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♪
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Well, to me, a sound is something
that we definitely take for granted.
♪
All kinds of sounds that we appreciate, music,
sound of the waves of the ocean,
babies, children,
all kinds of sounds that can bring joy to you.
Some sounds can bring sadness.
Sound can evoke emotions, memories,
or a state of being.
And it's a vehicle for me for actions,
and to get from one state of mind maybe to another.
So, for example, if I'm trying to go work out,
I need a bit more high intensity, a bit more energy.
I might get a higher beat, beat-per-minute type of song.
And then, if I'm trying to go to bed,
and I'd like to calm down, relax, bring myself down
to a more calmed frame of mind,
I might use something like
soothing wind sounds or rain.
Sound, for me, is most related to music.
I think all sounds can be a music rhythm
to it, in a way.
Sound to me, I guess, is kind of everywhere.
I don't know, energy waves.
♪
Sound has always been there.
It's how I can tell you the timeline of my life,
based on the music I was listening to.
So, life presents challenges.
There's ups, there's downs,
but what I noticed is sound
was always there for me.
Think about it.
Why do we spend money on music?
Why do we go to concerts?
Why do we travel to go see a grave site, or a house
of a performer that passed away
that we really liked?
It's because their music impacts us, it touches us.
We connect with it.
For example, Elvis Presley,
has been deceased for over 40 years.
He sold over a billion records,
and 600,000 people
visit Graceland annually.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,
last year, over half a million people
came from all over the world
to see it.
So, sound can be used for good,
but it can also be used as a weapon.
If you recall
the invasion of Panama,
the US really wanted to oust Manuel Noriega,
and he locked himself up in this building.
So what did the US do to get him out?
They set up these giant speakers
and blasted heavy metal music
at the building,
and they kept blasting
until he couldn't take it anymore
and finally came out of the building
and surrendered.
So, while sound can be used for good
and as a weapon,
I have used sound to find peace.
So, years ago I got a singing bowl,
and I would play it through really tough times.
And what I realized is
when I was playing my singing bowl,
I wasn't thinking about my problems.
I was just present with the sound.
And then I started working with clients,
and I noticed that they had very similar experiences.
So I decided to investigate why sound
impacts us the way it does
and how it works.
- Good morning, welcome. - Nice to see you, thank you.
- Thanks for havin' us. - No, it's good to have you.
Oh, absolutely, no, no.
- I'm excited. - I'm really excited.
The organ is more than 2,000 years old,
and so, for the great bulk of its history,
organs have had to have been tuned by ear.
The psychology of music
is inseparable from our own, from our being.
Music goes way back.
Music goes way back into prehistory,
and, well, it has to do with language,
which, of course, music is language,
and that's one of the most
important things about being human.
Not just speaking, of course,
but certainly there was music
at the very dawn of civilization.
I've been an organ builder here at Taylor and Boody
for 30 years.
It's a very interesting job to have.
We build expensive things,
which go, often, to small churches.
And so, our product,
which is at a very high level,
very carefully built,
goes to small communities
of people who come on Sunday to hear the organ.
And so, we hope that as a company, as an industry,
we're providing something that enriches people's lives,
and enriches the community as a whole.
♪
I once heard an interesting quote.
Somebody said that "the organ is the most
powerful thing made by human beings that doesn't explode."
There's a...
Well, we go back to the psychology of sound.
An instrument that's this large,
even when it's being played quietly,
has a great impact emotionally.
♪
Another interesting thing about the organ as an instrument
is that the pressure, the wind pressure,
that the organ uses to play...
On average, it varies...
Is about the same that our lungs produce when we sing.
Sound, super important.
That's it, in a nutshell!
♪
My name is John Adams.
Being a little kid in Cleveland growing up,
when they had real seats at a ballgame,
wood and metal, not plastic,
every kid was a seat banger.
So, your hands were too small to make a lot of noise,
so you'd grab the seat next to you
and just slam it down,
and everybody would be doing that in the park in unison.
So, one day sitting out in the bleachers,
where there's no seats to bang,
and being a drummer,
I thought, "Well, I'll bring a drum down."
♪
Making noise with a drum, that's what I do.
I send out good vibrations
to the Cleveland Indians
and join everybody together in sound.
Every now and then, you notice, well,
everybody starts clapping in unison.
♪
And that's what it's about,
so I'm sending out the vibrations for them
to clap in unison,
and everybody's like one in the ballpark.
It's a great feeling.
Sound has been used throughout the ages
to elicit a certain kind of feeling.
So, whether it's a sporting event,
or ceremonial purposes,
or even entertainment,
sound has the power to bring us together.
Sound and vibration induce a certain kind of feeling.
It brings us to a certain kind of state.
So, if it's having that kind of impact on us as humans,
what is it doing to the animal kingdom?
We went to Thailand to find out.
♪
The focus with Patara Elephant Farm
is to work on elephant conservation.
One of that.
We bring them here, rescue, adopt.
And then, we help them in the best way we can
with all kind of knowledge and technology available
to make them healthy.
And when I say applying knowledge and technologies,
it doesn't have to be something very modernized,
something that's only available in the Western countries,
but we're talking about the knowledge of sound therapy
and treatment by the singing bowls.
And it's very useful
for all kinds of healthcare processes,
activities that we do with elephants...
Including small things, like skin care, eye checks,
foot care, foot bath techniques,
even helps us to make the elephant relax
so that we can draw blood for lab tests
in a very friendly and easy way
with less stress for the elephant.
Not even simple things, but also in major operations,
elephants need to be, for example,
very heavy IV treatment,
which is kind of long.
We're talking about eight hours, ten hours a day process,
so, the elephant, many of them kind of
not happy with that.
