Karen Newell, Co-Founder of Sacred Acoustics: Healing With Sound

Dr. Mark Leeds [00:09] Welcome to The Rehab on the Mental Health News Radio Network. I am Dr. Mark Leeds and I will be your host. Join me in exploring the world of addiction treatment. How can we improve the ways that we help individuals to overcome addiction? The goal of treatment is to save lives and help people to get back on track to a path towards success and happiness in life. Karen Newell, welcome to the Rehab Podcast, and thank you for joining me today.

Karen Newell [00:50] Well, thank you, Mark. Thanks for inviting me.

Dr. Mark Leeds [00:52] So I’ve been listening to the recordings that you make at Sacred Acoustics, sacredacoustics.com, and I’m really enjoying them. I mean, they’ve really filled a void for me as far as just being able to relax and deal with anxiety and get to sleep.

Karen Newell [01:08] Oh, well, that’s wonderful to hear. What we do is we embed something that’s known as binaural beats. Now, we don’t use just regular binaural beats, but binaural beats themselves are quite powerful, And this is something that was developed back in the 70s, known originally as hemisync. Some people know it as hemisync or holosync. But basically, binaural beats are when you take one signal and put it in one ear and a slightly different signal and put it in the other ear. And the difference between those signals seems to correspond to a brainwave state. So, for example, a signal difference of maybe 4 hertz. 4 hertz is the borderline between delta and theta, the borderline between being asleep and awake. We’re all in that state every day when we’re falling asleep at night. It’s known as the hypnagogic state. And it really helps to get the brain into a quieter state so we can rest those distracting thoughts, so we can get more relaxed and not be so concerned about our daily worries and anxieties and concerns. And we not only deliver binaural beats, but we created a specially designed kind of proprietary method that we call neural helix, where we combine binaural beats with monaural beats. And the way we combine them is using very precise harmonic principles. So every tone you hear in the sound is harmonically in relationship to every other tone in the sound. So it’s not regular music. All digital frequencies and synthesizer, sometimes a human voice. And we end up creating soundscapes that do exactly what you were describing, Mark. People report that they help them get relaxed, help them sleep, feeling connected to the oneness that is out there and available to us all. So a great place to start is just getting that relaxed state because so many of us are stressed day after day, especially with just even just reading the news or what’s going on in our world can be quite stressful. So, yes, listening to those sounds are an escape from all of that and allows you to really train yourself how to get into these more relaxed states. The tones are wonderful at doing that while you’re listening, but also outside of listening. People report that they are able to stay more calm. They’re able to stay more attached to emotional difficulties that come up throughout the day rather than their normal reactive self. So, yes, the tones can help in many, many ways.

Dr. Mark Leeds [03:46] As far as people getting stressed out by the news and current events, I’d recommend just turn off the news and turn off social media and put on headphones and just listen to these great recordings. In fact, that’s what I’ve been doing during the day in the last couple weeks at work. When we have downtime between patients, I go into my office and sit in the recliner and turn the lights down and put on my headphones. And it’s really helped me a lot.

