Scientific Research on the use of the Pure Awareness Techniques
for the Reduction of Anxiety

GLT is sponsoring a scientific study on the use of the Pure Awareness Techniques for the reduction of anxiety. The study is being conducted at the University of Texas – Austin at the Laboratory for the Study of Anxiety Disorders under the direction of Dr. Michael Telch, one of the world’s leading anxiety researchers. Dr. Telch has been studying anxiety disorders for the past 25 years.

The study will involve rigorous recruiting, screening and testing to qualify the participants.  They will all be people with significant measureable levels of anxiety. The participants will go through program in which they will receive five sessions in small groups over a period of 5 weeks. They will be guided through the appropriate Pure Awareness Techniques to resolve anxious feelings and they will learn how to do the techniques on their own so that they can continue to do them outside the training classes.

The small group sessions will be lead by Celeste Hamman who is a Human Software Engineer with six years of experience in working with people using the Pure Awareness Techniques. Fortunately Celeste lives in Austin and is delighted to be providing the training sessions for the study.

The size of the study has been designed so that the resulting number of people completing the study will be statistically significant. There will be an additional group who will receive a separate kind of intervention that has a known effect on anxiety. This alternate intervention has been used extensively in other studies. By having this intervention along side the use of the Pure Awareness Techniques the difference between a known result and the effect from the use of the Pure Awareness Techniques can be quantified.

The study design involves extensive testing before during and after the training sessions. The testing is designed to be able to quantify just how much the use of the Pure Awareness Techniques can reduce anxiety.

We have initiated this study for several reasons. First and foremost we have been inspired by the dramatic reductions in anxiety that we have seen over the years from the use of the Pure Awareness Techniques. So many clients and seminar participants have reported that anxious feelings and anxiety states have simple vanished after using the Pure Awareness Techniques to resolve the underlying fears at the foundation of the anxiety.

Tom Stone’s book, Vaporize Your Anxiety without Drugs of Therapy explains how to use the Pure Awareness Techniques to resolve these underlying fears. Tom explains in the book that a new way to look at anxiety is to see it as a condition in which the anxious person is “dancing around the outer edges of the energy field of the underlying fear” without the knowledge or skill of how to resolve this fear.

The Pure Awareness Techniques are truly new and extraordinary. They are experiential techniques that allow for the rapid and thorough resolution of emotions. Emotions are often thought of as unwanted experiences that we want to get rid of. Most therapies of anxiety use techniques of disassociation, gradual desensitization, intellectual understanding and of course medications to numb the person to the fearful feelings. All of these techniques can be useful in helping reduce the intensity of anxiety but they are all based on the idea that the anxious feelings are something to be gotten rid of.

Human Software Engineering (HSE) is the larger field of which the Pure Awareness Techniques are a part.  HSE takes an entirely different approach then conventional therapies do for treating anxiety. HSE and the use of the Pure Awareness Techniques are based on a different basic principle. They are based on the idea that anxiety comes from the inability to complete and resolve the underlying fears that are the real cause of anxiety.  HSE asserts that anxiety is caused by the loss of the experience of wholeness.

The loss of wholeness is caused by the inability to complete and resolve the experience of the emotions of fear. Rather than suppress the symptoms or anxious feelings, using the Pure Awareness Techniques fulfills the purpose of the feeling’s presence in the body so that the body doesn’t have to produce the energy of the fear any more.

Rather than get rid of the emotion, which doesn’t work very well because the body is persistent in its insistence of bringing us the experience of the fear until the underlying basis of the fear is resolved, the Pure Awareness Techniques completely resolve the fear so that the body stops producing it. This returns the person to the experience of wholeness and a sense of inner peace. The HSE approach is to create a state in which the fear at the basis of the anxiety simply no longer exists because the reason that it was there in the first place is fulfilled. In a state of wholeness, anxiety just isn’t present.

Once this study is completed, assuming that it verifies and quantifies the excellent results that we have been seeing with seminar participants and clients, Tom will be updating the Vaporize Your Anxiety with Drugs or Therapy book with the results of the study.

Another important reason for doing this study is that Great Life Technologies has found articles on the internet that indicate that HMO’s (Health Maintenance Organizations) in analyzing their own costs have discovered that members with anxiety cost them on average about $2,000 more per year to care for than non-anxiety members.  Great Life Technologies intends to provide the Vaporize Your Anxiety program to HMO’s and the research study, if again it indicates that the Pure Awareness Techniques substantially reduce anxiety, will provide a compelling basis of HMO’s to try out the program with members with anxiety and track the results to see if indeed the participants with reduced anxiety have a resulting lowered cost of care.

In addition, this study will be the first to one to quantify the effectiveness of the use of the Pure Awareness Techniques. We also intend to do a similar study on the use of the Pure Awareness Techniques for reducing PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder).

The study at UT-Austin is now underway. The recruiting of study participants is beginning and the training sessions with the Pure Awareness Techniques will begin in July 2009. Results of the study are expected in the fall of 2009. Follow up will be done three months after the study is completed to see how well the results of the use of the Pure Awareness Techniques is lasting. An article about the results will be published in a major medical journal once the study is completed assuming that the results are significant.

We will update this web page with news about the study as it becomes available. Please join the Great Life Technologies newsletter email list to insure that you get news about this and other events and activities of Great Life Technologies.