Book Reviews

by Daniel J. Benor, MD (unless otherwise noted)

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Tiffany Snow. The Power of Divine: A Healer's Guide – Tapping into the Miracle

San Diego: Spirit Journey Books 2004. 226 pp. $18.95

This is an excellent discussion of spiritual healing, for both halers and healees. Tiffany Snow started her working career writing songs and producing records in Nashville, Tennessee. Her now considerable healing gifts were awakened after being struck by lightning and having a near-death experience. She has become a minister and regularly offers healing in church as well as in individual sessions. People often lose consciousness when they receive healing, entering ecstatic states which are classically described as being ‘slain in the spirit.’

What I like about Snow’s book is her practical, down to earth attitude, and her openness to learning herself from her work.

… I see my entire life as a classroom in preparation for this healing journey. Many have been the questions as struggle and blessings came across my path, each carrying their own specific burden and lessons. Some of these trappings, most of which were victim-based and religious in nature, I have stumbled on; I have found by tripping I've learned to lift my feet. Looking back, I realize that all the times of my brokenness were simply excellent opportunities for me to choose love over bitterness, love over fear, love over unforgiveness. By exercising the opportunity to use our Free Will to always choose love, we allow ourselves to become rebuilt into a better vessel; strong enough to be a flowing channel for Unconditional Love to all people, a true reflection of the nature of the Christ. (Author’s introductory note)

Spiritual healing can be Reiki, Therapeutic Touch, Qigong, Quantum Healing, etc. Spiritual healing has come to mean a variety of methods which may employ some sort of spiritual aspect with the healing, but may or may not include prayer. Also, the person healing may or may not be including his own energy in with the healing. Divine Healing always includes prayer, cannot activate without it, and healing is never done by including any of the person's own energy. It often includes some version of hands-on-healing or ‘laying-on-of-hands.’ (p. 4)

Sometimes, accessing Spirit is like dialing up on a phone line, and getting a party line! The information you receive may not even be for the situation or person at hand. (p. 33)

Tiffany Snow D.D. Psychic Gifts in the Christian Life. Tools to Connect

San Diego, CA: Spirit Journey Books, 2003 219 pp. $24.95

In this important book Tiffany Snow confronts some common misconceptions about the cultivation and use of Spiritual Gifts. She is a healer, medical intuitive, mystic, and spirit communicator, but suppressed her natural psychic abilities in childhood because her family didn’t approve of or understand them. She candidly describes the frustrations and heartaches of her early life as a musician and Country-Western song writer and how spiritually empty she became.

God reached out to her through a near death experience after she was struck by lightning. A spirit presence told her, “Welcome to the world of healers!” and she was changed in many ways while in the near death state. Soon afterwards she noticed that her hands would become hot, followed by spontaneous healings, when she touched ailing animals or her own body. Her previously diagnosed breast lumps, uterine fibroid tumors, and torn rotator cuff were healed in this way.

She began to heal friends through touch, and explains how she has learned to use her gift without taking on their pain. She also describes how she discovered her ability to psychically communicate with other creatures, including living and dead people.

Her advice on spirit communication is practical and spiritually sound, “Test everything out first, using prayer (two-way God communication), and your conscious (God-given reasoning ability of right and wrong). And listen to your gut-feeling (God-given intuition).”

Dr. Snow not only tells us what she can do, but inspires us through her book to seek our own ‘God Spots.’ She makes clear that a person doesn’t need to be struck by lightning to gain these spiritual gifts. Readers who wonder how such gifts can be used will be fascinated by the many examples which she provides.

She describes psychically seeing civil war soldiers in a Tennessee field, finding lost children, and clairvoyantly witnessing what happened in the planes which crashed into the twin towers on 9-11. I was impressed that she was able to give helpful descriptions of the hijackers to the FBI based on her communications with their spirits.

The final chapters of the book direct and encourage us, the readers, to use our own gifts with love, tolerance, and deeper understanding of Scripture. This book has value as a testimony of personal transformation, a guide to spiritually-based psychic development and use, and a resource for those who seek Scriptural validation of these abilities.