Karen Newell [04:14] When I first was trying to just simply meditate, I found it very difficult, as many people do. I knew from reading all the reports how wonderful it was for your physiological responses and, you know, getting more relaxed. And I wanted to learn how to get into those states. But when I first started to try, it was very challenging to get the mind to quiet down. It was nearly impossible because I was a busy project manager, you know, managing details constantly. And my mind was always making lists and I couldn’t quiet it down. So I got all kinds of different gadgets out there to help me, and there’s different sound machines, light machines, special pillows, masks, all kinds of things you can get. And like you, the sound for me was what really started to help me turn the corner on quieting my mind. And at first it was things like gongs or tuning forks or crystal bowls, brass bowls, anything that has kind of a monotonous sort of constant sound as opposed to a melody with lyrics and things like that. So when you hear that kind of monotonous sound, that’s where this brain entrainment comes in because your brain just kind of quiets and matches that sound somehow. And the binaural beats were what really put me over the edge. So interestingly, in our research, we started recording some of the sounds that crystal bowls and brass bowls make. And all of them, when you hear them, they kind of have this wah, wah, wah. That’s the sound of a binaural beat. Binaural beats are actually embedded into those bowls. It’s very interesting. I don’t know if the ancient people realized, but I’m sure they realized their hypnotic effects that they had on people. And they’ve been used for millennia, these kinds of instruments, to help people get into calmer states or altered states of awareness. I know my business partner, Kevin Cossie, who’s our audio engineer, he was down in Peru participating in a ceremony. And so interesting, he was standing in a circle with a number of other people. And on either side of the circle was a shaman playing a conch shell. They were blowing into a conch shell. And he recorded that experience, Kevin did, and when he got home and analyzed it, he found they were playing a binaural beat. Didgeridoos sometimes have built-in binaural beats, and those instruments have been around for 40,000 years. So while we’re bringing sort of a modern kind of technology take on this kind of technology, technology, it’s really a natural technology that’s been around for years that humans have taken advantage of. So it’s wonderful in the modern world how we can be so precise with the different tones that we select and how we combine them is very unique to every single recording. Now, along with sound in terms of gadgets and different things that I tried, the other thing that was really effective for me, you know, I have to stress here that we are all unique. We’re all going to find sort of that, I’ll call it magic formula that works for us. The other thing that worked for me was focus on the heart. And I was very interested in the heart with my mind, but I didn’t really know how to feel my heart. And I thought other people knew, but when I would ask them about it, most people really understand love as something that happens in their mind or some physiological response they have no control over, like falling in love and all the hormones kick off. But I was really interested in learning more about how the heart worked, and I was very inspired by the work of HeartMath Institute in California. I was reading a book by Joseph Chilton Pearce called Biology of Transcendence, and he was talking about the heart math research. And what’s so fascinating is they have discovered that an electromagnetic field emits from the heart, every one of our hearts emits this electromagnetic field, and it actually expands and contracts based on our emotional state. What’s so fascinating to me, though, is that as it expands and contracts, it seems to affect the people around us and also bring information back to us. So I thought, I want to know how my heart works. And so I took all kinds of different courses on how to use the heart, that Joseph Chilton Pearce book was so useful because he talks about just generating a feeling of gratitude, not a thought of gratitude, but a feeling of gratitude. And many of us just don’t know how to generate that at will. I certainly couldn’t. And it took a lot of practice. And what I would do is lay in bed, maybe when I was falling asleep, I would try to think of things I was grateful for and then wait to see if a feeling might come after that. As I did that, I would think of all kinds of things. The one that worked for me was puppies because when I was a six-year-old, my mother had taken in a stray dog for me and my brothers to enjoy, and this stray dog was pregnant. We didn’t realize that when she became a part of our household, but she decided to give birth to her puppies underneath my bed. And so for me at six years old, this was a beautiful, magical, just amazing moment. And when I remembered that moment lying in bed and what it was like for me to be with puppies, my heart started to feel something. And I was conjuring it by myself, actively with my free will choice. It wasn’t just happening unbidden. That’s how I was used for my heart to feel. It’s when it would just happen out in the world that I could actually generate it. And the more attention I started to put on my heart and consciously trying to conjure up these kinds of feelings in my heart, the more I was able to move out of that thought, thinking, constant, chattering brain of mine. Moving awareness down into the heart where there is no linguistic center allowed me to remove myself from that thinking brain. And so this was very, very useful. Now, I’ll go on just to say a side effect of that I did not expect. It’s that when I would start to put attention on my heart in different ways, there’s all kinds of techniques to do this, and we include some of those in our heart bundle selection of recordings. The basic thing that would happen is suddenly I would be putting attention on my heart, and I would suddenly start to feel very emotional, whether I felt lonely, sad, some not-so-pleasant emotion would be triggered. And at first I thought, oh, well, this is no fun. This is not what I want. I want the joy, the happy, the, you know, fun kinds of emotions. And yet I was having sadness and anxiety and depression and kind of odd feelings come up. And what I realized over time through the help of facilitators and my own trial and error is that I was actually activating stored emotional traumas that had been unprocessed from my past. I had placed emotions there that I didn’t know how to deal with. It had to do with anger and sadness and depression. And when I would activate them in these quiet moments, after establishing a feeling of gratitude, going into this kind of state of feeling my heart, when these other emotions would start to occur, I realized that watching what’s going on as you meditate, you can actually allow yourself to feel those emotions and let them go. They don’t come back. We have a very interesting story of someone who started listening to some of our very early recordings. He had PTSD. He had been over in the Middle East and he had night terrors. He couldn’t sleep at night because he had these horrible nightmares that would keep him awake. And so he would drink alcohol to help him sleep at night. So he would basically just drink himself into a stupor so he could pass out, and he called that sleep. Now, during the day, he smoked a lot of cigarettes because he was anxious. And so he would smoke and drink to kind of, I guess you could say, self-medicate with his emotions that he didn’t know how to process. And when he first started listening to our foundation series, he heard this phrase, let go, that we say sometimes in our guided versions. And what he would do is he would feel himself in this kind of altered, expanded, very relaxed state, but aware and alert. And he would feel those anxieties coming up. And when he would notice the anxieties, he would use that phrase, let go, let go. Somehow, no one taught him to do this, but somehow this is what he thought was the right thing to do. And slowly over time, really only a matter of a few weeks, he was no longer drinking at night to fall asleep. He was able to get better sleep. He was not having the night terrors anymore. He was able to go through the day smoking fewer cigarettes. I don’t believe he may have, I don’t know what his current status is now, but he was definitely smoking many, many fewer cigarettes because he didn’t feel as anxious. And this is when we started to realize the potential therapeutic benefits of these types of recordings.

Dr. Mark Leeds [13:45] And when you say let go, and that’s a common theme that runs through many of your recordings. I know in recovery, in 12-step Narcotics Anonymous, is it common saying let go and let God?

