The Science of Sound Therapy

Pascal: Hi, welcome to Nectara's Conversations where we're having intimate conversations into the psychedelic wellness journey. My name is Pascal Tremblay, and I’m the co-founder of Nectara. We're a psychedelic support ecosystem, and today I’m joined by my friend Phil Jacobs. Hi Phil.

Phil: Hi Pascal. Great to be here, and looking forward to the conversations and how they're going to unfold today about psychedelic medicines, and sound therapy and things like that. So thank you.

Pascal: Likewise. Me and Phil met 18 months ago, I think, or two years, I don't know, the time has been flying so much in the last few years, I’m not sure. But around that time I met Phil through a project that we collaborated on, and had a beautiful conversation with him back then on the very first call. And then, had another really good conversation with him on the second call. And then, had a couple of webinars with him and he's been hosting Sound Healing Journeys on Nectara, and he's doing some amazing things. Phil, do you want to share a bit more about your background?

Phil: Sure. It was an amazing coincidence, synchronicity with the Psychedelic Association of Canada, and we did some events there. And then, we co-created some events with Nectara, with the Twilight Tuesday events that we're doing here, specifically on the solstice and the equinox, and helping to support the Chacruna Institute. And it was amazing, beautiful experience, and I feel so grateful to be sharing my experience of sound and psychedelics, and getting into the neuroscience of things.

But a little bit of my background here, I've been a trained and practicing TCM Chinese medicine practitioner from 2008, and I retired the title about last year, and specifically come into working with psychedelic medicines and sounds. And leading up to that, I’ve had a journey like we all have growing up in the 70s and the 80s, and having parents that grew up through the 50s and 60s, and talking to my mom the other day around what her experience was like in the 60s, she was a teenager, and watching all of the psychedelic movement happening back then. And then, the anti-psychedelic movement which came in, in, like I said, the late 60s or early 70s.

And I was born 1972 and witnessed what that was like as a child, the racism and what was happening in the world, and through the 80s, 90s, studying music, and then coming into my own health issues and really not knowing what was going on. In 2005, I came across, I’ll get more into detail, I came across cannabis, and that was my first entry into understanding about psychedelic medicines and plant medicines. And that led me into studying Chinese medicine, and that helped me integrate sound and vibration and frequencies into medicine and healing.

I eventually ended up healing myself and come to this point of being able to talk about the neuroscience, the subtle body, the emotional body, and everything that's involved in the healing process, and how powerful psychedelic medicines and music – music is psychedelic, everything is psychedelic. It's a psychedelic mind manifest, and so excited to be on this conversation with you and elaborate a little bit more about my practice and the things that I’m getting up to.

Pascal: Yeah, thanks for sharing that. And what I’ve really loved about our conversation so far is the bridging of the science and the wisdom traditions angle that you have, and I learned a lot about the science, but I really appreciate the kind of the multidimensional approach you take to your work. Can you talk a bit more about that bridging that you've been working on and exploring for yourself?

Phil: I can, thank you. Thank you for asking. I turned 50 this year, which was quite a monumental birthday. But at the same time, I am at a point in my life where I can integrate all of my life's experiences. So it's going through the, I want to say the trauma or the, how would I say, turbulence – turbulence is a better word for that – turbulence throughout my whole life. And then, coming into what my spirit purpose is, and what my emotional – what my energy purpose is here, and what my universal directive is as a being on this planet. And to go through the trials and tribulations and the turbulence to get to this point, I feel very grateful.

And in my own healing journey, recognizing with music and sound as early as five or six, really coming into those BG Harmony, the harmonies of Abba, and putting the headphones on and listening to those frequencies and feeling and remembering how good that made me feel, and being in that state of consciousness, which inspired me to learn about music, learn how to play guitar, learn how to sing, and not recognizing at the time, cause I really loved heavy metal music, and rock and roll, and the revolutionary music, and the pushback against the system or oppressive systems.

And I used my voice at that time, I was a singer of a band in a very angry way, and that actually affected me, using my voice in anger. It not necessarily, didn't hurt anybody else, but hurt me in embodying the anger and helped me to have a really good look about the importance of integrating emotional content, and then, also the importance of what's the flip side of the emotion. Once we feel the emotion, yes, we have to express it, we have to clear it from our system, but what then, what do we do then? Integrating medical qigong, which is a very important practice in my life, they came in and I started to understand the virtue, which the emotion was signaling. So I can release the emotion, but then what can I do to reconstitute the body, the energy, the spirit, the mind, to come into a virtuous place that I’m not destructive, I’m more creative now. It's taken me 50 years to get to that point, but I’m very happy to be there.

Pascal: Yeah, it's a beautiful journey, and they say the older you get, the wiser you hopefully are, and it's a unique journey for all of us, but congratulations on your 50th year, and the lessons and teachings you've accumulated due to turbulence, and I really connect with your story around putting on a really beautiful piece of music and really sitting with it and really feeling it. And for me, music has been a huge part of my journey ever since I was 11, I picked up my sister's Walkman. There was yellow Walkman that used to exist all the time, and there was a cassette which was Metallica, and it felt so revolutionary for me back then to listen to hard rock or metal, and it did have that energy of finding oppressive systems, it did have this sense of freedom of expression and that was deep medicine for me.

And ever since that day, I've just been listening to music every day for hours, and that's been a huge part of my exploration of using music and different sound styles different musical styles across many years. The styles shift along with the journey and what I connect with on a lyrical, but also frequency level, changes along with how I’m changing along my own healing journey. And I really love that you could bring that into the fold and the conversation today is just the beauty and power of music for healing.

Phil: Thank you. I feel and get so much joy out of this transition into listening to angry music all the time and playing angry music – anger is a very important emotion. And I’m not playing anger down at all, but it was signaling something. And where I lacked the wisdom in is that I stayed at it. I stayed in the anger, where the anger is signaling something, where there's a boundary inside of me that's been crossed, or it’s not – it's in conflict with my heart's desires. And the anger, we know anger as an emotion, will fire off the cortisol levels in the body, which will then influence the kidneys and the adrenals, and that cortisol in the body all the time with that anger response is going to produce all kinds of or ranges of health conditions and health issues.

