Show notes
Karen Newell Sacred Acoustics To Reduce Anxiety So pleased to have another sharer willing to walk the walk - Karen is an author and specialist in personal development with a diverse body of work that rests upon the foundation of spiritually transformative experiences. 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 engage with your inner world to connect to guidance, achieve inspiration, improve wellness, and develop intuition. In this recording, Karen shares tools to help reduce anxiety and explains how binaural beats can assist in quieting the mind Please share this episode so others can also get the benefit: https://personaldevelopmentunplugged.com/379-karen-newell-sacred-acoustics-to-reduce-anxiety Please visit Karens website and find all her contact details - Plus you can download a free recording of Karen's at www.sacredacoustics.com or email her [email protected]. Shine brightly Paul Please remember you can leave a comment or email me with questions, requests and feedback. If you have enjoyed this or any other episode please share and subscribe. Just email me [email protected] If you want to subscribe to the podcast (I know you do) click here to learn more Or simply click here to go straight to Apple Music / iTunes to subscribe OR leave a review Remember for my specially designed programs for developing Supreme Inner Confidence, Free Your Life of Anxiety and specialize Hypnosis tracks go to PaulCloughOnline.com If you want to access my FREE HYPNOSIS tracks go to paulcloughonline.com/podcast Follow and inter-react on twitter @pcloughie I'm a therapist but not your therapist The information with this website or online work, techniques and exercises provided within these free and paid products are for educational purposes only. Do not use the techniques or exercises contained within some of these free or paid products whilst driving or operating machinery, or if you suffer from epilepsy, clinical depression or any other nervous or psychiatric conditions. The information provided is not a substitute for proper medical advice. If in doubt, please consult your doctor or licensed medical practitioner. Any decision you make having received any of Paul Clough's free or paid products are your own and you remain wholly responsible for any decisions and actions you take. Why not look for me and the podcast on SPOTIFY AND the app Castbox I'm also in iHeart radio YouTube - copy n paste UC3BlpN4voq8aAN7ePsIMt2Q into search bar The Libsyn podcast page http://personaldevelomentunplugged.libsyn.com tunein, learnoutloud, Google Play Music Music by Wataboi from Pixabay, Music by DreamHeaven from Pixabay, Music by ccjmusic from Pixabay, , Music by freegroove pixabay seduction-jazz-112149 from Pixabay, Music by prazkhanal Pixaby ventura-117073 from Pixabay, And the transcript WARNING if you're a lover of the written word this may make you frustrated, or angry - you have been warned - is it an 'ism This is a longer podcast with a guest from Sacred Acoustics Hey, here's your heads up to this longer podcast. We have a guest, Karen Newell, from sacred Acoustics, and she's going to show us the benefits of sound through meditation, how we can quieten the mind and help clear anxiety. Now, that's got to be a good thing, so please do listen. Warning, warning, warning, warning. You are entering into the unplugged mind of Paul Clough clove. Too late. Personal development unplugged. Hey. Yes, that's right. Clapping. Clapping. Why are we clapping? Karen Newell is an expert in entrainment and meditation Well, we have another guest. Another guest who's going to come and do a little talk for us. Her name is Karen, Karen Newell, and she is the co founder of Sacred Acoustics. She's also an author and a specialist in personal development with a diverse body of work that rests upon the foundation of spirituality, transformative experience. Hey, how's that? Her personal growth programs, workshops, guided meditations and teachings enable individuals to achieve life transformations towards a greater fulfillment or self fulfillment and contentment. She is an innovator in the emerging field of brainwave entrainment. That's a word. Entrainment and meditation. And Karen is going to. There'll be the rest of the bio, by the way, on the website, but Karen is going to talk to us about how the tools, tools for help, for anxiety, mental health, and slowing down those racing thoughts that anxiety gives us. And you see, meditations we all know have proven to reduce anxiety. And it's by using binour, I can't even say the word bino. Binourial, binourial, binaural beats explaining, how these beats, because I can't say binourial can quieten the mind just by quieting the. I can't get this right. By quieting the mind, you can now begin to clear or certainly reduce the level of anxiety. And she's going to share a few ways how to use these beats by no meal. I can't say the blooming thing beats to quieten the mind and then how holding a wonderful feeling in our heart will help reduce anxiety, which obviously