“If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music. … I get most joy in life out of music.” – Albert Einstein

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Music: More than Just Listening Pleasure

Often times, if I feel the need to be energized, like if I am cleaning the house or needing to get through something for work, I’ll put on my Pandora and rock-out to some house/dance music of some sort. It always does the trick as I immediately can feel the beat running through my bones and it gets me moving quickly.

And there is a biological reason why. It’s called entrainment.

Synchronization, Entrainment

Entrainment is defined essentially as synchronization of energy. Everything is comprised of energy, which has a rhythm, and there is a law saying that energy that moves within a certain speed or rate will attract each other and begin to mirror each other.

A great example of entrainment is if you have a room full of pendulum-type grandfather clocks and start the pendulums in motion at different times, they will all swing differently. However, if you walk out of this room and come back the next day, you will find that all the pendulums are swinging together at the same rate. This locking in step of rhythms is entrainment. The Dutch scientist Christian Huygens discovered it in 1665.

Within our own bodies, there are seemingly separate systems such as our heart rate, brain waves and respiration that all entrain with each other. Slow down your breath, for example, and you slow down your heartbeat and your brain waves. Conversely, if you are able to slow down your brain waves, you can affect your heart rate and respiration.

It has been found that the frequencies of pulse, breathing and blood circulation, as well as their combined activities, all function harmonically.

And since stress, especially as it pertains to fertility, is such an enormous factor within our bodies, we should do everything we can to lessen its effects. Music is an easy way to help your body unwind.

It makes me think of the book The Secret and if this entrainment concept is connected with it. At it’s basic core, the Secret says that when you feel good, good things will happen to you. When you feel bad and expect bad things, bad things will surely come. You create the life you want. If events are energy, and if your feelings are also energy, then – just like the pendulums swinging in tandem after a day or so – they entrain or come together. Interesting!!

Music and Entrainment

I am so fortunate to have a developing relationship with the music composer, Chuck Wild and his work called “Liquid Mind: Musical Healthcare.” Frequently on the top charts on iTunes for New Age, Chuck’s music is absolutely exquisite and extremely relaxing.

Not only is he a brilliant musician, but he has taken this idea of applying music to well-being in a very serious manner. Working with AIDs patients and now preemies, Chuck, and the researchers that he is working with, are uncovering loads of empowering information about the benefits that music can have on our bodies.

According to Chuck, music can be considered either stimulative or sedative. In either case, music enters the brain directly into the auditory cortex and mingles and directly affects our attention, memories, emotions, etc.

The rhythm associated with the particular composition can cause the body to physically change and entrain to the beat we are listening to. A fast beat will lead increase our blood flow, heart-rate and brain waves.

A slow, steady, “blanket quality” will do the opposite and allow relaxation to reverse the stress you may be experiencing.

Chuck developed this music after going through an intensely stressful period of his life. He couldn’t figure out how to calm his body and had chronic panic attacks. It changed for him when he took some time for himself and sat on the beach. He noticed that his body was finally beginning to unwind, and realized that it was the ocean steady, non-stop sound that enabled him to relax. This is when he came up with the name for “Liquid Mind.”

As he writes,

“I originally wrote the music of Liquid Mind to be of service to myself, my friends, and family in dealing with the anxiety & stress of working long hours, and also for friends and family dealing with the stress of life-threatening illnesses like cancer & HIV. The Liquid Mind albums seem to have an immediate “slowing down” effect on many listeners, and may also help some people get to sleep, and relax deeply after a tension-filled day.

The ultimate compliment to me is that people fall asleep to my music. This is functional music, it seeks to serve the purpose of assisting us to be tranquil, when that is not easy in today’s world. That’s why the compositions are longer than normal, and very slow in tempo. This music is very special to me, it is my labor of love, I hope you enjoy it.

I am a shameless advocate of life in the slow lane. For many years, I worked eighteen or more hours a day, seven days a week. Your body will always exact a toll for such abuse. I started composing slow music to help me find some peace and quiet, to get back in touch with the fact that I am responsible for the pace of my own life, to help me unify body, mind, and spirit.

Listen now to Chuck and I discuss his background and his theory on musical healthcare:

Listen now

And stay tuned for some exciting co-development work to be done with Chuck and his music with Circle + Bloom!

And for more information, and to listen to a free 5 minute song by LiquidMind, here is the website: www.liquidmindmusic.com

All We Need is Love

Let’s make no bones about it. Life sometimes is downright hard. It challenges us to our core, but time after time, we get up to fight the good fight.