Karen Newell [13:58] Yes, yes. Let go can mean many, many things. And we allow the listener to kind of have some flexibility on how they want to interpret that. But it can be let go of distracting thoughts, let go of any worries of the day, let go of awareness of the physical body, let go of all concerns that you need to solve all your problems right here, right now. Yes, and allow, allow God, the universe, source, your higher self, whatever you want to call it, to play a role. We’re all connected to a greater whole. And that’s what you start to realize when you establish this practice of going within. I co-authored a book with Dr. Eben Alexander called Living in a Mindful Universe. And we talk about this in there. He talks, Eben especially, talks very much about the scientific theory of materialism, and that is prevalent in our Western society, the idea that the physical is all that exists. And somehow our world has grown into this, I’ll say sarcastically modern culture of where our brains are completely in charge and emotions are often kind of viewed as a sign of weakness or something that we should learn how to deal with and not make public. And so many of us are walking around with these kind of suppressed emotions not knowing what to do. And the theory that we offer in that book is the opposite of materialism. Which is metaphysical or ontological idealism. And this is the idea that only consciousness exists and that all the physical reality emerges out of consciousness. And there’s scientific data we discuss in that book, Living in a Mindful Universe, to support all of this. But my interest is more how do we as individuals connect to that consciousness, become more aware of it, and play a more active role in our unfolding reality. Science does not know how the exact mechanism works at this point, and there’s a lot of disagreement in the physics world around all of this, but they’re all growing toward this realization that we must acknowledge consciousness as something that’s real. It is not an epiphenomenon of our brains. It is actually who we truly are. All of us can actually take the lead and start to experience it ourselves, And that really involves the practice of going within. And because meditation can be so challenging for so many, these audio tools offer a really great way for people to get started. And many people who are beginners find it very useful, but also those who already have a meditative practice, some of those people, many of those people, find they go even deeper with the support of the tones. And so we really think there’s so many applications that can be applied. For example, we have medical students who are very stressed. They go through, you must know as a doctor, all of the stress you go through when you’re in med school and then residency. And we have students using them to calm themselves so they can get good night’s sleep, so they can perform well. Their sleep is often lacking, and they are using them for greater focus, for tests, exams, and also for kind of getting more energy when they’re not as energized after losing some sleep or studying really hard. We’re noticing that those who we have measured are getting better grades on their exams and just generally feeling better about themselves. We are also concerned about the rising suicide rates in our country, especially amongst, what was it, the economic study from a couple years ago showed that it was white middle-aged Americans. The suicide rate was increasing, and the opioid crisis we hear about all the time. Yes, I agree, don’t watch the news, but that opioid crisis is one of the things that concerns us. And what we’d really like to see is people who take charge of their own lives, who are able to, I think in the world of addiction, one of the biggest problems is that feeling of emptiness inside. And what we do is we look for the external world, the external things to help us fill essentially spiritual holes deep inside. And the problem is none of that physical matter is really capable of filling a spiritual emptiness. And so the way to build that is by establishing a practice of going within, finding who you are deep inside, which is an energy. It’s not a body. And when you can find that energy and connect yourself to the love of all the universe that exists, things start to change. We have a woman who does acupuncture treatments in Iowa, and her specialty is, or the clinic she works in, is treating mostly children, young people, teenagers who have attempted suicide and failed. So they have tried to kill themselves, and now they’re in therapy to try and help them. And she does, her part of the treatment is acupuncture. And when she does the acupuncture, she plays different recordings. And when she started playing sacred acoustics recordings for her patients, they started reporting some remarkable things. Some of the children said things to her like, oh, my gosh, if I had only heard these sounds and felt this feeling before I tried to kill myself, I never would have done so. And so we’re very heartened to be involved in some pilot studies with Dr. Anna Yusim up in Manhattan. She’s a New York psychiatrist. She wrote a book called Fulfilled, and she is prescribing our tones to some of the patients in her practice and following their progress. And so far, results are showing that people who bring sacred acoustics into their therapy are having much faster and more significant results than without the tones. So we’re very heartened with the potential of how many different populations can hopefully use these to better their lives.

Dr. Mark Leeds [20:22] And that’s a good point. The last point you bring up about prescribing something like these recordings to patients to help them with issues of anxiety, depression, insomnia. When I treat people for addiction and I put them on medication, you know, and the medication to treat, for example, opioid dependence is very important. It has a high success rate compared to other kinds of therapy or therapy alone without medication. But most we don’t want to prescribe other medications in addition to the addiction treatment medication and often patients will say well I have a lot of anxiety I have insomnia I can’t sleep and they’re most likely asking for a sleeping pill or an anxiety pill and we don’t I don’t really want to prescribe those additional medications to those patients and I haven’t really up until now had had very many good tools I can talk about sleep hygiene you know take the tv out of the room, you know, don’t listen to music, don’t do your, don’t read the news in bed or whatever. And that all sounds great, but that doesn’t really practically help a lot of people. You know, they just can’t fall asleep and they’re going through a difficult time. And this gives me something that I can recommend. I mean, just yesterday it came up last week, a patient asked me, he said, he said, I can’t sleep. What can I do? And I said, I’m listening to these incredible recordings and they work really well. And I gave him the, website address. And then just yesterday, a patient asked me and I said, well, these recordings can really help. And she asked, how do you listen to them? Where do you get them from? And she was asking, can I just put them on the speakers in the room or does she have to wear? It was a family member. And she said, will she have to wear headphones or play them on the speakers? And actually, I wanted to ask you about that, about the best way to listen. But yeah, it’s an incredible tool for patients. I mean, and for any practitioner, for any doctor who’s looking for something to add to what they prescribe. I mean, we really just can’t keep prescribing pills for everything. And a lot of the advice we have is just not practical or useful for a lot of people. And this gives us a new tool.