helps us and those around us and the effects of that. And she goes into a, lot of data to prove that things she does really work. Now, I know, or you know that I know. I love things that are going to help reduce our anxiety, because maybe it does clear anxiety completely. But also I do know that if you can reduce the anxiety that you're feeling, it gives you the opportunity to then look for that root cause, maybe, and deal with it. Because when we're in a full blooded anxiety attack, then we're in the bottle. We can't read the label. We can't take a different perspective on, what's causing that anxiety to deal with the cause. Because, you know, that's where I come from, dealing with the cause, therefore, letting go of the effect, which anxiety is an effect. Anxiety leads to fear and things like that. So anything that can reduce the effect has to be a win, has to be a bonus. And, Karen will go through that with you. Personal development unplugged podcast welcomes Karen Newell So, whilst we're on the same page, we're coming from different directions, as usual, which is why I love to have people on the personal development unplugged podcast to show a diversity. What a word, eh? Used so many different ways, but it's done, in such a nice way. Someone wanting to share their thoughts, share their experiences. And we all know I've been talking about it long enough, when you share something, you get to keep it yourself, and other people get it, too. And she's also going to share a little free audio, and she'll go through that. But also, I just wanted. I found one of my other notes, and this is where we also gel so closely. It's using feelings of gratitude, and Karen will go through that, too, in this short little recording. So give that big, warm welcome to Karen Newell. Over to you, Karen. Karen Newell says meditation can help improve mental health Hello, I'm Karen Newell, co founder of Sacred Acoustics and co author of living in a mindful universe. And mental health seems to be a rather popular topic for people to talk about these days. It used to be a little bit taboo. Nobody wanted to admit that they had any mental health problems. It was kind of seen as something not to be discussed, kept behind closed doors. And thanks to a lot of, popular athletes and celebrities and other types of things, mental health has become a topic that is perfectly fine to discuss. And this is something that is very needed in our world today, because, especially anxiety seems to be rampant in our world. It, really became to be noticeable when the world entered into that shutdown because of the COVID pandemic several years ago, back in 2020. And lots of people were looking for tools on how to manage their mental health. Now, meditation is one of those tools, and meditation has been studied for several decades. It's something that's very common in eastern traditions. And it was actually the Dalai Lama who sort of spurred interest in the western world for studying meditation. And so academic institutions have discovered that meditation plays an incredibly helpful role in our physical, health and our mental health. And it can provide lots and lots of benefits. Unfortunately, for many of us in this western world, meditation is very challenging, and that's because we're used to always being active. And meditation is about sitting quietly, developing an inner focus and maintaining that focus on only one thing. And when most of us sit down to meditate, very often what we find in our inner world is that racing thoughts are constantly going and it's not quiet at all. And so we try to meditate and it just becomes more and more difficult. I know for me that was the case. I had learned about all the wonderful benefits of meditation. And then when I tried to do it, it was really hard. And I would sit quietly. I, would set the alarm for ten minutes, and it would seem like an eternity would go by before I could finish, my meditation. So it was really quite a chore and not something that I look forward to. And so I stopped doing it. I stopped and started. I kept hearing about it. And it was a particular quality of sound that really was a turning point for me. And at first it was things like gongs, tuning forks, brass bowls, crystal bowls. Some of you may be familiar with what those sound like, but usually it's sort of a monotonous kind of wavering sound wa like that, just going on and on. And usually there's lots of all of these beautiful overtones, higher frequencies, just amazing to listen to. And it really was able to capture my attention. And so I learned, wow, no wonder people use crystal bowls and brass bowls to help with meditation. And I eventually discovered a very specific type of sound known as binaural beats. And this is created using modern, software. It doesn't come from an instrument, but they're created using different, ah, sets of frequencies. So when you have one frequency in the left ear, a slightly different frequency in the right ear, what you hear, what your brain interprets that to be