Review by Rev. Cay Randall-May, Ph.D.

Intuitive Consultant, Medical Intuitive, and Healer; author of Pray Together Now, How to Find or Form a Prayer Group (Element Books, 1999) and The Intuitive Career, How to Succeed as a Consultant, Reader, or Healer (projected publ. date, 2005) 

Marilyn Schlitz/ Tina Amorok, with Marc S. Micozzi. Consciousness & Healing: Integral Approaches to Mind-Body Medicine

St. Louis, MO: Elsevier/ Churchill Livingstone 2005.

This book is a marvelously rich sampler of writings by clinicians and theorists in mind-body healing, some of them in original offerings, many as excerpts from previous articles. They are arranged in a coherent pattern, with sections/subsections on

DEFINING INTEGRAL MEDICINE;

MAPPING THE HEALING SYSTEM: Mind-Body Medicine, New Perspectives on the Body, Re-Visioning Illness; Honoring the Spectrum of Life;

HEALING: A MOVE TOWARDS WHOLENESS: Psychology’s Move Toward Wholeness, Spirituality Religion and Healing, Essential Capacities;

HONORING MULTIPLE WAYS OF KNOWING: Epistemological Pluralism, Integrating the Wisdom of the World’s Healing Systems;

ENVISIONING A NEW STORY FOR HEALTH AND HEALING: Transformations of Medicine, Sociopolitical Transformations of Integral Medicine, Healthy Earth-Healthy Human, Social Healing.

… the extent to which these gay men were ‘closeted…’ [revealed that] HIV infection advanced more rapidly in direct proportion to the extent participants concealed their gay identity. The investigators successfully ruled out explanations based on demographic characteristics, health practices, sexual behavior, and antiretroviral therapy. (p. 71)

Booth and Ashbridge’s model is reinforced by the many conspicuous metaphors between the mind-brain and immune-healing systems, long ago postulated by the psychoimmunology pioneer George Solomon. Both systems have the capacity for memory; both are designed for adaptation to environmental stressors; both serve functions of defense; both are harmed by inadequate defenses; both are harmed by excessive defenses; and both develop either tolerance or sensitivity to “noxious” (i.e. stressful, antigenic) agents. (p. 76)

The history of our lives, our joys and sorrows, has been inscribed upon our bodies. Our bodies remember everything from our first breath to our last dream. (p. 120)

Many years into my daily practice of surgery, I realized that the steps used in the enactment of a surgical operation mirror in pattern and sequence those used in rites of passage, which the anthropologist Mircea Eliade and others have delineated. The parallels between the two sequences, both on the literal and symbolic level, are indeed remarkable.

Summary of the Initiatory Sequence (Rites of Passage) 

• A crisis, social or individual

• Fasting and contemplation (separation)

• Purification and stripping off outer life

• Voluntary entrance into sacred space

• Death/rebirth sequence

• Blood or sacrifice ritual

• Regeneration/rebirth

Surgical Sequence

• An illness, accident, or other potential life-changing event

• Fasting (NPO--nothing by mouth the night before)

• Purification and cleansing

• Remove garments of outer life

• Enter an inner sanctum (operating room)

• Lay down on an altar (operating table)

• Undergo a death/rebirth (soma/anesthesia)

• Healing/rejuvenation" (p. 122)

• In the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, from abstraction to concreteness;

• In early modern medicine, from exteriority (theories of humors and dispositions) to interiority (“mechanical, dense and opaque… an extremely intricate machine…”

• Pursuing mechanistic explanations, modern medicine moved from qualities to causalities;

• Moving towards more systemic thinking, from states to processes;

• Shifting from analyzing the parts separately to holistic explanations and systemic integration

In doing this work, I have had a chance to spend a lot of time with the same group of patients over a period of many years. We got to know each other very well. They were about as different from each other as you could imagine--in age, race, religion, socio-economics, demographics, sex, sexual preference, disease severity, you name it. At first, it seemed the only thing they had in common was heart disease. But over time we began to realize that many of them had something else in common: an emotional or spiritual heart disease. By that I mean the sense of loneliness, isolation, and alienation that I think is epidemic in our culture." (p. 307)

Eve A Wood. Medicine, Mind and Meaning: A psychiatrist's guide to treating the body, mind, and spirit

Tucson, AZ: In One Press 2004 347 pp HB $21.95

Written by a psychiatrist who cares deeply for her clients, this book explores ways in which understanding the meanings that guide our lives can help us to sort out various disorders that cause physical and emotional problems.