The singing bowl helps the treatments
be conducted in a much more relaxing condition,
and it's helped us from using heavy chemicals
and some of the stressful
restraint systems.
Actually, I realized that being me
and being responsible for these numbers of elephants
and the people involved, I actually...
With or without myself noticing...
Create a lot of stress,
so I do have someone do singing bowl for me
for relaxation and help me to go
into the deep sleep
as much as I can.
Thank you so much.
♪
I have been playing the singing bowls
for at least a dozen years, I think more like 14.
So, I played them kind of just for my own
relaxation and my own enjoyment for a long time,
and then I started working with people
and putting the bowls on the body,
and I took the classes for that.
But then, when I went to Thailand,
which was January of 2017,
I was fascinated by the elephants,
and I went to the elephant farm,
and I just... when I came home,
I just wanted to work with elephants.
But I live in Illinois,
and there are no elephants here, except for in the zoo,
but we have a ton of horses.
Now, you can't come too close,
- sweetheart. - Yup.
Can you see it?
What is that, Precision?
Hi, baby.
What do you think?
I know!
Just enjoy it, yeah.
Lip's starting to droop a little bit.
Yeah.
See, his head's gotten lower now.
He had it up high, I think he was watching.
- Look at his eyes. - Yup.
You are startin' to...
Yeah, you are.
See, his eyes are closed.
Yup.
There you go, nice breath.
For a creature... how much did you say they weigh approximately?
- How much do horses weigh? - 1,200...
I think Ben's about 1,300.
- Yeah. - 1,200, 1,300 pounds
for a bowl this size,
right, to have that kind of impact
on a creature of that weight,
I mean, that's incredible.
♪
Some of my favorite sounds, the ocean,
dogs barking,
and birds chirping, no question.
Some of my favorite sounds are waterfalls,
thunderstorms,
tree frogs, and the ocean, yeah.
In the fall,
when the leaves are falling,
and the sound
when the wind blows through the trees,
through those leaves,
and you just hear this kind of
subtle little sounds.
I just like being able to get away from
the sound of the city,
and then it feels like you can be alone
because then, any time you spend
a significant amount of time in nature,
you just sort of are able to
feel connected with nature.
I feel like it's a natural input for
the human brain.
The thing that I am really concerned about, though,
is sounds in nature,
and I think that,
that hopefully
we'll protect those sounds
because I don't think there's anything purer than the sounds
that we witness in the woods,
or in canyons,
or in streams, and whatnot.
♪
I use sound and vibration in my work in many ways,
and it's kind of come to me organically.
My first experience was,
was hearing the, what we call, the music of the mountains,
music of the trees, up at about 10,000 feet here
on a winter solstice many years ago.
And I played my trumpet for an hour or two,
and I listened, then, to the silence
'cause I got too cold to play my trumpet.
And then from about ten minutes later,
from around the mountain,
came this angelic sound, orchestral sound,
that blew my mind.
And years later,
someone brought me a machine
that seemed to allow that sound to come right out of a plant.
And I'm like, "Oh, I've heard this before."
This is actually the sound of nature, and somehow
someone invented this machine
that was able to do that.
And so in my work,
I use sound,
number one, I think to relax myself
and to relax people, to center myself.
I use it in the sense of being able to identify life force,
and its vibratory pattern
associated with different plants.
Generally speaking, for the concerts,
we use machines, or multiple machines.
And the machine is able to measure the electrical output
of the needle, or the leaf, or the flower,
and then also of the root,
and then it compares it and assigns a MIDI value,
and then the synthesizer,
and then you're able to pick the voice.
Sometimes the plant or the machine
picks the voice for you, and you can't change it.
So this is the Music of the Plants
machine from Damanhur.
It's the original machine.
It has a built-in MIDI and synthesizer.
It has 128 different sounds to it.
This is the battery to power it,
and this is the speaker.
And then, out of this port comes
the wires that go to the leaf or needles of the plant,
and then also the roots.
And here, in the ground, you can't really see it,
is the grounding one, and then right here
is the one, the green one, that goes to the plant leaves,
or needles in this case, it's a juniper.
♪
And the juniper's playing a string synthesizer right now.
♪
I think this machine allows the plants
to offer an expression through their electrical voltage.
In this work with doing music with nature,
I call it nature fusion
because it's inviting nature to play with us,
and I think it's actually really the other way around.
Nature's actually inviting us.
It's already playing, most of us cannot hear it.
Most of us don't even know the secret
of being able to hear that music up there,
and here it is, the secret is listen to the silence.
You might say, "Well, what do you mean?
There's nothing to listen to."
Try it, try it, and if it gets too much,
then stop, make some sound.
On that experience, I kinda dared myself,
"How long can I listen to this silence?"
And then I actually liked it.
We're not just vibration.
We're vibration in space.
And what vibration can do
is point to like,
"Pay attention to the space."
Pay attention to that space,
not just the vibration.
Vibration can take you right home to the space.
It's really important, and you can bring that into
other aspects of your life.
And so, vibration can show us the space.
♪
Everything has sound.
That picture is a picture of sound, light, and vibration.
You can feel the sound going out, right?
And then it shakes, vibration, and then there's light,
- right? - Mm-hmm.
And there's, we say,
the way that energy emerges from the void
is through those three things.
And through sound, light, and vibration,
everything emerges.
So, this is our aura machine right here,
called Auracom, and as you can see,
on the front of it there are some fingerprints,
metal fingerprints.
Basically, it's a biofeedback machine.
I don't know if you've ever heard of biofeedback.
I've heard of it, but why don't you tell us more about it.
So basically, the Earth...
I always like to start with the Earth
when I explain about how biofeedback works.
The Earth has a magnetic field around it.
If it didn't have a magnetic field around it
that went like this,
it wouldn't just suspend itself in space, right?
