Discovering the Musical Body

Tami Simon: You’re listening to “Insights at the Edge.” Today I speak with David Ison. For more than 30 years, David has been a musician, composer, recording artist, and teacher. Health-care professionals throughout the world have used his work to bring the therapeutic qualities of sound and music to their patients. Through The Relaxation Company and Sounds True, David has created many albums, including The Musical Body series and The Ison Sleep System, as well as several albums designed to address pain management. I spoke to David about his own journey of discovery, how sound and music can be healing, about breath entrainment, and about how sound can actually unbind what blocks us energetically. Here’s my conversation with David Ison.

David, I know that your own commitment and now decades of work in the field of music and healing came actually from a difficult event in your life, a very terrible car accident. To begin with, I’m wondering if you can tell us a little bit about what happened, and your response in terms of turning to music as a force for healing.

David Ison: Yes, I’d be glad to. In 1980, I was married at the time, and my former wife and I lived on Cape Cod. She was driving, and she went through a stop sign at a very fast speed and hit a car head-on. I went through the windshield feet first; I was lying down with my feet on the dashboard, I broke my back and I was caught in the windshield. That was pretty scary, and so I was in the hospital.

Before that, I’d been practicing meditation, a particular kind of meditation that I learned from a wonderful man named Jack Schwarz. He published several books—he’s passed on now—on creative meditation, and he was the founder of the Aletheia Foundation. I had been practicing his techniques of chakra work and balancing the energy centers in the body through breath control, and part of that included a type of breathing that created a deep state of relaxation through controlled breathing and working through the autonomic nervous system.

So here I was in the hospital, and I couldn’t walk, and I was in a whole lot of pain, and I was really scared. I was only 30 then, you know, so I was a relatively young man. They wanted to give me a spinal fusion operation and a bunch of other stuff, and I just said, “No, let me do what I’m doing.” What I was doing was practicing these breathing techniques, and in so doing, I was dropping my pulse below 40, and [I had] really low blood pressure.

They would come around every four hours, you know, to take your vitals, and after the second day they sent a group of people and they said, “OK, so what are you doing? Because this is consistent, and this is not normal!” That’s when they said, “We want to do a spinal fusion.”

I said, “No. Let me do what I’m doing.” And because it was a teaching hospital in Boston, they were open to letting me do what I was doing, so I asked them to bring a light table—which is, you know, a way of showing X-rays—and I asked them to bring my X-ray and an X-ray of a not-broken back, and put them up next to each other. I could look at that, visualize that, and then I had a little handheld tape recorder, and I would talk to myself and count to myself the breathing counts that Jack had taught me. I did that for about two weeks, and they let me do it, and I walked out of the hospital.

TS: Now let’s just pause for one second. Can you tell me what exactly you were doing? What breathing technique were you doing?

DI: I was interested and needing to do two, maybe three things. First, I needed to maintain the lowest possible vibrational rate within my body that I personally could do. You know, Tibetan yogis and other folks can drop down much further than I was capable of doing, especially at that point, but the first intention was to breathe in such a way that it would create this deep state of relaxation and its attendant drop in pulse and blood pressure.

But equally important, and going to point number two, is that I needed to slow down my brainwave activity and get into a deeper delta state through the breath, through my own working with the autonomic nervous system.

Then number three: What I needed to do was learn to turn my eyes inward and begin to see inside of my body, and in this particular case, be able to see the bone chips that were pressing up against my spinal cord down at the fourth and fifth vertebrae, so that I could “dissolve” those bone chips and get them to go away so that they weren’t interfering with the electrochemical and electromagnetic flow of the energy in my spine.

And then, last but not least, I needed to emotionally and physically/emotionally come to grips with the nature of purpose and the character and the quality of intent. This situation put me in the cauldron of those energies. Before, in the ten years I was meditating and practicing, doing what I was doing, the sense of purpose was what it was, but here, faced with not being able to walk and being in a tremendous amount of pain, being a young person and having a whole life in front of me, purpose became very well-understood at that point. The breathing and the meditating took on a spiritual aspect at that level.

TS: OK, so just to make both of these points a little more clear for me: in terms of purpose, what did you discover about this while you were in the hospital?

