Tag: sound meditation

I know this is going to sound a bit woo-woo. And I’m not really woo-woo. I mean, I’m an engineer. I like facts. I like things to have explanations. But, I do believe in mystery too. I’ve had enough “meta-physical” experience not to dismiss things I don’t understand.

In the spring of 2019, I was following a guided sound meditation. 12 years after my life exploded when my first husband abandoned me and my kids, I had learned how much things like yoga and meditation can help with recovery from the trauma of emotional abuse, abandonment and betrayal. I have a https://www.gaia.com/ membership/subscription and one of my favourite yoga/meditation teachers on that site is Emily Spurling of Karma Being https://www.karmabeing.com. Emily had this 6-minute sound meditation in her Passageways to Peace series that changed the course of my life. It gave me the push I needed to start this blog and begin finally to tell my story, which I didn’t realize at the time, would be exactly what would help me put my emotional self together again.

At the very end of the meditation, when I was in a completely calmed state, Emily says, “In a moment, you will hear a bell. Notice if the sound resonates anywhere in your body.” When the bell rang, I had an unmistakable, sudden feeling in my throat that felt exactly like an adrenaline rush, but I’d only ever felt an adrenaline rush as a full body feeling. It shocked me. “What was that?!” I thought. To say I was puzzled is an understatement. What did it mean? I wondered about it for a couple days, then decided to do the meditation a second time to see what would happen.

The second time I did the guided sound meditation, the exact same thing happened. “Notice if the sound resonates anywhere in your body”, says Emily. Then, the bell rings. And my throat exploded again with a completely localized feeling of adrenaline rush. “Bizarre”, I thought. I have no clue why something like that would happen. I had never experienced anything like that before.

“If this happens a third time”, I thought to myself, “that’s it, I need to find out what’s going on”. So, a day or two later, I tried the sound meditation one more time, and the same thing happened. But, this time, having had just enough exposure to the woo-woo world to know vaguely what Chakras are, it occurred to me that there’s a throat Chakra. “Maybe it has something to do with that” I said, as I pulled out my laptop and started searching.

It took less than 2 minutes to find out what the throat Chakra was and what this experience with the sound meditation and my throat Chakra was trying to tell me. I found websites like this one: https://www.chakras.info/throat-chakra/ where I quickly realized that my long silence about my experiences with emotional abuse, betrayal and abandonment needed to be broken in order for me to be fully truthful about my life. My throat chakra was blocked, and I needed to start expressing and communicating what has been on my heart and mind for so long.

The problem was, as Dr. Bessel von der Kolk, M.D. points out in his landmark book about trauma (The Body Keeps the Score), finding words for the deeply traumatizing experiences we have is not so simple. But, once I KNEW I needed to speak, I was able to start working on finding those words. It led me to find a betrayal trauma recovery group in the fall of 2021, something that in 2007 would have been either non-existent, too hard to find, or perpetuating messaging that further harms victims of betrayal trauma and emotional abuse instead of helping. The betrayal trauma recovery group I found in 2021 helped me learn the language I needed to start describing all the trauma that had been floating around in my body, mind and spirit for 14 years.

And so, here I am. A weird woo-woo meta-physical experience and now I’m cautiously sharing my thoughts about what happened to me. And as I share, I heal. I still struggle painfully to come up with a blog post more frequently than once per month. I know, I know, bloggers “should” be a lot more prolific. But, it’s really, really hard to wrestle all the thoughts and feelings that have grown out of the experiences I’ve had into a coherent written piece that is fit for human consumption. I agonize over how poorly the words actually describe the feeling of the experience. But, it’s all I’ve got.

There are other reasons for the long silence. There are many other things that kept my throat Chakra blocked. Not just the difficulty of coming up with the words. Lots of reasons. Some of them, I still don’t understand. Maybe a topic for another post. Reasons why so many women don’t speak out about this, because it is a BIG problem. Betrayal trauma is no joke. But because it is so every day, so normalized in our society, I don’t think we really understand how much having so many people walking the streets, driving their cars, joining meetings, running errands dragging around this much pain is slowing ALL of us down. We really do need to talk about this a lot more. There’s got to be a way to stop this.