Karen Newell [22:18] Yeah, well, I’m glad to hear you say that because I’ll get to the how to listen. But I wanted to comment on the medication aspect. Now, I know there are many situations, as you say, where medication is highly appropriate. But on the other hand, it’s not always appropriate. And my daughter being someone like that, when she was a teenager, she was very actively abusing prescription drugs. And somehow kids are able to get a hold of these rather easily. And I don’t know exactly how they do it, but I’m told, you know, just taking them out of medicine cabinets a few at a time, taking them from different relatives or places where they babysit, it’s rather easy to slip a few out of a bottle. And my daughter was actively doing that. And she, at the same time, was acting out all kinds of ways. She had a lot of issues with anger. She was cutting herself. She was really just not acting what I would call like a normal teenager with emotional, you know, hormonal swings or something. And it concerned me a lot. And when I would take her to doctors to get her treated, they all wanted to put her on medication. And I would have conversations with them. I would say, but she’s actively abusing these same exact medicines. Why would I give her her own supply? And I refused to do it. Every single doctor who recommended it, I said no. And I tried other things with her and we got through it. We did get through it. But what’s so interesting is after she graduated from high school, she told me unbidden, I didn’t even ask her about it. She said, Mom, you were right. I wanted my own supply. I acted different around the doctors so they would think I was mentally imbalanced and give me the medicine so I would have them to abuse. And she was so grateful that I stood up and said no to all of these doctors. Now, every parent must make their own decision. This is not an endorsement in every situation. I want to be clear that in my particular situation, this was the right thing to do. And in the end, it was actually for her hypnosis. That started her turning around, and she also listens to these recordings as well, although back then I didn’t have those in my tool belt to offer her, or I definitely would have. Now, in terms of how to listen, headphones are usually quite important to get the full effect of the experience, but some of our recordings work okay over speakers, and we indicate that on our website if that’s the case. Because in some situations, for example, an acupuncturist giving a treatment to someone, We want to make sure that the speakers will work. Sometimes it’s just not convenient to wear the headphones. Some people also use these in a hospice setting, and sometimes speakers are better there. But the most powerful effect comes with headphones. Now, if you’re thinking about using them for insomnia or getting very relaxed at night and are worried about wearing headphones, there’s a particular style of headphones out there called sleep phones, and they’re made of a fleece band that goes around your head, and inside the band are two little earbuds. And those are quite effective, very comfortable to wear for long periods of time. It is important to get a set of headphones that is highly comfortable because after a while, headphones can really start to hurt your ears. Some people use the earbuds and put them inside their ears. Myself personally, I find that to be a little exhausting on my ear, so I prefer the around-the-ear headphone that’s very padded. Those kind of went out of style for a while, but they’re back in force. There’s many, many styles on the market. My personal favorite is the Bose brand. Those can run a little expensive, but there’s many, many other headphones on the market that people can try. Some people ask about the frequency range, and really any standard set of headphones covers the frequency range that our recordings offer. So there is no requirement for any specific frequency range. So the speaker situation, I would recommend not using a one-speaker system. So there’s a lot of one-speaker systems out there, and they’re not delivering the left and the right. Many of them, I know the Bose one-speaker system I have does not combine the higher frequencies, but does combine the bass into one signal. And that’s where you’re going to start to lose the real power of any kind of binaural beats. But good surround sound systems. Sometimes if you have a setup in a home theater or something and you can refine in a really nice chair and listen on surround sound, that’s a beautiful way to listen as well because then you really feel the vibrations of the tones as well as hear them in your ears. There’s many, many ways to do this. Some people actually listen and walk. I don’t really quite know how they do that, but some people use this as a walking meditation. We generally recommend laying down, which is a little counter to many meditation practices, which insists that you sit straight in a straight posture or on the floor with your legs crossed. But that can be challenging, too. And our goal is to get the body profoundly relaxed while the mind’s aware. Now, this can also, though, make someone fall asleep a little more easily. And if that is your goal, that’s great. If you’re trying to help with insomnia, then, of course. But if you’re trying to maintain an alert state and practice meditation and finding that observer within and maybe doing some guided visualizations, then you want to maintain some alertness. So if lying down puts you to sleep right away, you might want to consider reclining in a chair. Definitely never drive and listen to these tones. They’re going to put you into an altered state that you may not realize is as strong as it is, and it could lure you into just a state where you don’t realize you’re driving. So you want to be real careful when you’re driving, even though many of us like to pop things into our players in the car. So that’s a big caution. But pretty much anything else goes. We encourage listeners to try different things, to experiment with trial and error, with volumes, with places. It really is a very flexible system, and I hate to put too many rules on it, but that not driving is probably one of the most important ones. Other than that, it’s pretty much up to the listener to fit it into their day whenever they want. There’s not even a regular time for listening that we recommend. It totally depends on the person. I love how you can fit it into your day, in the middle of your day. My personal favorite time is first thing in the morning. When I first wake up, before I have a lot to think about, that’s when I like to do it. And other people like to do it right before they go to bed because it gets them into that very relaxed mode. Another fun thing to do is to do it in the middle of the night. So if you’re someone who has insomnia, say you fall asleep, but then you wake up at 1 a.m. Or something and you can’t get back to sleep, listen to some tones. It can, for some people, create some very interesting dreamscapes. And I especially think for those people who are in those early stages of substance addiction, having something else to do, something else to bring on a little bit different state of mind is probably a really excellent substitute for some of the substances that maybe not quite as powerful, but certainly safer, more gentle, can use more often, and especially in the setting of being in a therapy with someone like you, I think it could be an absolute beautiful adjunct to that kind of therapy.

Dr. Mark Leeds [30:04] What about pregnancy? Are there any issues with using these recordings for pregnant women?

Karen Newell [30:09] I have heard no contraindications of women who are pregnant. In fact, my daughter, who has come through her teenage experience beautifully and has grown into a wonderfully mature and stable adult, she just gave birth to my first grandchild last December. And so during the whole time she was pregnant, of course she still had some issues with being anxious and not wanting to make sure the baby was okay and anything she was doing was going to hurt the baby and things like this. And so I gave her some of the tones to listen to. And this was really, she hadn’t really listened to them up until this point. She didn’t have a reason, but I told her that they might help her throughout her pregnancy, and that motivated her, and it helped her very much to stay calm and to visualize a kind of safe and easy birth situation and a healthy baby. I encouraged her to imagine she was communicating with her baby’s soul before it was born, and so far from being not safe for pregnant women, And it’s actually, I think, helpful for pregnant women. And the beautiful thing is she would play. We actually have something we call our baby bundle. And one of the recordings is called Sacred Lullaby, which our audio engineer created after his first baby was born. He, of course, wanted to help his baby go to sleep faster like many of us do. And so they created Sacred Lullaby. He and his wife, who sings on Sacred Lullaby, she’s singing to her baby in the recording for babies to fall asleep. And so my daughter turned out loved listening to that one for herself during her pregnancy, and it helped her to fall asleep at night. And then the result is her baby actually heard it in the womb while she was listening to it, and she now uses it to help him fall asleep. The other recording that’s part of the baby bundle we call Cosmic Womb, And again, it was created by our audio engineer for his wife to give natural childbirth in their third floor Manhattan apartment in a rented birthing tub. And he created this absolutely beautiful recording that delivers a theta signal around 6 hertz that kept everyone in the room relaxed, including his mother-in-law, who is normally very anxious at these sorts of occasions. She has many grandchildren, but always is very anxious. She stayed calmer than usual. Everyone was calmer than usual. And what’s so beautiful, we used that recording when my daughter was in labor. And all the nurses, when they would come in, would say, what is that? Because they hear all kinds of music that people play during their labors. They’d never heard anything like this. And the beautiful thing about that, too, is the baby recognizes that sound. And so when she plays that, he knows, and it makes him calm. It reminds him of being in the womb and safe and secure. And I don’t know if every baby would respond the same, but our experiences with our own babies has been absolutely beautiful. And we encourage young mothers who especially feel a little stress and anxiety around being pregnant to try these sorts of things. Because I feel that a baby who’s born in a stressful womb may have more issues in the long run than a baby who is born in a very calm, kind of loving, safe, you know, kind of womb. And again, that’s all my own kind of suppositions. There’s not any scientific studies on that. But it just makes so much sense that a calm environment of developing cellular structure would be more conducive to happy, healthy babies than perhaps one where there’s a lot of anxiety going on.