DI: I discovered that purpose is an energy. It’s a physically quantifiable essence, and it lives outside of us; there’s a universal purpose that’s palpable and touchable and knowable. And then as we say, “As above, so below” or “The inner and the outer need to be harmonized.” I learned about those laws in this instance, and I learned about the essence of the energy of purpose within my mind, body, and spirit structure within my physical being. And purpose needs a direction, if you will. In order for purpose to be applied, as opposed to just being sort of an energetic, chaotic thing, it needs to be focused. This is where intent comes in. Intention and will enter into the field here.

To move a little bit ahead, I learned that all of this work was breathing with the chakras. I learned about the prana—or chi or kundalini, whichever anybody would like to call this energy that is the primal life-force that is moving through the body, and particularly coursing up the spine and moving through the energy centers of the body. I learned how to manipulate that, and that’s purpose, if you get my meaning. You can’t do that without choosing to do so, and that choice is the thing that activates that energy of purpose. I learned about that. Before I had the accident, I didn’t know about that; I didn’t have a need, if you will, to know about that, but when I was faced with this deep trauma, the need generated the purpose.

TS: Mm-hmm. Now, you talked about identifying purpose as an energy both inside and outside the body, and you’re describing it inside the body as a directionality, if you will, through the chakras. What did you discover about purpose outside the body? Is there a purpose, David, to what’s going on around here? I’d love to know what it is!

DI: Well, it’s funny, and I don’t mean to be trite or something about things, but the first level of purpose for every human consciousness, and perhaps for every existing thing, the first level of purpose is to learn what the purpose is. [Laughs] I know that sounds funny, but it’s actually true! I mean, hence your question, you know? It’s the same thing! So the first purpose is to learn what the purpose is, and that’s a lovely thing if you think about it. It’s something that everybody shares.

Then we move up the ladder of purpose. Purpose, like so many things, has multiple levels to it. It’s not just one static layer. There’s a ladder of consciousness, and there’s an attending ladder of purpose. I think that the universal purpose is nicely identified as being learning to— Again, Tami, you can move through so many levels of this, but I think that the universal purpose is to come to know the function and the form of unity, and to move and to allow the consciousness to know the meaning and the form and the function of unity. That is the path. The path is to move the consciousness toward this notion, and toward the embodiment of unification. The universal purpose is to unite with what is already in union. Do you get my meaning about that?

TS: I do. That’s wonderful. Thank you.

I do want to track back for a moment, because I’m still sort of with you in the hospital, if you will. Here you are, you’re inside your body, you’re making these discoveries, and you mentioned about how you really worked with your breathing. I know a big part of the music that you compose and create has to do with this idea of breath entrainment. In fact, there’s a phrase you’ve even coined: “The Ison Breath Effect.” You have a breath effect named after you! The Ison Breath Effect! So what I want to get clear about is, here you are in the hospital: Was it simply a question of slowing your breathing down? Were you breathing from a certain part of your body, like down in the lower abdomen? Tell me what you learned about this healing form of breathing.

DI: Well, like I was saying a moment ago, there are many layers to this. In the initial stages of just purely creating the relaxation response, and dropping pulse and blood pressure, and accessing the autonomic nervous system through slowing the consciousness rate of vibration down, there is a specific breathing pattern that one learns. And yes, by learning this pattern and performing it, you will step into the relaxation response.

That pattern is also related to resonating with the particular energy centers. Each energy center has a breathing pattern that’s associated with it, and these patterns are elongated in-breaths and elongated out-breaths, and then there is some period of holding the breaths in between the exhalation and the inhalation. It gets slightly complex for the layperson, if you will, at that level. Particularly as you’re climbing the ladder of the chakras, you know, by the time you get to the fifth chakra and above the heart, the breaths are really quite long. You have to be really well-versed in doing it to even sustain that kind of breathing pattern.

I learned all of that, and then I learned that there was a fundamental breathing pattern, based on a seven-second inhalation and a seven-second exhalation, and that when the body would breathe in this way, it would pretty much guarantee anybody can experience the relaxation response, with its attending drop in pulse and blood pressure and the slowing down of the brainwaves, through this particular breathing pattern out of all of them. It’s “easy,” and it’s the easiest out of all of them.