And in the same way, our bodies,
within three feet of our space, we also have a magnetic field,
or an energetic field around our bodies.
So, that energetic field
actually can be felt through heat.
There are different signals from the body
that kind of interpret that field for us.
So biofeedback is using those signals
that are especially evident through the hands and the feet
in order to kind of draw a picture
of what the field looks like around us.
Well, we brought someone with us.
She's been on our crew and traveling with us.
Her name's Donna Williams,
and she has volunteered today
if that's okay to have her photographed, so.
- Absolutely, yeah. - Okay, is this a good time
- to bring her in? - That would be
the perfect time to bring her in.
- Yeah. - All right.
So, Donna, come on in and join us.
Are you ready to have your photo taken?
- I am! - Are you ready to... okay.
You're gonna place your hands on the biofeedback hand prints,
- and the machine will read... - Okay.
And interpret through biofeedback
and then demonstrate to us in color.
All right, and closing your eyes.
♪
There you go.
You can open your eyes.
- There's your aura. - Wow.
How do you feel seeing that?
I always love watching people's reactions
when they first see their aura.
Some people are like,
"I thought that's what it would look like,"
and some people are like, "What?"
Those are my favorite colors, so that's great.
Yeah, so that's not uncommon that a lot of times
people see their auras and they'll be like,
"Those are my favorite colors."
- Those are what those are. - Yeah, yeah.
Some of my favorite.
So, are you familiar with chakras?
- A bit, yes. - A little bit? Yeah.
So just like I explained that there's a magnetic field
around your body,
you can break that down into what we call chakras.
They're like generators, energy centers, in the body.
So, you have this kind of generator around your body
that's interacting with your body,
and then each chakra's like a specific kind of generator.
You can kind of see this picture here.
That's why I like, I like this picture
'cause it illustrates kind of the colors
and where the chakras are located,
going from your tailbone, the base of your spine,
all the way to the top of your head.
In actuality, there are more chakras
than are illustrated here,
but these are the ones that are famous,
that everyone knows,
according mostly to Indian yogic tradition...
And that's the energy moving through,
that line that's connecting them...
That's right, it's the energy moving through.
And so, it goes all the way from your first chakra,
which is about survival,
through pleasure, power,
your heart, your voice,
your third eye... clarity...
All the way to inspiration.
Okay, so I know looking at this, right side, left side,
and the green is appearing on the left side,
which I know is going to the nurturing aspect.
So I know that primarily,
you're emotional about, let's say,
nurturing-oriented things.
It means that when you're working,
you're probably... Because when people work,
they primarily, probably tend to the more masculine traits...
But when you're talking about relationship,
things you're passionate about,
love, you know,
the more feminine aspects of life,
that's when the like "Ah!"
the fire comes through.
Does it make sense?
Sound and vibration seem to impact the animal kingdom.
We also saw that vibration from plants
can be translated into music.
And our own vibration, our own energy field,
can be captured via photograph,
and it looks like this beautiful array of colors around the body.
Yolessa Lawrince from the Sedona Healing Arts Center
said that everything has sound.
So if sound is so important in our world,
what would happen if we woke up
and lost it?
I was tired, so I laid down to take a nap.
I woke up, I was totally, totally deaf.
But to go from hearing poorly
to nothing is a dramatic drop
in your senses.
Sound and communication go hand in hand.
People who can't hear, oftentimes, become isolated.
I often tell parents, or ask my patients, actually,
"Are you sitting at the Thanksgiving table
just nodding your head and going along with the conversation,
or missing the jokes that are being said?"
And you don't wanna look like you don't know what's goin' on,
so they kinda nod their heads and go along.
And most of my patients say yes.
It becomes so much of an effort for them
to communicate with others because they can't hear,
and others don't wanna communicate with them
because they have to speak very loudly
in order for their loved one to understand what's going on.
So, they do become quite reclusive
and distance themselves from society quite a bit.
So hearing, hearing aids, cochlear implants,
doing surgery on the ear...
Sometimes those little bones we talked about get stiff.
We can correct those and bring back the hearing to a point
where they're like you and me,
where they can at least communicate
well with others.
We're social beings, we're social beings,
and if you're not getting that information
to effectively communicate, to effectively understand what
your loved ones are saying to you,
you're isolating yourself.
That just changes your brain chemically.
Finally, I wound up with Dr. Shaia
and the cochlear implants,
and I was crossing my fingers, "Please God,
let him take me on.
Let me be a candidate,"
because I was desperate.
What we have here is a standard cochlear implant.
There's several companies.
They're all basically shaped the same.
They have three basic components that are present.
They have a magnet here that helps the processor
stick through the scalp to the cochlear implant.
There's a processor here,
and then there are little electrodes
that go down into the cochlear
that we feed into the hearing organ
to stimulate the hair cells that help us hear.
And so then, the cochlear implant itself
that has the magnet here,
patients are given a unit
that fits on the outside of their ear.
- Should I do it this way? - Yup.
- Do you have that? - And this little wire
with a magnet goes against their scalp
like that, and it kinda sticks up there.
What it's sticking to is this magnet underneath.
And through this processor here,
goes up through the magnet and down the electrodes
to stimulate energy,
to give energy to the little hair cells
so that they can start hearing again.
Mr. Neblett, he's an older gentleman,
but he has done excellent with his cochlear implant.
His initial day of coming in to actually receive
the external portion of the cochlear implant,
which is called a processor,
and that initial, we call it activation, date
actually was very... Well, for him,
he was able to understand speech
right away, which is not always the case.
Everyone has different experiences
during that initial day of activation
of the cochlear implant, but he's one that actually,
his brain adapted very quickly
to processing this new electrical signal
that it had not heard before.
