Sense of Soul - Sacred Acoustics Binaural Beats

Episode Date: March 29, 2021

We had a fun conversation with Karen Newell, she’s an author and specialist in personal development with a diverse body of work that rests upon the foundation of heart-centered consciousness.  Her personal growth programs, workshops, guided meditations and teachings enable individuals to achieve life transformations towards greater self-fulfillment and contentment, quality relationships and choices aligned with one’s soul calling. As an innovator in the emerging field of brainwave entrainment audio meditation, Karen empowers others in their journeys of self-discovery.  Using Sacred Acoustics recordings and other techniques, she teaches how to enter and engage with your inner world to connect to guidance, achieve inspiration, improve wellness and develop intuition. Karen is co-author with her life partner Eben Alexander III, M.D. of Living in a Mindful Universe (order here). At international workshops presented with Dr. Alexander, Karen demonstrates key practices of consciousness exploration: heart awareness, intention, maintaining neutrality, emotional management and cultivating internal knowing.  www.sacredacoustics.com Please Rate, Review and Subscribe! Visit our website www.mysenseofsoul.com

Welcome to the Sense of Soul podcast. We are your hosts, Shanna and Mandy. Grab your coffee, open your mind, heart, and soul. It's time to awaken. Today on Sense of Soul, we're super excited. We have a wonderful guest for you. Karen Newell, co-founder of Sacred Acoustics and empowers others in their journeys of self-discovery. She teaches how to connect with inner guidance, achieve inspiration, improve wellness, and develop intuition, and has co-authored a book with Evan Alexander entitled Living in a Mindful Universe, a neurosurgeon's journey into the heart of consciousness. Karen is a lifelong seeker of esoteric wisdom. Even as a child, she states that she could sense a God force and has a massive

amount of firsthand experience exploring realms of the consciousness. Karen, we're so super excited to have you. Well, thank you, Shannon. Mandy, it's so great to be here with you. Yes, thank you so much. We had such a great conversation with your partner, Evan Alexander. And he was like, you know what? You need to get Karen on here. Wonderful. Great idea. So sacred acoustics. How long have you been doing that? Well, about a year before I met Eben Alexander, I had been creating audio recordings with a friend of mine who was interested in using sound to explore realms of consciousness for different kind of reasons. But he is an engineer and started making these binaural beat type recordings. And he asked me to help him. I actually had a huge library of other people's

binaural beats. And we used those, analyzed them, figured out how to make them ourselves. And then we met Eben Alexander, who of course had this amazing coma experience, but his book wasn't out yet. So he wasn't really publicly known, but he was at a workshop exploring sound just as Kevin and I were. At that meeting, I ended up telling him about these sounds that we were creating. And we offered to let Eben listen to them. And so when he did, he found that he could easily return to these states that he experienced during his coma and became very intrigued. And then he invited me to come along and teach people how to use these recordings for various purposes. So that's kind of how it came together. It's interesting that before I was awakened, I had no idea that there were so many amazing support groups and like retreats out there. So I mean, there's near death experience retreats. And then you're saying that

you guys met at a sound retreat. Yes. In fact, I'll tell you, you know, I had a job for 25 years in the magazine newspaper publishing industry. During that job, I very often would use my vacation time to go to these kinds of retreats. Not only sound retreats, but I learned feng shui, I learned remote viewing, I learned all about out of body-body experiences, many, many things you can learn on the weekends. I wasn't really fulfilled with my work. I didn't necessarily believe in the content of the publications I was supporting. They didn't have any meaning for me. So in this search for meaning and purpose is what ended up sending me out to these other sorts of retreats to learn. And for about two to three years, I did this very regularly. And I called it my spiritual boot camp. And when I first started doing these kind of retreats, I wouldn't necessarily realize how much I had changed.

I would sort of immerse myself for a weekend or a week into the experience we were learning. And then I would come back to work and people would say, Oh, you seem different somehow. And that's when I would really feel different when I was in another kind of environment. I think rehabs need to rename themselves because when people hear the word rehab, they feel like they're going to be like shipped off to this like 30 day real hardcore. And it is hardcore. I've been to quite a few in my life. I'm in recovery. So there's fear. They could just name it like a retreat because it felt like it was a self-help retreat. It truly was. It was diving into the emotions and the fears and the patterns and the behaviors. So you could just tweak that.

Maybe I'm going to jump on that as my next challenge. Let me ask you, you talked about even as a child, you could sense this God force. Can you talk about that? Yes. Well, when I was about seven years old, I grew up in a regular kind of American Protestant household. But when I was about seven years old, I grew up in a regular kind of American Protestant household. But when I was about seven years old, my grandmother, she sat me down with my brothers who were one year older, one year younger, us three kids sitting on the couch. And she said to us that we might want to accept Jesus into our hearts so that we didn't go to hell for all of eternity.

And she suggested that this really was a requirement or we would be punished. And I said, well, this really doesn't make sense to me because why would God or Jesus punish kids if they haven't even heard of him? And so what about all those kids who don't know? And she said, well, we have missionaries that go around the world to help. And I still was like, some kid isn't going to hear about this. And they're going to go to hell for all of eternity. I just rejected it out of hand. But meanwhile, I continued to go to Methodist church.