With the cortisol in the bloodstream, you can consider it a base hormone or a root shocker hormone or close to [inaudible] shocker hormone, and when we're feeling that anger and we're staying in the anger, that was flowing through my body and it wasn't releasing, and I wasn't detoxing from the cortisol, it was a constant thing in my body as growing up in stressful situations, and in the environment, at home, it was my baseline, so that's what I knew. But there was nothing, I’m going to say nothing publicly accessible that said here's your anger, what can I do with it?

What happened with it, and even in therapy, or in a psychotherapeutic dynamic was talk about the anger, but then, that left me in the anger. It didn't really talk about the anger, and help me shift into what I now know is a very important system in our bodies. Right?

So the emotion from what I understand now, and what I experience is the sympathetic nervous system response. And if we stay in a sympathetic we know the sympathetic nervous system response is the fight/flight. There's a few other ones, there's five things like a name. But it's the fight or flight in that survival mode I feel like I’m going to die, something's crossing my boundary, and I feel like I got to protect myself protect so hard.

And when I started to learn about the parasympathetic nervous system, I was like, oh, what's this, what is this – the parasympathetic nervous system is the system that helps to rest and digest and actually detoxify from the emotional, let's say, emotional surge of hormones that get put into the bloodstream, and then, stay into the bloodstream.

So we come into that restful place, we're able to actually detox from that emotional content, recalibrate and re-center, and we can do that every night when we go to sleep, proper night's sleep and things like that. But there's other things that we can introduce to there. But it was my understanding of the two systems, we have a sympathetic nervous system, which is the emotional response, and the emotional response is not necessarily anger. And from Chinese medicine, I’ll go through the five basic emotional responses, which is fear, anger, anxiety, worry, and grief and sadness. That's the emotional response.

So in the parasympathetic nervous system, there's a virtue which goes simultaneously like the yin and yang. So we got the yin, which is the emotion and the yang, which is the virtue. And the fear, the virtue is wisdom. Anger, the virtue is compassion. Anxiety, the virtue is joy. Worry, the virtue is trust. And then, sadness and grief, the virtue is integrity. I’m like, okay how does this all work.

And going further into that, and we can get into this a little later in the conversation about if we're stuck in the virtue – this is the flip side of this – if we're stuck in the virtue, we're not getting any sort of emotional signaling, which could land us in a very depressive state, if that makes sense. An emotional state is a very heightened protective state.

So there's a flip side to all of these things, and it's an understanding that we have to have a balance of both. We're human beings, the emotions are there to tell us something; and it's to us how we integrate that information from the emotion, not acting from the emotion, if that makes sense. We look at – that brings in that psychedelic place of where we go, and I feel like I want to hear what's coming up for you.

Pascal: Yeah, it's one of my teachers, Robin Clements, says feel the emotion, don't become the emotion, which I think is what you're alluding to in well spoken words there. So you were a younger man feeling this surge of angry energy in your body, and you're using your voice as well to do that, which is a whole different level of connecting with sound. And you're working through these intense emotions and what changed in terms of your narrative around that, and what did you seek in terms of tools and knowledge to support yourself in that transition?

Phil: Good question, it's given me all the flashbacks since the beginning of my lifetime, and this occurrence. Growing up, how I grew up, I'll talk about culture and environment and just such you grew up first 10 years, just south of London, England, and the racism was pretty brutal in that, and didn't understand really what's going on. My color of skin is not necessarily white, and it's not necessarily dark, it's somewhere in between. So there was no real place for me to fit in, so there was often an anger towards from both sides, depending on the different colors at the time.

My father got – he's very dark, he got a lot of skinhead racism, and it was just the white supremacy, and I saw that. And there's points in time where he couldn't walk down the street in our neighborhood at night, because there was a fear, his fear of him being attacked. And my mom was very white English. So I grew up watching my parents deal with culture and society, and they decided when I was about 10 years old to uproot us and come to Toronto, Canada.

So I’ve been here since I was 10, so 40 years, and experienced a little bit of you're new, you got an English accent, you're different color. So it was a little bit difficult for, I think the kids at my age to accept, and I got into a lot of fights, physical fights, defending myself in England and here, when I first got here. And when I got here, it was grade five, but three months in, my parents were called in, cause they were going to actually expel me from the first school that I was in Canada.

Gabor Maté has just released to book The Myth of Normal seriously, that the oppression even in just other people's minds that they've been delivered, you know how to respond and in what's normal, so I developed a very protective, and then, anybody was not safe. And we know that if we don't feel safe, you're in an automatic fight or flight mode instantaneously.

So at home it didn't feel safe, cause I was getting a lot of parental oppression, I’m going to say that, parental oppression. My dad's Indian back to the day, so we can understand what culture that was coming in. And then, my mom also grew up in a very stiff upper lip English, you don't talk back to your parents, you keep your mouth shut, and you only speak when you're spoken to, or else the consequences are very severe. So it leads me into my teenage years, so teenage years, I, 13, I decided to buy a guitar, and I hid it from my parents, my dad never wanted me to get it.

Pascal: Such a rebel.

Phil: So I went with my cousin to Steve's Music Store in Toronto, and got my first guitar for a hundred bucks, and I kept it at my cousin's place for a long time, until it felt appropriate to say, hey, dad, I went out and got my guitar, and this is what I really, I really enjoy playing the guitar, and I want to learn, and that through high school was my soother. It was like the place that I went to, that I felt that I could go to safely, it wasn't external, it was something that I could bring something internal out and inside myself.

So unexpressed sadness and grief with my boundaries being crossed by my parents and culture and society, I developed the skin rash and that throughout my teenage years developed all over my scalp, and into my 20s, it got even worse. Then I was starting to soothe myself with drinking and alcohol to numb out, and then, still playing music and being the rebel rock star, and doing all the gigs and stuff like that.

But my early 20s, I got married very early, and I had my eldest son who's now 28, and my youngest son who – I didn't know. those emotions are still, they're very present – my youngest son who's 22, so I had both of those in my 20s, and when I was in my teenage years, I swore to myself, I would never ever do to my kids what my parents did.

So when I got married and had kids, there were stressful situations that my reactivity – I reacted towards my eldest son, not the way that I wanted to, and I don't want to get into details, it was pretty harsh, but I felt so fucking bad, so bad afterwards. I left the marriage and I left my kids. That was the first thing in my mind, I’m like, you made an agreement that you would never ever do this, now you've done it, what are you going to do?

