If you’ve ever settled in for a guided meditation, braced yourself for something to happen without knowing what, and then spent the whole track waiting for that something - whatever it was “supposed to be” - instead of letting go and allowing it to happen, this one’s for you.
A simple two-minute habit can alter your experience - and the reason the habit works will change how you prepare for anything else that scares you, too.
Every Monroe trainer has a habit they may not even think about. Mine is telling everyone, before any track plays in my classes, what the track is intended to do.
I didn’t know how unusual that habit was until I read the Monroe archive.
The Monroe lab started in 1959, in a Quonset hut that Bob Monroe built on his own property in Westchester County without a building permit. The Institute’s own account of those years, written by Leslie France, says the early test subjects were “Bob’s friends, neighbors, and business associates,” and a little further on, “only the psychologist ever knew the reason for the experiments.” So the subjects were told nothing about what the experiments were for. France adds, with a completely straight face, “But they did get a lot of sleep.”
UPCOMING WORKSHOPS:
Shift Your Timeline - Live on Zoom
Dates:
Sunday, November 29, 10AM to 7PM Eastern
Sunday, December 20, 10AM to 7PM Eastern
In this one-day live workshop, the audio guides your body into deep stillness while your mind stays fully awake and alert, opening you into a state of expanded consciousness. Then, we move into a state outside of time. While you’re in that state, you focus on embodying the life you want instead of the one you’re currently headed toward. The idea is that choosing it clearly, in that state, makes it more likely to happen.
Starfire Signals - Live on Zoom
Dates:
Tuesday, November 3, 10 AM to Noon Eastern
Monday, November 30, 8 PM to 10 PM Eastern
Tuesday, December 8, 10 AM to Noon Eastern
Monday, December 28, 8 PM to 10 PM Eastern
In this bimonthly live class, the audio settles your body into deep rest while keeping your mind fully alert, opening the door to expanded consciousness. In that relaxed state, you practice noticing what your intuition is telling you, and writing it down before you second-guess it. Over time, that makes it easier to trust what you’re sensing and helps you to tap into your own guidance on command.
Starfire Spark - Live on Zoom
Dates:
Thursday, November 19, 8:30 PM to 10:30 PM Eastern
Thursday, December 17, 8:30 PM to 10:30 PM Eastern
In this monthly live class, you listen to special audio that helps your body relax deeply while your mind is still wide awake, tapping into expanded consciousness. Then, still on the call, you make something — a timed sprint where you write, play, or create without stopping to judge it. Some meetings, you’ll share one small piece of what you made with the group. Most meetings, you leave with something new that didn’t exist before class started.
Thirty years later, the habit of not telling people what they were about to experience - likely a habit that emerged from having followed the scientific method - was still there. In 1988, a workshop presenter named Michael Hutchison wrote an article in Breakthrough, the Institute’s own newsletter. He describes adjusting a Hemi-Sync synthesizer during his opening remarks “to add a beta tone to the slower tones (without explaining what I was doing).” Later that day, he told the group what he’d done. Several people, he says, remembered feeling right at that moment that they had “for some reason” become more alert. He reported this in the article as a success story.
In the same decade, a Monroe researcher named Gregory Carroll wrote a paper on using Hemi-Sync in classrooms, and in an appendix he asked the question out loud: “What ‘right’ does anyone have to alter the brainwave patterns of another individual?” He had his answer ready. “We do it all the time!” A hot classroom and a monotone teacher, he points out, change your brain state too. The only difference, in his view, is that those methods are “sanctioned as time-honored.”
He’s right about the classroom. But I still think his question deserved a better answer than a shrug, and the answer I’d give him is the one I give in every Signals class.
I explain the track before I play it so that you’ll have some idea what to expect and you’ll be prepared to settle in for the duration of the meditation. I don’t give everything away, nor do I tell people what they are going to experience. I just let them know what the meditation covers and what the intention behind the exercise is, letting them know on a high level what they’ll experience, and just a bit of what to expect, so that they feel a bit more comfortable.
I do it because explaining the track makes the session work, and it’s got nothing to do with the law. A person who knows even a little bit about what’s coming can trust the unknown enough to let go and allow themselves to simply have the experience without judging it. A person who doesn’t know what’s coming is bracing for literally anything, and a braced body doesn’t drop into the deep rest we’re all there to reach before we can expand our awareness. I think maybe those 1959 subjects got a lot of sleep because sleep is where your body goes when nobody’s told you that there might be somewhere else you could go. And the setting when you’re part of a controlled experiment is vastly different from the setting when you’re in a workshop or on a retreat.
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So you know what to expect from Starfire Signals: we meet on Zoom, and you put on stereo headphones. Then I play a Hemi-Sync track. If you haven’t heard of Hemi-Sync before, it combines an audio technique called binaural beats, in which you are played a slightly different tone in each ear and your brain reconciles these by producing a third tone which is the difference between the two, with other brainwave altering frequencies and tones layered in, to shift you into a state of synchronization between the hemispheres of your brain. This induces a calm, open, focused state from which you can access expanded awareness. Your body goes into deep rest while your mind stays awake and turns inward, and I’ll have told you what the track is for before it starts. When the track ends, you write down what your intuition gave you before your reasoning has a chance to argue with it, and then we share as a group, if you want to.
You can use the same habit on your own tonight, with any Hemi-Sync or Monroe Sound Science recording. Before you press play, read the description of the track out loud, decide where you’ll be lying down and for how long, and tell yourself the one thing that’s going to happen by the end. Then press play. Two minutes of doing that, compared with pressing play cold, is the difference between letting go and spending the whole track waiting.
Nobody’s going to walk you into deep rest by surprise. You’ll know what’s coming every time and you’ll have the audio to guide you, which is why people who’ve never meditated before are able get into deep rest using this technology, often on the first try. The next class is tomorrow, Tuesday, November 3, 10 AM to noon Eastern, live on Zoom. A session is $22.
Further Reading
Carroll, G. (1986). Hemi-Sync and Musical Interval Identification. The Monroe Institute Professional Seminar paper, in the Research Files: Hemi-Sync collection [online] Available here: https://archive.org/details/mi-research-files-hemi-sync
Hutchison, M. (1988). Some Observations on the Efficacy of the Hemi-Sync Synthesizer. Breakthrough, Winter 1988. The Monroe Institute [online] Available here: https://archive.org/details/breakthrough-1988-1-winter
The Monroe Institute (2000). Bob Monroe Research Lab: History and Lab Report. Research Files [online] Available here: https://archive.org/details/mi-research-files-ram-research-lab-report
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