So when I was in recovery, after I’d left the hospital—to much fanfare, I might add; there was like applause and stuff with the nurses, it was really great. When I went home, and now I was in recovery—and I still was in bad shape, I couldn’t really walk that well—I set up a room, and it was my first room where I set up a practice. I had my rugs and symbols and sacred geometry and all my books and my instruments, and I could lay down, and I could meditate in this laying-down position, and begin to pull the energy up my spine with consciousness, with work.

At the same time I was doing this deep experimenting based on Jack’s programs and my own discoveries now about purpose and intent, and tapping into the energy of those things—which are living in the root chakra, by the way. The root chakra is vibrating with four essences: creation, purpose, identity, and intent. Those essences are what is moving up the ladder of consciousness, and they’re transmuting and going through their various changes as you move up the ladder. I was able to latch onto those things, grab a hold of them, and pull that energy up my spine.

At the same time, I had many books. I’m a musician, and I’ve been a musician since I was 11, so I’m always composing. At that time, I had written lots of songs and sold songs and been a performer, but I had no experience with the therapeutic use of sound. I had glimmers of it, because everybody in the musical land knows that when you play a major chord, it’s happy, and when you play a minor chord, it’s sad. And so, with that little, tiny glimmer of therapeutic value, I began to obtain sacred volumes. This was in the days before eBay, when you had to go forth and find things, you know? I was always a collector of magic books and practices, and so I got a hold of ancient Ayurvedic texts, and these texts described key signatures and rates of vibration that were associated with each energy center, lo and behold! Who knew?

So I started to work with these texts. I practiced Tibetan three-note singing, so I’m like [sings tones], and I’m lying down, and I’m doing that, but I have a little, tiny guitar, a 1903 Martin guitar that somebody gave me when I broke my back. It was so light! I still have it; it’s right here in this room. The thing weighs as much as a feather, it’s so light and beautiful and old. I would put it on my chest and read the texts, get my mind into purpose and into intent, and then pluck the string that was the note of the energy center that I was reading about in these ancient Ayurvedic texts, and then tone that note in the Tibetan three-note singing style. And all of a sudden, the world began to change! I was activating the energy centers with sound.

TS: You know, you’re pretty good at that overtone singing thing!

DI: Oh, thanks! [Laughs]

TS: Did you just start experimenting with that and discover that you could do it?

DI: Yes, it just kind of popped out. You know, I’m a Tibetan practitioner at another level, and I have a great deal of resonance with that thing. You know, two years later, after I came out of all of this, I wrote soundtracks for films in Cambridge; that’s how I made money. I made some money, and we built a recording studio in Cambridge, behind MIT. It was in a house; we bought a house there, when you could buy houses in Cambridge, and we built a studio. Of course it was called In-House, because it was in a house. In that environment, because I owned the studio and I wasn’t constrained by money and hours of time—you know, because when you’re in the studio, all you do is sit there and look at your watch and count down $125 an hour, but when you own it, you don’t have to do that. I spent two years in the studio creating music that emulated the breathing pattern. I figured out a way of creating chord structures that rise and fall according to this seven- or eight-second inhalation and exhalation. It took about two years of sporadic experimentation to get that right.

I remember the day it happened: We were all in the studio, there were about ten people, and I played this track and I laid it into the computer, and then I played the other track. I played the track of rising chords, and then I played the track of falling chords. Then I played them back and cross-faded with faders in between them, so that I could do it for the seven seconds in the inhalation and the exhalation. I did this for 20 minutes, and we recorded that movement. I got everybody and pressed “Go,” and they were all in the studio room, and everybody started breathing in time with the music! And I didn’t tell anybody anything! I just said, “Here. Listen to this,” and they all started breathing! It was just the most amazing thing; it was really fulfilling. That was the beginning of TheraSound.

TS: Now, in just a moment, I want to hear some of the music from this creation. Really this was the birth of your Musical Body series. Is that correct?