is a wavering sound wa very similar to what those brass bowls and gongs are emitting. And isn't it interesting, when you analyze the sound coming out of a brass bowl, a crystal bowl and so on, you'll find there's natural binaural beats in there. And so it's no wonder that recordings that, create these binaural beats, more precisely, can be very effective at quieting the mind. And I'm going to tell you why. And that is because these frequencies, like I said, you put one frequency in the left ear, a slightly different frequency in the right ear. It's the difference between those two frequencies that creates the, binaural beat. And so the difference between these two frequencies is associated with different brainwave states. So when a brain is measured using an EEG that's measuring an electric signal that's being put out by the brain in different states, we find that, zero to 4 what's emitted when someone's in the delta state. Delta is associated with sleep. Now, four to 7 associated with the theta state. And that's the state that we're in when we're in meditation or maybe a very deep kind of flow state. alpha is seven to 12. That's associated with focus, concentration, deep relaxation, but not as deep, quite as theta and beta. That's twelve to 30 hz. That's the state when we're in, when we're talking, when we're walking, when we're interacting with others. That's the state when we're often in when we sit down to try to meditate. And so it's no wonder that that beta mind keeps on putting out all of these, hopefully interesting thoughts, but usually they're just distracting and, we'd like them to quiet down. And so using these binaural beats, you can reduce that, mental activity from the beta state closer down into the alpha, theta and delta states. Binaural beats can help with anxiety, depression and other mental health issues Now, binaural beats can also be used to help people sleep. And so in that case, you would want to be listening to delta frequencies. But many of us, we want to reach that kind of deep meditative state. That's what can really help with anxiety, depression and other types of mental health issues. and so when you listen to these recordings, you're actually helping get your mind from a beta brainwave state into a theta. That state between awaken, asleep, between delta and theta is what we're looking for. That's the sweet spot. And, on sacredacoustics.com, that's the company I'm, co founder of. We create all kinds of different binaural beat recordings for different purposes. And it was the whole mind bundle. That's a collection of recordings including whole delta, whole theta and whole alpha. That whole mind bundle was used in a pilot study. We were fortunate for a psychiatrist in a busy Manhattan practice, to prescribe these recordings to her patients. She prescribed these recordings that are part of the whole mind bundle. And the same listening protocols that her patients were given are also available on sacredacoustics.com. When you acquire the homemind bundle. But when patients started listening to this, they were, guided to find the best time of day that worked for them to listen to different recordings based on their personal goals in the delta theta and alpha ranges. And what they found was after two weeks of regular listening, they found a 26% reduction in anxiety. Now, the control group were Dr. Usum's other psychiatric patients who were getting regular therapy, but who did not begin listening to these types of recordings. And they noticed in the same period of time, a 7% reduction in anxiety. So that's quite a big difference. Just by adding these recordings to their daily routine, they found a much larger decrease in anxiety. And so this is very useful meditation, which can be so challenging. These recordings help bring your brain into that meditative state without quite as much concern, and trouble. And many of us, when we try to meditate and we're unsuccessful, that just seems to create more anxiety. So finding tools that can help us are very useful. we don't need to just use one technique. We recommend that people try different techniques and find a combination of techniques that works best for you. We're all unique, and so we're not all going to benefit the same way from different styles of meditation. And so there's many types of meditation out there. Some involve chanting, some involve movement, some involve different body positions or mudras where you hold your fingers in certain ways. All of that is available for people to explore with. And the sky's the limit here on, the different types of techniques that you can combine to find what works best for you. I know for me, I found a form of sufi heart rhythm meditation to be quite useful and in combination with the sound and that involved, matching m your breath to, your actual heartbeat. So, say you would count four heartbeats of breathing as opposed to four breaths. And just that extra awareness on the heart was incredibly useful at removing me from that busy thinking mind. And so