Dr. Mark Leeds [34:00] Yeah, that sounds great. And I was asking for one particular patient who was concerned. I had recommended the recordings to her, and she said, well, I’m pregnant now, and is that going to be an issue? And I can’t see any reason why it would be. I mean, it’s not a medication. It’s an audio recording. And, you know, I can’t imagine how it would, if anything, as you say, it would be beneficial.

Karen Newell [34:25] Yeah, the best thing to do, especially with the pregnant woman and anyone who’s concerned on those levels, is to start very gentle. The baby bundle is the most gentle that we have. And our free download is available for anyone to try. The best way to understand this is to actually experience it. And so we offer a 20-minute recording. It’s our OM frequencies, what we call our OM frequencies. And the OM, it’s not related to any kind of religious tradition or any kind of dogma. The OM sound is something that we found is very common in meditation. So when I would try different meditation classes and my audio engineer business partner had also taken transcendental meditation courses, they teach you how to OM. And we found that when we would vocalize that sound, just OM or whatever pitch you want, for me it would activate a feeling, a vibrational state in my heart. And it helped me get more into the present moment. For Kevin, it helped him activate what he thought was going on, is that it activated his pineal gland. And so for him, it gave him a way to kind of a great foundation for creating a lot of visual experiences that he was used to having. I was more of a feeler in my meditative states. And so I liked having an OM pitch that would make it feel like my heart was vibrating. And so once you can kind of establish this vibrational sense in your body, knowing that you really are made of energy along with your physical body, there’s an energetic part of you. When you can feel that energy start to get activated while you’re listening to the tones, I sort of visualize and imagine that my vibration is merging with the vibration of the sound and carrying my consciousness into an expanded state. So kind of visualizations like that, little tools we can use in our minds, our imagination can help us to achieve these kinds of states. But I totally understand the concern of safety. And so, yes, anyone. People often, too, ask us about young children, autistic kids, and we encourage everyone to try them. Others ask about hearing loss. Will they still work if I can’t hear in one ear? And many, many people who have hearing loss have experienced good benefits. It seems that the vibrations of the sound go into the brain, even if you can’t hear them with the cochlea of your ear. And so we encourage everyone to try it, to find out for themselves how they might react. So initial responses from listening to the free recording, there’s a huge wide range of responses that could happen. Some people immediately notice a calming of the mind. Others, it’s not so immediate. Some immediately find themselves connecting to oneness and having out-of-body experiences. That’s one very far, far extreme. The other extreme is nothing happened or I fell asleep or I didn’t hear it or I just feel the same after. But those two extremes are both very rare, I would say. Almost everyone has some response. And many people do talk about when they hear the tones, especially when they hear it for a little bit longer period than 10 or 15 minutes, They’ll feel sometimes these vibrations in their body where maybe their hands are moving, but their arm isn’t moving, but they feel this sensation of moving or rising. And what that is you’re just becoming more aware of your energetic body that’s there anyway. We’re not used to thinking about it. We think only about our physical body usually. And when you get into these expanded states, more awareness of that energy starts to take place. And so that very often is one of the first things that people notice. Some people notice, like I said earlier, they might start feeling emotional and not know why. For those that have very, very deep traumatic experiences, experiences that are so challenging to really revisit that they really do need the help of a supportive facilitator or therapist, those people want to be a little careful if you start to feel emotional. But most of us really just have to allow ourselves to feel emotions that we’ve suppressed in the past. And once we allow ourselves to feel them, they are able to be processed and let go. And so that can happen early on sometimes. And people wonder, why do I feel like crying after I listen? And my advice there is go let yourself cry. Whatever you feel like doing, let yourself feel it. Other people will notice that they have greater intuitive sense. They’ll notice synchronicities in the world start to line up more than usual. For example, that common thing of people knowing when the phone rings who it’s going to be before they pick it up. Things like that may start to happen more often. We like to call it becoming more whole, really understanding the whole part of who you are, not just the physical but the energetic, the unseen, the invisible, the part that science doesn’t really know how to study. We can all study every day in our daily lives just by becoming more aware of it. Each of us has a different need. Each of us, not all of us have problems with addiction. Not all of us have problems with insomnia. Some of us just want to connect with our higher self and grow that way. And all of these things are available. It really, the tones just meet you where you are and allow you to grow in your own way with the support of whatever it is that you need. And so that’s really a better way of looking at it rather than as some kind of cure-all like we would look at a medicine that is supposed to do certain things. It really is unique for every individual.

Dr. Mark Leeds [40:20] When you talk about the whole person, it’s something, you know, in my field of osteopathic medicine, we like to talk about how we’re treating the whole person. And from the perspective you’re describing, the whole person, you know, what we think of as a whole person, you know, the physical body and the brain may just be a tiny tip of the iceberg of what the actual whole person is, that there’s, you know, we’re not just a brain. I mean, you can’t take a brain and put it in a jar and connect it to a computer and say that’s a person, and then even the body. You had mentioned Dr. Alexander and the book had read about, you know, that he had had a near-death experience. And I think I’d read somewhere that your business partner had also had a near-death experience and that they’ve had experience of seeing something beyond life and something on the other side of life that’s even more real. And there’s more to it than just what we can even experience in this world. And I found that to be very interesting and maybe something that people would find reassuring.