I agree with the observation about this book by C. Everett Koop, former US Surgeon General, in the foreword: "It is written by a physician who loves her patients and has come to see that life depends not on the hand you are dealt, but on how you choose to live it." (p. 4)

Wood offers a host of helpful observations, as in the following:

Our biggest blind spots tend to encompass how we choose to look at things, what we choose to tell ourselves, or what we opt to believe. ...we usually see the roadblocks as external. We suffer a job loss, or the death of a dream, and allow these experiences to become the cause of our misery. As a result, we are unable to productively move along the life-path. We allow ourselves to be done in or victimized by our pain. We permit our grief to overtake us, robbing us of the joy and fulfillment we are due. We are all, to some extent, tripped up by our own blind spots. (p. 9-10)

Gunnel Minett. Exhale: An Overview of Breathwork

Edinburgh, UK: Floris 2004.
241 pp    3pp references, 2 pp resources   $35.00

Gunnel Minett presents an excellent, well-referenced discussion of an enormous range of information about breathing as a therapeutic intervention. Minett states that "Only three per cent of all waste products are eliminated through the faeces, seven per cent through urine and 20 per cent through the skin; the remaining 70 per cent is eliminated through exhalation." (p. 150) This is one of the few places where I would have liked to see more references.

This valuable book includes explanations of the many ways in which breathing can be therapeutic - way beyond the exchanges of gasses, the point at which western medicine generally ends its limited consideration of this topic. In cultures that recognize the full potential of the breath, its many beneficial effects are usually assigned to three distinct areas:

- A physiological and spiritual cleansing process that can help us to explore and influence the mind.

- A healing power that can be used for medical purposes and to trace the origin of illness.

- A religious or spiritual path that brings us in touch with other dimensions. (p. 23)

Minett enriches her presentation with a survey of many ways in which breathwork has been developed in China, India and Tibet. Here, as in the rest of the book, simple exercises invite the reader to appreciate the benefits of breathwork experientially.

Minett's discussion extends into transpersonal benefits of breathwork, both in ancient and modern traditions. Readers who are not aware of the potent Rebirthing and Holotropic breathwork techniques will be fascinated to read about how people can retrieve and release traumatic factual and feeling memories from the time of their birth. These memories suggest a variety of ways in which we could bring greater healing to the birthing process as currently conducted in western hospitals.

Minett also suggests broader applications for breathwork, such as introducing this as a simple, easily learned and readily applied de-stressing technique in schools.

This book is highly recommended for anyone interested in learning more about breathwork.

Judith Orloff. Positive Energy

New York: Harmony Books 2004. 353 pp
2 pp resources, 2 pp selected readings, Index

Judith Orloff identifies herself as an energy psychiatrist, indicating that she addresses subtle energy aspects of her patients’ issues. While Orloff’s earlier books focused on her use of medical intuition in psychiatric practice, this book focuses much more on self-healing approaches. (See IJHC interview in this issue that explores Orloff’s medical intuition.)

In Energy Psychiatry, part of my work is waking the dead. I don't mean the dearly departed, but the parts of us that become comatose to the abundance right before our eyes. Our society's shameless con is the belief that wealth and fame equal happiness. True, if your heart's in the right place and your ego isn't the size of Godzilla, affluence can be magnificent. Still, that's a big "if." Frequently, my patients who "have it all" are the most miserable. What makes them even worse off than others is feeling, "With all my success, why am I so unhappy?" The reason: They experience an emotional poverty that damns their ability to appreciate what they've got. Until I can help my patients resuscitate their hearts, they cannot grasp their gifts, material and more. (p. 321)

Ten sections, titled ‘Prescriptions,’ address the following issues (p. 12-13):

Awaken Intuition and Rejuvenate Yourself

Find a Nurturing Spiritual Path

Design an Energy-Aware Approach to Diet, Exercise, and Health

Generate Positive Emotional Energy to Counter Negativity

Develop a Heart-Centered Sexuality

Open Yourself to the Flow of Creativity and Inspiration

Celebrate the Sacredness of Laughter, Pampering, and The Replenishment of Retreat

Attract Positive People and Situations

Protect Yourself from Energy Vampires

Create Abundance.