And every single summer, I would go to church camp. And this was actually great fun. It was on the Oregon coast. So the beautiful natural beaches of Oregon is where this camp was located. And so when we would go, we would have a lot of fun, like play volleyball and things like that, rowboat in the lake, but also we would have to do prayers and things like that. And the counselors would say, go out into the woods and commune with God. And so I followed that instruction. I went out into the woods and I was thinking God should appear on a cloud or a big ray of light or somehow a trumpet. Let me know

very clearly that God is there, but none of that happened. And so I thought, you know, I'm just going to commune with nature. I'm going to feel all these beautiful trees and ferns and the sand in the ocean. And that's what I did when I was out in the woods. I communed with nature. And it wasn't until much, much later that I realized I was communing with that God force. But without the dogmatic kind of requirement of believing that God would show up in a certain way, we all can tap into that God force. It doesn't matter if you're religious, doesn't matter what your religion is. It's sort of our birthright as humans to be

connected to this greater consciousness. And each of us is a very critical, important aspect of that whole consciousness. But at any time, you know, we have this feeling that we're separate from everybody else. But at any time, through going into your inner world, as we call it, you can access this greater sort of energetic force that exists. And we believe that it's all of this collective consciousness together that really represents that God force. It's not necessarily a separate entity that commands how we all live. And everyone is going to have their own belief about this. But if people had that direct experience, especially Mandy, like you said, during your near-death experience and others who've had that direct connection, it turns from a simple belief into an absolute certain knowing because you felt it, you experienced, you know it.

And so if each of us on this planet has an opportunity to feel that, that's when I think people will really start to understand this truth that we really are all connected through consciousness. It's like a primal thing within us to be seeking it. And so I think that's why when someone, your child can tell you, this is how it's supposed to be. You're like, okay, well then that makes sense because I'm searching for this. And so thank you for filling in the blanks. I haven't yet experienced for myself. And then you grow up with these beliefs based on what other people believe, basically, rather than making your own experiences. That's what I love about you, Karen, is that you actually went out and experienced

so many different things. You were truth-seeking because I think it's built into us that we have this love and connection and we're trying to figure it out. What is it connected to? Yeah, I think all of us want to know at some point, why are we here and what is our purpose? And it's so interesting in our modern world that the secular world who really relies on science to give us the information we need, science, materialist, conventional, dominant science tells us that the spiritual realm is just an illusion. It's a hallucination. And yet so many of us are walking around touching it, feeling it, you know, after a loved one dies, maybe they show up in a dream or you have a vision or sometimes when people are driving along the road and they, they maybe don't realize they're heading into danger and they're hear a voice. Some people say it's the voice of their father who died

or just a voice that says pull over right now, they pull over, and then suddenly a semi, you know, comes right in front of them. So there's lots and lots of ways that we are really connecting to this energy. It's ours, it's our birthright. And yet it's been denied to us kind of systematically, at least in the Western world, both through religion, who all of the kind of main religions are really more dogmatic. I was never in my religious experience taught how to go within, how to feel the love of God, how to generate that love from within in order to, you know, attract that love to me, that none of this was taught to me. And so in, and of course, in the science minded person, that's all just nonsense anyway. And so we really, the Western mainstream world

has really been stripped of that. What I think is really our spiritual birthright. And again, it's the spiritual realm is talked about by scientists, but they just don't call it that they might call it the implicate order or the information field, anything that can't be strictly measured using measurement tools, they think isn't real. And yet they talk about this underlying sort of energy that exists. And to me, that's the spiritual realm. But to use that word so often puts people into their dogmatic corners. And, you know, we have to argue about what is actually happening in the spiritual realm. Whereas I think if we just accept the spiritual realm exists and then explore and find our own way through it, that that would be an improved way, I think, for us to really look at how life works. And that would immediately restore a sense of

meaning and purpose that we're here to grow. We're not just, you know, meaningless robots wandering around with, you know, thoughts and emotions being caused by neurons in our brains. We're actually on a journey. We're on a journey individually and collectively, and it's a journey of growth, a journey of understanding that we're all connected through love. And we learn this most definitely through the hardships that we experience in life, your coma experience and, you know, relationship breakups, job losses, illnesses, the loss of a loved one, all of these things, especially, you know, we're going through this COVID pandemic now for almost a year, the entire world is going through this.

And it really can be seen as sort of, they call it in the addiction world, you probably are familiar with this term, the gift of desperation, you know, when you hit bottom, and when you hit that bottom, it causes you to, to, in some cases, you know, bounce right back out of it. And so we can look at the whole world as being in this collective gift of desperation. And that's when we realize, oh, we really are connected. Oh, love really is important. Oh, we need to take care of each other. These are lessons that we will hopefully learn collectively to sort of bring about much more peace and harmony in our world. Gosh, you're so good with words. And, you know, I love synchronicity. You know, and it just dawned on me that this might have happened after I was listening to your acoustic samples. Over the last two nights, I've actually been waking up and just like writing at like three o'clock in the morning, which I've always woken up, you know, between three and four,

but this is like, in my dream, I'm being told knowledge, and then I get up and I write it. But one of the things that I wrote was a poem about a child playing hide and go seek trying to find God in a forest. And when you were just describing your experience in Oregon, it totally reminded me of this dream that I was having. And I saw ferns. People that have never been to Washington or to Oregon don't understand these ferns. They're everywhere. They're actually like part of just the grass and they're so beautiful. I've always been attracted to ferns. I don't know if it's because my mom had them when I was young, they were, and they're easy to take care of, but yeah, I just, I love that story. And I love that as a child, you were able to separate yourself from what you