Karen Newell [41:23] Yeah, near-death experiences are a fascinating topic. And yes, As it happens, Eben’s, of course, was the result of bacterial meningitis, and he ended up in a seven-day coma. And his experience happened during that coma, so it was very extensive. Now, Kevin’s experience was much shorter, very, very short, and many people’s are, just a minute or two, just a few minutes. But he connected to that light, that oneness, and he knew it, saw it, felt it. Even a few minutes of that connection can change people, transform people. And there’s an association, the International Association of Near-Death Studies, who study these in depth. They have conferences every year, chapters in every state, almost every state. And they go very much into much detail over all of the transformative effects that near-death experiences can bring. But you can also achieve those same transformational effects by establishing your own practice, your own spiritual practice of connecting to those realms. It can happen even without a near-death experience. I know I myself have cultivated a connection and have touched that same oneness. Now, when I say same oneness, I don’t know, I can’t know if it was exactly the same feeling that anyone else had. But when people come back from near-death experiences or very powerful spiritually transformative experiences, one of the factors is this ineffability, this idea that it’s so hard to describe what just happened. And that can happen in very deep meditative states. And my path to get there was through this attention to the heart, processing my stored traumas. Once all of that was kind of let go and processed and out of me, there was a hole. And instead of it being filled with substance or material or my thoughts or old patterns, it was filled with that love. I was able to connect to it and felt myself fill with it, connect with it, become it. And I really have become a huge advocate of really everyone on the planet becoming more aware of their heart. So many people talk about this. Oh, yes, we need to live from our heart. Or love is the most important thing. And Eben and I participated in a book that recently came out. It didn’t start as a book, but this fellow decided to ask a bunch of people, what’s the meaning of life? And apparently, we didn’t know what each other’s answers were, but when he put the book together, he ended up calling it simply love. Because apparently, that’s the meaning of life that every one of us talked about. And so, why aren’t more of us living the love? It’s very strange to me. When I looked up the science of love recently, all I could find was little videos and explanations about all the hormones in our bodies. But what about the feelings? What about the feelings? The idea that the hormones come first and then we react and can’t control ourselves, that’s what science has kind of been teaching us. I’m being very, very brief and widely sweeping generalization here. But basically, that’s what I found, you know, Googling immediately this approach. And I’m thinking, well, what about the feelings, the love, the relationships, the connections? This is the important thing in life. This is something that is harder for science to kind of quantitatively research. I know there’s some out there, but it’s usually related to hormones and physical responses. But that love is what drives all of us in every moment of our lives. And when we don’t have that love in our lives, that’s what’s missing. And that’s what we try to replace with other things, whether it’s money or sex or substances or alcohol or work, whatever it is. You know, we’re trying to replace that. And what we really need is a filling of that spiritual hole. And, you know, there’s this habit of public schools in America, at least, where every morning, at least when I was a child, we would put our hands on our hearts and we would do a pledge of allegiance to the flag. Well, what if every morning children learned to go within their heart, generate a feeling of gratitude, and imagine expanding it around their bodies, knowing that it will affect all the children around them in positive ways? I call it the ultimate golden rule. As we bring more love into ourselves, we learn how to fill our own spiritual holes. We become the love that we are. This is truly how to love oneself. And we’re able then to model that love to all the people around us without saying a word because the heart math research shows that whatever is in our hearts is affecting the people around us, whether we know it or not. And so I feel that children should learn this at a very young age. In fact, in Baltimore, there was a school that started, I wish they had had this, you know, my daughter was born in Baltimore. I wish they’d had this. I didn’t go to public school in Baltimore, but I wish they’d had it when she was a child. Because when those children are in trouble, when they act out in class, when they have a conflict with another student, they’re not sent to detention. They’re sent to the mindful moment room. And what they do in there is they go within. They’re guided to just feel their internal self, get in touch with their observer, sit quietly, do some relaxation exercises. If I had only known how to teach this to her when I was in my 20s when she was born, I feel as though she would have turned out to be a much different person. Now, she’s learning those techniques now. It’s never too late. In fact, I advocate not only children doing such things, but every politician, every CEO, every teacher, every doctor, every nurse, anyone in the world, by just going within, finding that space, five, ten minutes a morning, finding that before you start your day, having Congress do this before they vote on different bills, you know. Make this part of our culture. Make this part of our daily life. It doesn’t have to change how we approach medicine. You know, we just, it’s an adjunct to it doesn’t replace it. And this is something that I feel very strongly about, And I hope one day that the ultimate golden rule becomes a habit that all of us do just by our very nature of being human.

Dr. Mark Leeds [47:46] You remind me of a chart I’ve seen in several books where it shows the vibrational levels of, I guess, towards enlightenment. And then you have the very low levels, which are, you know, things like anger and hate. I don’t remember exactly, but I know that the very top vibrational level, just at the nearest to enlightenment, is love. This chart, I don’t remember who had designed or created this chart, but I saw a similar chart in at least a couple of different books. And maybe that’s what doctors should have on their wall, in addition to, you know, things about how to vaccinate children and the pain scales and vital signs. We all have these educational things telling people how to quit smoking, and that’s all important. But why not have also that chart of the vibrational levels towards enlightenment and to show people that love is the ultimate goal?

Karen Newell [48:38] Yeah, and not only that, but to have those same doctors model how to do it just by simply holding that love within. It’s not impossible. It sounds so foreign, I think, to someone in med school. In fact, Dr. Alexander’s son is in fourth year med school right now, and he actually uses the tones, and he’s also an osteopathic, and he completely understands the value. And I’m thinking, gosh, if only all med students could be exposed to this, what a different kind of healing structure we would have in our world.

Dr. Mark Leeds [49:12] I just listened to one of your new recordings and I like how you described in the beginning how a person can get that feeling of love to first think of a person alive or deceased or even an animal, someone that they love more than anything else and to try to feel the way that they feel when they think of that person.