Each section explains the issues involved, has a variety of relevant exercises, and is rounded out with a discussion by a prominent personality.

This book is warmly recommended for its clarity and helpfulness in dealing with a broad spectrum of dis-eases.

Daniel G. Amen. Healing the hardware of the Soul: How making the brain-soul connection can optimize your life, love, and spiritual growth

New York: Simon & Schuster/The Free Press 2002. 272 pp HB $25.00

I found this to be a peculiar book for several reasons. My first “startle” came from the focus by a psychiatrist on the physical brain as an index for emotional problems. Daniel Amen has a wealth of experience in ordering sophisticated SPECT scans of the brain. These provide 3-dimensional images of areas of the brain that are active at the time of the scan. Amen uses these to explain to people with psychological problems what parts of their brains are under- or over-active. He feels it is irresponsible to treat people for psychological problems without the aid of these tests.

Having identified the problems, Amen then suggests medications and/or various mental exercises that can correct the disorders he identifies. Much of what he suggests is in the realm of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).

Amen presents a clear and readable discussion, excellently illustrated, on parts of the brain he has identified as showing abnormalities in association with various psychological problems.

My second “startle” came from Amen’s advocating spiritual awareness as an important aspect of psychiatric intervention. On closer scrutiny, it becomes clear that he views spirituality as being based on values of a humanistic nature. While I found no direct statement about this, he appears to view a belief in God as a cognitive belief, influenced by brain functions.

Amen observes:

Our spirituality is influenced by how the brain functions. It has been my experience that when the brain is healthy for people with religious beliefs, God is experienced as loving, compassionate, forgiving, and present. When these people struggle with brain problems, God is often perceived as angry, vengeful, controlling, rigid, judgmental, and distant. Brain physiology impacts our perception of the world, including our perception of God. (p. 26)

EMDR calms the focal overactive areas of the brain. In PTSD, for example, we see a diamond pattern on SPECT, which is excessive activity in the anterior cingulate gyrus (top point of the diamond), basal ganglia (two side points of the diamond), and limbic-thalamus (bottom point of the diamond). This pattern fit nicely into the symptomatology of PTSD. People who have been traumatized and develop PTSD symptoms (such as flashbacks, nightmares, worries, quick startle, anxiety, depression, and avoidance) are frequently overly concerned and worried (anterior cingulate traits – get stuck), anxious and hyperalert (basal ganglia), and filter everything through negativity (limbic-thalamus). EMDR calms all of these areas on SPECT. (p. 191)

Wayne Dosick and Ellen Kaufman Dosick. Spiritually Healing the Indigo Children (And Adult Indigos Too): The Practical Guide and Handbook

 San Diego: Jodere Group, 2004. 254 pp. $24.00

Our Spiritual Guidance teaches that our Indigo Children come to Earth holding a vision of a perfected world. Their great pain comes from the dissonance they feel between their vision, and the wildly imperfect world they see and experience. Their pain is at the spiritual, emotional, energetic-soul-level. (p. 3)

. INDIGO—the Movie: An Extraordinary Experience

The weekend of January 29 and 30, 2005 turned out to become a major event for many people around the globe because of the premier showing of the movie INDIGO. Let me begin with a brief synopsis of the movie. The story revolves about Grace and her grandfather Ray, a man whose family life fell apart due to several fateful decisions he made. While on the run to protect the ten-year-old girl, Ray encounters the many gifts this Indigo child has to offer, which affect the lives of the many people they encounter, most significantly those of the members of her own family.

