Sarah wasn’t expecting to experience paralysis at 7 am on a weekday during a meditation at her home.
But in August, while listening to “The Gateway Tapes”—a set of guided meditations intended to help people reach new planes of consciousness—she says her limbs froze.
Sarah, who is in her early thirties and didn’t want her real name used due to privacy concerns, says the tapes—which she had been listening to on and off for months—took her on a roller-coaster journey of out-of-body experiences. “I was in and out of time and space,” she says. It felt like a bad trip, she says, despite the fact she was sober.
She recalls a subsequent three-week period of disorienting instability that veered from feelings of intense spiritual connection to fears that she may never again relate with others. Looking back, she is relieved she was not left “in a kind of a spiritual psychosis,” but she sees the events as part of an ultimately positive “awakening” process.
Sarah is not the only one to report baffling and petrifying experiences thanks to the Gateway Process, which has been around for over 50 years and has exploded in popularity since the pandemic. But, like many others, she also credits it with helping her calm her mind and make transformative life changes.
Developed by radio broadcasting executive Robert Monroe, the Gateway Process claims to be “a voyage of self-discovery” that can help people go “farther, deeper and faster into different dimensions of consciousness.” Monroe founded the Monroe Institute in 1971 in Faber, Virginia. Dubbed an American “Hogwarts” by one consciousness content creator, the facility claims to help coax people out of their bodies via in-person and virtual retreats, and even Spotify playlists, by way of self-hypnosis style exercises powered by “binaural beats”—sounds attuned to different frequencies which play in each headphone ear. Proponents claim binaural beats balance the two sides of the brain and boost wellness. And while there is still an absence of scientific evidence to support the institute’s methods, that hasn’t stopped the military from taking an interest in Monroe’s mysterious courses which also include manifestation and “remote viewing”—a form of clairvoyance in which one leaves the body to investigate the real world using only the mind.
Since 2022, some 12,500 people, including military service people, psychonauts, and meditators, have joined online and in-person “Gateway Voyage” programs. That’s a 35 percent increase in participants over the pre-pandemic period of 2016 to 2019. In 2025, there were 80 in-person retreats with 20 participants each, according to the institute. “For the first time in our history, we have reached the absolute maximum capacity of our campus retreats this year,” says Paul Citarella, the Monroe Institute’s executive vice president. In-person retreats cost $2,695 while virtual ones are $1,150. The growing demand has prompted the institute to host retreats beyond just Virginia at other locations across the US, as well as in Romania, Italy, Switzerland, and Greece. The organization’s Expand app has been installed 386,000 times since its July 2021 launch, company data shows.
In June, the institute announced it is undertaking what it calls “the world’s first higher states of consciousness study” with neurofeedback company Neuphoria, which claims that the research could help people become “among the first humans in history to map, master, and return to altered states—on demand, with data.” Some 333 Gateway Voyage graduates have signed up and will soon spend four weeks tracking their brain state data while listening to the meditations, paying $897 a piece.