So, it's a life-changer for a lot of people.
My older patients, who know what sound is like,
then they slowly lost hearing
to the point where they needed a cochlear implant,
90 percent of them do wonderful with the cochlear implantation.
They enjoy the sound.
They can hear things that they never heard before.
It may sound irrelevant to someone like you and me,
but if I walk outside, I can hear the birds chirping,
and they can hear that sound, and that makes them feel normal.
And it's something that we don't appreciate every day,
but we should.
When I was about 15...
This would put us about 1940,
we weren't yet in a war...
And the Met would go on tour
and came through Richmond with an opera.
Well, my next-door neighbor
was a managing editor at the Times, Dispatch.
He had a daughter and a couple of tickets
to the opera that the Met was putting on.
So, he wanted his daughter to go.
He couldn't stand operas.
He needed her... he wanted her to have an escort,
so I went with her to hear the opera.
When I heard that
first introduction to the opera,
from that point on,
there was only one music that ever touched my soul,
and that was grand opera.
♪
And it stayed in my memory.
Now, I go through this deafness, obviously,
I don't hear a thing.
But now with the cochlear,
that is the one...
You can usually restore speech fairly well,
but to restore sound or music
is much more difficult programming.
So, I'm going through that experience.
But what I'm hearing
is only about 40 percent
of what the real sound is,
but I make up that 60 percent
with my memory.
I can recall it exactly how I heard it
50 years ago.
♪ Figaro ♪
♪ Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro ♪
♪ Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Fi... ♪
We saw John Neblett's love for the opera
and how grateful he was when he could hear it again.
So, sound and vibration definitely move us.
Certain sounds are more pleasant than others,
but do they actually have an impact
on our wellbeing?
♪
Sound obviously is a vibration,
and it's not that we literally hear something.
What happens is our brain translates
the audio signals into vibrations.
Vibration is extremely important to our wellbeing
because, medicine can tell you,
that ultimately every portion of the body
operates at homeostasis,
that there's an interconnectedness between
all the body parts, the organs,
the blood pressure, the temperature, the blood flow,
and that when something is out of whack,
- illness results. - I started
where I wanted to harness sound and deliver it to people
in an affordable, accessible way that was non-invasive,
that would help them de-armor.
Like, you go through life and you collect your wounds,
and you collect your bruises,
and you start to armor up, right,
start to shut down.
And in just my own personal experiences,
you go through life, and then you're no longer available
to the love that's available to you.
You almost can't even see it
because you're too busy locking down.
So I wanted to find some way to use sound
to help people de-armor, right,
non-invasive, accessible, affordable, we can all have it.
How does sound affect the human body?
How does sound affect our brain, and our emotion,
and our thoughts, and our cognition?
So, I went to school to study that.
And to harness it... because the world of sound is endless...
♪
There are things that,
that you can access emotionally through music
that you can't always get through
just speaking or listening to somebody.
So music's very powerful for that,
for really piercing the armor
and getting into the emotional stuff.
So our brain does this neat thing.
It's constantly doing a Google search
of whatever's in front of us.
And that's super useful because then we don't have to
reinvent the wheel everyday,
and figure out how to get out of bed,
or how to move around in our world.
So, we've got all this pre-existing data in there.
Then our brain will take whatever's in front of us,
and say, "So, what in the files do I have that is useful?"
And that's why you'll trigger memories
when you experience, say,
a song you haven't heard in years.
I'm the research coordinator here at The Monroe Institute
in central Virginia.
I'm helping to do research here at TMI.
So, I'm involved in, right now, three different studies.
One of them involves looking at
basic brain mechanics
of the effects of sound.
- Correct.
Activity of the brain is producing currents
that are running right through here.
These things are picking up the voltage
that arises based on those currents.
♪
The participant would come in just one at a time.
We would wire them up to the cap, to an EEG cap,
take them to the shielded room we have here,
give them a book, say, "Read this book
while you're listening to sequences of
two- or three-second clips of sounds,
and we're just recording what's going on in your brain."
Each one of these lines represents a channel,
an electrode on the head.
Okay, and this is scrolling across time,
and the amplitude... The little squiggly line...
Represents the voltage that's being measured
at the electrode on the scalp.
For example, see these little oscillations here?
That's an Alpha burst.
This stuff right here is an eye blink.
What we do is take all these sequences
and overlay them, average them.
When you do that, the stuff that's synchronized,
the EEG that's synchronized with that sound
is gonna start appearing outta the average.
♪
The first one we're looking at is brain activity,
so that would be EEG.
So that first study I mentioned, which is basic brain mechanics,
that's looking for what they would call
frequency following response, or a driving effect,
in brain function caused by
some particular sound
program or sequence that's being use.
The classical one here is
based on binaural beats,
which is a combination of tones.
One of the tones might be, say,
4 Hz different from the other tone,
and they're presented separately to the left and right ears,
and with the result that you might see
at 4 Hz driving response in the brain.
The reason that's so interesting is because
the primary brain frequency can tend to
signify or reflect state of consciousness in a person.
The binaural beats are low.
They often are masked with white noise.
And yet, there are studies showing that even
with these binaural beats completely masked
so a person cannot hear them at all,
but they are there in the sound,
they were still able to measure differences in, say,
vigilance and mood.
So, it's having an effect,
even if you're not consciously hearing it.
♪
When you talk about using music to induce mood,
or emotion, or affect,
it absolutely changes your cognition,
and your ability to pay attention,
and what you pay attention to.
It shifts the way that you think.
It's not just candy.
Somebody did a study where they went into an office building
and found that
the hum coming off this computer is this note,
and the hum coming off this light is this other note,
and this sound from this other thing,
from the air conditioner, is another note
and it's discordant.
