The scientifically demonstrated effects of qi on the human body

Here’s a YouTube clip showing demonstrable, measurable evidence of the effects of qi  on the human body. Austin Goh teaches human energy healing and is a master of Wing Chun kung fu.
Pier Rubesa is an independent researcher looking into the practical uses of sound waves in living systems as the basis for diagnostic schemes therapeutic systems and their interaction (bioharmonic research).

Chris and I were clients of Pier’s. You can see the room where, over the course of a year, Chris was treated by Pier using the same technology. The difference is that in this video, human touch, not sound waves, is the medium being manipulated to bring about changes in the body. If you look closer at the video you will see speakers situated at various points in the room. In a sound therapy session, Pier introduces pure sounds that vibrate to the individual colors of the chakras. The machine picks up the body’s reactions to the sound or the touch through sensors that are placed under the mattress.

Here’s a link to some of the posts where I discussed the sound therapy. (Note: Chris was quicker than most to achieve an out-of-body experience.) If you wish to read more, just put “sound therapy” in the search bar.
http://holisticschizophrenia.blogspot.ch/2009/11/holistic-explanation-of-out-of-body.html
http://holisticschizophrenia.blogspot.ch/2009/12/desert-matrix.html
http://holisticschizophrenia.blogspot.ch/2009/11/myths-are-public-dreams-dreams-are.html

TED talk on sound therapy

Editor’s note: TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to “Ideas worth spreading,” which it makes available through talks posted on its website.

Julian Treasure, the author of “Sound Business,” is chairman of UK-based audio branding specialist The Sound Agency and an international speaker on sound’s effects on people, on business and on society.

His full presentation is found here.

“Less mainstream, though intellectually no more difficult to accept, is sound therapy: the use of tones or sounds to improve health through entrainment (affecting one oscillator with a stronger one). This is long-established: shamanic and community chant and the use of various resonators like bells and gongs, date back thousands of years and are still in use in many cultures around the world.”

Progress report from Chris

In the cranial-sacral therapy I have been doing for a few weeks, comfort is key, the therapy is intimate, you are placing your body into the therapist’s hands so it’s best to make the most of your time and listen to your feelings. At our last session the therapist stressed the importance of “mind-body dialogue,” keeping our thoughts firmly grounded in our real-world self. Strong feelings and judgments have their effect on the physical body and during the sessions I am encouraged to notice how certain thoughts are received, if they manifest themselves as tension.

Sound therapy continues to be a source of wonder and amazement. I’d never pay as much attention to a teacher at school or my GP, probably because my ST has all these cool gadgets, a lakefront view and a portrait from the adult version of “The Little Mermaid.” At each session after he plays his kaleidoscopic mix tape we share our impressions of what happened. I say this allows me to see clearly into my past, and he says each sound has with it a certain feeling associated with it. The channel of time is opened up.

Dr. Stern, my psychiatrist has all but said “reduce Serdolect at your own rate.” She genuinely supports my coming off this particular medication and is leaving it up to me. I’m down to about six milligrams from eight, and I could be as low as four by now if I paid more attention to the schedule for reduction prescribed online. Despite the lazy days of summer I’m more than willing to go for a jog in the morning or swim in the evening, partly as an effort to keep my weight down which has shot up again even over the past month.

I wish I’d paid more attention to my brother’s advice to find a job or a course to pass the summer because I don’t have anything to look forward to from one week to the next. Like many other hopefuls to the job market I’m throwing in my lot with a local technical school for computer training in the fall. It will be tough; I’ll have to work with younger people in a non-native language for me, learning something I’m not absolutely crazy about, but it will hopefully lead to better things. Thankfully there’s someone working with me who better grasps the language and the school’s policies. One of my goals is to find someone who wants to learn English to do things together and share language skills.

Chris Forbes

Connecting the dots in consciousness and schizophrenia

The therapeutic treatment of serious mental health issues like schizophrenia will converge in future around consciousness.

Eric Allen Bell
I asked Deepak, “Why is there suffering in the world” and he answered..”All suffering comes from the hallucination of separateness”.

Hallucinogens
Scientists are taking a new look at hallucinogens, which became taboo among regulators after enthusiasts like Timothy Leary promoted them in the 1960s with the slogan “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Now, using rigorous protocols and safeguards, scientists have won permission to study once again the drugs’ potential for treating mental problems and illuminating the nature of consciousness.

Lucid dreaming
People who focus single-mindedly on a task during the day, be it a computer game or playing a musical instrument, are more likely to experience lucid dreams, says Jayne Gackenbach at Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada.