sound is very useful. Attention to the heart is very useful. One of the, most basic techniques that I often share is to imagine that your breath is moving in and out of your heart. And so it's actually still moving out of your nose and through your mouth. But just imagine, use your imagination and tell yourself, no, it's moving in and out of my heart. And you can expand that into all kinds of interesting types of experiences by imagining that your breath is moving around your body in different ways. For example, you can imagine that your breath is being released to the left side and being, inhale from the right side, exhale to the left side. my favorite one is to exhale out into a circle, a sphere or a bubble that is surrounding your entire body. And then when you inhale, all of that comes back to you, back into your heart. And so you can breathe your heart energy in and out of this bubble that surrounds your entire body. And this is not just imagination, because heartmath institute in northern California, who has been studying the heart for decades, tell us that the heart emits an electromagnetic field, and it expands and contracts around your body just like I described. And, the expansion and contraction is based on your emotional state. So if you're in a very joyful, kind, compassionate kind of state, your electromagnetic field of your heart will be much larger. If you're in more of a, sad or depressed or anxious, upset about something, then you have a much smaller heart field. And so it's expanding and contracting around our bodies, whether we realize it or not. And the beautiful thing is that it seems to affect the people around us. And so we all know what it's like to be with one of those joyful people. It seems we can really sense or feel or resonate with that person's heart energy. And then, of course, we know what it's like to be around people that kind of make us uncomfortable, where maybe there's less resonance between our heart and their heart. And so I feel as though this is something that all of us can really take to heart, literally speaking, is to be aware that this is how our hearts are functioning. And if each of us can take the time to clear any anxieties, unprocessed emotions, anything that we're holding in our heart that's not beneficial or helpful to ourselves and to those around us, when we take the time to clear all of that, it's not only helping yourself, it's helping all those around you. And that's another thing that these binaural beat audio recordings are useful for some people. When they listen to these recordings, they will find that they get emotional and they won't necessarily understand why. but the idea there is to allow whatever emotion pops up in that moment, just imagine that it's being released. It's coming up because it wants your attention. And now you can allow it to release. And like layers of an onion, over time, you can peel back all of these sort of unprocessed emotional traumas from your life. And as you do this, you'll find that your heart, rather than holding on to those hurts that weren't properly processed, it gets replaced. It gets replaced with something else. And that is the essence of who you truly are. Another heart exercise that's very useful is to generate feelings of gratitude And another heart exercise that's very useful, that really is just critical to any of this, is to generate feelings of gratitude in the heart. And this isn't thinking of things to be grateful for. This is feeling gratitude. And so this can be very challenging. I know it was for me. And over time, it took the kind of act of recalling events from my past that made me feel joyful. And for me, that memory eventually settled, on puppies. I was enamored with puppies when I was a child. I still love dogs to this day. And imagining being with these puppies or dogs is what got that first spark of gratitude to be felt in my heart. And the more any of us can take the time to generate just simple feelings of gratitude, imagine that those feelings of gratitude are residing in your heart. And knowing how the heart function works, it's actually expanding and contracting and sharing that gratitude with the world around you. And so knowing how all of this works can be very useful. And if anyone wants to learn more about sacred acoustics, we have a website, sacredacoustics.com. You can go there and enter your email address, and we'll send you a free 20 minutes recording. Some people, this is the only recording they ever use as part of their practice. This recording is, some people's favorite, and so we hope that you'll be able to use that to determine if binaural beats would be helpful to you in your daily practice. And then also look for the whole mind bundle. Again, that's the set of recordings that was used in the pilot study showing a reduction in anxiety after two weeks of listening. These recordings were made available at the beginning of, 2020, when the first shutdowns of the pandemic first started happening. That's when this pilot study got published