Karen Newell [49:30] Yeah, that is the absolute really only way to get there is to feel it from within. You can’t do it in your mind. You can’t do it with your thoughts. You can’t do it with the, oh, I behave this way. And so that means I’m demonstrating love. You have to feel it to really be it. And again, it’s another one of those things you have to experience to understand. You can’t explain to someone and have them fully understand what it’s like to become one with all that is. You have to experience it. And, yes, you were mentioning that love body recording that just came out. This is really kind of the pinnacle of what we’re discussing here is that exact recording. But it is very important that someone be able to generate that feeling state in order to experience the full benefit of inviting that love into the body. And, of course, this just means practice. We all can do it, but some of us might have to practice more than others. We included animal because sometimes people, when you think of a person you love, very often there’s a lot of problems that come with that, a lot of baggage, conflicts that you’ve had. Love is not always easy and pure and clear, but animals don’t have that kind of baggage. And so many of us have grown to love different animals and we don’t have issues with animals. We just receive their unconditional love. Some people though may not have an animal or even a person that they can identify with that kind of loving state. So another option is a place, a beautiful place in nature that brings you joy or potentially an activity. So some people who love to run or skydive or whatever it is or some particular activity. It might even just be knitting. You know, remember what it’s like to do that activity. Anything that reminds you of love that you can use to help generate the love, once you generate that love from within, you attract it to you have no choice but to attract. That’s how resonance works. And so really when even if you’re not someone who has problems with addiction or a lot of mental issues if you have people in your family or friends who have them the best thing you can do is to model this balanced loving energy and to be present for them each of us needs to make the decision for ourselves when we’re going to make a shift in our life that’s a very challenging thing to do when you’re the parent of a daughter who is cutting herself and doing all of these crazy things, you know, you want to fix them, but really only she could fix herself, and I could be there to support her and to model a very balanced, loving energy, and that is absolutely what she credits with getting her through her teenage years was my presence, and it’s a beautiful thing to see, you know, 10 years after the fact. It’s not so beautiful when you’re going through it’s challenging. It’s difficult. It’s why is this happening, and once you get through these types of challenges, So you can look back and realize, oh, my God, it was so worth it.

Dr. Mark Leeds [52:40] And when you talk about gratitude, that’s something they, again, in Narcotics Anonymous 12-Step Recovery, they say a grateful addict will never use. And that’s something, you know, and a lot of people, in fact, one of my previous podcast guests, he says that when he starts with a new sponsee, the first assignment he gives is to ask them to keep a gratitude list every day. And, you know, and hopefully write as many things as possible, but at the very least to write the minimum three things. And the first thing they should be grateful for above anything is that they’re clean today. And then the next thing he would recommend, you know, be grateful for your higher power in your life. But, you know, gratitude and love, I mean, is very important. And, you know, something, you know, now that we’re talking about it’s something that I should bring up to my patients, you know, these kind of things, you know, talking about love and talking about gratitude. And, you know, when this patient the other day asked me, you know, what else can we do? You know, please tell me everything possible that we can do to give my family member the best possible chance. You know, these are all things that, you know, I probably need to formalize in a list and go over and say, don’t forget to keep your gratitude list. You know, don’t forget to focus on love in your life. And I mean, it’s, you know, these are important things that we need to be talking about with our patients and with our family and friends. Yes,

Karen Newell [54:02] It’s important not only for those people in deep distress and tackling these issues and being brave enough to seek out therapy and tackling them, but it’s also just for people going throughout their days not in distress. It’s for everyone. And as each of us does this, the idea that we’re helping people around us, even people we don’t know, if every person on the planet did this, we wouldn’t have any more conflicts. I’m totally convinced of this because we wouldn’t be able to behave in such a way that contradicted those loving feelings So I’m thrilled to be reminding you about bringing that up with your patients to try to solve those problems That’s beautiful, wonderful adjunct

Dr. Mark Leeds [54:47] Now another thing which goes beyond human health care When we talk about animals There’s a great show I saw briefly on TV about a dog psychologist I think he’s a therapist of some kind and he does therapy with dogs to help them with issues with their owners and resolve them. Have you had any experience with your recordings helping pets?

Karen Newell [55:11] Well, I do have experience with sound and animals. And what I learned is this was through a Healing Touch for Animals course that I took many years ago. But what I learned is that animals have much different sensitivity to sound than we do. They have a greater range of hearing, different frequencies, and the sounds don’t work the same way on the animals. And so we were guided to use only tuning forks for the heart chakra and the throat chakra. And those were the ones they said that worked best on animals. So we actually limited the type of sound we used on animals. And they recommended that the more complex sounds might make them more anxious. However, every animal is different. And so I know I have two dogs, and when I would play the frequencies and maybe start oming out loud, one of the dogs would leave the room. The other would come closer to me. And so I know that when Kevin creates these tones, he has two greyhounds that are in his office the entire time while he’s making them, and they sit with him all day while he’s working. And they like the tones. It doesn’t seem to bother them. But we haven’t done any specific studies on that, and I would caution people not to assume the same effects on animals as humans. We do have one really kind of funny story about these army ants in Costa Rica. Apparently, army ants, when they come through your jungle house, they just march right through and you just get out of their way. And a woman was sitting at her computer listening to our own recordings over her two computer speakers while she was working, and she saw the ants coming, knew she had to get the heck out of the way. I find it to be very odd that people would live somewhere like this, but this is normal routine for them. She got out of the way, left the house, came back, and all the ants who were in front of the two speakers stopped dead. They stopped right in front of those speakers and couldn’t move any further. It mesmerized them. So there potentially are some applications for animals out there, but we haven’t studied them quite yet.

Dr. Mark Leeds [57:22] A lot of animals will respond to the owner or the humans that they’re around. And so just a person treating themselves and improving their state of mind and their emotions and spiritual connection will most likely have an indirect effect on the animal anyway.

