Into the Gateway of Wonder
Gay Hendricks and His Passion for Consciousness
“Wonder, oh my gosh, wonder… I could go on for another two hours about wonder. It's your gateway, your portal to universal creativity. Because the moment you say, hmm, what do I really need to know? Hmm, what do I want to know more than anything else? What do I want to experience more than anything else? Once you start asking those big questions… literally the sky's the limit.” — Gay Hendricks
It all happened in an instant.
“I need to get out of here!” says Gay Hendricks to one in particular as he slams the door to his home.
He has just had yet another argument with his girlfriend and is fuming as he starts off down the country road where he lives. As he continues his walk, he steps into a frozen puddle of ice. The only problem is that it’s covered — entirely — by the recent snowfall.
Wham.
Before he realizes what’s happening, Hendricks’s feet shoot out from under him, and he lands first on his back… and then on his head, which slams against the ground.
But he doesn’t knock himself out. He just knocks himself out of his normal state of consciousness. In just an instant, everything seems to look different.
His head throbbing, sprawled in the snow, he has an epiphany.
“I can’t live this way anymore,” he thinks. His head hurts, but his thoughts are clear. For 24 years, he realizes, he’s been fundamentally passive — existing, not living. Lying there now he somehow grasps on a more visceral level than before that change begins with a conscious decision only he can make. For the first time in his life, he doesn’t just think he has the power within him to transform his life. He feels it.
This moment of clarity marked a turning point for Gay Hendricks, Ph.D., a distinguished psychologist, author, and educator whose expansive career has been devoted to the exploration of personal growth, relationship dynamics, and the integration of body-mind therapies.
He is the author of an impressive roster of 51 books, including The Big Leap, Conscious Loving, and most recently, Your Big Leap Year. Alongside Katie, his partner in life and work for over four decades, Hendricks is known for his transformative seminars and for changing lives coaching others and training others to do the same. Together, they strive toward a singular goal: fostering a more conscious way of living and loving across the globe.
He is also one of my heroes.
I first read Hendricks’s book, The Big Leap, over a decade ago. At the time, I was drifting through my mid-twenties, feeling lost and frustrated with my then-life trajectory. The Big Leap changed all that for me. It helped me begin the long process of figuring out the direction I wanted to take. Since then, I’ve followed Hendricks’s career closely, and he’s always struck me as one of the most passionate people in a field of already extremely passionate people.
So I was thrilled when he agreed to speak to me and share what led him to a life of passion — including those early experiences, like the day he slipped on invisible ice.
“I had this illuminating experience that was like being able to see down through all the layers of myself,” Hendricks says as he reflects on that watershed moment. “There was anger there and sadness and fear… things I’d never seen before. It was like the lights went on in the room.”
Before that day, he says, he’d dug himself into what seemed like an inescapable abyss. He was over 100 pounds overweight, stuck in a toxic relationship, had a stressful job he hated, smoked two or three packs of cigarettes a day, and had just $30 left in his bank account to boot. He was barely surviving, let alone thriving.
“[But in that moment] I could see what I call pure consciousness surrounding everything in me,” he says. “It was like this shimmering field of light that was always there.”
This realization struck him with the force of a revelation: to be conscious — to truly see and feel the essence of existence — is the most fundamental and important gift that we possess as humans.
That seeing came with a secondary benefit — passion — as he thought about the many implications of this new “seeing.” And he’s still on fire about it nearly a half century later.
“Think about this,” he says, his eyes lighting up. “There are roughly nine million species on our planet. But you and I are the only ones that can have a conversation about what we’re doing.” Unlike the rest, we aren’t bound to run on autopilot. As humans, we have the unique capacity to make deliberate decisions that shape our destinies.
Yet recognizing our consciousness is merely the first step. The real magic, Hendricks insists, lies in our ability to become fully aware of this consciousness and harness it as a foundation for crafting our lives — liberating us from the constraints of past conditioning.
He describes this transformative process as “freedom from the known,” and helping others gain the power to navigate their paths and author their own narratives is how he’s spent the vast majority of his waking energy since.
But it had to start with himself. Before he got up from the snow, he made a vow to himself.
“I made a commitment and I think it saved my life. I was going to do whatever it takes,” Hendricks says, recounting that time.
He started by making small changes, like tweaking his diet. He swapped out his cheeseburger and milkshake lunches for fruits and vegetables. A month into his new lifestyle, Hendricks had lost a lot of weight and felt healthier mentally and physically than ever before. One conscious choice then led to another opportunity for one.