What Dr. Eva Selhub teaches us in her book, The Love Response®, however, gives us a very powerful weapon to steer us towards finding peace no matter what life is throwing us at us. And it’s love.

As simple as flicking a switch, we can make the choice to feel love in our hearts. Even if it starts as a faint flicker, focus on it and let it grow. Something amazing happens inside. Peace and tranquility, and yes, happiness, soon follows.

Listen now to my conversation with Dr. Eva as we discuss why she wrote this book, and how we can use love as a “SHIELD” to live our best lives.

Listen now

The Antidote to Fear

Dr. Selhub talks about the Fear Response that is usually prevalent in our lives. We tend to run scared, full of stress, in our modern lives, and it’s so harmful to not only our bodies, but our lives overall.

But, we need to learn to control it, and use it as an advantage when necessary. We have the choice to counter-balance these feelings with those of joy and pleasure. And we can do that by activating our Love Response.

“When love is infused into the process of relaxation, a positive physiology takes over that allows the body to heal and allows joy to dominate your existence. Love represents a fusion of varied emotions, thoughts, positive neuropathways and reward mechanisms that ultimately allow the body, mind and spirit to maintain equilibrium. Love has a unique hormonal marker, a biochemical function that creates bonding, attachment, and pleasurable sensations. Certain physical processes occur in the body and brain when you feel love and you give love and affection,” continues Eva.

When you experience love, a cascade of positive hormones and peptides run through every element of your body. These include endorphins, oxytocin, dopamine, vasopressin and nitric oxide. They help reverse the symptoms of the fear response.

How to Feel Love, Whenever, Wherever

Every single chapter of Eva’s book gives you excellent exercises you can do to help yourself move towards the Love Response.

Most of them have you relax, do some deep breathing, visualize a certain barrier of protection, accompanied by a strong sense that you are never alone. After a period of 5 – 10 minutes, she asks you to them take out a piece of paper and write about what you just experienced. If it makes sense, to go back in time to re-experience something that will help you let go of deep-seated emotional memories that no longer serve any purpose but to elicit the fear response. If you set your mind to it and do these exercises with a mind-set towards personal growth, I know they will be hugely beneficial for you.

I highly recommend checking out her book!

As I spoke about above, you can experience the feelings of love anytime, anywhere. Here is a little mini-exercise that can’t help but make you feel better:

1. Stop
2. Notice your environment
3. Pick out something, or someone, of beauty. It could be as simple as a ray of sunlight, or your dog looking at you
4. Take a deep breath
5. Feel the feelings of love and gratitude for your object of affection right now
6. Let these feelings expand and grow, expand and grow, expand and grow

“Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.” – Mozart

Love is a Choice

Did you know that giving and receiving of love can improve your health? That love is a choice, not something that happens to you? That by generating feelings of love throughout the day, we literally change our biochemical make-up for the better?

Listen Now to Podcast

In Week 10 of our Einstein series, we talked about the role of spirituality in healing. An incredible body of evidence points to the power of prayer….click here to read more from last week. Note: This is the first of two Einstein’s posts that will focus on the incredible work of Dr. Eva Selhub. Stay tuned next week as well to learn more about the Love Response®.

We are thrilled to have recently met Dr. Eva Selhub, creator and author of The Love Response®, and the opportunity for us to partner and collaborate was made clear as our goals are so well-aligned towards health empowerment. Eva is a senior staff physician at the Benson Henry Institute for Mind/Body Medicine at Mass General Hospital. An integrative health specialist and the founder of Alight Medicine for Learning and Healing in Newton, Massachusetts, she is also a clinical instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. After a big welcome hug, she sat down and impressed us with her positive energy and commitment she has towards helping others with a better way of living.

She developed a new way of living through her book The Love Response®, based upon the fact that our bodies are simply different when we feel good about ourselves, our community and family and spiritually, or what she calls our Love Pyramid. There is a chain of bio-chemical processes that occur in the body when a person operates from love that ultimately results in health and well-being. Over 30 years of research has pointed to the benefits of eliciting the relaxation response, as coined by Dr. Herbert Benson. Now, Dr. Selhub has taken this work to the next level by incorporating love into the meditative experience.