Can you put any kind of
acoustic padding around something,
or do something, so you don't have this, all day,
you have this discordant note playing in your background?
So there are things like that.
Another factor is,
a lot of people, in psychological studies
on what we define as noise,
has to do with is it controllable and predictable?
So, when you can turn the volume down on something,
or you know when the next sound's gonna happen,
we don't interpret it as noise.
It's when it feels like a thing we can't control
that... and can't predict... that's when it feels threatening,
and we interpret it as noise.
These things are... I would say they're tools
in consciousness exploration.
So, the more you can explore consciousness,
that would seem to be quite important to me
for health and wellbeing.
I really try to implement the tools
that the body already has to heal itself.
So as an osteopathic family medicine physician,
we're taught that the mind-body connection,
mind-body spirit is very important
and, given the appropriate tools,
the body can heal itself.
So really, I look at the root cause
and try to figure out what is the root cause
of what is ailing the person
and then educate them and give them
whatever tool it may be
to help them to heal themself,
because truly, I believe that we are our own best healer.
So, your vibration is created by what you put into your body
as well as what you put out.
So as long as you become more cognizant
of what you're doing to yourself,
I think it is possible to raise your own vibration.
What we know is that we can just be around busyness
and absorb that stress and that energy,
whether we're sitting in traffic,
whether we're walking in the mall,
whether we are just around coworkers at work
or projects.
And so, really, I have found,
in being a therapist and in my own life,
that using meditation, taking a time-out,
and getting hyper focused on something,
a sound and a vibration are very, very helpful
and beneficial to focusing us
into a state of relaxation.
Everything has vibration.
Whether it's the cells in our body,
to a plant, to an animal,
to a thought, to a color.
Sound is very beneficial
in helping in mood disorders,
anxiety, depression, irritable bowel,
a lot of the inflammatory disorders.
You know, the inflammation that occurs in our system
a lot of times is because of tension,
and so when we use sound therapy,
that vibration that occurs throughout the body
can help to relax in those areas.
♪
Really what it's doing is it's activating
your parasympathetic nervous system.
It's relaxing your body
to a state where it can heal itself.
Another way that you can use sound therapy
is in healing of fractures.
So there was a particular patient that I knew of
that had played on an ankle fracture
and the ankle fracture healed much faster
than what the physicians really thought that it could ever heal
and I think it was the vibration
that actually created the healing.
So it allowed the bone to start to heal on its own
a little bit quicker than what otherwise
would have occurred.
I have a lot of clients who come in
that are on prescription anxiety medication,
and one of the goals of therapy
is to use different modalities
to help reduce their need for the medication at all
or to lower the dosage of the medication.
And what I have found very quickly,
within just several sessions,
is we are able to do that.
So, the prescription medication and need for it
is being reduced.
I had been on a prescription steroid, prednisone,
for three years.
I have hard-to-treat asthma.
And just having the bowls around me
and on my physical body,
within the course of that week,
I ended up, for the first time in three years,
being completely off steroids for almost three weeks.
And as I continued the treatment,
it is keeping me off of those steroids
or a very low dose of the steroids,
where in the medical community,
even trying a variety of treatment combinations,
they were not able to do that.
So I have a really personal story
that goes along with using the bowls.
And I learned over time, really,
that sound can vibrate the body
in a way that takes you to a place
that you may not otherwise get
when you don't have that.
So, in my work...
I guess I should say in my personal life,
I did a didgeridoo guided meditation journey.
When I was in that journey,
I was really thinking to myself,
"Oh my goodness, this is so relaxing,"
and I really was at such a place of peace and calm,
one of which I hadn't experienced for quite some time,
and I thought, "You know, I really needed this."
And then I thought, "My patients need this,"
and then I thought, "You know, my community needs this,
the world needs this."
♪
Edgar Cayce's been called the founder
or the father of holistic medicine.
In fact, in the 1970s,
a group of medical doctors got together
and founded the American Holistic Medical Association
because of their interest in the Edgar Cayce material.
And the reason he's called the founder of holistic medicine
is not because he only relies on ancient remedies
or because he's only into homeopathy,
but he saw total wellness as really
all the parts of the body,
all the parts of the individual...
Body, mind, and spirit...
Working together to promote wellness.
Edgar Cayce was the most documented psychic of all time.
He lived between 1877 and 1945.
For 43 years of his adult life,
he was able to put himself to sleep on a couch,
close his eyes,
and respond to any question imaginable.
Of the 14,000 readings,
approximately 2,000 talk about the subject of vibration.
And according to Edgar Cayce,
vibration is really at the root of everything.
Science would say that vibration
really is how our senses work.
Quantum physics would say that
essentially everything is made up of the same stuff,
just vibrating at different levels of vibration.
We live in a very sympathetic world.
So we're all running
and we're going here, there, and everywhere
and it's not often enough
that we're implementing our parasympathetic
and when we utilize sound therapy,
and especially employing it
as a kind of training wheels to help us,
it really helps us to get to a spot
that we couldn't otherwise get to.
♪
If sound and vibration can influence our wellness
and help with issues like anxiety, depression,
fibromyalgia, digestive issues,
inflammatory disorders,
aid in getting patients off medication,
and even assist with healing fractures,
then what about our voice?
Our voice is a sound.
So, can our voice aid in our health?
And our words.
Do these things matter?
Edgar Cayce actually gave a number,
a suggested chant,
that he said could be very helpful
to raise your vibration.
One of them was...
He said that the word "home,"
that if you could put the word "home"
into a vibration, like...
that that kind of vibration
could really have resonance inside the being
to make the person feel at home wherever they were.
♪
Humming, which my wife Andi and I
wrote this wonderful book on humming
called The Humming Effect,
has been, like, shown to be so important
in terms of releasing nitric oxide
in the nasal cavity.