And later on in my years, my eldest son we've had some good healing conversations, and I think it was – I don't know if it was last year or the year before, he was like, fuck you for leaving dad, but thank you, because he's understanding about how the trauma, how it gets stored in the brainstem, and if you go into a fight or flight mode, that's the only program you know how to come from – we look at the environments, and then things like that.

Back to my body and my immune system, the skin rashes and the psoriasis, when I was 33, I was playing a gig, playing guitar, and I was singing in a bar and just playing the circuits and stuff like that, and through the first set, I started to lose the ability to move my hand, and then, I lost the ability to actually sustain a vocal tone in tune. I'm like, look back to my drummer, he's you okay. And I’m like, aha, don't know what's going on, really don't know what's going on. He said, okay, we're going to take a break, so he hopped on the mic, he said, hey, we're taking a break. Put my guitar down, run to the phone, called 911. I don't know, I called telehealth, and I said, these are the symptoms that are happening. They thought I was having a stroke.

So I went to emergency, told them what happened – trying to tell them what happened, and as I’m telling them, my faculties of remembering were just like disappearing. And they took me into emergency, and I ended up staying in the hospital for five weeks. And through the first week, I couldn't feed myself, I couldn't walk, I couldn't dress myself.

And then, four weeks later after that, they're like you have a form of MS, which is very rare. So multiple sclerosis, and we all know about the myelin sheath in the nervous system. And looking back now, with the anger, grief, oppressive society, and what I had gone through, what my parents had gone through, and what their parents had gone through, my immune system was automatically oppressing itself, say the signaling was just like, okay, you just got to shut down here. And it literally shut me down, where I couldn't move.

And I remember conversations that I’m having with myself as I'm lying in the hospital bed, not being able to move, and I was like, oh, what are we going to do now, is this the rest of our life, are we going out now or... And this voice came to me and said you're going through this because you're strong enough, you're resilient enough to know how to heal yourself. It's going to take some time, and you are now going to help people through, not heal people. I can act as a guide or say a lighthouse to help people through these kinds of conditions like death, contemplating death, contemplating losing faculties or absolutely losing yourself and shutting down.

And that was that big incident, that was the big incident. I call it the Jesus year. The Jesus year where the universe literally killed me. And we know, we're not separate from the universe then, I recognized that what is inside of me is killing me – what is inside of me is creating a sacrifice in such a way that as I heal, I’m going to attain wisdom, and I’m going to draw from the wisdom that is within that's going to carry me through this and push it from the inside out, whatever's been entrained in me over generations since the beginning of time.

I'm understanding from my experience of what I’ve gone through in western medicine, when we're looking at the psyche, they're looking at disconnecting the body from the psyche, which is, we know the trouble with that. But we know the effectiveness of that to heal ourselves, sometimes that needs to happen. But if it's constantly pills, constantly numbing out and things like that, it's not effective, it's actually worsening the body's conditions.

So integrating the emotions and understanding how the emotions and the mindset and the energy and the spirit of the person can actually, from the inside out, start to heal the body, that was absolutely incredible and that led me into internships in Guatemala and China oversees, with fabulous experiences around seeing how they're integrating this medicine with western medicine.

We can influence that subconscious vibration that we can then flush out what's making us sick, and then really bring in the true authentic self. So that was, yeah, and then, that was my sort of step in and gateway to really using psychedelic medicines appropriately in a healing sense. And then, understanding from a contemplative psychotherapy, a relational psychosomatic therapy point of view how important this work is, and the sacredness of the container that needs to be happening with this type of healing.

Pascal: Beautiful, I love your story around having this history with your parents and your upbringing with oppressive systems, and the connection to music as a savior, I would say – is that the right word as some new thing that got into your life that transformed your life forever. And I love the kind of irony in the poetry of you having lived with parents that were culturally or in a very real way, traumatizing you around suppressing your voice and your creativity. And then, you picked up a guitar in secret and made music and your voice, your medicine, and sharing it with the world as well.

So I just want to commend you on that journey of deep internal healing through a lot of pain and suffering, and eventually, leading the way to sharing those gifts into the world and how it was divinely called in, I would say, on that Jesus year that you called, I love to use that term. But yeah, I just want to commend you on the journey you've been on, just the unfolding of the gifts and the unfolding of the knowledge, which, as you've shared, there's a lot to learn there, and I'd love to learn more about the science behind healing and sounds, cause you talked about frequencies, you've talked about the emotional content of music.

I'd love to hear more around what you learned along the way around the sound of frequencies and also the healing that comes with it what is the latest science, and what are the things that you found the most interesting along your path?

Phil: Thank you, and thank you for witnessing my story, Pascal. It's a beautiful feeling to be witnessed, and probably one of the most important things to embody is to be witnessed by – purely witnessed by another being, another human being, soul being, so thank you for that, and thank you for the space.

It was interesting to come into Chinese medicine and traditional medicines and really understand, and, back in the day, the cultures, the medicine person, let's say, feminine, masculine, however you want to bring that forward, they would use songs, they would use movement, and then, they would use some sort of a herbal plant medicine concoction. And then, the whole community would get together, and it wouldn't be isolated into anything, but the whole community would get together and sing and move. And once the entity of disease was flushed through the system, the person would often rise – rise like the phoenix, dying to the sickness, and then, coming into a fullness of themselves.

What I learned in – I'm going to come back to medical qigong, cause medical qigong was pre-Chinese medicine, and Chinese medicine was based out of that qigong, Taoist qigong practice – is they had different tones to clear the different emotions. I was like, are you serious, like, when I'm reading this, I’m like, why don't we know about this, why isn't this on public record that if we sing and we create tones, we can heal ourselves, not just go to a club or put on headphones and dance around. There's a real sense of healing here.

And then I was like, okay, so I can sing, play guitar, I can play music and things. So I started to, not perform, but integrate sound and music and songs into my acupuncture sessions, and then, watch how quickly the body could recalibrate itself so quickly. And then, looking into a bit further around the neuroscience and the power that sound has on our nervous system, specifically the brain and the brainwave entrainment, and looking into the different subsets of the brainwaves that we know in western medicine, so I looked at it, and there's five different subsets of brainwaves. – we got the delta, which is the, let's say, the slowest, we got the theta, and we got the alpha, and we got the beta, and we got the gamma.

