Sound Bathing, Minus the Nonsense

On feeling vibrations in your body

Every few weeks I go to a public space, lay on the ground with strangers, and let crystal singing bowls carry me off into bliss.

The vibe is aggressively wholesome. On offer is a syncretic mashup of Buddhism, Hinduism, Western Occultism, Russian Esotericism, psychedelia, and new age nonsense. This video should help set the scene:

As allergic as I am to all the talk of “awakening” and “transformation”, sound bathing is one of the most viscerally pleasurable activities I engage in, right up there with a post-coital cuddle.

Even stranger, all that “transformation” talk has substance behind it. There are lasting, positive emotional effects—the kind you’d expect from meditation or a psychedelic trip.

What’s going on here?

Outline

• Becoming a Synesthete

• The Bowls

• Solve…

• …et Coagula

• Is this Jhāna?

Becoming a Synesthete

I first learned about synesthesia in undergrad. I was fascinated by exotic states of mind, and even experienced a few minutes of “seeing sounds” during a freshman year mushroom trip. I was envious of people with drug-free access to such rich sensory experience. My day-to-day mode of being felt drab in comparison.

So I was surprised and delighted when, after a couple years of meditation practice, I started to develop sound-touch synesthesia.

I began to feel music in my body.

With a good pair of headphones on, any piece of music would generate intricate, symmetrical patterns of tactile sensation. The nerves in my skin would undulate to the beat; I’d feel low tones in my stomach, and high tones in my head. White noise would create a spreading, tingling sensation; a loud drone note would set every nerve vibrating at the same resonant frequency.

I’d always been keen on music, but this was something new.

And yet, as far as I can tell, that synesthetic link was always there—the meditation practice just helped me notice it. It got me to shift my attention away from my ears and into my body, drawing those tactile sensations into the foreground.

And from my discussions with other meditators, this appears to be true for everyone. Including you, dear reader. You too are a latent synesthete.

Let’s see if I can convince you.

To maximize the effect, we’ll unfortunately have to start at the opposite end of the bliss spectrum. Close your eyes and listen to these jump scare sound effects. Pay particular attention to what’s going on in your body.

Unless you have nerves of steel, you should feel your body tense up a bit at each jolt. For me, it’s like someone tossed a large rock into a calm lake. There’s a sudden splash, and the ripples linger for a few seconds as that initial moment of panic dissipates.

This is easy to explain away as a flight response: you hear a threatening noise, and your muscles tense, preparing to react.

Let’s see how a more predictable sound feels:

(The effect is going to be an order of magnitude more subtle here. You may want to turn up the volume. If you’re not feeling any tactile effect, maybe try the jump scares again to familiarize yourself with the sort of sensation you should be looking for.)

When I listen to this steady kick drum, I feel a scooping or pushing sensation, mainly in my face, arms, and chest, coming forward to meet the sound of the drum. And if I pause the audio, those tactile sensations continue to echo for a few beats, eventually trailing off into the ether.¹ [1]

If you’re still following me, let’s take one step further down the subtlety train:

Sitting here at my desk, it takes a good 30 seconds of quiet sitting to really start to feel the marimbas vibrate inside my head and torso, and even then the effect is soft. But different notes seem to resonate in different places, and recurring motifs trace a circuitous path through my torso. The biggest sensations arise when a new pattern appears, like that first sour note at 1:28—a miniature and much more pleasant jump scare.

Maybe you feel these things too. Maybe not. Maybe you feel something, but you’re not sure if you’re just imagining it. To which I’d say: keep imagining! The line between reality and hallucination is very blurry here.

However much you feel as you listen to these sounds, know that it’s a practicable skill. Meditation—especially body scanning—can help grow your synesthetic capacity. (For the impatient, a small dose of cannabis can greatly amplify the effect.)

Every sound is an invitation to react—to run, dance, turn your head, or shift your gaze. Whether or not you follow that invitation, you can feel your body prepare for it.

The Bowls

All the sounds above were percussive. Even the marimbas make a sudden burst of sound when the mallet strikes, which makes the resulting tactile sensations easier to notice.

But that kiki spike carries with it a touch of unpleasantness. It’s a miniature jump scare, a minor affront to expectations at the edge of your predictive processing network.

Singing bowls, by contrast, are as bouba as it gets. Just a single, constant note, resonating for minutes. Unlike the percussive sounds, which evoke a sense of motion and direction, the bowls generate a steady pulse.

When the bowls sing, my body begins to pulsate along with them. There are usually two dominant frequencies: the note itself, vibrating hundreds of times per second; and a subtle undulation in volume, cycling once or twice per second.

I can feel both in my body. The former is a warm tingling, the latter a steady pulse of expansion and contraction.