So if you can hum...
for even five minutes a day,
it's probably very therapeutic
as well as chilling you out.
Is there anything they have to do to prepare in advance?
Is there a certain kind of space they need to be in?
Do they need to be fully hydrated
or not eat anything beforehand?
Well, these are really, really good questions.
I would say no to everything except finding a space
where you'll not be disturbed, okay?
Then sitting there, closing your eyes,
taking some nice deep breaths,
and then focusing your intention
on what you would like the hum to achieve.
Because I have this formula which is
frequency plus intent equals healing, right?
So, if you focus your intention on what you want,
whether it's to resonate your sinus cavity
or just fill yourself
with a lot of luminosity and whatnot,
and then you clo...
And make sure your eyes are closed
because believe it or not,
you have different brainwave activity
when your eyes are open than when your eyes are closed.
Get, also really important, to the point of stillness.
So a lot of people have a very hard time...
♪
I've worked with all sorts of safety sounds
for 40 years
and one of the more frustrating things
is simply that a lot of people go,
"Well, I'm not a trained musician,"
or, "I'm not a trained vocalist,
I can't do these sounds."
And so everybody's really judgmental
about the sounds that they make
but there's nobody that I know
who basically is judgmental about their humming.
It's something that babies do,
it's something that old people do.
Yeah, I mean, that's a really good point.
You know, because it's something you're experiencing,
although it's audible to other people,
but it's more of an internal process, correct?
- Is that accurate? - It's the most powerful
vibroacoustic sound that we can make.
There are two ways that sound affects us.
One is sound goes into our ears,
into our brain, affecting our heart rate,
our respiration, our brainwaves.
This is called psychoacoustics.
It's sound going usually from music
or from voice,
but it's going into our ears
through the act of hearing or listening.
And basically, it's affecting us,
our nervous system.
But the other is called vibroacoustics
and these are where the sound literally goes into us
on a cellular level,
causing our cells in our body
and literally a musical massage, if you like,
or a sonic massage
and it's extraordinarily powerful.
And humming is, from my perspective,
the most powerful vibroacoustic thing.
An om to go home.
Exactly. Exactly. Yes.
So, yeah, I tell people that, you know,
no matter where they are,
and I've heard other people mention this too,
that when you do that, that is the home.
That is the home. It brings us there, right?
So, on this journey
have mentioned and made reference to that too.
So, can we do one together?
- Would that be okay? - Sure.
Now, take a nice deep breath when you do it.
♪
Excuse me, it got me at the end.
- Clearing. - Right, I felt it move.
Thank you.
♪
It's also about the spoken word.
For example, if a bunch of people at work
are gossiping or talking about someone else,
you can enter in something positive,
a positive comment, and change the vibration.
Everything we think,
everything we say, everything we do
creates a vibration,
and ultimately, Cayce would say,
our job is to somehow grow spiritually,
raise our vibration, transform ourself,
and in turn, transform the world.
♪
I think it's important to consider the words that we use
have a lot of power in our lives
and I think even, you know,
people talk about gratitude.
Those that express gratitude
really do have happier, healthier lives.
And we look at the people that live the longest
and they seem to have the most positive attitude.
You're looking at different disease processes
like cancer, heart disease, there's power in...
If a physician tells you,
"You only have this long to live,"
a person may think that that's all that they have,
but really, there's nobody that can really determine that.
So, I think it's important to be positive
and to use positive words and positive affirmation.
♪ Well, that's all right, yeah, that's okay ♪
♪ 'Cause you gon' make it at least today, yeah ♪
♪ Come on ♪
♪ Yeah, come on ♪
♪ Whoa, whoa ♪
♪ Yeah-hey-hey ♪
How important is the voice as an instrument
to maybe achieving a state of wellness?
There are certain teachers
that I love the sound of their voice so much
I feel calm.
My nervous system drops
and there's this sense of all is well.
I feel that just in the sound of their voice.
And that's huge.
I think it's a huge part of their teaching
and their communication.
It's really happening on different levels.
On one level, it's what they're saying
and what they're saying is important,
but on another level,
you could say it's at the level of vibration
or at the level simply of how those sound waves come
and impact us.
It's as much a teaching as the words themselves.
Our own voice is a natural expression
of the human instrument that we are.
In that way, so is our face,
so is our smile.
It's not really any different.
And if you walk by and somebody has
just a beautiful smile,
it lifts everybody up.
You know, you just see the person in the grocery store,
they smile, and suddenly you feel so much better.
And it's the same with our voice.
When we speak, just to anybody passing by,
and we say, "Enjoy the day,"
and our voice has that quality
like a big, open smile
with heart and beauty in it,
we're lifting other people up
and we have the opportunity to do that every single time
we open our mouth.
♪
If our own voice can evoke a state of wellness
and bring us to balance through things like humming
and even the words we choose in a mindful manner,
then what about silence?
We went to the Green Bank Observatory
in West Virginia
to find out what the National Radio Quiet Zone is
and why it's important.
♪
Right now, we're in what's called
the National Radio Quiet Zone.
This is an area of 13,000 square miles
that straddles the West Virginia-Virginia border.
This was set up in the 1950s
whenever the Green Bank Observatory,
then called the National Radio Astronomy Observatory,
was founded,
as a way for us to limit transmissions
that could interfere with the telescope.
In radio astronomy,
we can observe through clouds,
we can observe if it's really bright outside,
but we can't observe if there's a cell tower
anywhere near us.
So, things that interact with our observations
are cell towers, TV stations,
anything that is emitting lots of radio energy.
Here on site,
I'm under contract not to have a microwave, for instance,
because microwaves,
even though all of the energy
is mostly sealed inside that metal box,
some escapes
and that's radio energy at similar frequencies
as we observe with the Green Bank telescope.