And delta, let's say, look at it from a yin-yang type of way, right – delta being the most yin, and the gamma being the most yang. Relating the two systems of the nervous system, we can say a sympathetic response is yang, and the parasympathetic response is yin. So we can look at, on a relational perspective, that the delta wave is more parasympathetic, very relaxed. We go into a delta wave consciousness when we go to sleep very still. And then, during the day, we can come up to a gamma wave consciousness, which is a very sympathetic response. Daytime, we need to be a little bit more sympathetic, and a little bit more active, a little bit more yang; and at nighttime, we go into this more yin state, parasympathetic state.

We often look at diseases and different types of diseases, and I'm going to look at two of them specifically, which is anxiousness, which would be like a high gamma, a high sympathetic state. And then, there is the depression or depressive state, which is a very low, doesn't want to move, very not motivated, which is a very yin state. So we look in, we relate to the traditional medicines from a yin-yang, those kinds of states. We need a balance of both.

We need a balance of both. But if we're stuck in one state, this is where the disease occurs, and this is where the neurons start to fire off all the time. It becomes automated – automated every response, every situation becomes an automated place. And what I’m learning, and what I have learned in my own life, it's a range of frequencies, and if I can access all frequencies, if I have that at my access or at my tool belt, I'm able to shift, I'm able to adapt, I’m able to respond in the most appropriate way instead of the preconceived or the pre-programmed way.

So we look at, I'm just going to talk about the brainwaves, real, real simple here. The brainwaves from – and would look at the beta brainwave and the alpha brainwave, which is, I'm going to say, the third – alpha is the third, and the beta, I’m going to say, is the fourth level up. And the relationship between theta and beta – the beta and alpha is the difference between having your eyes open and your eyes closed. As soon as you open your eyes, you shift into some sort of a beta state, which they wouldn't call like a waking consciousness, doesn't necessarily mean like you're awake-awake, but like awake, like your eyes are open and you're getting external information. As soon as you close your eyes, you drop into an alpha state, which is coming inside, being inside, which is a very yin state.

And then, from the alpha state, you can access the theta, which is where we do creative visualization, anything that we want to imagine, your imagination, dreams and things like that. And then, we can drop in from there, which is the delta state of consciousness, which is very still, mostly with no occurrences of nothing coming on – so no thoughts, no anything, but just pure awareness, and it hasn't become anything yet.

We can call that, from a Buddhist point of view, a state of emptiness. It hasn't become anything, but it can anything. In that state, in the delta state, we can really come into a vibration of self, and then, work our way up into, once we're in the delta state, into a theta state, where we can actually start to visualize and imagine what it is we want to shift, whatever it is we want to change, or whatever information that is in there that we want to do.

And then, the alpha, we come into the alpha state, which is just pre-opening our eyes, it starts to embody – that vibration starts to embody in our nervous system, which is very powerful. And then, we open our eyes, then we can start to act accordingly, and take action to what it is that has come through in those states. And then, the gamma is heightened awareness, I'm exploring this a little bit more, because back in the day, it would be a combination of all of those brainwaves accessing the gamma state, where the ancient monks in the day used to move stones with their minds. They used to be able to move things with their minds, that's crazy amazing, and I’m learning about this.

And in the end, interconnectivity of all things, we can influence vibration wise, I know that we can influence people in a room, if we're over-happy or overly sad, we start to feel that vibration or resonance. In a full embodied state, I feel what we're capable of is that we're able to do those things that we were told that we can't do, or maybe necessarily told that was witchcraft or devil's work. And it was a very oppressive state.

So as I'm coming through this, I'm understanding the bioelectromagnet of ourselves, our heart centers, our mind centers, and what we can do, we can definitely influence things around us, and inside of us by the way that we feel, by the way that we vision, which is absolutely incredible – and using sound and vibrational frequencies, a range of them, not just one, it's not just 432, it's not 440, it's not 20 hertz, or it's that we are a dynamic being and have access to all of those brainwave states. I'm going to call those brainwave states – brainwave states in western medicine – I’m going to call these dimensions. The dimensions that we have access to through, and psychedelic medicines help us attain and access these other dimensions that are inside of us, and be able to embody and integrate them in a very holistic way, and come into really authentically who we actually are as beings on this planet, in this universe.

Pascal: Which is accessing those dimensions that normally we're not fully aware of, and this is really interesting, because in a psychedelic experience, I’ve never heard this perspective around accessing the full dimension of the frequencies that we are capable of. I'd love for you to talk a little bit more about that and how sound comes into that, cause as you were sharing, it landed in me just how impactful the music we actually listen to can actually affect everything in our whole body. And during a psychedelic experience, especially like everything is heightened up, and how does sound play into those different frequencies, and how – it's a bit of magic, like you said, honestly it's a little bit magical to be, but it's very scientific as well. I’d love you to expand on, like, when sound comes in, what happens.

Phil: Sure. Let's talk about the bodies – the body systems. In the ear, there's an, what they call, the auricular branch of the vagus nerve. And in the larynx, there's the laryngeal – parapharyngeal branch of the vagus nerve too. So there's a feedback loop of the vagus nerve as we're taking signals in through our ears. There is cranial nerve, I'm going to say seven, I get these mixed up every once in a while, I think it's cranial nerve, number seven or number eight. The vestibular cochlear nerve coming in through the cortex, and through the limbic system, and through to the brainstem, which is responsible for balance of the system, and joining of the left and the right hemisphere of the brain. So we're already wired for sound to be, to take us to these dimensions.

Now, if we're listening to a song specifically, we can relate the different instruments to the different brainwaves. So a drumbeat or a pulse or something like that is, no – I wouldn't say no faster than 200 beats per minute, 240 beats a minute you're getting up there, you're getting to thrash metal, and things like that, but that range with the drumbeat can go down to 60 beats a minute, and we can relate this to hertz now.

So the delta wave consciousness is between 0.1 hertz and 4 hertz. Now, 4 hertz is four cycles a second, so that gets us up to 240 beats a minute. So anything percussive like a bass drum and a snare drum is directly in training the delta state, which is crazy. You feel that the pulse is going, and then, all of a sudden, there's this innate, the body wants to start to move, and we don't know why – correlate that to the brainstem is now becoming active and responsive. And then, I can – from that observation, I can relate the delta state of consciousness to be affecting the brainstem from that point of view. It's pulling us out, it's pulling us into the present, and then, coming into this place.