were being told to believe and, you know, find your God in the things around you instead of in what they were telling you to believe. I love that story. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah. Well, that kind of synchronicity is really interesting. And for me, the way you described it and the way it just happened so recently, I would call that kind of a precognitive dream where you were sort of feeling into the future of this conversation. And Ferns, you're right. Oh my gosh. I took them for granted in Oregon. I was born in Arizona, but grew up in Oregon. So I knew there were different terrains out there. But when I moved to the East coast, I desperately wanted to find these ferns and waterfalls. Oregon has the most beautiful waterfalls. And yeah, so nature, that's where

you find that force for sure. Often there is a lot of pain to purpose and pain to awakening. So what I'm wondering is, is this possibly an answer and an avenue that people can take without having to go through the pain? Because we often meet people and they're like, I don't want to go through the pain. Like I'm only 23 years old. I'm just starting. And I'd like to awaken and further my journey, my spiritual growth, but I don't want to have to go through the pain. Is that possible? Well, word is through all of the experiences I've been in is that that pain is part of you. Part of your purpose. That pain got put in there at some point. And so to deny it really is not, you're not fulfilling the purpose

of what we might say is becoming more whole. So acknowledging that spiritual aspect of you usually also involves acknowledging the hurts and fears that you've put away over time. So this is from a 23 year old. I will tell you that I grew up feeling pretty balanced. I didn't feel like I had a lot of emotional issues. I didn't feel like, you know, I had been through all these kinds of challenges and it was really curiosity about telepathy and out of body experience and that sort of thing that got me interested in this spiritual kind of experience. I didn't realize I kind of got tricked. I tricked myself and realized, yes, personal and spiritual growth absolutely is the result of these kinds of explorations.

However, when I first started, I was like that 23 year old. I didn't want to deal with any pain. I didn't want to bring up any emotions. Why can't I just have my out of body experience? But what I found was when I would get quiet inside, when I would find that space, at first, what I found was tears. I found crying. I found loneliness. I found despair. And over time, I realized, oh my gosh, I put this there. This is that, we call it sort of this universal wound of separation. In my case, it was a rejection of my father. When my parents got divorced, I decided, oh, I don't need you anymore, was sort of a self-preservation mechanism. But then much later in life, I realized that I had shut down very consciously at age seven, this idea that I could be connected and be loved by someone, a man, I guess. And it kind of made me realize the

relationship issues that I had, that that was the source. And so when you're walking around as a 23 year old thinking, oh, I don't want to go there. If you want to really become more whole and go deep, you got to run into who you are and that's part of who you are. But the good news is, is once you, once you identify it, it can be released. And if you're starting out at age 20, you know, you're even 30, you're much better off because most people start doing this, you know, after age 50, honestly, I was more in my forties, but there were a lot, most people were much older than me. And that's when you have this whole lifetime of trauma that potentially could come up. And by trauma, it's not just, you know, very severe trauma, but very small things like children used to make fun of me when I was young, because I had this high forehead. And I looked like Frankenstein. And I was very,

I was very paranoid about that. But this was back in the 70s, when everyone wore long, straight hair, and I decided to have bangs cut. Still, to this day, I wear bangs. So that kind of that's a trauma that it didn't necessarily ruin my life or anything. But it did have an effect on my sort of self esteem and ideas of what I looked like. So those kinds of traumas can turn into limiting beliefs that keep us from moving forward with our goals. Yeah, I can relate to that. They called me five head. And then I was, I felt so like relieved and free when I saw that someone had said people with high foreheads just need a bigger head

because their brains are bigger. That's exactly what I learned. That's people with high foreheads just need a bigger head because their brains are bigger. That's exactly what I learned that people with high foreheads are more intelligent. And so that's what I should have told those little kids. But yeah, I used to actually try to look up if you could get like your hairline brought down. And there was an app where you could like, you know, pencil in like the hair. And then I saw it and I was like, that's not me. I love my forehead. And my mom has my forehead and my grandma has my forehead and my aunt, my cousins have our forehead.

And now my daughter doesn't like it. And I'm like, honey, one day you'll love it. Yeah, that's so funny. That's, you know, it's very interesting, Karen. I just recently had something that came up that I never in my life. I did not the whole time. I, you know, here I am in my spiritual journey and I'm listening to other people's pain and stories.

And I'm like, I don't know why, you know, I had that happen to me too. And it never, it never affected my life. I just got lucky that it didn't. And holy shit, it sure did. And it just popped up over the past two weeks. And I was like, oh my gosh, I even have goosebumps telling about it because it was a very significant awakening that I had. And I had realized it had been affecting me my whole life. And I never, ever, ever could put my finger on it. Once I was able to, I was like, okay, well, I don't have to have that fear anymore.

What I've found is that we are most blind to our own deepest issues. Very easy to see other people's issues, but we can't see our own. And even when people might point it out to us, we're in denial. We just don't even understand. And yes, you need that sort of awakening. I went through a very similar thing and realized, oh my gosh, I do have emotional issues. The fear was living in me and I didn't even know it. And I swear, just like you said, if someone would have given me like an energy session and said, you have fear here, I'd have been, oh, no, I don't. I don't have any further.

