Dahn Yoga Class New Mexico

Even as adults, we tend to bounce our knees and drum our fingers when stressed or nervous. Also, when we feel disappointment or disgust, we shake our head side to side. This movement is done around the world, which Darwin noticed long ago through his observations of emotional expression. I believe these motions are instinctive to people because they help calm the brain waves in a very natural way. Through the rhythmic movements of Brain Wave Vibration, I hope you will begin to apply these methods to yourself in a more conscious, deliberate manner.

The healing power of rhythm is becoming very clear. Recently, drumming has become an increasingly popular form of therapy. It seems to offer troubled individuals a chance to release stored emotions and to gain a feeling of personal power. One study found that workers who got together to participate in group drumming gained a much more positive outlook about their work and developed a sense of community with their co-workers. Researchers concluded that drumming circles provided a great release for the workers’ stress and that the practice could reduce worker burnout significantly, leading to a reduction in employee turnover (Stevens).

The instruments are also thought to signify the voices of both heaven and Earth. The bulk and janggu, which are made of leather, represent the sounds of the Earth, while the jing and kkwaeng-gwa-ri, made of metal, represent sounds of the heavens. The music is composed to match the progression of nature—the wind blows, the clouds gather, thunder and lightning strike, and the rain falls. On hearing the music, listeners are swept up in the cycle of Earth’s natural rhythms.

I believe that this music, like a lot of other traditional musical forms, possesses a remarkable ability to affect the brain positively. It may be that rhythmic music has a great psychological effect because the first experiences we perceive with our brains are rhythmical.

Medical science has confirmed that infants begin responding to sounds around them long before they arc born. When you were developing in your mother’s womb, your ears were practical Iv the only sensory organs taking in information.

When people go out to a nightclub or blast the latest pop tunes from their car stereos, they are, in a sense, “self-medicating” their own brain waves. Typically, these songs have very heavy beats, which allow the brain to settle down to a more primitive, prerational state of being, in much the same way that tribal drumming helps produce subconscious, trance like states in primitive healing practices. Of course, the effects are not quite so dramatic, but the constant, heavy beat does provide the brain a chance to “simmer down,” escaping from the constant left-brain, prefrontal cortex activity that modern life demands. So the next time you see the guy in the car next to you bobbing his head up and down to the rhythm of the latest top-ten hit, you can think to yourself, “Oh! He knows Brain Wave Vibration, too!”

In his book This Is Your Brain on Music, neuroscientist and musician Daniel J. Levitin discusses the effect music has on the human brain. He notes that music is unique in its ability to stimulate all areas of the brain at once. He says, “Musical activity involves nearly every region of the brain that we know about, and nearly every neural subsystem.”

In my five-step Brain Education method, the goal of the fourth step, Brain Integrating, is to unify the three layers of the brain—the primitive brain stem, the emotional limbic system, and the rational necrotic. Very often one part of the brain undermines another, as when rational thinking is overcome by emotion. The goal of Brain Integrating is to get the various parts of the brain working together harmoniously, rather than competing with each other. Since it activates diverse parts of the brain, music seems to be a good step in that direction, which may also explain the cognitive advantage that children who study music seem to have over their nonmusical peers (Levitin).

Yull-yo, the Rhythm of Life

When I train people in the Brain Wave Vibration method, I usually use sa-mul-no-ri, the traditional drumming art of my native Korea. It has its roots in very ancient aspects of Korean culture, originating in the rituals of farmers who wished to ensure the success of their crops.

The four sa-mul-no-ri instruments each represent a different weather condition: the jang-gu, an hourglass-shaped drum, represents rain; the kkwaeng-gwa-ri, a small gong, represents thunder; the jing, the larger of two gongs, represents the wind; and the buk, a large bass drum, represents clouds.

Your skin could sense the warmth of your mother’s body, but it was a consistent, unvarying temperature, and you were suspended in the amniotic fluid, an environment with very little variety of texture. Your eyes were closed to the dark interior of your mother’s body and your mouth had no food to taste.

You lived alone in a dark world where the unceasing rhythm of your mother’s heartbeat was your constant companion. This and the sounds of your parent’s voices were the first stimuli to create connections in your brain and the first to begin giving definition to your being. When you hear the sound of rhythmic drumming now, or when you follow the rhythmical movements of Brain Wave Vibration, you are transported back to a place of newness and simplicity.

Music is such a consistent part of the experience of life that you could say that rhythm is essential to life. Medieval school of Europe hypothesized that a great harmonic system, called “the music of the spheres,” kept the planets in their proper or bit and rotation.