It seems that experiencing love was something that I personally needed to focus on. I am on the constant look-out for areas that I can improve myself, my levels of happiness and life experience…monitoring my reactions, my thoughts, my choices. And the funny part is that this idea that LOVE can be transforming. And I don’t mean romantic love. That’s good too, but, I am talking about a more fundamental approach to life. Whether blog articles, or books – LOVE – kept screaming at me and it wanted my attention. And what I first noticed after reading her book and doing the exercises – many of which are visualization and journaling oriented – that experiencing love is something that we have the choice to feel at anytime we decide. When I meditate on love, I get this profound feeling of heaviness inside, like I am being filled up by the universe with energy. I feel warmer all over, and of course more at peace with my thoughts. Nothing can stand in the way of these feelings. Try it now: simply think love filling you up. It’s a wonerful feeling of balancing, of

The Physical Response of Lack of Love: Fear

Eva talks about the lack of love, or fear. When we are in the Fear Response, our bodies, minds and feelings of well-being are harder, more stressed, profoundly more complicated than when we are in the Love Response. Science shows that fear affects every aspect of your body and mind, including your brain function, immune system, mental and emotional states and propensity towards illness. What happens is a cascade of cause and effect inside the amygdala-hippocampus complex (AHC). Your emotional response center and the primitive part of the brain, often called the “lizard brain.” The lizard brain handles those actions for the body that ensure our survival, such as fear and aggression. It also stores the memory of any given negative experience or threat so that you can react to it faster in the future.

When our lizard brain is activated, there is a cascade of biochemical events that create stress and the production of hormones and peptides such as cortisol and adrenaline, that cause physical change in the body. At the same time, changes occur in the brain that prevent you from doing any complex problem solving. Studies have shown that brains over-exposed to cortisol, the stress hormone, actually have a smaller hippocampus than average – which is where our memory is stored. And this is just the start of the negative influences the fear response can have on the body. As Eva points out in her book, here are some of the symptoms of the fear response:

• Brain: you are hyper-alert, unable to sleep, anxious
• Muscles: You feel tense, especially in your neck, back, shoulders and jaw
• Reproduction: Your periods are irregular and you have problems conceiving
• Gastrointestinal tract: You are constipated or have loose stools, heartburn, or cramping
• Blood flow: You have cold hands and feet.
• Heart: Your heart races and pumps harder and your blood pressure rises.
• Lungs: You breathe faster and more shallowly.
• Immune system: Your white blood cells get ready for a possible attack, causing inflammation.

“The Fear Response is like a fire – beneficial when it cooks your food but harmful if it is not extinguished. If the Fear Response continues too long or unregulated, the body stays in a constant state of stress and pathological problems inevitably arise, including increases in blood pressure and thickening of and tears in blood vessel walls. Excess production of fatty acids and blood sugar may lead to deposits in these tears and formation of atherosclerotic plagues, eventually resulting in heart disease and stroke. The combination of excessive adrenaline and cortisol production and high levels of insulin released from the pancreas in response to elevated glucose levels may eventually lead to insulin-resistant diabetes and other metabolic disorders such as high cholesterol,” says Eva in the Love Response® book.

Next Week….

Stay tuned for next as we intend to cover Dr. Eva’s recommendations on how to counter-balance the negative physical effects (and emotional for that matter) of the Fear Response. We will also have Dr. Eva Selhub on as a special guest on our podcast, so please stay tuned!

“In my view there is no conflict in being a rigorous scientist and a person who believes in a God who takes a personal interest in each one of us. Science’s domain is to explore nature. God’s domain is in the spiritual world, a realm not possible to explore with the tools and language of science.” – Dr. Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project

Week 10: The Connection Between Spirituality and Health

Welcome to Week 10 of our How Einstein Would Get Pregnant blog series. Last week we discussed the evidence pointing to the fact of the “Body-Mind” connection, or the fact that our body can make us feel certain emotions by virtue of its state of relative health. This week, in honor of the holidays and religious celebrations going on around the world, we intend to focus on the power of prayer…the miraculous stories of healing…and the biology of belief.

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Click here to listen to Week 9 podcast.

Miracles Abound

It’s England on December 14, 1421 and a fourteen-year old girl suffered a painful and life-threatening injury when a hot spit went into her abdomen. People around here were able to extract the spit, but she was to the point of death. At that point, her parents and several other neighbors prayed to a specific saint (Osmund, the eleventh-century bishop of Salisbury) asking him that in exchange for her life being spared, that they would visit his tomb and honor him in prayer. Shortly thereafter, the girl began to show renewed signs of life, and two days later awoke and rose from her bed. Ten days later she was completely recovered.

The connection between religion, spirituality and healing is widespread and runs the history among many traditions. Jesus and Buddha were both healers, and saints and Gods are often attributed to miraculous healings, as exemplified by the story of the fourteen-year-old girl. Dr. Wayne Dyer speaks of his miracle cure to his knee during a visit to Lourdes in France, the famous shrine were thousands of similar healings are said to have occurred.