We move up to theta, which is the next level, it's around 4 to 8 hertz and the pulsing, I consider that sort of be like a baseline, so we're building the structures up there. Now, there's some sort of melody coming out through the pulse, so you got the drumbeat, and the pulse. And then, there's like this joining together of with the pulse, some sort of a low melody, which is, I relate to the theta. And then, we move up to – cause the baseline is often doing the subsets of whatever the drumbeat is. And then, move up to the alpha state of consciousness, and the alpha brainwave, and I'm going to look at, maybe it's a little bit of guitar on that.

So now you got the layers of the first three subsets of brainwaves. And then, what's next? Some sort of a melody, some sort of a melody or a vocalization, which is where language and words come in, which is a beta state. And then, coming up from – coming up into the gamma very high intensity. It could be a shake, or it could be like a harmonies, like a six-part harmonies. I was thinking of Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody, and those harmonies that come up, those frequencies that they're creating in there you're going through gamma and through all of the brainwaves.

And let's go back to theta with the baseline. So we are going to align the baseline, and the drumbeat, the delta, and the theta to be influencing obviously the brainstem. We talked about that, but then, what happens after that? The brainstem is connected to the limbic system, which is where all your memories and all your emotions and thoughts come from. And it's the connection, so it starts to influence what my thoughts are, what my emotions are. So depending on the groove or the pulse of a song, or a pulse of the music, we can influence, we have access to the emotional content, we have access to memories.

I don't know if you're listening to a song that was from your teenage years, it brings back all those memories from your teenage years, or when you were a child. This is how it works, you have access to it. And then, in alpha state, we get to – we can start to come into what that memory is, and actually have some sort of a visual what that memory is and bring it out. And then, we can actually start to talk about it, which then brings us into the beta state. We start to use our words, and then we start to use harmonies on top with the gamma state.

So the limbic system, we can relate to a high theta – sorry an alpha state, and then, when we get into a full visualization, we're getting into sort of a beta, because the vision's coming, and then, our interaction with whatever it is around us is a high, it comes into the gamma state. We start to take action with what is coming through in the brainwaves.

The frequencies that are being produced is not just one frequency, it's the relationship between two or more notes or two or more pulses. It's not just one. In that relationship, we create what we now know as a binaural pulse frequency, which is, that's the importance of helping our nervous system understand where we need to go, how we can drop in, and how we can really come into being present with ourselves, it's those frequencies.

Rejoin allows the joining of the left and right hemisphere, as well as access to brainstem, limbic system, and gamma, or the sort of the cortex. The cortex is the higher awareness, so I didn't touch into that, so the high beta and gamma, we can consider the cortex. So the cortex is online, we want to access. I want I – access to my full brain, not just the limbic system but the brainstem.

So with the binaural pulses, we join the left and right hemisphere, which we know that the left is a little bit more logical task oriented, the right, that is a more emotional, creative, let's say, creative more than emotional, and it's the joining of those spheres, the two hemisphere, which is helping us right now in this day and age to come into who we fully are. We've been programmed to be task oriented, I remember going for job interviews, oh, can you multitask. Of course, I can, I really want the job, which then puts us, the left brain puts us into a very sympathetic state of being.

We're in the sympathetic state of being, you know what happens with the stress, we talked about that earlier. Some of my colleagues that I've been talking with as well over the past couple of years is that we're so right brain deficient as a species that we've forgotten how to be creative, feel our emotions, and be okay with them, not judge ourselves or anything like that, just have a fully human experience.

Pascal: And that's when music can come in then, hijack the program, right? It's like when you're jamming to a really good song you just feel like dancing and you're humming and you'd forget stuff that is on your to-do list, it feels great. So what happens when that happens?

Phil: This is it. I'm going to say the external consequence of not completing a task is not there anymore, that's an external thing. The music helps us come fully into the present with ourselves, and it's okay, we'll just do things as a flow. I am the master of my own destiny. It comes into place, and music does, and I like the way you say it, it hijacks the sympathetic response, and then, brings us into this full, community with all of our cells. And then, that allows us to be in community with others, and we're not specifically thinking about a task that I got to do and ignore everything else.

Pascal: And during a psychedelic experience, most traditions and most containers include music of some sort, either you have a playlist with the face mask on, or there's a person or practitioner singing or people are playing songs on their radio, there's a lot of times a music component – what happens when you're pairing the psychedelic experience with the sound? What happens in your body, in your brain that invokes such a special, sacred, ceremonial space and accesses things that in our day to day life we're not able to access? Is it that it touches on all their frequencies and it removes the judgment or the left brain thinking what happens when you pair the two together?

Phil: Sure. Great. Great question. Thank you for asking that. The music is vibrational, you can't touch it. You can't necessarily taste music, but you can feel it, you can definitely feel it, and have visceral response. And then, you bring in plant medicines, you can touch it, and you can taste it, so the fizzy – the combination of, you could say, music is a yang medicine, and a plant medicine is a yin medicine.

So music is something that comes from the outside in, and when we take plant medicines, it's working from the inside out. So it's very effective at getting into those places that we need to get into for a full whole body healing, or a full body reset there. The plant medicines, when we get into the – I'm going to call them yin, but there's always a yin and yang aspect to whichever, whatever the medicine is. And they look at Iboga being a little bit more yang than ayahuasca and ayahuasca being a little bit more yin. And there's no reason why you can't combine, there's no reason why you can't combine the medicines or combine different medicines for integration.

Chinese medicine taught me that it's not one medicine – it's not one medicine that's going to help the system. It's going to be a combination of maybe three or four or two or three, but it has to be more than just the one, which is really interesting.

Pascal: And just as a disclaimer for the people out there, we're not suggesting to have four medicines at the same time, but more of having a variety of different experiences to touch on different parts of our psyche.

Phil: For sure, and thank you for that, cause we know the ayahuasca brew is made out of two plants. It's not just the one, right? It's not just one. And thank you for saying that, not recommending to go out and do that. But understanding that the different medicines are going to have different affects on the psyche and the body as well. So I've known when I’ve communed with ayahuasca, it's more of a nighttime, very still, not moving into anything like that. But when I’ve gone and communed with Iboga, it's very functional very – it's more of a daytime with the Iboga for myself.