These experiments in lucid dreaming, few though they currently are, may have wide-reaching implications in clinical situations, particularly in the study of mental illness. “When you’re a schizophrenic, you’re in primary consciousness really,” Voss claims. “What you’re lacking is reflective awareness; you cannot distinguish between reality and your hallucinations.” On this basis, Voss wonders whether it might be possible to stimulate the necessary regions in schizophrenic patients to help them achieve greater lucidity in their waking life. The work might even suggest ways for healthy people to enjoy lucid dreams. “Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get somebody in REM sleep to become a lucid dreamer just by stimulating his brain?” says Voss. “No one’s tried this before.”

The Satori system
This privately developed technology is being used by the US military in veterans centers and in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is becoming widely available in US spas and the developers are partnering with Mental Health America to distribute 250,000 MP3 complimentary downloads to U.S. servicemen (emphasis, my own)

The Satori system uses alpha, theta and delta frequencies to induce relaxation by lowering brainwaves, lowering serotonin levels and bringing the body into a REM-like state.

Chris Forbes on sound (color) therapy
A very interesting thing happened, which accelerated the time it took to achieve “zen” with the color therapy. Beginning with red (opposites), all the tension left me and I entered into a different space, a space that was not defined by my body but rather was defined by my “rational” mind, the part of me which had preferences and opinions. My mind was liberated, and while I did not enter into free fantasy or “lucid dreaming”, I was questioning things I took for granted, and how I defined most things against my body. At green and blue I was released completely from the present and concentrated on my memories, and I became aware of the life flowing in my limbs and the changes, I could see how my legs had become stronger but less flexible since I started treating the body like a machine.

Sound of mind

I sent Chris’s sound shaman the New York Times article on hallucinogens. It is very exciting to me that researchers are actively probing the ways in which consciousness can be heightened by chemical means (psilocybin). Though the results so far are encouraging they are also preliminary, and, according to the article researchers caution against reading too much into these small-scale studies. They do not want to repeat the mistakes of the 1960s, when some scientists-turned-evangelists exaggerated their understanding of the drugs’ risks and benefits. (Rossa’s comment: Now, if only they would use their findings for good and not evil!)

Chris’s sound shaman is mechanically inducing heightened consciousness through sound manipulation, which is a drugless way of going after the same results. Here is his reply to my e-mail.

Hello Rossa,

Thank you for the interesting link.

The key phrase here is experience in which the boundaries between the self and others disappear . This exceptional phenomenon is attributed to an ecstatic, spiritual, and out of body sensation, as it spans a vast realm of experience, method, and interpretation. These sensations can be brought upon by the use of external stimulants. In practically all cultures the practice of changing sensory state is achieved through a change in sensory perception functions via the energy exchange occurring between elements through chemical reaction, mechanical vibration, and motive force! Specific drugs, sound, and movement, are the primary interface methods for experiencing this phenomenon known as a changed state of perception.

Wishing you a good evening, and hope to speak with you soon.

The Building of the Ego

Chris reports on his sound therapy progress

The past few weeks with sound therapy have been constructive, as we increasingly moved into the world of imagination. As the shaman says, “Sound is linked to memory,” and he’s really helped me by letting me release tension, from the present as well as the past. I remember hearing Ray of Light by Madonna at the end of my last session, which really describes his therapy in a nutshell.

What we did this time was the same six-color palette played in sequence, and the shaman gave me a “keyword” associated with each color. They were:

red: opposites
orange: movement
yellow: action
green: distance
blue: sound
violet: form

I didn’t know quite what to expect. A very interesting thing happened, which accelerated the time it took to achieve “zen” with the color therapy. Beginning with red (opposites), all the tension left me and I entered into a different space, a space that was not defined by my body but rather was defined by my “rational” mind, the part of me which had preferences and opinions. My mind was liberated, and while I did not enter into free fantasy or “lucid dreaming,” I was questioning things I took for granted, and how I defined most things against my body. At green and blue I was released completely from the present and concentrated on my memories, and I became aware of the life flowing in my limbs and the changes, I could see how my legs had become stronger but less flexible since I started treating the body like a machine.

Completing the session, for the second part the shaman gave two keywords or combinations, red (“opposites”) and each other color, eg. “opposites and distance.” Looking at each combination, you were forced to ask what is an opposite, and this freed me from judgment. I was always looking at how fast something moved, or how loud a sound was. With movement, I defined an upward motion versus a downward motion, but when it came to green (opposites and distance), things looked completely different. How far away is one person when talking to another person? What if you measure from one cell of the body to another, or one atom to another? Then the distance from one person to the next could be greater than “the length of a football field”. How you define your perspective is as important as the objective world you perceive. The issue of personal space: there is a limit somewhere between your body and someone else’s, where you can share your feelings without becoming a slave to every little outside stimulus.

