Stress-busting With Sound
By Jacob Eapen
In a recent article titled "Stress -- Mind, Body or Emotions?" I wrote about the link between our mind, our feelings and emotions, and the physical body; and how stress has a lot to do with how we think and feel. I explained how unresolved feelings and emotions can trigger undesirable emotional responses and interfere with our ability to handle daily life situations in a calm and rational way -- leading to more stress. Excess stress affects our ability to sleep, diminishes our capacity to operate at peak efficiency and eventually leads to burnout. Stress can also rob the body’s organs and tissues of much needed nutrients, vitamins and regulatory signals from the brain that keep them functioning at a healthy level. Studies have shown that stress is linked to many disease processes including asthma, allergies, high blood pressure, heart disease, and is also known to weaken the immune system which can leave the body open to all kinds of infections and diseases.
While eating healthy food, drinking plenty of clean water, daily exercise, taking time to rest and relax, getting adequate sleep are all important ways of dealing with stress, it is essential to find ways to diffuse unresolved feelings and emotions. So what exactly are unresolved feelings and emotions, and how do you diffuse them?
Feelings and emotions are as natural as our thoughts, and along with our five senses, they are the means by which we experience life. When we run into unexpected experiences that trigger our feelings and emotions and we don’t know how to deal with them, we end up expressing them inappropriately or suppressing them. Feelings and emotions, like thoughts, are basically energy. Energy cannot be destroyed, and it does not disappear just because you choose to ignore it. When you do not deal with feelings and emotions, they simply go underground and start to fester away. Fortunately, because they are energy we can use one of the laws of physics to rebalance them.
All energy has specific frequency to it. Pure sound, or tone, has a higher frequency than that of unresolved feelings and emotions. By placing the higher frequency sound near the lower frequency energy we can then raise its frequency using the principle of resonance.
After many years of observation and experimenting I discovered that the different parts of the physical body respond to different notes in the musical scale and can span several octaves, and this is universal to all humans as well as animals. Each region of the body along with the organs and tissues connected to it has a natural tone or frequency — refer to the diagram below.
For example, playing a pure C note causes the lowest region of your spine, your hips, pelvis, and the legs down to the feet to resonate at that same frequency. The D note affects parts of the sacral and lumbar regions of the spine including the lower abdominal area of the body. Similarly, the A note affects the upper cervical region of the spine and the organs and tissues connected to that region, and the B note affects the upper cranial area or top part of the brain.
Each system in the body has multiple resonant frequencies — or frequencies that they vibrate at most naturally. Stress causes the affected systems to drop to a lower resonant frequency. By introducing a pure higher resonant frequency the affected systems will come into resonance with it. When this happens you experience the shift in frequency in your body as a relaxation.
So will any sound accomplish this? A piece of music may be very melodious and hence great for listening, but if its frequencies do not match the natural frequencies of the body it will not induce relaxation. Even so, what some consider relaxing music may not be relaxing to others. This has to do with the overall frequency you are at relative to the natural frequencies of the body. For example, if you are feeling down and if you fight to keep your body from going into resonance for whatever reason, you will sense the higher frequency as an irritation. On the other hand, noise will induce stress.
The natural frequencies of the body are very complex, and are carefully balanced to work in harmony with each other. By introducing pure tones that are carefully arranged to match the natural frequencies of the body you can induce resonance, and help the body relax and promote healing.
Jacob Eapen is author of the book Mirror Mirror: Tell Me Who I Am — a book about each person's quest to find relevance in everyday living. He is also the developer of the Diffusion CD — an exciting and powerful new tool for stress relief and healing. He is the creator of the Relevance in Everyday Living programs.
