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Positive Cycology: Epic Adventures and Peak Experiences
Positive Cycology
Positive Cycology is an exploration of cycling and psychology concepts to positively enrich your riding and living experience. Enjoy!
Epic Adventures and Peak Experiences
Epic adventures are transformative learning experiences that expand your capabilities, deepen your self-knowledge, and strengthen your character.
Peak experiences are exhilarating, elevating experiences that generate an advanced form of perceiving reality and are magical in their effect.
Read on to learn more about epic adventures and peak experiences. Questions are at the end of this page to help you apply these positive cycology concepts to your own life.
Epic adventures
Epic adventures are heroic, involving daring or extreme measures - such as cycling 300 miles in four consecutive days. Epic adventures are relative to the person undertaking them. 300 miles in four days may be nothing to a professional rider on the Tour de France, but to the average person, this is an epic adventure we all celebrate.
Epic adventures stretch the perception of your strengths, vulnerability, and potential. Epic adventures can be physical, mental, and emotional challenges such as climbing Mount Everest or recovering from addiction. In each case, you are challenged to confront a perceived weakness and the victories are heroic. You must find your strengths, overcome your vulnerabilities, and achieve your full potential. If you are present and aware, you are gaining not only physical, but mental and emotional self-knowledge along the way.
Epic adventures are experiential. Experiential learning teaches you on a level like no other. You can be told how scary it is to jump of the high dive or how bad it is going to hurt when you close that cycling gap, but there is no way you are really going to know until actually do it. Once you have experienced the dive or closing the gap, you will know with all of your being. Your mind, your body, and your emotions. You will know how scary it was to free fall and feel break of the water or how your lungs ached and legs began to shake as you caught the next wheel.
Epic adventures can be understood as Experience + Process = Inspired Change. A challenging experience is the learning lab. Undertaking a task bigger than yourself will provide the environment for you to test and explore your capabilities. Reflecting upon your experience is the process of bringing to your consciousness all the lessons you learned subconsciously. You need to acknowledge and absorb all the growth and things you just did. Taking inventory of how you handled challenges, how you excelled, how your emotions ranged, and how you responded with or without mental toughness is the process of becoming self-aware. Inculcating those lessons into who you are expands your self-concept and leads you to inspired change.
Epic adventures offer experiential knowledge of your self-efficacy. Your confidence grows as you gain trust in yourself. This strengthened sense of self-efficacy leads to the belief that you can handle challenges and influence outcomes. Your sense of self-determination grows, moving from things happening to you, to you overcoming things. You feel less of a victim and more in charge of your own destiny.
Epic adventures teach you about yourself. Experience accompanied by self-refection deepens your self-understanding and puts your character in focus. Your self-identity begins to manifest, becoming stronger, more present and powerful. Researcher, Dr. Stacy Tooru Taniguchi, adopted the chemistry term fractional sublimation and applied it to the psychological process that occurs in epic adventures. Fractional sublimation as he explains is the process of removing bit by bit our personal facades, exposing parts of who we are, good or bad, so that we can deal with them. Personal facades protect, limit, and fool us. Epic adventures can be a purifying experience that help us become and grow our into true selves.
Epic adventures set the stage to learn profound lessons about values, incentives, and purpose. A healthy mix of challenge (physical and mental), achievement, reflection, and natural beauty contributes to the purifying process that has the power to illuminate perspectives, transform behaviors, and provide greater meaning and direction. An epic adventure can strip back comfort and familiarity to push you to overcome challenges and ultimately thrive. This same knowledge can then be applied to all areas of life, both personally and professionally.
Peak Experiences
According to psychologist Abraham Maslow, who coined the term, a peak experience is an altered state of consciousness characterized by euphoria, and is often achieved by self-actualizing individuals. To be self-actualized means to be all that you can be. Peak experiences are rare and can range from simple activities to intense events. It is not about what you are doing, but the ecstatic, blissful feeling you experience while doing it.
Due to the nature and characteristics of self-actualized individuals, peak experiences often occur in their lives with their ability to perceive, accept, understand, and enjoy the journey of life.
Peak experiences involve a state of flow. Flow is a subjective conscious process that happens internally, peak experiences are describing an event that has occurred to someone who was functioning at optimal levels. Peak experiences are the actual outcome of an external occurrence, while flow is an internal mental process that may or may not precede a peak experience. Loosing yourself in the flow of your scientific study is not the same as the peak experience as discovering the cure. Loosing yourself in the flow of spinning your bike gears is not the same as the peak experience of winning the final stage and the race.
Most peak experiences occur during athletic, artistic, religious, or nature experiences. They can also occur during intimate moments with friends or family. Peak experiences can be thought of as the most wonderful experience of our lives. They can arise out of being in love, listening to music, helping another in need, or feeling deeply inspired by art or action. A peak experience may be a hard won victory, the birth of a child, or a serene sunrise that speaks to your soul.
Three characteristics of Peak Experiences:
1. Fulfillment- intrinsically rewarding positive emotions
2. Significance- increased personal awareness and understanding
3. Spiritual- a sense of feeling oneness with the world
Peak experiences leave you seeing yourself and the world in a new way. You see yourself more positively, life is more meaningful and worthwhile. Peak experiences cause you to seek more of them, to repeat the euphoria which drives you to quest for positive growth and maximize your potential. Self-actualization, according to Maslow, is the true goal of human existence.
Epic Adventures and You
1. What is an example of an epic adventure to you?
2. What epic adventures have you undertaken?
3. What did you discover about yourself?
4. How has the Tour de Virginia been an epic adventure?
5. What have you learned about yourself mentally, physically, and emotionally on the Tour?
Peak Experiences and You
1. Have you ever had a peak experience? When? What was happening?
2. Describe your sense of fulfillment, significance, and spirituality.
3. What did you learn from that peak experience? How did it change your life?
4. Describe different examples of flow and peak experience in your life.
5. How do peak experiences help inform or guide us to the true goal of human existence?