When it came to “opposites and form,” red and violet, I pictured myself in a building, and the contrast between my body and the naked structure of an apartment building, and I saw myself fall through the building from the top to below the ground. The shaman told me that often in psychology a building represents the human ego, so I found a connection between the ego (the building) and the body, and the way to transcend the ego (the confines of the building) was to shift my focus away from my body. There the session ended. I didn’t especially enjoy being stuck in a building and was happy to keep my new awareness of the connections between my body and the physical world around me.

Satori system, post-traumatic stress and schizophrenia

The Financial Times copyright policy forbids distribution of this article by e-mail. You can google it using keywords Satori system, Financial Times and David Kaufman.

This privately developed technology is being used by the US military in veterans centers and in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is becoming widely available in US spas and the developers are partnering with Mental Health America to distribute 250,000 MP3 complimentary downloads to U.S. servicemen (emphasis, my own)

The Satori system uses alpha, theta and delta frequencies to induce relaxation by lowering brainwaves, lowering serotonin levels and bringing the body into a REM-like state. Lucid dreaming anyone?

The client winds down in a specially designed chaise longue type chair where vibrational energy is pumped in via headphones and four strategically placed transducers (which I suspect are located under the length of the chair and in contact with the body.)

I have written elsewhere (here, here, here and here) about Chris’s encouraging experiences with the sound shaman, using a different sound therapy approach but having in common the use of vibrational energy and sound to heal. According to the FT article, the Satori system helps disable your innate “fight or flight” response.

All of this is wonderful, but why isn’t Mental Health America making these downloads freely available to people with schizophrenia, their natural constituency? Come on, what’s the difference between Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and schizophrenia? Dr. Loren Mosher said shell shock (PSTD) resembles schizophrenia but in PSTD it seems obvious where the stressors came from and in schizophrenia it is not so obvious. Okay, PSTD, like autism, is a hot topic, and schizophrenia, as usual, suffers from a dirth of outside the box thinking.

I will follow up with Mental Health America and see if not distributing the free downloads to their natural clients isn’t just an oversight.

Desert matrix

Chris’s report on his fifth sound therapy

Last Friday I went out for my fifth session with the sound therapist. I was feeling sleepy, yet I was eager to begin. We made small talk about travel and music. The therapist introduced me to an idea, which I have found to be one that’s been recurring, via well-intentioned adults namely, who am I, what is my purpose and what am I to do with my life? He explained further that people often miss their calling in life, and spend years working in a job they hate or in regret over missed opportunities. I told him I would like to teach people, or be someone who is respected and looked up to. What I was trying to communicate was that I still look for validation from other people, and that I believe that I could be content in such a role. I was feeling ambivalent about his questions, as I would resent his persistence which at once exposed my insecurities and promised a recovery.

For the first part of the therapy, we listened to colors as usual. I was supposed to imagine each color, and I tried this time to see what each color meant to me. I remember the middle band colors, yellow and green, I imagined like earth colors, sand and grass, really vast and beautiful; blue and violet I saw as people and human activity. The colors appeared like emotions naturally and gently, as sunlight rolling down a hill. The therapist told me he had never (or rarely) seen such well defined color bands from visualisation show up on his meter.

For the second part, he told me of societies which in the past sent their youth into the wilderness to search for guidance, who were welcomed back into the tribe if they emerged but were not expected necessarily to return. Now, was I comfortable to pretend that I know myself, without having to go into the wilderness, or do I want to find out more of life than I know already? The therapist then asked me to imagine I was entering a desert from which I could not return as I came, and posited I may find someone there, bringing a message. I saw a cactus, but it was enormous, filling up my field of view, and I couldn’t get past unless I let it prick me. Then the view opened up and I could see for a mile around. There was nothing remarkable until I began to imagine myself thirsty and soon I was surrounded by cacti once again.

As I lay on the ground, my vision shifted to that of an eagle, or bird/man, and as he flew towards me lying on the ground, we became one animal, and I felt held up high by a strange force; and at last I started to fall towards the earth because my right wing was broken. At this time the sounds finished and I opened my eyes. I noticed that at the end I was ignoring the broken wing and was happy just to not fly properly. This must show how we need something extra to return home from the desert, the awareness that we are not fully healed; the feeling of being lost before finding my wings is the same as the insecurity of flying with a broken wing. Having no wings and crashing with a broken wing are the same thing, and if you can’t fix your wing you can stay on the ground, but if you want to fix it you have to give up roaming the desert.