I did not even have a clue. So there could be more. It's almost, it's like we call it peeling layers of an onion. You know, you peel one and there's another and another and another. And sometimes you can go for a few months or years and not run into it again. And then, and then sometimes it's the same issue that you thought you had resolved and it's coming up again. When that happens, I like to think that it's really an opportunity to make a different

choice. When a patterned sort of thing occurs, if you can change your pattern, then the pattern will be broken and it may not happen again. But just when we think we've resolved a certain issue, another situation will, will trigger it. And that's when we find out it's almost like the final exam. Are you really, are you really okay with this? And you find out how do you respond? So the more we can learn to manage our responses and not just be reactive, that's when we can really start to move forward with these kinds of things. Do you believe also that sometimes it's divine timing? So if this would

have been released in her brain five years ago or 10 years ago, she wouldn't have had the tools to handle it because it's very traumatic. And I'm going to use my near death as an example. So I have told the story over and over again, but then all of a sudden this memory comes out of nowhere. So I added into the stories because it's new. And some people might think, oh, she's just making shit up now because she never said that from the beginning. But really it's just been released to me because of the timing. And I believe God knowing that I can handle it. Yeah. I totally believe in this idea of divine timing or synchronicity. I think you said earlier,

it's almost as if the part of us that resides in the spiritual realm, even when we're here, some people say higher self, more expanded self, another aspect of yourself that's more spiritual. That part of you may have greater knowledge of what's going on than what you have here. And I feel like that connection helps to bring those divine timed events into our lives. And even if you're just like the other day, sort of precogging this idea of ferns in the forest and God, some people would say, oh, that's just a coincidence. In fact, that's what most Western minds would say, even my own. Oh, that was a coincidence.

But I've learned over time that no, it's not a coincidence. And if we're paying attention, such so-called coincidences are happening all the time. And that's where we use the word synchronicities instead, because that's an event that seems to be unrelated, and yet it's incredibly related, at least symbolically, or, you know, these kinds of synchronicities can really help to validate what, what choices we're making or, or things like that in a given moment, just ask for that validation and some synchronicity might appear. Yeah. Spiritual intelligence. It's seriously a thing. It's amazing. So let's talk about your bininaural beats or it's not, it's called sacred acoustics. Is it

the same thing as binaural beats? What are they and why and how would they benefit us? Well, sacred acoustics is just our company name for the audio technology we create. Binaural beats is the generic term for a form of brainwave entrainment. These binaural beats are created by feeding one signal into one ear, a slightly different signal into the other ear. And if you ever listen to a crystal bowl or a gong or a brass bowl that makes that wah, wah, wah kind of sound, that's a binaural beat. It's just a natural binaural beat when you hear it in a musical instrument. But when you create them precisely using digital frequencies, it's the difference between those two frequencies that seems to entrain the brain to a level that

might appear on an EEG, which measures the electrical signal coming out of your brain. So zero to four hertz is the state that you're in when you're asleep. Four to seven Hertz is the theta state. That's the state mostly associated with meditation. And then above that, the alpha state, 12 to 30 Hertz, that's associated with focused relaxation and beta. That's what we're in where we're walking around. So the Western mind, especially when they sit down to try to meditate. And I was one of those people, incredibly challenging to get my distracting thoughts to even quiet, even for a moment. And it just seemed like a big waste of time until I found sound. And this particular kind of sound, binaural beats, really helps to calm the mind from that beta state, that's 30 Hertz and up,

into a lower state of awareness like theta. So if the difference between the two binaural beat frequencies is four Hertz, you're receiving a signal that should entrain the brain, or your brain should follow that frequency into a four Hertz brainwave state. So that four Hertz I mentioned, because it's a very common frequency that we include in our recordings, because that's the state between awake and asleep. We're all in this state every day when we're first waking up in the morning,

as we're falling asleep at night, it can be called the hypnagogic state. But these recordings help to get your body profoundly relaxed, but your mind is still aware. So you're almost mimicking that state of being asleep. Your body is asleep, but your mind is still awake. And so that's one reason people use these recordings. They can be used to just support sleep at night. They can be used to support studying. We have a pilot study that was done a couple years ago that just got published in February of 2020 that showed a 26% reduction in anxiety listening to these recordings just for two weeks. The control group only had a 7% reduction in anxiety. So they really can make a difference in just calming people to a state where they're not just, you know, having these racing

thoughts of fear and anxiety. I know when I started listening to these and my mind finally started to get quiet, first I would just fall asleep, but then I learned to sort of keep myself aware. And over time I developed that skill. And then what would happen is occasionally, I would play these recordings, I would start to feel emotional. And that was another aspect of sort of clearing these traumas is that the sound seemed to activate this that was already in my system. Certain forms of meditation did the same thing. But the sound played a really interesting role, because it's almost like I learned to, if I felt myself feeling emotional at the beginning of listening, I would realize, oh But over time I learned I had developed what I call the inner observer, which is the part every one of us that notices when your thoughts have wandered.

So it's that part of you that notices and brings your attention back. Well, this part of me is almost enacted on a regular basis now. So I can kind of observe what I'm doing as I do it. So in a sound journey, if I went into an emotional release kind of mode, another part of me was like, okay, this is good for you. You're going to get through this. And yet I would be so emotional and really release it. So it was almost like a cognitive and a emotional kind of reaction at once. And that combination really helped to manage this idea of releasing the emotions so that then they could be replaced with something else. There's such a wide variety of reasons that people listen and anxiety these days is something that everyone could use a little help with reducing.