“ Take a vital role, an active part in bringing your extraordinary experiences forward…You are it. You are the message and the messenger.” These words by Neale Donald Walsch, co-writer and convincing actor in the role of Ray in INDIGO-the Movie, are indeed crucial to understanding the wider implications of what this film might represent.

I am writing this article from Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, where the movie attracted a crowd of about 550 people at two venues. Each venue offered the viewers a post-movie panel discussion, hosted by educators, social workers and energy workers, all of whom were experienced in the field of spiritual healing or working with Indigo and Crystal children. I was very fortunate to co-host with Dr. Karin Cremasco (a gifted energy practitioner and teacher) a post-movie session where the audiences felt that the opportunity to exchange comments, questions, answers, and concerns in the hour following the film greatly enhanced their viewing experience and understanding of Indigo children. Perhaps many attendees realized that this movie is truly about each one of us. As the director Stephen Simon reiterated, “We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

Standing on its own, the movie presents a few challenges. If it is intended to inform the average citizen about who Indigo children are, then the story line does not offer insights into the broad spectrum of who these children actually are. Grace, the principal character and an Indigo child, is such an extremely gifted child that few people are able to relate to her gifts as relevant to most other children. Even in addressing those who are already genuinely interested in the topic, the movie was lacking information that would be helpful to parents or educators in a practical sense. Some parents even felt that their children might be perceived as second- or third-rate children because they do not compare to Grace. With regards to appealing to Indigos themselves, the apparent mission of the film would have been better served if more attention had been given to the spectrum of sensitivities these children display. One frequent comment from young attendees at the viewings was that “the movie was too violent”, most often in the form of a threat of violence rather then visible violence. Jan Yordy (Energy Connection Therapies) points out: “With enhanced awareness, their (the Indigo children’s) highly tuned system picks up the negative emotional and environmental energy from their surroundings like a sponge. This causes Indigos or Crystals to become ungrounded, scrambled and often energetically reversed leading them to make poor choices and to self-sabotage.”

Perhaps a further word of caution is needed, Grace, the Indigo child, plays the role of the rescuer of the adults around her. Parenting the parents should never be the recommended role of children, no matter who they are. She is also the only character in the movie that remains unchanged and demonstrates no feelings. Several viewers remarked, “she was unreal in the sense that we could not empathize with her at all.” Her detachment removed her from the playful world of children that was only accessible to the audience through the remarkable pictures shown to us in the opening scene of the movie and later, very briefly, in the orphanage.

Most importantly, though, the production team, headed by James Twyman, Stephen Simon and Neale Donald Walsch, really did accomplish a number of feats. First, INDIGO ignited enormous excitement around the world on the topic of intuitively gifted children. Very often these days, we are inundated with negative press about youth. Rarely do we take time to celebrate children, and even less their spirit. INDIGO invites all of us to realize that all of us are children and all children possess gifts, even though those may be very subtle, as James Twyman highlights in the preamble to the movie. Indeed, we are all special. The movie certainly transmitted this message very clearly, and hope remains that it never is too late to make changes.

Second, INDIGO highlights the spiritual aspects of these children, their strong intuitive skills, and their reliance on inner knowing and wisdom. Grace feels she has a lot to say and communicates telepathically with her friends, which works, according to her, because “we’re all connected with each other.” This message resonated with many audience members who voiced their concerns about compartmentalization and separation. We also tend to place responsibilities on others rather than search for our own imaginative way to deal with challenges that arise and to accept them as an invitation to growth so we can relate better to each other.

The title of the movie, and of course labelling certain groups of children as Indigos, presents a paradox in itself: “I don’t like being put in boxes,” states Nicholas, the second Indigo child portrayed in the movie. As one grandfather remarked to me after the movie, “I’m convinced now that I am ‘dimensionally challenged’ to some degree (Grace’s description of Ray) even though I thought of myself as rather open-minded. But now I think that I’ll keep in mind that most likely it’s me who tends to put others and myself in a box rather than stay open to what surrounds me. Maybe I’ll be able to listen differently to my grandson now when he doesn’t seem to pay attention to me and notice what he’s actually talking about.” What a wonderful realization that may open many doors for both grandchild and grandfather, and most likely all others involved in their lives.

