Transcriber: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
I'd like to talk to you about something I've gotten intensely interested in
in the last few years,
and that's sound therapy.
I came to sound therapy by actually needing it myself.
I found myself experiencing deep anxiety.
Physiologically,
I was experiencing rapid heart rate,
my breathing was short,
my muscles were extremely tense.
And to me, it literally felt like I was dying.
Mentally, it was equally as painful
and almost psychedelic
as I felt like I was really losing control of my reality,
and as bad as all of that sounds,
it was actually a wonderful blessing
because it taught me so much about my mind from the inside out,
my body and my spirit.
And I learned about several tools that could help.
Sound therapy turned out to be one of those great tools,
and I discovered that sound and music are not only great ways to entertain us
but that sound itself can also have many deep, therapeutic benefits for us,
mentally and physically.
The first thing I did following this experience
was to start to read as many books as I could
on neuroscience, psychology, spirituality -
basically, anything that I could get my hands on
that had to do with the mind.
I wanted to come to a more grounded scientific understanding
of this experience,
which seemed very mystical to me,
and also convince myself, hopefully, that I wasn't completely insane -
which I'm still working on.
(Laughter)
The first book I read was on stress,
and what caught my attention was a section that talked about our brain wave states
and how they relate to our stress states
and how those brain waves themselves are measured in hertz.
Well, this piqued my attention
because as a musician,
I use hertz as a measurement of sound all the time in my music.
So I use it for recording, performing, when we did soundcheck here.
So it's something I'm very familiar with,
and I found that brain waves and sound waves
are measured the exact same way,
so we're literally creating frequency waves with our thoughts.
We have four main brain wave states:
they're beta, which is our waking state,
then into alpha and theta,
which are more relaxed or meditative states,
and then into delta, which is a deep-sleep state.
Each of those states
has their own frequency range, or frequency band,
and it's very similar to how the EQ on your stereo works
from bass to treble,
so there are ranges for each of those states.
Sound therapy works because our mind has a natural response
called the "frequency following response."
And so when we hear a certain oscillation, or frequency or sound,
that's in this frequency range,
our mind naturally tends to synchronize with that state.
So I found that when I was in my really stressed-out state,
I was having a lot of random thoughts and seemed out of control,
and what I needed to do was bring my mind down and relax,
and I found that sound therapy was a great tool for helping me do that.
What I found, also, was that with sound therapy,
I could not only alter my brain waves and relax more
but that when I relaxed those brain waves, and mentally,
that my body relaxed,
my breathing relaxed,
my heart rate relaxed and my muscles were less tense.
Stress, of course, is caused by the fight or flight response,
and I found for myself
that I was reacting to things in life with these stressful responses,
that I really didn't need to.
So my body was producing chemicals, like adrenaline and cortisol,
and over time, this was, of course, damaging healthwise.
Well, I discovered that our body has an opposite response,
which is called the "relaxation response."
And so by relaxing consciously, using sound therapy as one of those tools,
I found that I not only started to not feel anxious
but that I started to feel better and better and better.
And eventually I felt so good
that when I was relaxing at night,
that I actually felt high, or euphoric.
And so then I was a little concerned about this
and thought I've gone too far.
(Laughter)
So I went to the doctor to get it checked out.
It turned out everything was just fine.
And then I realized that feeling good is how I'm supposed to feel
and how we're supposed to feel.
So I had a little epiphany from this whole experience,
that physiologically speaking,
that I am both the producer and the experiencer of stress,
but physiologically speaking,
that I'm also the producer and experiencer of good feelings -
like joy, euphoria, bliss -
and that I have a choice
by choosing the thoughts I want to engage with
and then how I'm going to react to those thoughts,
and that I have that choice to basically feel good
and to choose either fear and stress or love for myself and others
and all of those good feelings that go with it.
And so that's really what I want to share,
and that I think that at the heart of it all
is just the ability to relax deeply and sort of let go and just be,
and I found that sound therapy
was a wonderful tool for me in getting there.
So just to recap -
sound waves can alter our brain waves.
By altering our brain waves,
we can find deep states of relaxation.
And by relaxing consciously and deliberately,
that over time, it can create a lot of really wonderful things for us,
physiologically and mentally.
So next I'd like to play just a short taste of this sound therapy.
And what I'm going to do is play these Tibetan bowls -
I have a set of them up here -
and these are kind of like the original sound therapy.
They've been around for thousands of years
and create those sounds that can help to synchronize our brain waves.
So I'm going to play the Tibetan bowls
and some Native American flute
as well as some nature sounds that I recorded,
and then Jenn, my partner, and I
are going to play a song that we wrote for guitar and cello,
called "Canyon Breeze."
So I hope you enjoy this.
Just take this time to breathe deep,
maybe close your eyes,
and just let go and try to totally relax.
(Ethereal, soothing music with Tibetan bowls and nature sounds)
(Native American flute music with backround nature sounds)
(Tibetan bowls music with background nature sounds)
(Bowls and nature sounds fade and cello music starts)
[Montana Skies]
(Guitar music added)
(Music slows down)
(Music ends)
(Applause and cheers)