And then, you bring in psilocybin or the that kind of medicine too. We're looking at a combination of like it's an in-between, it's not too yang, and it's not too yin. So the different capabilities and the different aspects for the different medicines are that which they are. But when I was studying, I’ll let you know, when I was studying the Chinese medicine, we had to experience one herb at a time so that we knew what affect that it would have, and then we can integrate the other medicines appropriately.

Pascal: And when you bring in the musical element during a ceremony, what is happening between the plant and your body and the music?

Phil: So we've talked about the yin and yang aspect, so we can talk about music being yang, we could talk about the plant medicine being a little bit yin. There are two aspects for Chinese medicine, which really help, there's the qi, which is the energy which influences the movement. And then, there's like the blood or the fluids or the physical the physical body and stuff. And it's the qi that moves the fluids through the body. So it's important, and I relate music like qi.

The music's going to influence the vibration and how it flows, and then, you've got the plant medicine, which is the reconstituting of the physical body, and it flushes out everything, it doesn't need to know anybody that has done plant medicines before, there's either some sort of a purge a diaphoresis or a bowel evacuation, or a esophagus regurgitation too. And it’s all part of the clearing, but music is so important to integrate with this medicine, and this type of healing, because it influences the way it moves, and we can get into all the states of consciousness, and we don't really have to do anything except receive and release, and it's important for the music to be there, because in those difficult places, in those dark, really dark places, we get entangled in, and there's often judgments, the music often helps clear the entanglement, it clears the attachment, and then helps to move it through.

Pascal: And you touched a little bit on it, but I'd love to learn more about it, which is the different frequencies touch on different emotions, and when you're working with a plant medicine, you're going through your journey, there's different content that will obviously come up, how does music or sound bridge the experience of the sound itself into different parts of our emotional content and how does it help it move, or help it resolve or help it come to peace in our bodies, which is a potentially deep question that is probably multifaceted, and not such a one answer for all, but what are the things you've experienced before in terms of, cause you do sound therapy, like matching a different sound frequency with a certain kind of use case or a certain piece of content that someone's going through, like, how do you do that and what happens then?

Phil: The different frequencies, and I don't feel like – it's not a random thing that there's five different brainwave frequencies, and there's five emotions, and there's five virtues, and there's five elements here. So depending on what we're working with or what a client would come and see me for with sound therapy or sound healing and plant medicines, the baseline would be, what is it that's most present. And if it's a, I want to say a fear based response, a fear based response is embedded in the delta, and the delta and low theta relating it to the brainstem.

So we can use those types of frequencies to move the fear out, flush the fear out with the plant medicine's help as well, in combination of – move the fear out so that is not driving the shell anymore. That delta wave is just imagine yourself in the middle of the ocean and you got these waves, they're slowly coming by, these big giant waves, and you don't really have control over that current. You can swim as hard as you want, but that ocean wave or that wave is going to push you in the direction that it's going to push you.

So I look at that, and I’m like, okay delta wave, a fear response, the virtue is wisdom. So we can look at, like, where we can draw from wisdom in there, but the element in Chinese medicine is, guess what, water. We can look at that, and we can look at, like, how water moves, water can become anything at once. It can crash, it can carve, it can, the little stream that created the Grand Canyon, it just kept going. So water that – the delta wave and the low theta wave are very influential.

We look at, we can get into the theta wave, and relate it to anger. If anger gets stuck or is, the first and foremost, fear – if there's a fear response, there's a safety issue, and what often comes into play when you need to protect yourself is anger. Right? The anger is going to say, nope, create a boundary. But if that's ongoing, that's what's going to manifest through the way, and anger often will influence an alpha state, which then can produce worry, anger starts to feed itself. Anger's I have to create a thought process that's going to help justify my anger, and then, keep me in this fear response.

And then, we move up into the beta frequencies, the beta and the gamma frequencies are so closely related, cause they are waking states, and they're very active manifestation, if that makes sense – the active manifestations in those states, that's where we take action, and we can bring things to life. There's an interchangeable between the anxiety and grief and sadness. The beta, often when there's a lot of worry will fuel the sadness and grief.

We start with fear, there's been a bit of a boundary being crossed. Anger then steps in to say, hey, no, push, this is not okay. And then, the worry and the thoughts start to come online, and then, there's the sadness and grief of I don't feel okay, I feel lonely, and I feel isolated, and I can't connect to anything. And that produces then an anxious over time, a very anxious response.

Pascal: And is that how you as a facilitator, and just more frequencies and emotions, but once you've identified a pattern or a signature or someone shared an intention around something, how do you create a music playlist for them, or how do you decide which sounds are you trying to counter or the fear response of something a bit more hopeful, like, how do you do that from both the scientific, but also there's an artistic side of this as well there's a freedom side of this that comes in as well, and love for you to share your process around that.

Phil: Sure. Thanks. There’s so much that comes through with that I'm fortunate because I’m a musician, so I can custom create on the spot.

So based on my TCM diagnosis back in the day, and then, incorporating that into what kind of sounds can I make, what kind of vocal tones can I make, and what kind of songs can I introduce to this, if you're making, playlists are great, they're wonderful to have, cause they're incorporating all of the frequencies and things like that, but if you're making a playlist, can you make a playlist quickly for your next client when they come in, and then, do a nice playlist for 45 minutes or an hour, however long your session is – is it going to be the most appropriate for that set and setting, being that if I made something five days ago, and I'm bringing this playlist into a current setting, is it going to be relevant for that?

So the most important thing with the playlist is where do you start. If you have a range of songs for fear or delta wave, and that's what you're working with first, then you can be present with your playlist, understanding, watching with your client, where your client is, where your client's breath is, where your client's state in theta consciousness, what is the next song to be introduced from a playlist.

And so I'm going to have a great conversation, I just signed on with the Michener Institute with the University Health Network here in Toronto for Foundations of Psychedelic Studies, and they brought me on to talk about music curation and sound and playlists; and these are really important things to understand that this is a dynamic process, it's not the same every single time with the clients that you're using [inaudible] with the songs that you're using, and then, the clients that I’m working with, every client, every situation is new. It's a different circumstance from one hour to the next, from one day to the next, which then requires an intuitiveness, inside myself and develop that intuitiveness inside, and then, understand what I can bring to the table in my toolset.