The third major message the movie was able to transmit to its audience is to LISTEN and BELIEVE. This movie “invited us to listen to our children and to ourselves and to believe that there is motivation for our children’s behaviour that is absolutely real to them even if, and perhaps, particularly when, this motivation remains invisible and incomprehensible to us”—in the words of a couple in the audience, both of whom are educators and parents of teenagers.

Another parent was struck by Grace’s quotation of Einstein: “What makes you think imagination isn’t real? After all, something has to be imagined before it can be created!” We are invited to ponder the question how much room contemporary society at large reserves for imagination and thus nurtures the soul. Educational institutions, from junior kindergarten, to high school and university, have become more of a training ground that emphasizes factual knowledge and career training rather than education that nurtures the whole person. Little room is given to quiet contemplation and the inner voice. Grace asks us to believe, to give ourselves permission to accept the invisible, that which is different, inconceivable and impalpable. Then “parenting becomes an intentional spiritual discipline when we practice the art of understanding,” as Tobin Hart argues in The Secret Spiritual World of Children (2003). It then facilitates the differentiation between wants and needs of each individual, including the adults’—often unconscious—projection of their needs onto their children and other people in their environment. Ray reaches this conclusion after his precognitive vision towards the end of the film, when he apologizes to his son, admitting his errors and wrong choices, realizing he had not allowed his son to accept responsibility for himself: “Sometimes the things you want are not the things you need.” How many of us remain caught up in wants and do not listen to the inner voices of the heart that sing the songs of our needs?

The fourth important message of this movie resounds in the word “mystery”. Grace emphasizes that mystery is sometimes better than exact knowing. Children display a natural curiosity that often is squelched because the rational adults run out of patience trying to explain and perhaps feel put on the spot for not knowing the answers. INDIGO challenges us to “try to love the questions themselves” (Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet). It would be fascinating to show this film to a group of children and adolescents and partake in their discussions afterwards.

I am convinced that all those of you who had a chance to see the movie feel enriched even if it is in the form of more questions and mysteries. Perhaps that will bring us closer to the wondrous world of our children. To all those of you who have not yet had a chance to watch INDIGO, count on a heart-warming experience!

Indigo Movie review by Martina Steiger, ThD, IJHC Assistant Editor

Alex Grey and Kenji Williams. WorldSpirit DVD

Format NTSC 16:9 Widescreen $29.95 USD Includes 28pp full-color booklet featuring Alex Grey’s art and lyrics.

Features:

DVD:

• 1-hour video of the live performance interwoven with Alex Grey's art - in both 2.0 stereo and 5.1 surround-sound audio

• 1-hour 'art only' video featuring Alex Grey's art set to the soundtrack of the performance - in both vocal and instrumental versions

• 40-minute documentary on the creation of WORLDSPIRIT

• 3 bonus music videos by Kenji Williams

• Chapel of Sacred Mirrors Animation

• English, French, Spanish, German, and Japanese subtitles

• Soundtrack of WORLDSPIRIT performance

• Additional bonus tracks by Kenji Williams

. The Monroe Hemi Synch music

The Monroe Institute produces a fascinating system for healing through frequencies that are generated in the listener’s brain. Pulses of different frequencies are played in each ear, and an interference pattern is set up in the brain that is said to be healing. Covering music is included in all the tapes, including a variety of compositions (some well known pieces that were not created for this purpose, and some specifically crafted to enhance the process).

The Monroe Institute website provides the following succinct summary:

Hemi-Sync® is an audio guidance technology that works quite simply by sending different sounds (tones) to each ear through stereo headphones. The two hemispheres of the brain then act in unison to "hear" a third signal - the difference between the two tones. This is not actual sound, but an electrical signal that can only be perceived within the brain by both brain hemispheres working together.