DI: Well, actually, yes, but no. The first piece that came out was a piece called “Balance.” It’s a very famous piece of music, and some people say it’s the first actual real therapeutic piece of music. That came out in 1985, and through various twists and turns of life, I began to work on The Musical Body program around 1985. I didn’t complete that until 1990.

It took five years to make it, and I was on that every day for five years. I gave up everything. I sold the studio, I went into vipassana for the first time—I gave up practicing all the other practices, and I went and learned vipassana—and I gave up my studio, and I got a house in Newton. I set up a little tiny recording studio in my living room, and I just, as they say in music, musicians go and we woodshed. I was shedding; I just shed, and worked on my own body, my own energy centers, my own psyche. I lost my mind, so much so that my girlfriend at the time (I finally was not married anymore to Stacy, who put me through the windshield), my girlfriend Laura, a loving, kind woman, she said, “You need to go and see your real father.”

I had never met my real father in my life, and the heart chakra, I couldn’t do it. I was insane. She put me on a plane, and I flew to California and met my real father because of the work on The Musical Body program.

TS: So you mean the song that we’re about to hear, which is in the key of C, that in order for you to actually create this, you had to have your own heart opening that involved going to visit your father, with whom you were estranged?

DI: Who I’d never met!

TS: Who you’d never met!

DI: Who I’d never met, and I was 38 years old. My mother had kept me from meeting my real father my whole entire life, because of the terrible things—in her mind—that he had done. Lo and behold, I meet my father, and he’s a doctor! He’s an MD, and he’s a classical pianist! The rest is history.

I was so crazy when I went to meet my father—and he had a house in Three Rivers, California, this beautiful house in the mountains, in the Sierra Nevadas—and I was talking all this stuff! I’d never met this person, and I was talking all of this business about chakras and energy centers and key signatures and rates of vibration, and purpose and intent and this kind of business. And he said, “I know a place where I think you should go.” He actually said that!

I said, “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you give me that Volkswagen van over there, and I’ll drive up into the Sierra Nevadas, and I’m going to do a seven-day meditation course by myself, and I’m going to come back, and I’ll be OK.” I did that, and I didn’t even have a name yet for The Musical Body, but I had all seven pieces completed, and I came back down, and I had the picture of the Musical Body drawn, and the whole thing, and I was just fine. That’s how that happened.

TS: So David, can you tell us just a little bit about the track that we’re about to hear?

DI: Yes. This is “The Key of C.” It’s from The Musical Body program. The key of C resonates with the first chakra in the energetic body. This music will help you breathe in such a way as to drop your pulse and blood pressure, and to come into the body. The root chakra is about many things: It’s about creation. It’s about purpose. It’s about “Who am I?” It’s also very much about grounding, and so the energy of grounding is in this piece of music, and the purpose of the use of the key of C is to come into the body and truly experience the joys of incarnation, because lots of us don’t want to be here, you know, but we actually are here! [Laughs] I made this piece so it will hopefully help people ground and come into the body.

TS: Wonderful. [Musical interlude] Now, is the idea, David, when listening to a piece of music from The Musical Body that’s designed to open the energy of a certain chakra, is it opening? Do I feel the root chakra in my being change while I’m listening to your music? As I was listening, I felt this sort of whole-body effect, so I’m curious about that.

DI: First of all, that’s a very good question. And second of all, it’s not that you were having that particular whole-body experience. The answer is yes, each energy center is resonating at a particular rate of vibration. This goes back to the Ayurvedic work, and the Chinese work, by the way. A rate of vibration is like—for example, the key of A is 440 cycles a second. If you will, there’s no such thing as the key of A. There is the rate of vibration of 440 cycles a second, and we have assigned that value of “the key of A” to that rate of vibration. That rate of vibration happens to correspond to the rate of vibration of the brow chakra. Moving to the root chakra, and this concept of rates of vibration becoming key signatures—this enables musicians and composers to create music that is performed in the key signature that is the rate of vibration of the energy center.

