Dear Subscribers,

Of all the emails and essays I have posted online, it is absolutely obvious to me that the person with the most lasting impact on your imaginations has been Morrnah Simeona.  It has been fascinating for me to see how wide her circle has become so it being Sunday, I wanted to share one of the most valuable teachings I ever received.  Lest you jump over it as just too simplistic, let me say that taking in the depth and exploring the ramifications has taken me at least three decades, in short about half a lifetime and my entire really adult life, if in fact I am actually an adult because I sometimes have occasion to question that.

The context was deceptively simple.  In her capacity as an expert in lomi lomi, Hawaiian massage, some young massage students wanted Morrnah's opinion on Rolfing.  When you are with a gifted teacher, it probably behooves each of us to learn how to phrase our questions, but with certification in the works, there were many schools of massage popping up and each, of course, had its own history and theories.  Morrnah's answer was:

“Whatever does not feel good to the subconscious is resisted by the unihipili.”

Just think about it. Unlike me, she rarely took hours to express herself. 

Since I was not studying massage, the answer that was relevant to those contemplating becoming Rolfers was not important so the first opportunity I had to work on a deep level with this valuable explanation of the unihipili came shortly after I moved to Santa Fe and became almost immediately involved with some people doing past life regressions using a combination of massage and classical music.

In this case, the massage was deceptively simple because the idea behind it was to lift the memories out of the physical body and the motion used for that was something like kneading bread, usually firm but gentle.  No oils were used because the technique affected the etheric body more than the physical body and the interesting observation I made was that once this process started, the energy moved more or less independently of the therapist's hands because clients often maintained that the pressure was hurting the head when actually the hands were on the feet.  So much for certainty!

It was believed by those who practiced the Well Springs Technique that the music and massage had to be used together and that no results could be expected when relying exclusively on one or the other.  I actually found this not to be true, but that is a long story and it won't fit into an email.

The question was always the choice of music, when to make changes in the music, and what is amazing for an outsider is how complex the literature and convictions are about such unknown issues as the effect of music on the psyche.  My book is still unpublished though I suspect it could fit into some category now but when I wrote it in the early 80's, it was politely rejected by 30 publishers on the basis that it didn't fit with any other titles they were marketing.  That itself was a lesson on what it is like to have an original idea that cannot be catalogued because the system does not have a number for it.

The usual way a session started was by asking the client what kind of music he or she liked, the theory being that "familiar" is a very good place to start.  The parameters were simple enough:  the music must be well performed and classical, but it could come from any era or culture.  It was believed that the music is not at all suggestive and most of this theory seems to be at least superficially correct.  By this, I mean that the Chinese music does not elicit memories of incarnations in China.

I remember asking one young man for his prefeence and he said, "Any tribal drumming would be fine."  When I said I probably didn't have any such CDs, he said, "Well, how about Rachmaninoff." Kay Ortmans, the creative force behind the Well Springs Technique, would have loved the suggestion because she was very prone to using even heavier Russian music, such as Moussorgsky, the idea being that lots of noise and dissonance forces open heavily secured locks on the vaults in the subconscious.  Being far more Neptunian, I found seduction more to my liking so I tended to select music with very high melodic appeal that felt safe and attractive. 

In short, applying the lesson from Morrnah, "whatever doesn't feel good, the body resists," I chose music that I felt would be pleasing because it is a bit like what I was telling you about the horse.  Once he found someone who would listen to him, he wanted to be touched:  first, here, then, there. 

So, let's not try to get to past lives.  Let's stay in the present and take something as common place (and lamentable) as discord between parents.  There is an interesting composer named Gerald Markoe who explains the horoscope in Pythagorean musical terms.  He says, and this is all from memory from eons ago, that if you take a string and hold it in the middle, the sound goes up an octave and that this is the normal difference between a male and female voice.  Astrologically, it is the distance from the first house to the seventh -- which my astrology teacher, Ivy Jacobson, said is where you agree to disagree. 

Without writing another unpublishable book, let me just say that the unconscious hears music in a completely different manner than the conscious self.  So, those octaves can actually speak to deep emotional issues, but let me give an example that is much more obvious.  I was working with someone who was in the early stages of a shamanic journey.  She was very attractive but devastated by her marital failures.  We did about ten sessions together, many with the Faure Requiem.  In each session the material that arose was completely different, but in the first, she heard the "voices" harmonizing and she realized she could work out her issues now that she had truly heard the way the voices could be safely blended.  Interestingly, one can have a similar experience with instruments other than the voice, but the separation of the octave seems to be one key although obviou! sly, this is hugely simplified for purposes of this post.

