Sound Energy

Everything vibrates, you included. There is a line, often attributed to Einstein, that we are slowed down sound and light waves, a walking bundle of frequencies tuned into the cosmos, and that our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music. Whoever said it first, it is true, and once you start listening for it you cannot stop.

Sound goes straight in

Most energy has to get past your thinking before it reaches you. Sound does not. It goes in through the ears and the skin and the bones, and it has moved something in you before your head has decided whether to allow it.

That is why a piece of music can bring you to tears in the car with no warning. It is why a raised voice in the next room tightens your stomach even when it has nothing to do with you. It is why a room full of people laughing feels different on your skin from a room full of people arguing, before you have heard a single word. Sound is energy arriving unfiltered, and that makes it both the easiest energy to use on purpose and the easiest to be damaged by without noticing.

What music looks like

Here is something to try the next time you play a piece of music you love.

Sit comfortably, close your eyes, and tune in with your higher self while you listen. Then look at the music rather than only hearing it. Let a picture of it form.

Really good music looks like gently made rope. Neatly coiled, every strand where it should be, the whole thing turning slowly. Bad or discordant music looks like rope that is badly frayed, strands sticking out all over the place, nothing holding together.

You will know which is which the moment you see it. And you will find, over the following weeks, that the frayed kind starts to bother you in a way it did not before. Music you used to leave on in the background will start to feel like sandpaper. That is your energy telling you what it does and does not want to bathe in, and it is worth listening to.

Try the same thing with the sound of somebody's voice. It is very revealing.

Sound that moves the brain

Your brain runs at different speeds depending on what you are doing. The fast busy beta of a working day. Alpha when you relax. Theta when you go deep in meditation or drift toward sleep. Delta in deep sleep. The brain wave teaching in the Meditation and Grounding area walks through all of them.

Sound can set that speed for you, which is the single most useful thing on this page.

Binaural beats are the simplest way to do it. You need a pair of decent headphones, because this only works with a separate sound in each ear, and a recording made for the purpose. Two slightly different frequencies are played, one into each ear, say 300 hertz on the left and 325 on the right. Your brain hears the difference between them, 25 hertz, and settles toward it. Choose a recording aimed at the state you want, alpha for a light meditation, theta for going deep, and let the sound carry you down.

I use them when I want to get somewhere quickly. They are a tool rather than a shortcut, and thirty minutes of plain sitting a day is still the foundation that nothing replaces, but on a day when the mind will not settle they are a very good tool. There are plenty of free recordings about. Try a few and keep the ones that work for you.

Your own sound

Your voice is sound energy too, and it is the instrument you always have with you.

Chanting. Humming. Singing badly in the car with the windows up. Saying a word out loud that you have only been thinking. All of it moves energy through the body, and the body knows the difference between a thought and a spoken thing. Every tradition chants, and the reason is the vibration of your own voice in your own chest, which changes what is happening in there, whatever the words happen to be.

If you have never tried it, here is the exercise. Sit up straight, close your eyes, take a slow breath in, and hum one long low note on the way out, as low as is comfortable. Feel where it sits in your chest. Do it three times. Then move the note up and notice where it sits now. Somewhere in that range there is a note that makes the whole of your chest buzz, and that one is yours. Use it when you feel scattered.

That is the oldest instrument there is.

Silence

The other half of sound is the absence of it, and most people never get any.

There is noise in the car, noise in the office, noise in the kitchen, noise in your pocket. Your energy never gets a moment to settle into its own shape, because it is always being played by something outside you. Give yourself some silence every day. Ten minutes with nothing on. It will feel strange at first, and that strangeness is how far you have drifted from your own frequency.

The mistakes people make

Leaving sound on that you have not chosen. Background television, the radio for company. You are bathing in it whether or not you are listening, and the water energy page explains what that means.

Using binaural beats instead of meditating rather than alongside it. The beats set the state. The sitting does the work.

Using cheap earbuds for binaural work and deciding it does not work. It needs a proper left and right. Borrow a decent pair before you write it off.

Being embarrassed to use your own voice. Nobody is listening, and if they are, they could use a hum too.

Pay attention to the sound you live in. Some of it is coiled rope and some of it is frayed. Choose more of the coiled kind, make some of your own, and give yourself enough silence to hear yourself think.