Taoist Temple to a group of students and their Master."&nbsp;&nbsp;<span style="font-size: 1rem;">She began by explaining the Mind Mirror pattern to the Taoists and then asked for a volunteer to be connected to the machine.&nbsp;No one moved.&nbsp;Finally, the Master himself volunteered. He showed an excellent State 5 pattern, exactly as she had just described.&nbsp;Then everybody wanted the experience.&nbsp;&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">She realized that the group had needed the Master to validate the machine before they would try it, whereas in the West an excellent pattern instead would give confidence in the Master; that is, the machine would validate the master.</span></p><p>During this same session, the Master’s pattern suddenly disappeared; he seemed to be in a deep trance, with only two straight lines indicated on the Mind Mirror display.&nbsp;Anna asked the Master to “come back,” and he confirmed that he been out of his body.&nbsp;Thus did Anna discover the flatline out-of-body pattern.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p></div><div id="cc-m-12308484557"><div></div></div><div id="cc-m-12308483657"><div><div id="cc-matrix-3523369157"><div id="cc-m-12308484457"><p>In the 1990s, her unique work and sparkling charisma attracted the attention of Jeremy Tarcher, who served on the board of Esalen<img src="@@PLUGINFILE@@/Awakening%20the%20Mind.jpg" alt="Awakening the Mind" width="225" height="338" class="img-responsive atto_image_button_right"> Institute and invited Anna to teach there. Soon he invited her to write a book which became a classic:&nbsp;<em>The High-Performance Mind: Mastering Brainwaves for Insight, Healing and Creativity</em>. In 2003, Tarcher,&nbsp;an imprint of Random House and the literary giant, Penguin-Putnam, published her second book,&nbsp;<em>Awakening the Mind</em>, which also became a classic in the field of mind research.</p><p><img src="@@PLUGINFILE@@/The%20High%20Performance%20Mind.jpg" alt="The High Performance Mind" width="225" height="341" class="img-responsive atto_image_button_left"></p><p>A brilliant teacher and writer, Anna was first and foremost a mind researcher. She hooked up her son, John, to the Mind Mirror when he was just six months old. She wired up horses, which led to a lasting relationship with the healer&nbsp;<a href="https://ttouch.com/" target="_blank" title="https://ttouch.com/">Linda Tellington-Jones</a>, who formed an international&nbsp;educational network for the healers of horses and dogs and has authored many books.</p></div></div></div><div data-display="cms-only"><div></div></div><div><div id="cc-matrix-3523369257"><div id="cc-m-12308484057"><figure><span style="font-size: 1rem;">Anna hooked up women in an Asian factory and discovered that their infants would not breast feed because they were stressed and operating in beta. She taught the women to deepen into delta and connect with their babies in those low, slow frequencies of the instinctual unconscious mind. She hooked up married couples and discovered that at least some of their difficulties related to the husband's thinking in beta and the wife's feeling in theta. She taught them to converse in the Awakened Mind pattern.&nbsp;</span></figure></div></div></div></div><div id="cc-m-12308483557"><p>Having moved to the San Francisco area in 2001 with her four-year-old son, John, Anna lived in the thick of things. She hooked up spiritual leaders including Deepak Chopra and Barbara Marx Hubbard. She said that Barbara Marx Hubbard had the most advanced brainwaves she had ever seen: a sustained Evolved Mind pattern.&nbsp;</p><p><strong>Teaching and Growing&nbsp;at Esalen</strong></p><p>Beginning in the 1980s, Anna traveled three or four times each year, often with John in tow, to Esalen Institute near Big Sur to teach two- and five-day seminars. Her classes of 24 were always full, and there was usually a waiting list. People came from all over the world to learn from Anna and enjoy Esalen's stunning facilities: the organic gardens and delicious meals, steaming cliff-side hot tubs,&nbsp;an oceanside swimming pool, walking trails through ancient forests, and the beautiful, domed meditation sanctuary overlooking the bay.</p><p>When she lived in Berkeley, this writer served as her assistant, traveling cross-country to pack her lumbering van to the ceiling with cases of Mind Mirrors, switchboxes, EEG harnesses and extensions, dozens of ESRs, and boxes of supplies, swapping stories on the winding, mountainous drive along coastal Highway 1 to Big Sur.&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;<span style="font-size: 1rem;">Whether her Esalen seminars were seven or 10 days long, Anna played as hard as she worked, holding court with her students late in the evening on the high, seaside deck of the Big House, where people enjoyed the fresh sea air and watched flocks of birds dip and wheel over the frothy waves of the dark blue Pacific.