And so for that reason, it was at the beginning of the COVID crisis that we decided to make this set of recordings we call the whole mind bundle. These are exact same recordings used in that pilot study that showed that reduction in anxiety. These recordings are available at a drastically reduced price. And there is a free option because we know so many people who really are in more anxiety than others don't have the finances. And so anyone in financial uncertainty is welcome to download those files with our gratitude for taking time to calm the mind, because we know we're all connected. So if your mind is anxious, my mind can't be as calm as it could be. And we can keep ourselves separate from each other, but fundamentally we're connected. So anytime people make that effort, I am profoundly grateful. Well, I was profoundly grateful for the free recordings,

the samples. I'm curious if, if I tell you which one resonated with me the most, would you be able to tell what maybe my soul is craving or, or needing or going through? I don't know if I can tell you exactly that, but I could tell you something. So yeah. Tell me about your experience. I loved the cosmic womb. Like I could listen to that all day long. I loved how it, I mean, it was really intense in my ears and going the back and forth. Now I have to say, I loved EMDR and it helped me with my trauma after my near death experience. I don't know that one resonated with me deep. Yeah. I'm not sure that would tell me what your soul is craving, but I do have some comments. EMDR

is a technique that, that we find to be rather similar to binaural beats because when you do EMDR, you're asked to move your eyes from left to right or move your attention somehow from side to side. And that's what the binaural beats are doing this, both sides. And I think it's yoga nidra is another system where they ask you to move your attention from the left to the right. So that's really interesting. The Cosmic Womb has a six hertz signal in it. And it's actually one of the least musical instrument that we've enhanced with binaural beats rather than strict digital frequencies. So this one was designed specifically to assist our audio engineer's wife in childbirth. That's why we call it Cosmic Womb. He succeeded. She gave birth now three times listening to this recording in her third floor Manhattan apartment in a rented birthing tub. So she listens to this recording and of course her parents are there and so on. And she found

it to be much easier to relax, but more than that, she found that it helped her family members like her mother to be more relaxed because she had noted her mother when her siblings had had babies that her mother would be so anxious. It made everyone else anxious. And so she was very calm. And I can say, I used that same recording when my daughter was giving birth to my grandson. And every time a nurse would come in, they would hear that beautiful, you know what it sounds like Mandy, that beautiful, peaceful sound and oh, what is this? And so yes, very, very calming. But to know what your soul is craving, I would need to know a little bit more than what. Yeah, apparently it's craving the six hurts. It's definitely not craving to

have another baby. Let's get that straight. Yeah, yeah. Anyone of any age can listen to this. But I will tell you, my daughter listened to it while she was pregnant just to calm her down. So, you know, I thought I was going to like the one with the flutes because I love Native American music and I love flutes. And I mean, of course, they're all amazing. But this one just really got me. And I think what happened was because it was going back and forth from left to right, left to right, it was so easy for me to get present because I was just paying attention to how it's switching from ear to ear. And before I knew it, I was just in complete presence. And so it made it easy for me. Yeah. And just so people know, you don't have to pay attention to the sound the way you're describing, although that sounds like it was effective for you, but very often you just allow

the sound to be in the background and either just sort of passively listen and feel the feelings that are coming up, or we highly recommend setting an intention while you're listening. And so if you did have a problem you wanted to solve, or you did want to know, what is my purpose or what is my soul's calling? You know, You could sort of put that out there while you're listening. And it sort of opens up the channels for that information to come in. Earlier, you were saying that you wake up from a dream state and write everything down. And you're in a hypnagogic state when you do that. Lots of times when we remember our dreams in the morning, we get up and walk around,

all of the memories just fade. If you stay in your bed, keep that pencil and paper nearby, all of the memories just fade. If you stay in your bed, keep that pencil and paper nearby, like I'm sure you do, you stay in that state. And it does allow you to receive more information. You mentioned earlier that you had, you know, a memory that came back to you after all this time from your NDE. And that's often what can happen when you're in these meditative states. You know, you might be given this huge, maybe call it a thought ball, this huge concept all at once, but you can't really unpack it all in that moment. But later you can, you can realize, oh, that's available for me and go in. And I know Eben has done that with his near-death experience memories as well. He can return to that

realm and sort of deepen into it, open up new channels and really feel that connection more deeply. Okay. Well, here you go. Here's a perfect example. What I just said that I had just awakened to and figured out, I figured that out in the middle of the night at four o'clock in the morning because I was woken up. There you go. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. So think about this. So our dream state or when you first wake up, when those insights happen, that's what happens when we're asleep and we wake up. When you listen to these sacred acoustics recordings, you're in an awake state. And then you sort of drift into that sort of lucid dreaming state from an awake state.

But you're really finding that same space. So you can do it more intentionally open up those channels. Lots of people use these recordings exactly for opening up creative channels. And that is what shamans did right all over the world. I mean, they would do their dream journeying for that purpose and dream recall. I mean, this is not anything new. In fact, when I think about the vibrations and like the chanting of the OM, some of the earliest things that people were doing to connect. We do recommend that chanting OM sometimes does help get you into that state more quickly because what you're doing is you're creating a vibration in yours with yourself.

Yeah. That kind of activates your energetic field. Don't you find it so amazing that here we are trying to get to this state, but yet the early parts of our life, we are already in that brainwave. And so we're like trying to go back to having that simple, you know, none of the brain chatter, none of the worries, none of the I want to be someone different or have something more state. You make an excellent point and incredibly appropriate because when kids are young, when they're roughly seven and younger, they're in a theta state all the time. That's their natural state of walking around talking. And it makes total

sense because this is when they're, they're little sponges learning so much. I watched my grandson, who's three now. It is unbelievable, especially now that I'm older, been through all of this to more acutely watch how he's developing. And oh my gosh, he knows, he knows everything. You think they know nothing and they know everything when I have a daughter coming out of that and so I can see her all of a sudden caring about shit she never cared about yeah and it's so sad I'm like how do we keep you there how do we yeah that's just part of what happens and interestingly children who who remember their past life memories are are almost always under age seven. She actually recalled two of them. Yeah, around five years old, like in detail names and everything.