in a medical journal, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, in February of 2020. And so in March, that's when suddenly everyone was faced with, a new life of staying at home, perhaps, and, finding new, innovative, things to do with your time. And so we made those recordings, available for free at that time, and they still remain available for free because the anxiety in our world has not decreased quite enough. And so we would love for people to have access to those with no financial barrier. They're also available for a small, fee. But it's up to you what you're able to spend on these recordings, and you can access these. And anyone who takes time to do this, please accept my gratitude for taking time to go within and to clearing any anxiety and unprocessed emotions that you have using some of these heart exercises that I've shared, and also these audio recordings. Anyone who takes time to do this. Please accept my gratitude for helping yourself, because as you're helping yourself, you're helping all those around you. And for that, I thank you. Hey, friends. Isn't that good? Karen Newell from sacred Acoustics. And you must go and get that free recording and give it a go. And please get in touch with Karen via her website to let her know how much you enjoyed her talk. Because we really do want to have a better life, don't we? We want to be free of anxiety. And there'll always be something, I guess will make us a little bit anxious now and again. But when we know how we can deal with it, then when things come along, we deal with it. That's what it is. We have that positive belief. Done it before. I'll do it again. I've, got this. It's those type of subtle, positive beliefs that allow us to be free, and then we can have those feelings of gratitude that just make everything in the world different for us. Because when we have that gratitude, you're telling your unconscious mind we've got it right. This is the thing. This feeling is the thing that I enjoy. It makes me feel so good. And when I feel this good feeling, this grateful, it means I'm safe, which is that one thing your unconscious mind has to do. Not just the one thing, but it's one of the main things your unconscious mind has to do, cannot not do it. It has to keep you safe. And, once you show your unconscious mind the experiences that you're having right now by feeling grateful, then it makes such a difference. So once again, thank you so much to Karen, and thank you so much to you. And if you found this a benefit, please do email me, too. Feedback at personal developmentunplugged.com. Just let me know your experiences, and, also let me know if you would. Do you like these little snippets of people coming into our world via personal development unplugged, the podcast, sharing what they know. I love it, by the way. I love it. I said I wouldn't do it. There's my little baby. The, unplugged personal development podcast. Personal development, unplugged. It's like my little baby, but I love sharing that, too. To give other people a platform, but it's not the platform to, it's a platform to share. That's what I'm trying to say. And when you get it, you could share it, too. And that would be. And then he said, awesome. That would be absolutely wonderful if you would share the things that you learn here. So please do that. Please let me know as I say, if you like guests coming along, and if so, do you know somebody maybe you'd like? You think they've got something to share? Or maybe it's even you. Maybe you have something to share. And that would be a great thing to do. If we just have a small recording of your wins, your celebrations. That would be awesome. That's just a thought that come into my mind, may go somewhere, may not, but I've put it a seed into your mind now because it's easy to do. We've all got a phone. We can record something easily, effortlessly, and make a difference in the world. Because that's what it's all about, isn't it? Making a difference to us, which makes a difference to the people around us. And, makes a positive difference to little old planet earth. It's that real ecological way of making a difference in not just your life, but everyone's life, being the change you want to see in others. And all those wonderful mimi type things, those ones are the real good things. So again, please enjoy Karen's free recordings and let me know. So until next time, my friend, I am so grateful of your company, and I'm very grateful of Karen putting herself out. Because there's so many people who asked to come on, this little platform of ours. They talk the talk, but they cannot do the walk. And Karen has definitely done the walk today. So thank you so much again. So until next time, my friend, just find those benefits of meditation, sound, and enjoy. Personal development unplugged. It's time to fly on your own it's time to fly. Bye bye, now. Warning. You are now leaving the unplugged mind of Paul clough. It's time to fly on your own. Be brave, my friends. Personal development unplugged.