Fireside Chat - A Psychedelic Interpretation Of Sound Baths

This is a casual fireside chat with Kevin about a few of the possible reasons why soundbaths work, and why the gongs he uses are particularly well-suited to produce the desired results. This talk uses the idea of psychedelics as a way of getting toward the concepts that might bear fruit for one seeking to understand the how and why of soundbaths to a greater degree.

Transcript

So here's just a couple quick thoughts about sound baths and a practice like this and why it might work.

Recently I read Michael Pollan's book How to Change Your Mind,

Which is basically all about psychedelics and how the history of psychedelic research played out and its present day standing in academia.

And it also gives a recounting of the author's own experiences with some of these compounds.

But at one point,

Or at a few points,

He's describing how the psychedelic experience might be felt in terms of its phenomenology and what it does to one's psychology.

So he likened it to shaking a snow globe,

Which I think is a really useful little analogy.

So as we have a human experience and as we age also,

Things tend to perhaps ossify or become stagnant in the mind and also in the body.

So stiffness in the body and also a sense of stiffness in the mind perhaps.

Things get stuck.

And where the therapeutic potential of psychedelics comes in is that you have that experience such as the snow globe that is your life and your mind and your relationship to yourself gets shaken up.

And where the snowflakes fell before,

So to speak,

Is not where they fall afterwards.

It might look roughly the same,

But there's going to be some fundamental changes with respect to how things were before.

So what I'm not claiming is that taking a sound bath is equivalent to that.

Although I do think that psychedelic is actually a pretty helpful word when thinking about what the power of a sound bath is and how it kind of works in the body and in the mind.

So there is a psychedelic aspect to it in that sense that we're doing something that for many of us,

Most of the time at least,

Is completely different than what we're usually doing.

So any potential stuckness,

Or not any,

But some potential stuckness when you either take a psychedelic drug or you commit to an intentional practice,

A conscious intentional practice which may or may not be a sound bath,

But even just something like prayer or meditation,

It could have a psychedelic effect in that specific sense that I've been talking about.

So specifically in terms of the gongs and the sound baths that are recorded here,

I think it lends itself or might lend itself particularly well to that interpretation.

So as established,

We've got the part about sound bathing that is intentional.

So we're taking some time to consciously do something and that's at the expense of doing other things.

So we've got that intentionality piece.

But there's also the nature of the sound bath itself,

The types of sounds that are coming from the gongs.

And in other places at other times I've referred to these types of sounds as ancient is a word that comes to mind.

Compelling is one that often comes to mind,

But compelling because of something and it's the because of something that's really what I'm going towards here.

So primal or primordial.

So these sounds kind of grope towards something deep at the core of the human experience or again with that ancient idea goes back to a more temporally distant part of our evolution or of our bodies or brains.

So there's older parts of the brain evolutionarily speaking than other parts of the brain.

And perhaps there's something about these sounds that takes the experiencer back to those more ancient or primal parts of the brain.

So what else to say about the sounds that come from the gongs?

Well,

The struggle that I'm having to come up with words maybe points to another one that it's kind of ineffable.

Ineffable is a word that you come across a lot in philosophy of religion.

So in describing a religious experience and again I'm not claiming that taking a gong bath is going to result in a religious experience but ineffable is a good word just in the sense that in the same way that we conceptualize and describe other experiences or sensations or even objects that we come across in a typical day to day setting.

Those are not the types of things that are experienced in a gong bath.

The sounds are way different than any other sound.

Most of us are liable to be hearing throughout the course of a day.

And the experience itself,

I encourage people to lie down on the floor and commit to making the body very comfortable and relaxed.

That's an unusual way to use your body based on how most people most of the time are using their body throughout the day.

So physically speaking,

In terms of the senses that the experiencer is receiving,

A sound bath is quite different and distinct from what you might call mundane experience.

The quality with which you're listening.

So it's rare or more rare to be intentionally focused on something and that's what we want to somewhat do in a sound bath practice.

So it's listening intentionally and that might kind of come in and go out a little bit.

There might be periods where you're quite in tune with the experience and moving with the experience kind of in real time and there might be moments where you just lose it completely and you're either distracted or perhaps have fallen asleep or something like that.

So there can be ebbs and flows in that locked in type of an experience.

But for the most part there is something different even about accessing that state in and out than what is experienced often times throughout the course of a day.

So that's a few reasons why,

Maybe not exhaustive,

But a few reasons why a sound bath and these gongs in particular might be a really unique experience in terms of what is normally experienced throughout the course of a day.