Karen Newell [57:37] Oh, absolutely. And animals themselves offer such an unconditional loving energy for their owners or guardians, whatever you want to call them. But yes, animals will notice when their owners get calmer and behavioral issues can subside. And, you know, when I talk about animals not having any issues, that, of course, does not include the many animals who have been in abusive situations and may not be quite as capable of offering that type of unconditional love. But most animals out in the domestic, you know, domestic animals in the homes are generally speaking rather well balanced in that sense.

Dr. Mark Leeds [58:17] There’s a place across the street from my office where they offer various kinds of therapy, including acupuncture and massage. And they have a room there. I visited a few years ago when I first opened up in that neighborhood. And there’s a sound therapy room. And they have one therapist that does all the sound therapy. And she was showing me the different things they have. She has tuning forks and she has these large bowls that you can, I think, run your finger along or hit with a mallet and they generate different tones. And she mentioned that the use of the different tones is to help reduce blockages of different chakras or blockages of energy flow.

Karen Newell [58:52] Yeah, there are so many sound therapies out there and many people do focus on these specific chakras. You can get crystal bowls that are tuned to each of the chakras. We haven’t created anything specifically related to the chakras, but people have used our recordings to do their own chakra meditations. We have one recording, actually, that is called Divine Love, which is a yoga nidra practice. So it’s a very guided practice that actually induces similar effects on its own that our recordings have. So kind of that hypnagogic state, yoga nidra. But at any rate, in that recording, that particular script was written by a Yoga Nidra practitioner and read by her. And she included a journey through the chakras. She didn’t call them chakras. She called them the different colors of the chakras. And we actually did invest in those crystal bowls for the different chakras for that one 90-second little clip. And so that’s our only recording currently that addresses the chakras, but people love that part. So maybe one day we’ll make one that is more extended.

Dr. Mark Leeds [1:00:07] I just wanted to tell you how incredibly easy it was to listen to your recordings. Rather than getting some complex device with all kinds of wires and reading a manual or having to go lay in a bed at some therapist for individual sessions, All I had to do was I downloaded the recordings on my phone, straight onto my phone. I have a Google Pixel phone, and I use these little Pixel earbuds, and they’re very comfortable. And it just works. I mean, within minutes, a person can go into your website, find the program they want to hear. They just pay online and download it, and within minutes, you can be listening. And then you also have follow-up. I noticed that I’ve been getting emails, and it’s great that you continue. Supporting your clients and providing additional follow-up emails and support and additional information on an ongoing basis.

Karen Newell [1:01:01] Yeah, we do that. And it’s important, I think, because it is so easy to do. It’s almost deceptively easy. Like, oh, it can’t be that easy, but it is easy. And yet, some powerful things can happen. And if you’re doing this on your own at home, we don’t want to just leave you in a vacuum. And yes, we absolutely encourage people who try this and have questions about what’s happening to write in. Some people do have technical issues, and we will help with those immediately. Some of the more personal questions might take a little longer to answer, but we will get to them. And we have a series of free, what I call, training videos that help people get started also on our website, all the common concerns, ways to get started, different ways to kind of approached this. And we’re working on additional courses that will be very flexible for people to do in their own homes and or in conjunct with a therapist. And so we’re working on those actively and we’ll probably be launching those in the not too distant future, probably this fall. So keep your eye out for more kind of structured programs that people can use to really make a difference and get somewhere with their issues.

Dr. Mark Leeds [1:02:14] Can you one more time just tell us what is the website that people go to and how do they go to get the recordings?

Karen Newell [1:02:24] Okay, you can go to sacredacoustics.com. That’s where the free download is available. Enter your email. That puts you on our mailing list and then you’ll get a link to the free download. That’s yours to keep for as long as you wish. We also have those training videos on that site and a blog with some extra additional kind of fun information. We also have an app. Now, the app has been in development for about a year and a half. We’ve been ironing out a lot of kind of glitches. Most of those glitches have all been cleared up. One thing to stress with your listeners, though, is the two different systems are not integrated. So if you buy them on the website, you do need to sync to your phone if you want to get them on your device. If you go to the app and you only are going to be using your iPhone or Android, that may be the better route to go. But you purchase them in both places separately. And so many people don’t have computers anymore. They only have a device. And if that’s the case, I would recommend the app. But either way is simple and easy and we’ll help you out. You just go to that contact form on our website and email us. And we have support. We respond pretty quickly. So we encourage people to ask their questions and get started at sacredacoustics.com.

Dr. Mark Leeds [1:03:40] Okay. And then the app is also called, they can search in the App Store and the Google Play Store for Sacred Acoustics?

Karen Newell [1:03:46] That’s correct. It’s in the Google Play and also the Apple App Store, not iTunes. We can’t put our recordings on iTunes or really any music service because they compress the files by default. And ours must stay at the 320 kilobytes per second, the highest MP3 quality available. And or people can purchase CDs. For those who still use CDs, we have those available for all of our products.

Dr. Mark Leeds [1:04:15] So that’s an important thing. If someone downloads a recording on their computer, make sure you’re not using a system that might compress the audio below the original quality.

Karen Newell [1:04:25] Correct, yes. And all those instructions we include when you make the purchase.

Dr. Mark Leeds [1:04:30] Okay, that’s great. So thank you again. Thank you, Karen Newell, for joining me today on the Rehab Podcast. And it was really great talking to you and I appreciate it. Thank you.

Karen Newell [1:04:38] Well, I appreciate it too, Mark. I love talking about this stuff and I really hope that your patients get something out of it. Thank you so much.

Dr. Mark Leeds [1:04:49] Thank you for joining us today on The Rehab on the Mental Health News Radio Network. I hope that you have found this show to be interesting and useful. If so, please subscribe to The Rehab Podcast and share on social media. I appreciate your taking the time to listen to The Rehab.