And so, the National Radio Quiet Zone
is an area in the U.S.
that prevents people
from erecting fixed commercial transmitters
nearby the telescope
that would interact with us.
It keeps cell phone companies from building things nearby,
which means that you don't get cell service
for about an hour surrounding the observatory.
There's another quiet zone that is smaller
and centered right around Green Bank.
It's about a ten-mile radius,
so significantly smaller
than the National Radio Quiet Zone
which is 13,000 square miles.
This West Virginia quiet zone
prevents people from having personal transmitters
that would interact with the telescope.
So, that smaller quiet zone
is why I can't have a microwave
and I can't have Wi-Fi.
I do have the internet,
but it's all wired over the Ethernet cable
and I can use my cell phone,
but I have a little dongle
that plugs it straight into that wired internet.
So it's kind of wild the ways we have to work around
some of these restrictions
that protect the telescope
for what we see as modern ways of life.
♪
Since we are looking at
such faint signals from outer space,
we can't have a lot of stray radio energy.
We need to be in this radio quiet zone.
We need there to be radio silence
around the site.
If we're going to detect these faint signals
of a galaxy that is billions of light-years away,
we need to be in a place where we're not seeing
someone's cell tower from two miles away
broadcasting at those same frequencies.
And so it's very important to us
to have a radio quiet environment.
For people, I think there's something also to be said
about the intentionality of having silence,
being able to collect your thoughts
and know what it is that you're focusing on.
And so, that could be a corollary
between radio telescopes needing silence
so that we can actually look at the objects
that we want to look at
and not have interference from every direction,
and how we go about our daily lives
and not have noise from everything
bombarding us all the time.
If the telescope at the Green Bank Observatory
is so sensitive
that things like Wi-Fi, cell phone towers,
and microwaves are off limits
due to the disruption they could cause,
then what are our surroundings doing to us?
We've learned a little bit about sound,
but what about silence?
Sitting quietly in silence
I think has a great impact
on becoming familiar with who you really are.
It's just kind of like helped me to
kind of like rethink of what it is
and what I can heal or what can I do to fix a problem,
those kind of things.
So I think quiet time is something that
actually makes you realize like what you need to do.
All the different sounds from the world,
just your day to day rigmarole, running around,
dealing with this person, that person,
dealing with this business, you know, sometimes
you gotta clear all that noise out of your head
and just take a moment of silence
to kind of just regroup.
You know, reconnect with yourself.
It's mandatory that I do that, you know,
several times a day.
Silence is actually really important
in our mental health and physical health
and I can personally tell you
that when I spend my Sunday planning my week ahead
that I will strategize what I'm doing
with not just my food but my exercise
and also my downtime.
It's home. Silence is home.
This is really important,
I want to share this with you
because it's something that a lot of people
who are investigating sound...
It took me about 15 years to discover this really...
simplistic concept.
The power of silence.
Silence is the yin to the yang of sound.
Silence is the place
where the sound can create the shift and changes
on a vibrational level,
on a physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual level.
So after you go, "Om"...
♪
After you've done that for five minutes, be in silence.
You'll be amazed, 'cause if you try to get up...
Well, first of all, you might pitch over
because you might be so blissed out,
but also, you're shifting the frequency.
Allow the frequency or frequencies
that you've created
to have the ability to create change in yourself,
and silence is mandatory.
A lot of folks don't realize it
and a lot of people don't even...
They've never actually been in silence
because they gotta keep moving, gotta keep changing this...
No.
♪
Silence has always come into my life...
at the right moment and it's healed me
through some really, really tragic, terrible things.
You know, one of the things we're starting to see
is that, you know, this area in the brain,
the amygdala, that has all this chatter,
if we don't settle that down,
it's going to lead to more health problems.
A big one is dementia.
And so, unfortunately, in our country...
You know, I always say,
there are so many diseases that we can reverse
but dementia is one that we don't have
a lot of medications to help that,
and once you get dementia,
you really are looking at adding medication
to really preserve your memory
and hope that you don't lose it.
So, you know, taking that time
to really rest your mind and relax it
is imperative for your overall health and longevity.
It balances out one's mental state.
I think we fill it all the time
with sound and the radio
and especially now with this whole political climate
and social media and stuff.
I was going nuts, you know, watching...
Doing Facebook and Googling
and watching all the news
and all the events that are happening,
and listening to the radio all the time,
and I was getting uneasy
and it was like, well, what's going on?
It was like, oh!
I'm away from that deep anchor of home.
That...
that pure, eternal nothing
which can't be defined.
In silence, there is so much.
There's the sound of infinite space.
There's the sound before creation.
There's the sound of potential.
There's the sound of what wants to come forth
that hasn't yet come forth.
So often in our culture,
we have something going at all times
and even when you choose to have silence,
it's hard to attain it.
There's this wonderful story about John Cage
where he went to a...
I think it was Princeton
where they had an anechoic chamber,
so a chamber that has as little sound
as you can possibly have in a space.
And so he went into this space
and he's very interested in silence and in sound,
so he thought, "I'll go in this space
and see what silence is like."
So the only sound in that room was his own functioning.
As kind of the name implies,
"anechoic," it means without echo.
So, it also happens to be very quiet.
So this is isolated from the rest of the building
with very thick walls.
What you're probably hearing now on the video
is a lot of my voice
and not much of anything else.
We don't hear the reverb
we likely hear in rooms that you're used to.
We're also not going to hear any outside influence...
Cars, air conditioning, any kind of noise like that.
So it should sound pretty pristine.
♪
It's a very calm state of present awareness
as to what's going on
and you still maintain your choice
as to where you put your focus.