If you take that premise, and now here’s another one: this is called resonance or entrainment. I can take a tuning fork, two tuning forks, both in the key of C. I strike one of the tuning forks, and I hold the other tuning fork, without striking it, up against the one that is vibrating. What happens is the non-struck tuning fork begins to vibrate along with the one that is struck and is vibrating. This is the theory—it’s not really a theory, it’s the function—of resonance. I applied this function to creating music, to composing music. What I do is study, deeply, both interiorly in my own experience, and through constantly updating and experiencing ancient texts, about rates of vibration and their harmonic correlation to energy centers.

That’s the theory in that zone. And now what happens is that as we walk through life, and we’re human beings on this path, working on our purpose, working through life, the vicissitudes of life do their thing, particularly in 2010 as the world crashes in on us, and we live in the world, all of our energy bodies are completely out of tune. They’re shut down. Out of tune is equated with shutting down, or as I call it, bound. They’re bound. So the energy centers are bound up, and “blocked” is another word. What’s blocked is the free-flowing movement of vital force.

Small aside: that’s what you experience when you say “a whole-body experience.” The key of C resonates with the root chakra to such a nice degree that it actually, in that very short period of time, can get the body to breathe in a certain way, and in so doing actually help to release the vital force that is held in the root chakra. That’s why it’s a whole-body experience, and that’s why it’s a grounding experience, because the root chakra is the seat of the essence of the vital force. It’s what they call “the fire,” “the creative fire.” This is why you always see a serpent coiled down at the bottom of Hindu drawings of the energy centers. Does that answer your question?

TS: Yes. So we’re bound up, and the music unbinds us. Our energy system begins to resonate with the vibratory key of the music.

DI: Yes, which is the frequency of the energy center. And through the phenomenon of resonance, the energy center comes into vibrational contact with an external sound source (i.e., the music). And like the two tuning forks, it resonates with its optimal frequency, the rate of vibration of the energy center. When it resonates with that optimal frequency, it opens up. To use a term, it becomes unbound.

TS: OK. Now I want to go back to this image of you lying down, doing the Tibetan overtone singing with the feather on top of your chakras. How does this discovery, the discoveries that you’ve now put into your music, relate to the overtones, the singing, and the feather on top of you?

DI: What I would do is locate the frequencies, translate them into key signatures (documents in the Ayurvedic land do that), and then I would pluck the string that was in that key, like the key of C, the key of G, the key of A. And at the same time, when I was plucking the string and it was lying on my chest, the vibration of the string in the key signature, which is the rate of vibration of the energy center, would go into my chest and go into my body. At the same time I was doing that, I was doing the breathing thing for each energy center, and getting myself to be in that deep relaxation place, and so I was doing both of those things at the same time. Lastly, I would tone, and use the three-tone technique, which is a very ancient technique. It’s one of the oldest instruments, the body; the body is an instrument, singing. At that point I would use a tone, to use a term, in the key signature that I was plucking on the guitar, and so I was getting the tonality of the [sings Tibetan tone] and I would get that tonality in my chest cavity, and in the practice of that thing.

What you would do is you’d isolate entities that are in the body. I don’t know if you know this, I mean this is a very specific thing. You isolate entities that are looked at as sankaras in the body. These are entities that are desires and attachments and things that are binding the body. By shooting, with intention, that vibration that is contained in the three-tone singing to that area of the body, you help dissolve and unbind that entity. You don’t kill it. You don’t remove it. You just resolve the issues that are underneath the entity.

TS: That’s a very interesting word: “entity.”

DI: Yes. It’s very Jungian, you know.

TS: I mean, an entity is like a being.

DI: Yes. It’s just a way of understanding archetypes, and it’s a way of understanding how the trauma— Back to the binding: you see, the thing that’s binding the entity back to the energy center is the traumas of everyday life, and then the individual traumas that one might go through—for example, like not knowing one’s father, like having an accident and breaking your back. These traumas bind up the energy body, and hold and keep the chi from free-flowing through the body, which then keeps the essential self—which is the whole point of all this work, to clear out the pathways within the mind and body system for the essential self to come forward into the heart. This is the entire purpose of the practice: to experience the vibrational rate of the unfettered heart, which is the expression of unity and the expression of the beauty of the inner and outer being simultaneously, of the macro and micro being harmonized, and of all four essences (purpose, creation, identity, and intent) being one with the movement of giving and receiving simultaneously.