Information overload

Here is an e-mail I received from the sound shaman in response to Chris’s latest write-up of his experiences undergoing sound therapy.
http://holisticschizophrenia.blogspot.com/2009/11/sound-shaman-as-therapist.html

“Thank you Rossa, I am glad that we seem to be making positive progress. Chris is a wonderful and deeply sensitive young man, and in my opinion, he needs to gain a deeper understanding that the mind, with it’s endless stream of chatter and unceasing kaleidoscope of imaginings, is not who he really IS.

We have a serious problem in our modern society: it is that we have forgotten what it is to be silent. Our world is trapped in an uncontrollable spiral whose velocity is in the danger zone. Young people are being subjected to an ever schizophrenic society – just watch an hour of MTV, the Saturday morning cartoons, or a typical video game – the number of messages evoked through sound and image is equivalent to what we (as parents in our generation) would have been exposed to in almost a year of media. In earlier generations, this amount of new information would have been absorbed over decades. It is no wonder that our children have difficulty concentrating, sitting still, or thinking coherently – much less understanding their emotions as they are being bombarded with largely irrelevant, incoherent, and manipulative information at an ever increasing rate. It is unlikely that this frenzied multi-media phenomenon will change in the near future, thus it is more important than ever to find ways to offload or discharge this very negative influence.

As we can demonstrate with measurements, our thoughts influence our electrical field, which in turn influences the atomic and molecular cohesion in the body. The rising incidence of disease in children in modern societies, such as allergies, psychological problems, etc., is not just a result of environmental pollution or bad diet, rather I believe, that it is very much related to the disturbance of the body’s electrical field due to an oversupply of sensory and conceptual information. To heal, we need not medicate our children or give them ever more activities, rather we need to teach them to appreciate silence, stillness, and relaxation. Observing the flow of a river in the forest is far more therapeutic to our information overloaded children than any antidepressant!”

The sound shaman as therapist

Chris’s notes from the fourth session

Before we began the session of sound therapy, the shaman asked me how I was doing.

I explained that I had been feverish for a day prior to our meeting. We discussed the implications of this, how this is usually a sign that a change is needed in my behavior towards my body especially. He asked after my family, especially my father and brother, both away at the moment. He said that there was something I could do for my brother, but did not say what, and that I might not want to do this thing for him. These were the things I explored during the therapy, which took on a very concrete path, more understandable and clear than previously.

The shaman had moved his practice to different premises, such that instead of an airy, mystical environment it was now in a more intimate setting, smaller cosy rooms that felt more personable. There was no staring-out-windows-pretending I was a bird. Rather than playing with my surroundings, toying with the possibilities of super-grounded experience, I was able to be practically focused, to take up a larger living space and give full vent to my inner conflicts. My therapy session was like a dialogue, with my emotions expressing themselves as thoughts, which I was able to interpret because of the sounds. I got the vague sense that time was slowed down, and I could hear myself more clearly and understand my emotions better, without the implications of meaning, i.e. feelings of confusion were the “real” me, not some quest of fulfilment.

With the first set of sounds, I felt I could live inside my body with so much space, every nerve and muscle vibrated with the sounds, so that my leg felt like a wooden bat and stretched as long as the ceiling is high. My mind, usually relegated to my head and stuffed into his tiny cubicle, opened the windows on all my body and became clearer and louder. I began to cry at fleeting feelings I had for people I no longer see and some who I still see. I was not confused by fantasies of sex or violence, which I attribute this time to the therapy working, that my body was releasing judgments on these somewhat uncomfortable matters. I had recurring feelings of pain as I thought of my father and of my little brother. I have the sentiment now of guilt about these two people: I have been unwilling to accept my part in our sometimes difficult relationship. I discovered that the pain can only mean one thing: When I am hurt in a relationship the other person is hurt also, which shows affection on their part and not indifference as I often assume. With the sound therapy I can isolate problems and look at them from an exterior point of view.

Concerning how the therapy “works,” I think the success or failure of the therapy is dependent on my state of mind, and just because I wasn’t getting images of sex and violence does not mean that I am somehow “cured” or need to be “cured” of thinking of these things. I am humbled to say I feel as I have no control whatsoever of the images and thoughts that come to me as I lie down at the therapy. If there is any improvement in my well-being as a result of the therapy, well it is hard to say what part I had played in it, only that I can be more or less open in mind towards the work.