The History of Religion, Sickness and Health

Thomas Moore, in his book Care of the Soul in Medicine, suggests to doctors, nurses and other modern-day healers to try to possess a generally positive, “caring radiance” – making the comparison to the radiance associated with the halo around Jesus’ head as well as the radiant background to the various depictions of the Buddha. And as he says, “but we all have halos and auras. We all radiate the quality of our souls, both good and bad. It doesn’t take much to pick up on the radiance of care around a nurse or the radiance or expertise behind a doctor.”

“Those of us whose notions about the causes and cures of sickness are rooted in medical science may have difficulty knowing what to make of such reports.” The skeptics and scientists of our age often dismiss these stories as exaggerations, even pure fiction,” writes Robert Scott, author of Miracle Cures. He says that faith and the appeal of prayer to heal is “based on a body of theory and research that has been largely overlooked by those who study miracles cures: the work of social, behavioral and medical scientists showing that culture, beliefs, cognitions, emotions, social relationships and physical environment play a central role in the onset, course and outcome of illness.” I believe this is a very balanced and noteworthy point of view.

Our Thoughts, Beliefs and Fertility

The power of belief is all-encompassing when it comes to our bodies and our health. Barbara Bradley Hagerty in her book Fingerprints of God, writes about her experience with Christian Science, which holds as a central premise that healing is a function of spiritual understanding and that prayer changes our thoughts which enables us to heal. “Everything is thought in Christian Science. Everything is going on in your thinking.” She uses the example that if a mirror was full of smudges and toothpaste, your image is distorted and marred, but it is the mirror that holds the problem, not yourself. The way you clean the mirror – and restore your reflection – is to clean up your thinking.

She writes about the story of her Mother’s broken hand. She was playing around with her fiance at the time, hit her hand the wrong way, and knew immediately that something was wrong. She started thinking – almost like a mantra or meditation – “nothing can come into my human experience that I do no allow in my consciousness as a reality. You take it out of your consciousness – the broken hand – and erase it, and then you substitute health with the truth.  She then writes that her mother “had this great sense of light – of one thing flowing out of another, out of another, out of another, into eternity. There was nothing but light. It’s all one. It’s all God. The all-ness of God, which is the oneness of God, and I was within that oneness.” She later went to see a doctor about her hand, who said that yes, the hand was broken, but that it was perfectly set and almost healed. She writes that her mother “reliving the intensity of the moment, remember walking out of his office, my feet didn’t touch the ground, I was so filled with God’s truth, the spirituality, the marvel in it. That was the end of it.”

I don’t know about you, but when I hear such stories I get into a different zone of thought as various doors open in my brain that I didn’t even know existed. I listen to them with an incredible amount of hope. Knowing and sensing this greater power that is readily available to us at all times. The spirit and universe that flows through all of us.

In fact, the quote from above of “one thing flowing out of another, out of another, out of another” made me think of Jill Bolte Taylor’s Stroke of Insight and her incredible and very moving speech about what happened to her while she was experiencing a stroke. Here it is and I highly recommend if you haven’t already done so, please watch this.  For everyone faced with a medical challenge – or simply with the desire to live within a deeper level of truth and beauty – this video may point you in a new direction, a new wonderful way of thinking about life.

In Summary….

This meandering post doesn’t conclude with any specific suggestions or conclusions, but hopefully raised some questions in your mind about the power of belief as it pertains to spirituality. Why is it that the more we know about science, the more questions are raised that are almost unanswerable? Another great book is The Language of God by Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project. Here is a scientist who for most of his life defined his religious views as atheist, and the more he researched the human body and the building blocks of life, the more he became convinced that there simply is a higher power. Science and spirituality becoming closer the more we learn. Amazing.

“I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.” – Albert Einstein

In last week’s How Einstein Would Get Pregnant series, we discussed the question of whether or not there is just as strong of a body-mind connection as there is a mind-body connection. Does the way our body feels impact our thoughts and emotions?

This week, in honor of the religious holidays celebrated by people around the world, we thought we would ask the question about how our religious beliefs play a role in our health.  We will refer to many books this week, such as Miracle Cures by Robert Scott, Fingerprints of God by Barbara Bradley Hagerty, the Language of God by Dr. Francis Collins, among others.

How Einstein Would Get Pregnant: Week 10 from Circle + Bloom on Vimeo.

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