At the beginning when I started, I knew a few things, but over the years, it's expanded, the songs, the range, the vocal tones, including some playlists, and as people come in, there's like a nice vibrational music that's being played. And then, depending on the tones and things, I can have that going underneath the session, as I then incorporate some live aspect, using my voice or guitar or crystal bowls, shakers, Native Indian flute and drumming too.

So it can vary, but I would caution against having a static playlist. It's the same thing, I know for myself, if I'm listening to the same songs over and over again, I get a little bit bored. And if I'm in a client setting, or in that kind of setting, if there's just that, a few playlists that I’m using, I would challenge people that are listening, the practitioners that are listening to this podcast, how could I make my playlist more dynamic in the moment – in that moment, and cater it for the group at hand.

You see the group at hand, it might be a mix of maybe three or four of the playlists that are curated, but at least have access to what is the next song or what is the next dimension that we need to introduce with the songs, if that makes sense. I'm seeing things spark up in you.

Pascal: Oh I'm really fascinated by the frequencies relating to specific emotional content, and then, how sound can come in, and, for example, if someone is working with fear, I'm curious to understand better if you have a curated playlist for fear, what are you trying to achieve in the nervous system, and the frequencies of the person, alleviates them, or, at least, temporarily from fear what are you trying to change there in the frequencies what happens when you're creating the perfect playlist for that person?

Phil: Good question. We look at – so you've created a playlist for fear, and you can create a playlist for anger and frustration and anxiousness and worry and sadness and grief too, and have four or five different playlists there. But what we're trying to do is if somebody's in fear all the time, we want to give them access to the rest of the system. So like we know that as the practitioners and guides meeting – meeting the person or meeting the group where they're at first, so introducing those frequencies that relate to fear, but then bringing in some sort of maybe a verbal narrative to instill the virtue.

What is the fear saying? So there could be a narrative or a song that invokes that sort of contemplation. And we know that with words and spoken voice we're accessing an alpha, sorry, a high alpha and a beta state. So it's giving the delta, I want to say the delta state, access to a range of self, which is a little bit more waking, and then, being able to be present with the fear, and then, understanding and vocalizing what it actually is.

Once we've done that, we can drop into some sort of a theta, which we can then reimagine or re-visualize what it is we want the response to be, instead of fear. It's like almost like a hypnotherapy almost. It's exactly that's how hypnotherapy works. And from the theta state, we have now access to the delta, the theta, the alpha, the beta, and then all that's left to come online is the gamma awareness, which is the cortex, the higher brain centers and our decision executive functioning, and we'll say the spiritual aspects or spiritual connection or the crown chakra, that's where we want to go, we want to move.

So depending on what the state is, and often, we'll say often it's the fight or flight or the fear response that's driving the show, we want to work with that. But depending on what is presenting itself, if it's anxiousness, if it's worry or whatever that is, you can start with that specific brainwave, and then, introduce the other dimensions, so to speak, or the other brainwaves. I hope that answers your question.

Pascal: It does, thank you.

So Phil, this is all fascinating information, I’m learning a lot, and I have tons more questions. And I'm also curious around for the people at home that are really curious around integrating this knowledge into their life what are some practical advice for psychedelic preparation, integration, for example, like, how can having a bit more awareness around frequencies and around the emotional content that's stored in those frequencies and how music can affect that what are ways that people can support their journey with what you've shared here today?

Phil: Thank you for asking that. It's taken a lot of my own personal experience, and my personal journeys with the music and frequencies and exploring different tones and different aspects of that, and really understanding how it affects myself in that, cause, when we enter into a ceremony, or we enter into any sort of energetic dynamic with a group or a one-on-one session.

We have to understand that we are not separate, to understand that we are part of the system in play, although we're acting as the, I want to say, guide or captain of the ship, or the pilot, we also need to know that we are a part of this whole dynamic. Now, the important part is to make sure to practice with self, and practice with others and get generous feedback, and all of the sharing that happens with those experiences, and understand that we are beings, we are on the journey too.

I am no further along than anyone else here, but I have some strengths that I can bring to the table as an offering, bring to the altar as an offering, and just keep practicing – keep practicing with the nuances. Even the time of day, a morning ceremony is going to be completely different than an afternoon ceremony, and an evening ceremony.

Watching with the light frequencies and where the sun is and where the moon is, and astrologically, all of those celestial bodies out there playing effect with frequency gravitation, sorry, gravity and the electromagnetic fields and things like that – practice as a musician, and as a vocalist. The more that I practice, and the more that I develop this side of myself, the integration side of myself, the more intuitive I'm going to be able to be in the room or in that dynamic than I'm with myself.

So exploring how delta frequencies work on me, and through up to the gamma, I have a sound therapy practitioner certification program, which is a five-day module, and we look at each frequency, and the relationships in each module, and I demonstrate with what I call a tone, it's a tone generator, it's an app that you can get, that you can create the binaural frequencies and actually feel what that pulse feels like, and what is it doing to the nervous system.

I’ve gotten a really good response, and we're looking at incorporating that as a workshop in through the Michener Institute with the University Health Network for Foundations of Psychotherapy here in Toronto. And it's looking at really self-discovery and self-discovery about what it is and how it feels, what it's bringing up. And it's going to take some practice and take some patience, there's no rush – there's no rush to do this work as a group.

Collaboratively, working with another person that's in the same journey can help speed up the process, so if you're working with a group or working with a team on that same level, you can each explore together, and then, you can each share together what the experiences were like. So that aspect too, and then, making sure that you have a good mentor that you can check in with. Sometimes things come up and it's just like I don't know what to do with this, I'm not sure where to go or where to access this.

So I’m very fortunate to have some very key people in my life that are like, they have a little bit more experience, 20, 30, 40 years more experience that I can rely on to say, hey, this happened, and this is where I feel that I need to integrate some of the information, can you help assist in this circumstance – so being sure that you're not doing this alone, making sure that you have a team like Nectara behind you, you have the resources behind you to support your process.

The main takeaway that I would say for the preparation is self-practice first, self-practice first, and then practice with others. And then, you start to really introduce that. My first mentor said that I wouldn't be ready until I had 10 years. I was like 10 years, I want to help people heal now. And it's the process of the hours and the days and the years of embodiment, so then it becomes second nature.