So it's very interesting. But you know, I have four kids, some that are way older than her. And then I had she's like my love child that I have later in life. And I've allowed her to, you know, experience those things in that beta brainwave. And it's so amazing. And do you know, we do a lot of binarial beats at night now, her and I, she loves to go to sleep to any kind of spa music, and sometimes they come on. And so maybe she'll stay open more open than otherwise. Well, I think that children who have supportive parents like you are very likely to stay more open if they're open already. But so often they go off to school and teachers and other authority figures start to tell them, you know, what's right and wrong.

But I know me as a child, I did have this natural sort of ability to not believe what all authority figures told me. I had some kind of sensibility in me even at that age. So she'll probably keep that too. I'm going to guess that so often later in life, maybe in a few years from now, she won't even remember she told you about those past lives. I know. Yeah. So is there a disclaimer that comes with your acoustics? Because they could probably trigger some things for you, right? Should you have a journal in there? How should you listen to it?

What should you do? Well, we do recommend having a journal for sure. And yes, be prepared for any kind of response. I have created a series of free, I call them training videos, where I explain what to expect, you know, how to deal with common concerns, you know, what if you just fall asleep, or what if you can't make those thoughts really go away so easily. There's such a wide range of ways that people can respond. But we do have one disclaimer that is highly critical for every listener, and that is to not listen and drive. So many people, you know, they just put music on

their radio, they're driving along, and even when you're driving without playing these kinds of sounds, you can sometimes get into this zone, right, where you might kind of drift off or something, so you need to stay alert, and these kinds of recordings will not help you to stay alert, so that is one very important disclaimer, is to not listen and drive. And we always recommend listening with headphones so that you can get that left and right signal going into your brain. Because if you just listen like with a one speaker system, you'll get some of the power because we do include monaural beats with our binaural beats in the way that we create our technology, but you won't get the same power without those headphones. Okay. Well then I'm going to have to find my other earbud because I don't have one right now.

You're so funny. She actually bought me the best present ever. It's like this sleeping eye mask, wireless headphone. I mean, I definitely suggest it for everyone. It's so soft too. I love it. Okay. Would you share maybe like one of your more profound experiences or messages that you got after doing this acoustic listening? Yes. One comes to mind rather immediately. I'm going to give you one of my early experiences. Because this is when I was just kind of figuring out what to do. And, you know, when I would be at these workshops, people would talk about, oh, I was in a cabin and I saw my grandmother and all of these things they would see and I didn't really see things. And so I thought maybe I wasn't doing it right or couldn't do it, but I was doing this one experience and we were guided to go, it was rather involved to walk along a stream,

walk along this path, walk up this hill and so on and so on until we got to a door. And then we were to open the door and behind the door was something. And that's what our gift was, whatever was behind this door. And so when I opened this door, I immediately started crying. I recognized my grandmother who had passed. I recognized my grandfather who had passed, my stepfather who had passed. They were all there. And they were saying, we're with you, we're with you. If you jump, we will catch you. And this was at an incredibly kind of vulnerable

part of my life. I was wondering if I should leave my marriage. I was wondering if I should leave my career. It was all just very, it seemed just like every decision I needed to make was on me. And when I felt, I didn't see these people, but what I realized is I could feel them. I could know them. And it was so real. Each and every one of them was there for me and I'll never forget it. And even now, if I feel like, I feel like I'm alone or nobody's here for me. I just have that memory. And it wasn't just people that I knew. It was this other energy of support that was so overwhelming. And I just burst into tears. So in this case, I was bursting into tears, more of a relief sort of crying, whereas other situations I was feeling, you know, anxiety inside of myself crying and it would release. There's all kinds

of different ways you can experience emotions. Sometimes you can feel this incredibly overwhelming sense of oneness and connection when you're, when you're listening in these states, but yeah, that was a beautiful experience. And one of the first ones I had that made me realize I really can get something out of this besides just sitting around waiting for something to happen. So that was very early on, but incredibly powerful. You know that I had a client who said that she couldn't listen to these because they caused her to have anxiety. Well, now I'm thinking, yeah, that probably was a good thing. You probably should have just kept listening. You were probably released. Yeah, That's exactly what I tell people sometimes when they use that word, they caused me to feel

anxious. Now some people feel it for a little bit and then it'll subside. We always have to be careful because everyone is unique. So I'm real careful, but I always suggest maybe that was activating some anxiety that's already inside of you. And maybe you can use that feeling to get past it. I'm so sensitive to vibration and sound. I mean, the TV literally will make me irritable and drive me crazy. And I'm always asking my husband to turn it down. The music I used to listen to does not resonate with my soul at all anymore. Everything has changed. Like a drop of a pencil upstairs right now would make me jump. I can hear light bulbs buzzing. Like my senses. How long ago was your NDE? The last one was in

