Meditation made easy with technology

The meditation jungle Google “Meditation” and you’ll get literally over 24 million hits.rnMany people wanting to learn meditation give up quickly. There is too much to choose from.rnMost of us don’t have the time or energy to spend years learning meditation techniques. On the internet you find everything from Indian guru’s intending to save the world with their meditation technique to hyper expensive meditation programs, CD’s with whale and dolphin sounds, chanting Indians, Mongolian overtone-singing and who knows what else, when searching for ways to improve your well-being. Meditation will do this in a fantastic way, if you learn a good way to do it. I’ve been through this jungle and would like to help you in your search by narrowing it down from hundreds to a handful of alternatives that really work. Let’s get right to the point. Brainwave entrainment technology will help you get the effects of meditation more or less instantly.rnNo need to learn any meditation techniques. What is brainwave entrainment? To understand this you first you need to know roughly how brainwaves work, or it won’t make much sense. Basically there are 5 groups of brainwave patterns listed by their brainwave frequency range: Gamma 28Hz +rnBeta 13-28HzrnAlpha 7-13HzrnTheta 4-7HzrnDelta 0.5-4Hzrn rnAll brainwaves are present any given moment. Though some are more dominant depending on what you are doing. Delta waves are dominant while sleeping. Beta, when we are active. High amounts of Beta is present when we are stressed or anxious and in cases of really extreme stress or extreme focus, Gamma is the dominant frequency. When you are daydreaming, or relaxing with eyes closed, alpha brainwaves increases. If you go even deeper, without falling asleep, Theta will be dominating. How to stimulate the brainwaves of your chioce Let us say you want to relax in to an Alpha state and decide to stimulate the 10Hz frequency. Do not confuse the Hz used to describe the pitch of a note with brainwave frequencies. Hz (Hertz) is used to tell pulses per second. A 10Hz note can not even be heard since the human ear only picks up from about 20Hz-20Khz (20.000Hz). What you do is to use headphones and play one steady tone is the left ear at lets say 400Hz, and in the right ear a tone at 410Hz. What will happen now is that these two tones together create one pulsing tone and it will sound like it comes from the middle of your head, just between your ears. The pulse will be 10Hz because this is the difference between the tones. (410Hz - 400Hz = 10Hz). It is being created by the brain and it will begin to stimulate this frequency in your brain. Soon you will begin feeling more relaxed and if someone did a EEG test on you after 10 minutes you would see that you have more amplitude in Alpha frequencies around 10Hz. Different types of brainwave entrainment technology Although there are more than one type of brainwave entrainment, they all basically work the same way. The most used types are: Binaural beatsrnMonaural beatsrnIsochronic beatsrnHemisync (Hemispheric synchronization, developed by the Monroe institute) You can get these sounds on CD, or MP3 files that you can purchase or download for free on some sites. BUT, even if free stuff is nice, there is a reason that some are free and some aren’t. Usually the ones you pay for has a lot more work put into them and works a lot better. Audio-visual brainwave entrainment This is also known as AVS. If you synchronize the sound pulses with light pulses – usually in the form of strobe light goggles with LED lights – the effect is improved a lot. These devices are known as “mind machines” and there are several to choose from. They are much more expensive than CD’s but in one machine you can get hundreds or different sessions to choose from. Usually they come with some type of software that will let you load or create your own new sessions to your AVS device. The first AVS devices came with red LED lights. Now they come with multi-color LED’s that are able to reproduce any color you can think of. The effects of multi-colored lights are not really clear although the companies selling them claim more colors are better. The most important thing though is the synchronization of the light and sound. There’s no real scientific proof that I’ve seen about any improved effect by the use of multi-colored lights. They are nice to experience though! Other technology worth checking out TMS technology (Transcranical Magnetic Stimulation.) I’m a pretty adventurous person when it comes to trying technology for altered states etc, and one of the coolest things this far is the “8-coil shakti”. It’s a TMS device developed by Mr. Todd Murphy. He is a Behavioral Neuroscientist associated with Dr. Michael Persinger. This is powerful stuff and something you should really study first if you plan to use it. Bliss Coded sound A sound pattern based on the math behind the golden ratio, discovered by myself (Marcus Knudsen) in 2008. Started out as an experimental project and was released to the public after never ending requests from the participants of the project who liked it so much they started offering money to get hold of the full length sounds. Most of the participants reached a meditative state in a few minutes along with a whole bunch of other enjoyable effects. These effects was experienced even faster than with normal brainwave entrainment. You choose I’ve tried all of the technologies mentioned in this article and many more. These are the ones that work according to me. Enjoy the fruits of meditation, without having to learn how to grow the tree. Good luck! /Marcus Knudsen