TS: Mmm. Beautiful.

DI: Tami, that is the purpose, OK?

TS: Beautiful! Now, of course I’m interested in more unbinding, which means we’re going to listen to another piece of music in just a few moments. But leading up to it, I want to listen to some music that’s from the work that you’ve done with pain management, because I mean, if ever there was an instance of feeling bound, I think it’s when we feel pain—physical pain, emotional pain of some kind. I’m wondering if you could just talk a little bit about how you’ve incorporated these discoveries into music that helps people with pain management.

DI: Well, being a person who lived through and still does live with chronic pain, I have a deep interest, from a service standpoint, of helping folks get some relief from pain without addicting narcotics. In my own personal experience, I found very much how breath control and relaxation techniques through the breath and through meditation, to use a term, were very, very helpful in relieving pain. Through the work of “Balance” and through the work of The Musical Body program, I learned and had many wonderful experiences with patients and with practitioners who would talk about the experiences they were having with the unbinding of the energy centers, and how oftentimes there was the sense of relief of pain, “letting go” of pain, that happened to them when they listened to The Musical Body program or other pieces. That led me to think that I should try to turn my attention to actually constructing some music that was specifically designed to help folks let go and relieve pain.

The binding concept is an overarching function in the work (and it applies here very much) where pain is pain. To use a term, we “hold” the body. Pain will create a posture in the body. It’s a way of holding the body so that you don’t have the pain. You know, you’ll sit in one way, or you’ll arch your foot one way, or you’ll lie down one way, or your neck will move one way, and you’ll be holding the body. This holding, over time, creates a posture. It creates a mental posture, an emotional posture, and a physical posture. Just like the binding, which also creates its own posture in the chakras, in the energy centers, the binding will cause mental and physical postures—it’s the same thing with pain; pain will generate these ways of holding the body. This concept of holding is a very big concept in the therapeutic use of sound, and just in the energetic work that I do in general. We’ve called these things “letting go” or “unbinding,” things like this. There’s a basic premise that the body is holding the trauma of the source of the pain at the location of the trauma. There’s a lot of nice work about fascia, and the grid of the fascia in the body, and how the fascia is the bridge between the mind and the body, and the fascia is the place where the trauma is physically held in the body.

So, armed with all this knowledge and the intention of serving and helping folks come to get some relief in a non-pharmacological, non-addictive format, and to help people come to know themselves and to know that they can do this work. I’m not anti-drug, anti-pain medication, but I am very much an advocate of the patient learning to take responsibility for some of their own healing, and so it’s with that type of outlook that I set out to create the pain-management program.

It’s a two-CD set. One CD is designed to resonate and help the body let go of the pain and the trauma, let go of the holding. You see, as the body holds, it tenses. It’s tension, right? It creates tension. This tension is a good thing in the beginning of the trauma, but it turns pathogenic, to use a term, over time. It becomes unhealthy, and it doesn’t allow healing to occur. That’s what swelling is over time. That’s why people take Tylenol, or you apply ice, or you apply heat. It’s so that the swelling can stop, because when it’s still swollen, and all that blood is rushing down there, it won’t let go. So the tension is still there, and it continues to perpetuate the pain. Breathing is very good for this, and so one CD is about breathing into the body and helping the body.

The interesting thing about the pain-management program is— Not in any order of importance, the second CD is designed to work with emotional trauma, which in my experience is half, if not more, of the chronic-pain journey that any individual suffering from chronic pain is on. What happens is, just like the body is holding the trauma, the mind is holding the trauma. Suppose your mother abused you, or your uncle abused you, or something bad happened, or that you were in a bad car accident. The memory of this abuse, the memory of this trauma, is held in the body. It’s held in the mind, and it’s held in the body, and you need to let that go! As long as you’re holding on to that, the pain will cycle around and cycle around and cycle around, and you’ll find yourself caught in the circle of chronic pain. I designed the second CD to deal with this emotional aspect of chronic pain. It has a very nice effect, and I think it’s fairly unique in the annals of pain management to develop a program that’s both body and mind.