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">Inside the Big House on the cliffs, which had been founder Michael Murphy's family home, her students applauded when&nbsp;she glided majestically into the bright, spacious training room, clad in beautifully colored and patterned shawls, and they listened intently to every word their master said. Her students hooked each other up then leaned back against large, colorful pillows to meditate off and on all day long and into the evening.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">&nbsp;</span></p><p>Nine people were monitored on the Mind Mirror simultaneously, with the rest of the class monitored on ESRs. This arrangement alternated until everyone received feedback from Anna and her assistant on their brainwave patterns. Her assistant sketched the patterns and managed the volume levels of the music while Anna read her meditations to the group. Her powerful meditations gradually awakening their awareness, often into cosmic consciousness.</p></div><div id="cc-m-12308509057"><div><div id="cc-m-textwithimage-12308509057" data-name="text" data-action="text"><p>Anna's classes at Esalen began at 10 a.m. in the morning, broke for lunch and dinner, and usually continued until 10 or 11 p.m. at night. She was seemingly tireless, even after Multiple Sclerosis took her health during the last 15 years of her life.&nbsp;<span style="font-size: 1rem;">Her students loved her wit and deeply held attention to them and their meditative experiences. Her self-mastery and intuitive grasp of the heart of things deeply touched students of all ages and nationalities.</span></p><p>Anna made people shine, simply by listening respectfully and guiding them to their own insights as they spoke. She was the consummate wise and loving humanistic psychologist and teacher.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><strong>The Anna Wise Protocol</strong></p><p>While at Esalen, many students asked Anna to create a program that would train them in her methods for careers in this work. In 2001, she held her first practitioner training program, which consisted of the Anna Wise Protocol for Awakened Mind brainwave training. The Anna Wise Protocol is still the basis of the&nbsp;Practitioner Training Program&nbsp;taught today by practitioner trainers affiliated with the&nbsp;Institute for the Awakened Mind.</p><p>As the years passed, even as she succumbed to the ravages of Multiple Sclerosis, Anna taught with the energy and verve of the master she was. Seven to 10 students attended each of her practitioner training classes, which she organized into six 4.5-day seminars. Students flew in from many countries to learn from her, each lit with inner excitement that sometimes erupted into chaos in her small teaching areas. "You are all in high beta," she would say sternly. "This is about mastery." You could hear a pin drop in the room.</p><p>A determined and demanding taskmaster, Anna wanted only the best students to take her work out into the world. She gave everything she had and more. <span style="font-size: 1rem;">Current research and a high-tech new Mind Mirror with advanced analytical capabilities have only proved the validity of Max and Anna's research, while furthering it with new understanding of high-frequency gamma waves. The new research has added to the knowledge base two higher-state brainwave patterns: the Superconscious Mind of Gamma Synchrony (Max's State 7) and the gamma-infused University Consciousness pattern (Max's state 8).</span></p><p><strong>Entering the Light</strong></p><p>Determined, feisty, funny, a brilliant teacher and visionary, a humanistic psychologist, Christian and Taoist, Anna put her heart and soul into awakening and enlightening her clients and students.&nbsp;<span style="font-size: 1rem;">She courageously wrote her books, taught at Esalen, and worked with many private clients while battling Multiple Sclerosis for 15 years until her death in March of 2010. She was teaching her sixty-sixth workshop at Esalen, the last before her retirement, when she grew ill and was taken to a hospital in Monterrey, where she passed on a few days later with her son John by her side.</span></p><p>At her memorial service in San Francisco, her former husband Jim MacRitchie quipped that she “died with her boots on,” teaching her beloved work until the very end. No doubt, when she floated through that portal of light for the last time and heard her beautiful celestial choirs, she was met on the other side by Max and Isabel Cade and Geoff Blundell.&nbsp;Jim suggested that, once they were all together again, they would most certainly try to brainwave God.&nbsp;<span style="font-size: 1rem;">But indeed,&nbsp;Anna had been doing that all along, in the form of countless numbers of people who continue to be inspired and changed for the better by her Boddhisattva presence on Earth.&nbsp;</span></p><p><em>Written by Anna's student, Judith Pennington, May 2020</em></p></div></div></div><br><p></p>

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