So it's intentionally different.

It's designed to be different.

And it's potentially going to hit on some different parts of your brain,

Your mind,

Your experience that aren't normally accessed as well.

So psychedelic,

The gongs,

Gong bathing as a psychedelic experience in terms of your snow globe of reality and your experience,

Your day to day expected beingness of things that gets challenged,

Shaken up and potentially the experience is remembered so you can go back to the different possibility for things to be,

Ways to feel,

For sensations to be experienced or perhaps things actually do kind of permanently shift as well.

The snow falls actually somewhere different and stays somewhere different.

So the sound bath experience and the psychedelic experience,

They're not the same thing.

They're not equivalent.

Where a psychedelic experience might kind of force to the surface a radically different way of experiencing reality and being a self or being a human,

Being an animal.

The sound bath experience tends to act more so just as a reminder.

The sound bath is a reminder of your ability to be relaxed,

To be focused,

To be both of those things simultaneously,

To be creative,

To be relaxed and creative simultaneously.

There's a relationship there.

You need to be relaxed,

To be creative it seems.

So it's not a strong shaking of the snow globe.

It's a shaking but instead of a complete redefinition or a full blown challenge to your ordinary way of experiencing reality,

The sound bath experience is perhaps more so just a reminder of another way that things could be.

Another way that most people most of the time can access and experience reality that way but we choose not to or tend not to or have lost the habit of doing that on a regular basis and it's a good place to be.

There's something that feels at home.

There's something that feels nourished.

There's something that feels human I think about occupying a place like that.

So there are differences.

It's not the same thing,

The psychedelic experience and the sound bath experience but there's definite similarity too and there's overlap in those two experiences and one place where you might get some interesting overlap is on the sensory side.

So on the sensory side of things in a psychedelic experience perhaps there's all sorts of different things experienced all the way to the further end of the spectrum with hallucinations and perhaps there's a bit of common ground with creativity and what might happen in a sound bath so the mind in its relaxation tends to occupy a place where its ongoing productions are elegant,

Artful and as I said creative.

So based on everything that's kind of percolating in the mind creativity can take place when space is left and when input of action is removed or just relaxing in other words and then what grows what naturally grows just like how a plant grows or water flows thoughts and knowledge any kind of content in the mind reorganizes itself it's going to go somewhere and where it tends to go is in that creative direction so different ways of looking at things are experienced.

Insight might arise,

Eureka moments might arise or again just on that sensory level perhaps there is ways of experiencing vision that aren't normally the way you experience vision so normally the mind is at work relaying information to your visual cortex in a way that looks a certain way and perhaps that can become relaxed or challenged or move in a slightly different direction when we're engaged in a sound bath practice and the vibrations themselves might be giving your brain information that creates a totally different and novel and perhaps enjoyable sensory experience visual experience so sound coming in and that otherwise relaxation happening is giving the space for something kind of akin to a visual hallucination but it's really just what is endogenous to the brain it's there it just needs to be accessed with the right types of preparation so similarity and overlap but also important differences so just to tie it all together here maybe a nice thing to keep in mind is the etymology or the history of the origin of the word psychedelic this is really what I'm getting at with this philosophical meandering here this is the crux of it and what I'm not suggesting necessarily is that psychedelics need to be experienced this is just a useful descriptive tool to use here to help to describe how and why sound baths might work and some of the thinking that is behind my work with these gongs so the word itself psychedelic comes from greek words and it's basically two parts psyche mind and the delic part is basically meaning manifesting the whole thing comes through and means mind manifesting or mind making so when I'm talking about something like how a gong bath might create some interesting visual perceptions that are quite extraordinary this is more what I mean and when I talk about the creativity that might be experienced in a sound bath this is what I'm talking about so when things are relaxed and when and when we have an input like the strange primal sounds of the gongs we get a different thing produced in the mind and this is as I've been saying akin to something psychedelic and in this specific sense of mind manifesting we're getting a different look at how the mind works so when we relax things when we quiet things down there is a creativity that tends to keep going there's an aliveness that tends to keep creating things so this is the mind perhaps doing what the mind does best the mind being active in a way that's really healthy and vibrant so mind manifesting this means that in a sound bath perhaps we're getting a look at how the mind works in an optimal state so hopefully some of this has been helpful to you and I encourage you to keep using these gong bath practices and use them as a practice do them a few times and do them a few times a week if you can and just see where you get with it please get in touch if you have any questions.

Thank you.