Vibration as medicine.

This morning I woke up to a very stiff and achy body. I’m not sure why: too much sedentary time over the last couple days? Not enough downward dog? The lunar eclipse? Whatever the cause, I recognized that for me, the lethargic and uncomfortable body can be a prelude to more depressive cognition.

At first, I thought it might be a good day to go to the gym and pound it out. Do some cardio and some weight training to trigger a dramatic shift in inner state. But the body was in no mood for hopping on a treadmill. It was really craving unwinding, so unwinding is what I did.

The Body Unwinding classes that I currently offer weekly were borne out of this realization. Often, what my body needs before anything else is very careful, tender, intuitive physical exploration. Tension and pain direct the sequence.

So anyway, I did about 45 minutes of Body Unwinding, and then I sat up intending to do some pranayama (breathing practices). I noticed that my mind was still a bit resistant — you know that feeling where you’re half-focused on your practice, easily distracted, and you are just going through the motions? I felt some of that. So I turned to chanting, which for me is a helpful way to get the conceptual mind more integration with the feeling body.

In the first few sounds of the chanting, when my voice slipped into resonance with the drone, I felt this palpable tingling. I think there’s something about resonance that dissolves the boundary between the internal awareness and the external awareness, and that dissolution seems very healing. The sensation bloom felt like a firework expanding from my throat into the rest of my body, and as I continued chanting, this tingling would fluctuate in and out of my awareness.

Taking a cue from this experience, a bit later on I moved into the humming practice often called bhramari. I was taught that bhramari is a monotone hum, and my teacher used a pretty low tone, so that’s what I did too. It’s a very soothing way to do the practice. Some years later I learned that other teachers teach it at a much higher tone, more nasal, more like the buzzing of a small bee. I experimented with this and liked it as well. Eventually, I started to explore a full spectrum of sounds while humming with the ears closes and the eyes veiled. This feels the most powerful, because like a multi-tone mantra, the humming at multiple registers changes the site of vibration inside the body. With the humming breath, those sites feel mostly inside the skull. The position of the tongue also plays a big role in moving the vibration. When my tongue connects with the roof of my mouth, the vibration shifts upward into the nasal cavity, and if the tone of the sound is higher, even higher in the skull. I can create the sensation of vibration in my nose, my jaw, the base of my brain, the forehead, the crown of the head. It really feels like a kind of targeted vibration therapy.

I was enjoying Gary Gulman’s standup special The Depresh recently, and in it he talks about electro-convulsive therapy (ECT). This is a mainstream-reputable medical intervention for treating depression in which electrodes hooked up to the head produce stimulation to various parts of the brain. I wonder if this roaming bhramari practice I’ve stumbled into isn’t doing something similar.