2013. Okay. So it's been a while, but yeah, those kind of after effects are not uncommon. In fact, I know one woman, she's had several, I don't know if you've heard of her, PMH Atwater. She's researched NDEs in children, and she's really interesting. But she is so sensitive to sound that she can't even listen to our binaural beats. They just drive her. Really? Yeah, she can't. She just can't listen. So I'm pleased that you find them useful. Kevin sure does. He doesn't have that aversion to sound at all. He has no sound sensitivity, I would say. Is there a certain amount of time that you should be listening to them? Like, can you like overdo it? Well, there's the, there's two extremes. Some

people say, oh, I only have five or 10 minutes and a day to devote to this. So if you're only going to listen for five or 10 minutes, you're probably not going to get the deepest effects. You might get a little bit of relaxation, but you won't get those more profound effects because you need to be in it for a while. We do recommend at least 20 minutes. The free download that we offer just by putting in your email address, that's a 20 minute recording. And the whole mind bundle comes with a set of 20 minute and 60 minute recordings that can be played for any length of time. But if you want to have the deepest experience, we found that 40 minutes is really an ideal time. Now, some people will string

like Eben, several 40 minute ones together. And we do have some that are 60 to 70 minutes for those really deep experiences. So it really just depends how much time you have, what your goals are. The idea of doing it too much is again, very, very personal. Some people will find like Eben can listen for hours a day and he just loves it. Others might find that listening for hours a day will make them feel kind of lightheaded or groggy or not quite in there. Grounded. Yeah, not grounded. In that case, we would say you need to ground yourself with cold water, a cold shower, something like that. And that usually pulls people out of it. But I would not say that there's too much risk of doing it too much. It's just you need to monitor yourself. And honestly, when you're in a practice of meditation or going within,

the idea, at least from a Western mind like mine, is not to stay in that state all day long every day, but to learn how to bring that calmer kind of knowing state to your everyday life. So experimenting and practicing a regular practice of this sort of thing will not just be your escape from the world, but it will help make you a better person acting in the world. I love that you mentioned that. I get a lot of people say, I can't do that. I'm a teacher. Like I always got to be planning or my husband, he's like, I can't do that. I have to be on meetings all day long. They don't understand that it's coming from that space of calmness and you can still implement it into what you're doing. Right. I often say that

the best time to listen is either right when you're going to bed or right when you wake up, depending on your goal. If your goal is to relax, I would say doing it at bedtime is good. Or when you wake up in the middle of the night, so many people wake up at 3, 4 a.m., can't get back to sleep. That's a great time to do it. That's not taking you from your daily activity. But at some point, if someone wants to, you know, really make a change, they need to make that commitment. You know, Evan often says this is a lifelong commitment. I like to say, well, no, you don't have to consider that once you start, you will never stop. But I like to say, well, if I'm having a particular issue, I'm going to commit to this for three or four weeks, you know, and see if I can't address that issue. And then, you know,

bring it back up another time, because it can be overwhelming to think of it as a constant every day for the rest of my life kind of practice. And it doesn't have to be that way, but regular practice does make the results more beneficial. So one of the advanced techniques you talk about is listening with a friend. What have you seen happen with collective listening? Well, that is just so much fun. So at the beginning, I spoke about Kevin, he's my audio engineer. And when he would create these recordings, we would kind of create them together. But eventually he was creating them all. We would listen at the same time.

And then I would tell him, well, here's what I liked. Here's what I didn't like. And then he would tweak them. But as we continue to do this, we realized that we could run into each other in these experiences. And so we would have a shared intention. Sometimes we would do things like, let's go to Jupiter, somewhere, you know, that isn't, I love it. Yeah. Or you would say, let's go back to the time when the pyramids were built or something like that. We would just set that intention. And then afterwards we would tell each other what

happened. And so sometimes there would be overlap in our experience and he might describe something that he saw. And I might describe something that I just felt or knew, but it would be the same thing. So it really served as really excellent validation that we weren't just making these things up, that there was actually some connection that could be made. And after we met Eben and he became a big listener, we invited him and we would have these three-way sound journeys. Occasionally, Kevin's wife would join us. So we had four. And again, we would listen at the same time and then share experiences after looking for kind of those commonalities.

I love it. Yeah. Well, guess what? I have another synchronicity story. You guys, in my shaman class, we would play hide and seek and do journeys. It goes back to my poem and journeying. I love it. I love it. Yeah. I was going to say that also in group settings, this happens. So when I would go on these retreats, I remember lots and lots of connections that we would make. We would all listen, get back together, share our experiences. And one day someone said, Karen, I saw you.

I saw you in my experience. And you were standing on the edge of a pier wearing one of those orange floppy fisherman's hats. And I was kind of shocked because in my experience I had experienced becoming an orange dragonfly and she saw me on the edge of a pier in an orange hat with floppy you know with yeah it's like a dragonfly I was just you know my jaw dropped oh you so your shaman is uh very smart Mandy, we should play hide and seek. I'm down.

Let's do it. You just wrote your poem. She just sent me her poem, the hide and seek poem, like two days ago. Oh, my gosh. That's a triple synchronicity. I love that. I know. Karen, I have one question that I already regret not asking Evan.