Until it didn’t. Hendricks’s first personal encounter with what he would later define as the “Upper Limit Problem” came after a transformational period of self-care. Before long, he found himself undermining his progress by impulsively indulging in a massive ice-cream sundae. This lapse not only led to a massive stomachache but also to another profound realization.
“I felt great for 30 days. And then I ruined that,” he reflects. Why? I ask him, and though I have a hunch about the answer having read his books, the starkness of his response wakes me up as I furiously race to figure out how it may be true for me too. He realized, he tells me, that he was allergic to feeling good.
This moment of clarity propelled Hendricks deeper into exploring human consciousness, which eventually resulted in him going to Stanford University, where he received a PhD in Counseling Psychology. He wanted to learn more about himself and what he calls “the magic of consciousness.”
Since then, he has devoted his career to helping others break through limiting beliefs and take control of their lives through what he calls conscious living. So, when did his focus shift from applying these insights to his own life to also helping others? Another watershed, of course — part of being passionate about consciousness is that you’re acutely aware of potential transformational turning points.
“It came from one moment,” he says. While completing his master's degree, he volunteered at a counseling center, where he encountered a junior high student whose life was severely affected by an overwhelming fear of snakes.
“I worked with him for two or three sessions and we cleared up his fear of snakes,” he says. Hendricks helped the student realize that his fear was a limiting belief — and that he had the power to change it.
“It was as close to a miracle as I’d ever seen,” Hendricks says. “Just by having a couple of hours conversation, you could clear up some problem that’s been there all your life, you know? It sounds like a simple thing, a fear of snakes, but in a way it’s a template for almost every other kind of human condition.”
Hendricks’s passion continued to deepen. He began to understand that we all have the tendency to get caught up in limiting stories — stories that keep repeating themselves over and over until we take the leap and do something about it. And he wanted to be the one to help change that.
“Once I saw the look on someone’s face when they’ve shed an old limiting belief… oh wow.” He pauses and I see the look of wonder in his eyes. “I promise you, once you’ve seen that, you’re going to want to be around a lot more of that.” Hendricks knew at that moment that he wanted to be able to do that with anybody, for any reason — not just snakes.
There’s no question that Hendricks succeeded in his mission. In his now five-decades long career, Hendricks has transformed tens of thousands of lives — including my own.
Now almost 80, Hendricks says “he’s just getting started.”
Hendricks says it’s wonder that guides him. Wonder about the nature of consciousness and the power to take control of our lives.
“Wonder, oh my gosh… wonder,” Hendricks says as his smile widens. “I could go on for another two hours about wonder. It’s your gateway, your portal to universal creativity.”
“Because the moment you start asking yourself those big questions… the sky’s the limit.”
Takeaways
Here is one big thing I learned this week about passion, one exercise you can do to stoke your own inner fire, and one aspect of Hendricks’s intense enthusiasm that rubbed off on me — and that I now want to learn more about, too!
One Lesson: An Epiphany is Just the Beginning
Hendricks repeatedly emphasized during our conversation that, while his snowy fall set his new life in motion, it would have been easy to revert to his former ways. What made the difference? A deliberate commitment to embody his perspective in the life he aspired to lead. And it didn’t happen overnight. It took years of dedicated effort to reach a state where he genuinely felt he was leading the life he desired.
Hendricks’s story is a reminder that choosing to follow a passion is just the first step. The next and often more challenging task is the diligent effort required to fully integrate this new path into our lives.
One Exercise: Identify Your “Wonder Question”
In Your Big Leap Year, Hendricks puts forth the idea of a “wonder question” as a tool for personal growth and a way to help us shift from a problem-focused mindset to one of curiosity and possibility. The idea is to help us explore our potential by asking ourselves what could happen if we transcended our current limitations or fears. Try it: transform the self-limiting thought "Why can't I achieve my goals?" into a wonder question like "What steps can I take today that will bring me closer to my goals?"
One Curiosity: Upper Limit Problems
I first encountered the term Upper Limit Problem, which Hendricks defines as our natural inclination to bump up against limits in order to grow, when I read The Big Leap over a decade ago. Becoming conscious of the various ways I was essentially holding myself back helped me make big leaps in my personal growth. But as every wise person comes to realize, we are never done growing. My recent conversation with Hendricks has made me wonder: what limits am I currently bumping up against? Time to dig deep and embrace the work ahead.