And that's for preparation, but moving into the integration process, just from a quantum physics' point of view, scientific point of view, and I use this explanation in the sound therapy practitioner program is the double slit experiment, where if it's not observed, you can look into it, if what is happening is not observed, it's unlimited potential, it can be anything. And from the worst case scenario to the best case scenario, doesn't matter what it is, it just doesn't really care, there's no judgment there. But once it's observed what is showing up, it organizes itself, I don't – I myself feel don't have to do anything for anyone, just simply observe.

That's how powerful we are as human beings if we're just witnessed and observed, our nervous system knows what to do to reorganize itself to be in the present. And that's the best piece of advice I can give for integration, there is no advice giving, as I’m giving advice here or suggestions here. It is up to the person that we're witnessing to come to their own wisdom, and then, we start to instill the virtue and they get to tap into something inside of themselves instead of being dependent on my response, tap inside to some part of themselves where they can actually start to grow and develop their own balance without the training wheels, if that makes sense. And that's the biggest piece with my experience with integration practice, and I hope that helps.

Pascal: Yeah, that's super interesting, from a practitioner perspective, what's the average training program that people can join in Toronto, and I don't know if you're doing it online – but we'll put the link in the show notes. And I'm curious from a journeyer's perspective, I’m heading into, assuming I’m heading into a ceremony in a month or two months, how can I leverage sound and music to help me land in the space in a safer and deeper way, and then, conversely, how do I leverage music typically, what I do is I have my giant playlist that I put on, and it's just like music I love, and it really gets me into the medicine space, but what's a more scientifically trauma-informed way of leveraging sound for before and after the ceremony?

Phil: The first thing that comes to mind is curate a playlist of your favorite songs, that's going to help to bring you through the emotional entanglement, first and foremost. Secondly, you can look at curating a playlist that speaks specifically to your intention – your intention of the work that it is that you want to do, and you can build a playlist around your intention. Often, when I do one-on-one sessions or group sessions and things like that, I encourage the person that is coming to create a playlist based on what their favorite songs were when they were before teenage years, and then in the teenage years. We know that most of the neuro pathways are built on that, and then, to curate a playlist that is based around your intention of what it is that you want to heal, or whatever you feel that it is that you need to heal. That is, I want to say, the most ideal two parts.

But if you don't know what the intention is first, and that's okay, build a playlist of your favorite songs, and then, from there, you can define it, polish the playlist, or create other playlists around specific intentions that you want to do, or if there's a specific emotional content, or if there's a specific memory that's firing off on emotional content, you can do that. But to have both, so that you can move the emotional content, and then, you can listen to your favorite playlist to bring you into now, in that field of joyous space.

Pascal: Beautiful Thank you. You host regular sound events in Toronto and online as well, Twilight Tuesdays, a lot of what I’ve seen you do is bringing community around sound, which I found beautiful and amazing. It's reconnecting us to our ancestral roots of getting together around a bonfire or music, it varies, but the power of community and sound you want to share a little bit more about what you've experienced there and how are you bringing community around sound and how can people engage with that?

Phil: Community and sound, we each resonate differently, we each resonates with a different – our own unique vibration, I got to say. It's not good nor bad or anything like that. If you can look at us as two different notes coming together, that resonant frequency is creating a third vibration. So in a group dynamic, something that – some vibration that I may be necessarily not aware of, or that is in the subconscious, can be brought through and witnessed through somebody else's work.

As our nervous systems come together in community and in groups, it's the mirror neurons in our brain that are interacting with each other, even pre-verbal. So all of those downloads and all the signaling, as we go through our journey together, so we heal together at a more expansive rate, and it's a beautiful thing to come together in a community, and I've seen some wonderful things happen on Twilight Tuesday.

So we're really excited to be doing that, and we're going to start up the Twilight Tuesday next spring in person, but it's been a year since I launched it online, and it was like a week after I broke my ankle on this full moon in Taurus last year, and it's been quite a journey and quite an experience to develop my own practice and come to the community with my own practice every single Tuesday, and then, just seeing the community grow.

It's not something I could put together so that I would do something for the community. I showed up doing something for myself, and then, allowing and giving permission for the community to do things for themselves in community. And that was just a switch, a total switch in my practice, and in my intentions and things like that.

And then, the sound therapy practitioner program, it's all online now. We launched it last year, so we did the live classes, and then we recorded them, and it’s a 100-hour continuing education program that has been partnered with Daybreak Therapy and Training in here in Toronto. And if you're a psychotherapist or a social worker, this program is eligible for continuing education units, and I feel that's pretty revolutionary in these times that a psychotherapist can actually take a sound therapy program, and get continuing education units to – I laugh with joy, it's amazing that you can incorporate this.

We did it in such a way you can incorporate sound therapy into your practice wherever you are, and we're launching the level 2 training in Costa Rica in February, which will be in person, and I'm actually right after this call, I'm getting on a call with the president of Daybreak Therapy and Training to iron out what the days are going to look like, and then, we're going to start marketing that. So that's going to be available next February 2023, February 1st to 5th and the 5th being the full moon in Leo, yeah, I’ll just say that.

Pascal: That's beautiful. As you were talking earlier around the science and everything, it just dawned on me that I personally feel like every practitioner or therapist out there that's working with people, that's working with the healing space in general, should be trained in just a science of sound, and how it interfaces with the body, mind, and soul really. And even, dreaming further is let's have our city planners and people design airports and stuff to be trained in this stuff so that we can create these places of sound healing wherever we're going, not to put music everywhere, but just to have an understanding of how we can create better spaces for humanity to live in really that's a big piece to me.

I find that it's, maybe in the future, we'll be having conversations where there's a lot more access and a lot more understanding of sound, and so that we can weave that into our everyday life. I find that very interesting, and very hopeful about that in the future. And so yeah, thanks for putting the program together and doing this sort of work, it's beautiful. And yeah, thank you so much for sharing your story and your knowledge, and I feel like there's a 10-part series here we can go on into science, and hopefully we touched on the main things, but yeah, thanks so much for sharing this with us today.

Phil: You're so welcome, Pascal. This has been a wonderful conversation.

Pascal: Thank you Phil, thanks for joining, really appreciate you and your work and blessings on the day and looking forward to the next conversation.

Phil: Thank you, Pascal. Hope you have a wonderful day, and anytime we want to talk about sound and frequencies, vibration, and healing, I’m happy to jump.

Pascal: You might add. Thank you, all right, take care of yourself.

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