TS: And I want to listen to this piece from the pain-management program that’s on letting go of anxiety, the emotional aspect of physical pain. As we’re listening, do you have any recommendations? Should we breathe in a certain way while we’re listening, or relax in a certain kind of way?

DI: Yes, sure. It would be nice if all of us would listen to this composition for a few cycles of it, and you’ll hear these lovely bell tones. They’re really beautiful. They’re ancient Tibetan bells, by the way. These are not digital things; they’re actual bronze bells that I have. You’ll hear the bell, and then you’ll see that there is a period of time in between that bell and the next bell. That period of time is approximately seven to eight seconds, and that is the in-breath, and then the bell tones, and it lets you know, from the tone, that it’s time to exhale. Then the next tone happens, and the cycle continues. I use those bells as a way of helping the listener key in to the precise breathing-pattern that will create the relaxation response and help in this letting-go process.

At another level, Tami, we hope that what will happen is, over many days of using the work, that the person will begin to experience the relaxation response very quickly, but in so doing they will find themselves in a safe sonic environment that will allow them to observe and witness the source of their emotional trauma, and not run away from it, not be angry about the position that they find themselves in, not be full of guilt or rage about the fact that they can’t walk, or that it’s difficult to get out of bed, or that they’re angry at the person who hurt them. Hopefully, by creating this safe environment, their consciousness is allowing the reception of this deeply held trauma, and it’s allowing it to come forward in the consciousness through the container of beautiful music.

TS: Let’s listen to part of The Ison Pain Management System. [Musical interlude] One of the things that’s so unique about your work is it’s actually been clinically tested and validated. I know that the National Institutes of Health has actually done a study of the impact of your music. Can you tell us a little bit about that, both how the study came into being and what has been shown, what has been proven?

DI: Well, in my life as a musician and artist and practitioner, the idea that the National Institutes of Health, which is the holy of holies, would seek me out and research my work is extraordinary! I am forever honored and forever grateful for that!

Here’s how that happened; it’s a nice story. Dr. Jim Gordon, he’s the founder of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine, and he’s quite a character. Those of us who have been in this business, like you and like me, you know we’ve gone through the change from “alternative medicine” to “complimentary medicine” to “integrative medicine.” We’ve gone through that change all the way from the 1980s to where we are now, and certainly Jim was a big part of that. He was actually—this was after the study, but he became the head of the alternative medicine arm of the NIH.

At any rate, Jim had this place in the middle 1990s (which he still does) called the Center for Mind-Body Medicine. He had me come and do a nice workshop there, which I did, and unbeknownst to me, he invited his friends from the NIH to come and attend this workshop. I didn’t know that. So they came, and it was a big success, and it was really great. You know, it was supposed to last from seven to nine at night, and there were only supposed to be 80 people there. There was like 200 people, and at midnight I was still on the stage processing people through the harmonizer and being the Lenny Bruce of the sound-healing movement! It was really, really a nice thing.

Six months later, I’m at my desk in Concord, Massachusetts, and my secretary comes in and says, “The National Institutes of Health is on the phone.” And I’m like, “What?” I pick up the phone and this guy says, “This is Dr. George Patrick from the NIH. I’m chief of rehabilitative medicine.” Now I’m basically on the floor. I can’t believe this! He says, “We went to the Jim Gordon thing, and we got your Musical Body program, and we got “Balance,” and we’ve been playing it and using it with our patients here. We’ve determined that this music creates, physically, the relaxation response, and it drops pulse and blood pressure, without even telling people what to do to do it. We’ve figured out that this is real, real enough for us to now fund a three-year study with like 287 patients, and so we were just going to call you up and say that that’s what we’re going to do.” And that’s basically how that happened.

TS: And what has the three-year study revealed? Anything definitive? And how was it measured?

DI: It’s very definitive, as definitive as what we call “experiential” research can be. As you know, during the evolution of alternative medicine and integrative medicine, there began to be a need for different research models, as opposed to the double-blind tests. There began to be a need for models that were not based on the traditional approach, especially in terms of energetic work and things like this, so they developed what they call tools of measuring based on experience and real-time experience, which were employed in this study.