That's really what meditation is
is you're training your mind to keep a focus
and still be able to process what's happening in real time.
Like you are now present with
actually everything that's going on.
You know.
At the area of the brain that's responsible
for depression and anxiety, the amygdala,
and there was a lot of chatter in that area
with these people with depression and anxiety,
so they took two groups of people
and they put one group on medication
and they put the other group on modalities
like yoga, tai chi, meditation, mindfulness,
things that would relax them
with these integrative modalities,
and after eight weeks,
they looked at the functional MRI of the brain again
and saw that there was a reduction in the area
of the chatter in the brain.
So, you know, the person then has a choice.
Do they want to choose a medication
or do they want to choose a mindfulness-based approach
to implement that instead of the medication?
♪
Silence and meditation.
Taking a moment to find stillness in this world
can really help with relaxation.
It also has health benefits.
So, we are often told to live a balanced life.
A balanced diet, balance between work and play,
and we even have the yin-yang symbol.
So what is that, right? It's the perfect balance.
So, what are some other ways we can find balance?
♪
So, some of the things you can do
to help balance the body
include taking time for meditation and prayer...
going for a walk...
listening to music,
include a healthy diet,
exercise program,
being careful what thoughts come out of your body
as well as what you take into your body.
I think if you're trying to find balance in your world,
I think it's important to not just, you know,
do the things like exercise to be active
but it's important to find things like downtime to relax.
And we all have our drive into work,
you know, that we may have to be able to be silent
and you can do meditation
and mindfulness when you're there.
You know, I tell people, don't close your eyes
at the traffic light, but when you're at the traffic light,
you can actually just, you know,
kind of put your head back on the headrest behind you
and breathe and just count your breath
and do that slow, deep breathing.
You don't have to have the radio on,
you don't have to make that phone call.
Do it when you're in the shower.
Do it when you're brushing your teeth.
You know, find a spot in your day
that is kind of a routine for you
that you can implement the silence
and the relaxation things,
because I think that when you make it a habit
then you're always going to have it with you.
The thing I recommend the most
is the mindfulness exercises,
and you can...
The nice thing is you can do them absolutely anywhere.
People often think that relaxation
involves sitting on a mountain in Hawaii,
and that sure is great to do that
but how often can we do that?
So, if you can be on the bus
going to your doctor's appointment
and be mindful about all the sensory data around you,
not judge any of it but try to keep in your mind
an awareness of all of the different factors,
what you hear and what you feel, the air on your skin
or the vibrations of the vehicle as it travels,
and you fill your mind with all of this
without judging it,
it crowds out all those things like,
"What if I go to the doctor's appointment
and they do something painful?"
or "What about that terrible thing that happened
when I was three?"
You've crowded that out
by thinking about where you are.
A lot of that is how many sounds
can I hold in my awareness at once?
So in any moment, there could be many frequencies
and things happening that we can hold in our mind.
Yes, you're really in this moment
when you do that.
And so often we're not.
We're sort of in this moment
while we're also thinking about this thing
and being distracted by that thing.
So, it's a skill to be able to pull in that focus
and just be in this moment right now.
There's a saying that
if you're stuck in the past, you're depressed,
if you're stuck in the future, you're anxious,
and if you're in the present, you're calm.
I believe that was Eckhart Tolle, yeah.
I love that idea that we can choose
where we put our awareness.
The more you're really supportive of your child
or the more you're kind to your spouse
or the more you really go out of your way
to be of service to someone,
you create an energetic resonance
that really can couple with the energy of other people.
And I really took that to heart
that somehow if, even in my own little room
with every day we work with positive thoughts,
prayer, meditation, affirmations,
that we can transform ourselves
and in turn help transform society.
♪
The way we use sound in the Tewa culture
is just with our singing, our drumming.
It's just in everything that we do.
Our prayers, everything, meditating,
being able to balance one's self
and harmonize, you know, with everything around us.
And those are just some of the ways
that we utilize sound within our community.
All our songs have a special message
depending what we're dancing.
You saw today the Buffalo Dance
and we honor the buffalo in that song.
You know, a lot of our songs
discuss everything from the earth to the sun,
the waters, the trees, the different plants,
the different animals,
and we ask them to bring their spirit to us.
Sound, to me, I think has been a blessing.
To be able to hear, to be able to feel,
a lot of people don't have that,
but they're able to feel the vibration of the drum,
the vibration of the rattle,
the vibration of, you know, your feet touching the earth.
It's just very important.
♪
♪ I just laugh ♪
♪
♪ And I relax ♪
♪
♪ Try to forget ♪
♪ About the past ♪
I think if we can pay close attention
to the colors we seek, to the music we seek,
we would know how to heal ourselves.
But it all comes from something, I think,
in our core.
And I think it's proven by our love of music.
♪ This is my happy song ♪
♪
♪ Sound of my happy, happy, happy, happy, happy song ♪
♪
We have this exercise
where we take our energy body
and we rev it up.
And we do that easily with a vocal toning.
So it's a...
You know, something like that
and it just takes that energy body that we have
and just raises it up like that.
It's that energy that's raised up
and you can just be there
and be in a really great place
when everything else around you is just like crazy.
♪ There's no words worth saying ♪
♪ There's no time for praying
and your tears won't set you free ♪
♪
♪ Midnight man comes a-wanderin' around ♪
♪
♪ He snatched up all the girls in your town ♪
♪
♪ He's gonna go and get some, you better lose a fight ♪
♪ He'll put a man down 'cause he own the night ♪
♪
♪ Oo, yeah ♪
♪
Woo, I like that.
Major chord!
Woo!
I feel like maybe I'm watching a television story.
You are.
You're part of one.
So I'm in the television story.
You are the television story, yes.
You're very welcome.
I'm so happy to share this with you.