And you even talk about it in the advanced techniques, invoking imagination. What do you believe imagination is? I feel like it gets a bad rap, like people think it's fake. I'm curious, what do you think? come up with ideas that we're bringing that into the world. You know, one way to look at it is Einstein famously said, knowledge is nothing, imagination is everything. So knowledge is what we learn in books, what we read, that's where I could read all kinds of information, but until I had my own experience, it wasn't going to be the same. And so imagination is that ability to tap into this greater force. Another way to look at it, though, is you mentioned that so many people kind of dismiss imagination. And I think that speaks to this Western culture idea that consciousness is an illusion and that your near-death experience was a hallucination. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's just

dismissed when, in fact, that's the meat, that's the meat in the sandwich where we really gain most out of life is within our consciousness, not within the physical world. The physical world is like a stage setting for us, but imagination in the setting of, I think the video that you saw, imagination is absolutely valuable when going into one of these sound journeys. So a lot of times traditional meditation is just thought of as, oh, sit quietly, breathe, quiet your thoughts, be present. But we call them sound journeys for a reason, because they can be used more for shamanic type journeys, where you actually interact with your consciousness, where you actually pose a question and get an answer. And so your imagination is what is driving

all of that. And your imagination is what brings those things to life during your sound journey. So it's highly, highly critical. And so the experience of validating those experiences through doing it with a friend helps you realize firsthand, it's not my imagination. This is actually real. And so we can start to prove it to ourselves in those kinds of ways. I was so curious to what you thought, because I grew up thinking imagination was all fake. It's just made up. And then now that I've also become more acutely aware, as you said, of your grandchild, I have with my youngest, cause I'm Shannon and I both have kids in our twenties

and then little younger ones. And so unfortunately we weren't present as much with our older ones as we are with our little ones. And I just, I'm really trying to encourage her to look at the imagination as like her, her higher self and her knowing and her intuition. For sure. And I would also, if I, if I had, I'm going to do this with my grandson. If I had a child, I'd be doing this too. I would teach them how to generate and hold love within their heart, love and gratitude to feel that feeling because, you know, our world, when we grow up and we cry, you know, adults tell us stop crying. They're basically telling us don't feel. And so we need

to learn how to feel constructively. The epidemic of mental health issues is not just because of COVID. And it's not just because of materialist Western worldview of stripping, you know, our consciousness out of reality. But it also has to do with not knowing how to process our emotions. And so that bullying that happens with kids. And I love this story. These kids in Baltimore, a school in Baltimore city, which is a tough city. They had something called the mindful moment room. So if a child got in trouble in class, say two kids that were fighting, they would send them both off to the mindful moment room. And there they would learn, you know, to breathe quiet, to breathe, get quiet, feel their feelings,

maybe feel the other person's feelings, have a little compassion of what might have just taken place. And over time, then these kids would go back to class. They never got in trouble. They were just taught these coping skills when they got in trouble. I'm saying that they weren't punished when they got in trouble, but they were giving these coping skills. No more suspensions.

Kids learn how to learn. Wow. All because of the change of a word. Because if you would have called it a timeout room, they would have taught it in a negative way. Yeah. I wish I would have known about that. Me too, for my child.

Yeah. She used to get suspended all the time for cursing at teachers. I'm surprised you haven't. That was my child. I did, but mine wasn't too bad. I'll never forget because when I got called in and got in trouble and had to have the parent meeting, my mom bursted out laughing and she was like, I am so sorry because I called him a butt fungus. Yeah. I kind of thought the teachers usually deserved it in my situation too, but yeah, I'll never, I'll never forget my poor mom when he said it, she's like, what did you call him? I'm like, I don't remember mom. So we went to like, you know, meet at the school and my dad

was there too. And he told her her she called me a butt fungus my mom just started cracking up so i have a son who's autistic and he was like in elementary school and his teacher calls me and the teacher says will you tell her ethan what you called miss so and so and i was like oh no he called her a bitch i know he called her a bitch. I know he called her a bitch. And he goes, grandma. He called her grandma. I'm like, she totally is a grandma. Like, that's not bad. Oh, Karen, you have been such a pleasure. I love the work you're doing, how the divine world had you and Evan cross paths and that you guys do such beautiful work together. You know, I love how his story and your story benefits each other's work. It's just a really, it's a really cool story.

Thank you for what you're doing. Thank you to Kevin. Sounds like a very talented person. And you invited to the Goop Health Summit. I loved the Goop Lab that came out on Netflix. How cool that you got to be part of that. Was that so much fun? It was incredibly fun. And Eben was on

a panel with a bunch of other folks, but I got to lead a meditation to kick off the day right before Gwyneth Paltrow. So yeah, it was very fun. Very, very fun. Well, thank you for being the light. And I can't wait for our listeners to log on. I highly recommend that everyone goes and listens to those free downloads. Can you tell them where they can find you? Yes. Sacredacoustics.com. You'll find the free download and there's a contact form. If you want to reach out, I'll get those messages and with any questions and thank you guys so much for what you do, bringing these kinds of concepts into people's minds. It's incredibly, incredibly important. Evan and I could have all the conversations with ourselves that we want,

but unless other people can really share and learn and grow along with us, it's not really doing as much good as it could. So thank you so much for doing that. And I just also wanted to tell the listeners that a lot of the questions that you might have are answered. Your videos are amazing. I watched every single one of them. You like nailed it with every question I had. And so I highly recommend people watch those. They'll tell you how to listen, where to listen, different techniques. So thank you for those videos. And now it's time for break that shit down. Be the love that you are. Perfect.

I mean, it is that simple. If you can just connect with the love inside of you. Yep. I wanted to keep it very simple. Be the love that you are. I might have to get that tattooed on me. Yeah, that's a good one. Thanks, Karen. I have a claim on it. I might have to get that tattooed on me. Yeah, that's a good one. Thanks, Karen.

I have a claim on it. I love it. Karen, thank you for everything that you do. And thank you so much for coming on Sense of Soul. All right. Thank you so much. Thanks for being with us today. We hope you will come back next week.

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