The growth and success of PF’s Leadership / Step-Down Programming has led us to think critically about its strengthening. We believe leaders must always be challenged to keep growing, and that we often grow most when we are uncomfortable.

Our PF Leadership participants are invited to join an annual travel experience. As many of our families know, I was a wilderness therapist in my 20’s. Wilderness and experiential work draws from Maslow’s concept of Peak Experiences.

At root, Peak Experiences are the moments that we connect with the experience of being acutely, vitally alive and connected to each other and the world around us. These are the moments when we are gasping for mountain air after a climb we didn’t believe we could achieve. Or the moments we see or experience something so deeply breathtaking or sacred we are speechless. Always, these moments remind us we are connected, we are powerful and we are alive.

For those of us in recovery, peak experiences are the resuscitation of a life barely lived. Many among us behaved like the walking dead, so anesthetized to pain and joy. Research on peak experience asks: what is the anecdote to a life so greatly under-lived? How do we reclaim our vitality? How do we re-discover our thirsts and our passions? Research teaches that peak experiences integrate to inform our paths forward, our perspective and our experience of vitality. Peak experiences deepen our connections to each other and to a ‘moment in time.’ They feed, sustain and add meaning to our lives.