It was a three-year study, and they would put people in chairs to lie down. These were all kinds of people, from AIDS patients to physical trauma patients to cancer patients to just accident-related people. There was a large variety and a large population. They would play the music, they would take pulse and blood pressure before and after, and they would ask various questions during the sessions. The people were instructed to raise their finger if it was “Yes,” and to not raise their finger if it was “No.” This was a way of collecting real-time data and experiential data, as well as taking pulse and blood pressure and some other measurements.

What they found was that certainly the relaxation response and the dropping of pulse and blood pressure is very consistent in using the music over a twenty-minute period of time. Secondarily, and much more interestingly, is that there were a number of symptoms—like headaches, like pain, like dizziness and nausea, and a list of symptoms—that are associated with illness and trauma, and all of these symptoms showed a drop. They measured a drop of 54 percent, pretty much across the board of all of these symptoms that are associated with trauma and pain.

TS: That’s a very definitive result, as you said, a 54-percent drop. That’s huge.

DI: It’s real! And then a lot of these symptoms—it’s very interesting, you know, a lot of these symptoms are emotional in nature, and that brings us to the pain-management idea. It also brings us to the binding idea, it brings us to the letting-go idea, and the emotional component of a spiritual practice, and the emotional component of pain management and relaxation and stress reduction.

TS: Tell us a little bit about the piece we’re going to hear from Relax, which is scheduled to come out early in 2011.

DI: Well, I’d like to preface that by saying this: Music is a wonderful and ancient vehicle for spiritual growth, personal growth, and healing. Music is the bridge between the etheric essence, the realm of essence; this realm is where the Golden Proportion lives, where the Fibonacci series lives, where the energies of purpose and the essences of identity and intention, these live behind the veil of the physical world. Those things, like the Golden Proportion, are in fact proportions, and they’re ratios, and in fact those ratios and those proportions are harmonic in nature. Music is harmony, and it’s harmonic in nature. Music is the bridge between those etheric constants, those essences of universal energies, and music is the physical harmonic representation of those proportions. Composed correctly, using those proportions and using clear intention and clear purpose, music can pull those proportions down into the physical realm, and provide the listener with an experience of those very essences, [and it does this] by representing those essences as the proportions that they appear as in nature. Music is the only art form that does that.

We would like to share with people how much we have lost in the art of music and the magic of tone, and how much sacred work has gone on in the dark past, in the long past, in the ancient past, and how far away we’ve come from the use of music as a healing and as a spiritual tool. I would like to hope that my work is helping renew that spirit. I have dedicated my life to learning those laws, and to being able to compose accordingly. I just wanted to say that.

TS: A beautiful statement. And I can assure you, David, that the work that you’re doing is helping to reclaim this highest function of sound and music in the world. I can assure you of that.

DI: Thanks, Tami. So the new piece, “Relax,” is my newest composition. It uses the sacred-breath effect and the breathing patterns, but they change in the piece itself. The piece is an hour long. It’s a full composition that lasts an hour, so it has as its bed, at the bottom of it, the breath-effect chord structures, but this is overlaid by melodic counterparts that express emotion, that are designed to tell a story of emotional fulfillment, of peace, and of longing. It’s an expression of those emotions that sit on top of the breath effect. And the sum total of all of this harmony together, in my experience, is one of the most beautiful pieces that I’ve ever written. I’m just really thrilled that it has found a home in Sounds True, because it’s a really special piece of music, and it’s very different, and yet at the same time it’s tapped into that ancient spiritual path. So that’s the new piece called “Relax.” [Musical interlude]

TS: David, it’s been fabulous to be with you, and to have an introduction to your musical work. There are so many things about life on the spiritual path that, for me at least, are hard and challenging, and being able to listen to that kind of music, to sit back and breathe, is a great joy, is a great balm, so thank you! Thank you so much.

DI: You’re very welcome, Tami.

TS: David Ison has created many programs that are available through SoundsTrue.com, including The Ison Sleep System,</ The Ison Pain Management System, a nine-CD set on The Musical Body, as well as a transformational musical journey that’s called The Musical Body: Vitalizer. And then, coming out early next year, a CD called Relax. SoundsTrue.com: many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.

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