The Hemi-Sync® process has been refined with over 40 years of research and development. These efforts have resulted in the development of scores of individual products for specific applications such as focused attention, stress management, meditation, sleep enhancement, and pain management, to name a few.

Hemi-Sync® can help you experience enhanced mental, physical, and emotional states, by combining verbal guidance, music, pink sound and/or other audio effects with the binaural beats.

I had heard from numbers of people about this music and have been curious for a number of years to experience it but had had no opportunity to explore these, and was grateful when Brian Daily, MD kindly mediated the IJHC office receiving a set of review copies. I am an avid music listener, preferring classical music, having gone through phases of listening particularly to guitar, flute, and country or Irish fiddle pieces. I prefer to work most of the time with music in the background. I am, however, missing a link between my ears and my vocal chords. A person close to me once spent several hours during a long drive in attempts to get me to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ on key, and finally agreed with the opinion of my erstwhile childhood piano teacher that I am simply tone deaf.

I was therefore curious to explore how I would experience the ‘metamusic’ – starting with the CDs titled, Remembrance and Higher. I was disappointed to find that I felt no effects, either with earphones or without, but assumed this was due to my missing auditory link. I therefore forwarded several of the CDs to two other people whose sensitivity and judgment I value. The comments of one of these people follow. (The second person’s comments were similar, but for reasons beyond her control she was unable to type them out.)


Music and Meditation

As a long time meditator, it is nice to have meditation aids, especially while traveling. As a “music person” I find myself to be particularly responsive to audio tones. I, therefore, often use music recordings to aid my meditation. This is especially useful, when done with headphones, in noisy environments, such as hotel rooms.

The tones that seem to be most effective for me are those which are quiet, not distracting and soothing in nature. The more musical tonalities may make pleasant listening or even background music, but can be distracting.

As my favorite form of meditation is ‘heart based’ or in the realm of loving kindness, I am particularly attracted to tones that resonate in the 5th charka. Amongst these would be the sounds of brass bowls or Tibetan bells. I find their tones to be deeply resonant in the middle charkas and ‘drop’ me into a meditative state readily. Environmental sounds also work nicely to sooth the anxious meditator.

In addition, there have been multiple CDs produced which can be described as “designer” music. These recordings are produced to create a neuro-physiological state of relaxation. My first experience in this realm was with Doc Childre’s ‘Heart Zones’ and ‘Quite Joy.’ Doc is the founder of the Institute of HeartMath (Heartmath.org). The institute has been focused on studying the health and educational impact of emotional shifting and meditative techniques. In general, these techniques are based in appreciation, love and caring. These HeartMath CDs have been created to bring the listener into his/her heart area and are meant to be accompanied with a practice, such as the HeartMath ‘Lock-in’ techniques. This is an appreciation-based practice. In combination, the music and Lock-in practice have been demonstrated to improve autonomic nervous system tone very effectively in multiple research projects (see for instance "Quiet Joy" by Doc Childre, HeartMath.org).

Another ‘designer’ set of CDs are the recordings of the Monroe Institute. These recordings use ‘Hemi-sync’ technology to stimulate the brain into a greater sense of balance. The theory is that by playing alternating tones in each ear with similar, yet slightly different frequency the brain will find the middle tone between the two. In trying these Cds (Inner Journey, Hemi-Sync Meditation) I found an unusual occurrence. I did feel a sense of balance or evenness in my brain-body, however I also experienced a sense of agitation. I even experienced some twitching of my fingers in response to the music. This was a unique experience for me. I also noticed that I was less relaxed with using these CDs than with other forms of meditation music or tones. To be fair, however, the Monroe Institute suggests taking one of their courses and that the CDs are just one piece of their process.

The most important recommendation I have for you is that trial and error works. It is my belief that individuals respond differently to different sounds and music. I do believe that simple is better as musical complexity can be distracting for most people. Enjoy the adventure.

CD review by Lee Lipsenthal, MD, ABHM

Anne Herman. Meditations for Cats: Favorite Feline Philosophies

Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel 2002.  80 pp. $9.95   

Christopher J. Moore. In Other Words: A language lover's guide to the most intriguing words around the world

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