Sacred Waves May 2005 Newsletter
"Such a price the Gods exact for song: To become what we sing."
Special Blessings from a Mayan Elder ~
Don Alejandro, the Mayan Elder from Guatemala, was invited recently to speak in Tucson. That event was recorded live, and a CD will soon be available for purchase. He shared with us some Mayan prophecies about the year 2012, thoughts about 9/11, and a special blessing and prayer for Global Oneness. Listen here for Don Alejandro's beautiful blessing:
New Items This Month!
Hoop Drums - Hoop drums are used in many native cultures, and are perhaps most commonly linked to Native Americans. These are very resonant and lightweight drums. Great for drumming circles and anywhere you might want to take a nice compact drum. The hoop part of the drum is made from wood and the head is goat skin. A comfortable cross handle is located on the back. Available in 3 sizes - 14", 16" and 18".
Alpha Wave Piano Music - Jean Atkins-Snyder is a pianist who was a child prodigy of Helen Whiting-Phillips of the Juilliard School of Music in New York. She is also a composer and her music is the result of studying with an alpha-wave scientist. This music will soothe you and is excellent for concentration.
The alpha wave state represents a state of relaxed but alert awareness. It is an excellent frequency for learning. In this state your peripheral awareness is acute but soft and unfocused, and the mind-body is in an energy efficient mode. Learning is enhanced because it is concentrated around a single activity.
Jean has two CD's available and is presently recording her third album, entitled Destiny. She welcomes your emails and feedback. You can reach her at jwandjean@msn.com.
Magical Musical Rainsticks! - Rainsticks are musical and ceremonial instruments used from ancient times to present day. Their name describes the soothing rain-like sound that these instruments produce. These rainsticks are made from the wood skeleton of a dead cactus plant. No living plants are used. The cactus plants grow in large quantities in extensive desert areas, and die after about 70 years. The exterior thorns and flesh then fall off leaving the skeleton. The thorns are then collected from the area around the cactus and pounded back into the cactus skeleton. Tiny stones and pebbles are then poured down the inside of the cactus creating a rainstick!
Each unique rainstick produces a very calming, peaceful, and nurturing sound. Available in 15", 30", and 40".
Feature Article!
Current Context of Brain Activity Feedback
by
Dr. James V. Hardt
Biocybernaut Institute
[Published in Megabrain Reports, May, 1994, edited for the web]
An ever increasing body of evidence is defining and substantiating the knowledge that the brain has the power to regulate all bodily functions. In addition, brain activity is increasingly being implicated as a significant, even a controlling, factor in both wellness functions and in the onset and progression of illnesses, including addictive behaviors.
In recent years, an explosion of knowledge in the neurosciences has uncovered dozens of chemical messengers that the brain uses for its far ranging influence in the body and communication between cells. Among these potent compounds are stress hormones and fast acting neurotransmitters that vary in magnitude, time of action, and kind of action depending, in part, on a person's moods, attitudes, and learned ways of reacting to one's perceptions of various situations. How one thinks about an experience and how one defines it to oneself effects cell receptors for the neurochemicals.
However, medicine's archaic bio-mechanical/disease model gives only limited recognition to the mind's influences on the bodily processes we call wellness or disease. The old disease model includes mainly genetic and external factors in the Illness/Etiology equation. As a consequence, much of medicine has not considered relevant the manner in which a person reacts to life's experiences. Up until now, the person's reactions to life's events and the person's brain activity has not been considered relevant in the diagnosis and treatment of most illnesses.
The "bio-mechanical/disease" model of medicine is now no longer considered valid for up to 80 percent of all illness and with most addictive behavior. It was founded on the incomplete assumption that mind and body are separate and the incorrect view that there are no mechanisms by which attitudes and moods could physically affect organs and tissue.
Consequently, much of the arsenal of current medical treatments are not optimally effective, resulting in billions of dollars being wasted annually, directly and indirectly, on unsuccessful treatments, which are the logical consequences of the incomplete medical model. Most treatment of disease has been directed overwhelmingly towards giving symptomatic relief. Treatment has been palliative, meaning that it is directed toward suppressing or eliminating the symptoms of disease, and very little has been done to cure and remove the basic causes.
Disease is not so much the effect of external forces as it is the faulty efforts (reactions) of a person's mind and body to deal with them. Microbes already reside in our bodies. We are born with our genetic strengths and weaknesses. When our responses to apparent problems in life are excessive or deficient, the central nervous system and hormones act on our immune defenses in such a way that "germs" and genetic weaknesses aid and abet disease rather than cause it. These disorders are the result of normal natural processes of the body going awry by too much or too little stimulation as a result of an autonomic nervous system stress reaction.