In the altered state, most people "hear" things that are not on the recording.  I will risk embarrassing myself royally by mentioning that after a session in which I was the client, I commented to the therapist, "That was an interesting recording of the Dvorak Cell Concerto.  I never heard a vocal interpretation."  She looked at me dumbfounded and showed me the CD cover.  Well, this was to repeat itself over and over again.  In fact, I attended a seminar/concert with a troubadour harpist named Erik Berglund in which he played mostly very simple tunes in the key of C.  It was actually so musically boring to me that I found it easy to escape into another dimension and then, interestingly, I could actually see and hear what all the others in the room were experiencing.  I was born with a photographic memory, which, by the way, I think is natural and I ! believe it is how animals communicate, so I took a "snapshot" of the psychic space and talked to people later.  For instance, I went to one woman and said that she had a gorgeous soprano voice and should just have sung with Erik, not kept it all in her mind.  She was overjoyed to have had that recognition.  My belief is that good music is always inspired and inspiration, of course, comes not just from one's muse but rather through one's soul and all the souls that celebrate with your soul.  It's an amazing chorus actually.

The harp, of course, has a prominent reputation in the music therapy world.  This is probably because it is a rather perfect instrument, but also, it is seductive.  This is very hard to explain in a few words, but after a lifetime of contemplation, I am absolutely convinced that we perceive different sounds through different parts of our own mechanism.  In actuality, this has to be the case.  We are ultimately instruments playing musical scores.  Every note affects our aura and forces organization or reorganization or creates damage.  John Diamond tried to catalogue this and hypothesized, for instance, that certain types of music, such as syncopation, can cause misfiring of synapses.  

There are some wonderful experiments with cymatics involving structural reorganization of soft and pliable substances such as lycopodium or mobile substances like metal filings.  They reorganize with sound so there is, in fact, no more powerful organizing or disorganizing effect on anything than sound and there is nothing more pliable than the aura.  So, if we try to detach from certain common misconceptions, we will realize that we not only live in a psychic soup of dissonance but our auras are the matrices in which we live, not exudations spilling out.  Language can be misleading.  "Animal magnetism" is supposedly a heat radiating from the body that attracts others.  In actuality, it is a "toxic spill" and it's radiatory, not magnetic, and it should be offensive unless we are freezing.

So, while it is possible to spill a bit, by and large, the physics of the aura are the reverse, i.e., what happens in the physical happens first in the subtle and the energy from the subtle is passed into the physical.  On that level, resistance to what does not feel good is absolutely profound so the body reorganizes to block the intrusion and this is the subtle cause of every kind of dense physical congestion.  Relief then depends on unblocking the resistance and here is where mind over matter fails and why the subconscious is actually more honest and dependable than the conscious self.  It does not rationalize and here is another misleading word because there is nothing rational about rationalizing and I think our language is a mess and misleads our minds.

Again, the cinematographic landscape of the subconscious is far more spectacular than the three-dimensions in which we normally exist.  However, here is where the facts are facts and not hypotheses that change with every new edition of information overload in the "real" world.  Moreover, because there is nothing in the subconscious equivalent to the density of the third dimension, there is no opposing force strong enough to transform the subconscious.  The only way to transform the subconscious is to heal it through new experiences that play out differently than the old.  So, going back to the woman with the failed marriages, when her psyche was safe with a male energy that does not feel threatening, she would begin rewriting the emotional file that says, "trouble with men."  In most cases, the new experiences have to repeat and they have to be consistently g! ood or the psyche reverts to its opinion that men cause pain and suffering.  The imagination is a place to practice what you hope eventually to make real in the outer world.

Obviously, I do not want to limit this chatter to boys and girls because the judgment the subconscious places on an experience may not be gender biased.  It may be based on the color of the clothing, like cardinals' robes, or the inflection in the voice, or some quirky gesture.  You cannot possibly understand the idiosyncratic system of the subconscious until you actually start exploring it and this is when true and permanent healing becomes possible.

Blessings,

Ingrid

Copyright by Ingrid Naiman 2009

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