Antiquated medical practice draws the incomplete conclusion that the brain's and the body's autonomic responses are autonomous, ie. that they are not available to our conscious control and direction. Consequently, the powerful and ultimately determinant role played by cortical activity is largely ignored. And more importantly, "standard" medical practice does not, and can not, account for the role of intention, of will, and of awareness in the control and regulation of the autonomic systems of the brain and body.
Thus, under the old bio-mechanical/disease model, stress and the resultant illnesses and addictive behaviors are either simply unavoidable consequences of life or attempts are made to deal with this situation symptomatically by prescribing tranquilizers and the like for the amelioration of stress. Psychologists typically attempt to treat the stress problem through the teaching of coping mechanisms, which is likewise symptomatic because it attempts to reduce the effects of stress without eliminating the stress reaction right from the start.
Both approaches are premised upon the incomplete idea that the stress responses of the autonomic nervous system, ie. its sympathetic and parasympathetic responses are unavoidable, because of a false belief that we innately do not have the ability to control the brain activity that affects those responses. Whereas the truth is that we DO INNATELY HAVE THE ABILITIES TO CONTROL BRAIN ACTIVITY, but that we are taught, through cultural conditioning, not to use them.
Dr. Willis Harmon has described the cultural conditioning we give our children (the process of acculturation) as meeting the classical definition of hypnosis, so perhaps most of us are hypnotized in our early years into accepting a rigid and limited view of our own mental abilities. Exceptional and gifted people have simply learned how to adopt additional viewpoints, new mind perspectives, which require only that they can control their brain activity in new ways.
Any experience you have requires specific underlying brain activity. Choosing and controlling what you will experience is as easy as choosing and controlling your brain activity. Most people can control their brain activity sufficiently to go to sleep and to wake up as needed. Those who have exceptional mental abilities simply have additional subtleties of brain self-regulation available to them.
Learning to understand and control the subtleties of one's own brain function opens up vast new areas of skills, abilities, and experiential fulfillment. It is simply learning to operate one's bio-computer more effectively, and the rewards are beyond your current ability to imagine, just as a 2 dimensional person could not imagine life in a 3 dimensional world. You first need to make the shift into a new mind perspective, a new point of view, to understand the implications of having that new point of view.
And then there are additional benefits of having multiple perspectives. For example depth perception requires at least two eyes, spaced some distance apart. With three perspectives, it is possible to triangulate and find the location of a signal source anywhere in three dimensions. Creative people have the natural ability to adopt a different [high Alpha] brain state when they are working on a problem. This ability to step into a different brain state, gives them a new mind state, and one that is ideal for being creative. Thus they are completely interconnected. Without this ability to change the brain activity, the person is non-creative. The ability for voluntary control of our brain activity is one key. The other key is experiencing the subtleties and knowing what brain changes to make for any situation.
Creativity is an area of personal excellence, mental giftedness, and mental mastery, and it is of profound importance culturally, figuring as a principle component of international competitiveness and economic success for countries and for individuals. Some excellent early work on the relationship between creativity and Alpha brain waves has been done by Collin Martindale, who declares:"Creativity is a matter of having the right brain waves.When creative people go to work on an imaginative task, their Alpha jumps..."Reports show that highly creative people differ remarkably from normal people in their EEG Alpha activity. When told to rest (baselines), the minds of creative subjects remained activated. At rest they actually showed less Alpha than non creative subjects, who did relax and whose brains deactivated, in resting conditions. On the other hand, when given creative problems to solve, creative subjects shifted their brains into high Alpha in order to solve the problems quickly and creatively.
Non creative subjects made no such upward shifts in Alpha, and actually decreased their Alpha if they concentrated. Non creative subjects blocked Alpha (meaning Alpha went away) on all types of cognitive tasks, but creative subjects blocked only on tasks not allowing for creativity, and actually increased Alpha during tasks calling for or allowing creativity.
How do we interpret these remarkable findings? The highly significant increase in creativity of ideas in the Alpha group suggests that it may be possible for a wide range of people to become more creative. If supported by further studies, this finding could have exciting implications for the conduct of daily life, and the development of human culture.
You are receiving this newsletter because you subscribed by signing up on the SacredWaves.com website, or you are a customer who has purchased from our website. If you would like to discontinue receiving further notifications, please send an email to newsletter @ sacredwaves.com with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject line.
Phone: (520) 260-3014 * Email: info @ sacredwaves.com
©2005 Sacred Waves