This isn’t entirely a synesthetic sensation. When you’re in the same room as the bowls, there’s a physicality to their vibrations. If you’ve ever been to a loud concert and felt the bass vibrate in your chest, you’ll have a sense for what I’m talking about. You can play the first video in this essay at full volume and place your hands on the speakers to get a sense for what I’m talking about. But something is lost in the recording.

When I’m in the presence of the singing bowls, those physical vibrations blend into and resonate with the synesthetic ones. It’s unclear where one ends and the other begins. The boundary between the external world and internal subjectivity gets fuzzy, and starts to dissolve.

Within minutes, my body disappears entirely. All that’s left is disembodied vibration.

Solve…

Phenomenology is a tricky thing. It’s famously impossible to describe “blue” to a blind person. How can possibly I describe to you what it feels like to not have a body?

We’ve already had a little practice with body scanning in the jump scare exercise, so let’s start there. Close your eyes and sit still—what sensations are telling you hey, you have a body?

Maybe you feel the pressure of the chair on your butt, or the cool air on your hands, or a tension around your forehead. All of these are tactile perceptions, spread out in space. And they form a foundation for proprioception—for your sense of your body’s size, shape, and orientation.

What would happen if those sensations went away? Or if all that differentiation between coolness and pressure and tension congealed into a single throbbing pulse?

This is exactly what I get from the singing bowls. At first I feel the hard density of the ground against my back, the cool air on my face, the roughness of my clothing. But soon the bowls dominate, and those individual sensations start to swirl together. Instead of feeling dozens of disparate proprioceptive signals, there’s just a single buzzing cloud. Sometimes it has a solid boundary, sometimes it bleeds out into infinity. But the shape of head-torso-limbs is nowhere to be found.

The effect fades in and out. Occasionally some individual sensation will poke back through into consciousness. Or I’ll get distracted when some tantalizing thought enters my awareness.

But for minutes at a time, I bask in the cozy comfort of dissolution.

…et Coagula

But I promised more than mere bliss. I promised long-term effects, on par with meditation and psychedelics.

Here we’ll have to step on epistemically shaky ground. I’m going to make an assertion, which you can, in time, verify empirically: all emotions are just correlated groups of tactile sensations.²

Here’s Bessel van der Kolk, in The Body Keeps the Score:

In my practice I begin the process by helping my patients to first notice and then describe the feelings in their bodies—not emotions such as anger or anxiety or fear but the physical sensations beneath the emotions: pressure, heat, muscular tension, tingling, caving in, feeling hollow, and so on. I also work on identifying the sensations associated with relaxation or pleasure. I help them become aware of their breath, their gestures and movements.

(emphasis mine)

To put it a bit more directly: say you’re experiencing anxiety. Maybe there’s a knot in your stomach, a tension in your brow, a clenching in your jaw. We’d colloquially say that “anxiety”—some mysterious intangible force—causes these symptoms. I’m saying that it is identical to them. If you took away all that knotting and clenching, there’d be no residual sensation to label “anxiety”.

If you pay attention to this fact, patterns emerge. Positive emotions tend to be fluid, effervescent, difficult to localize. Negative emotions tend to be hard, dense, and have a specific location or set of locations. The worst emotions though (in my opinion) carry a sense of emptiness, as though your chest or head has been hollowed out, and all that remains is a hard outer shell.

So it’s not surprising that the singing bowls carry me off into bliss! The physical and synesthetic vibrations dissolve the hard edges propping up whatever anxiety or sadness or anger is lingering in my body. Everything becomes that singular ringing sensation.

This experience of dissolved body sensations is essential to meditative and psychedelic experiences. Here’s Michael Pollan describing his experience listening to Yo-Yo Ma on mushrooms:

Instead of Emerson’s transparent eyeball, egoless and one with all it beheld, I became a transparent ear, indistinguishable from the stream of sound that flooded my consciousness until there was nothing else in it, not even a dry tiny corner in which to plant an I and observe. Opened to the music, I became first the strings, could feel on my skin the exquisite friction of the horsehair rubbing over me, and then the breeze of sound flowing past as it crossed the lips of the instrument and went out to meet the world, beginning its lonely transit of the universe. Then I passed down into the resonant black well of space inside the cello…and I was now it, with no remainder.

Of course, eventually the bowls stop singing, or I stand up from my meditation, or I come down from my psychedelic trip. Slowly I return to my body. All those hard edges recongeal.

Usually the process is as sudden and natural as waking up. But once—at the end of an intense psychedelic trip—I was able to observe it. I watched as the smooth surface of my tactile lake rose up, twisted upon itself, and burrowed deep into my suddenly-remembered stomach. “Oh neat, I guess that’s where my baseline anxiety lives.”

Each time I untie and retie these knots, I get better at it. I figure out the tricks. There’s the anxiety in my stomach, which loosens so long as my attention is on it. There’s a knot in my left temple that seems to correlate with discursive thought and problem solving. I’m even starting to be able to conjure a sense of joy just by spreading my attention across my head, torso, and the surrounding space.

Is this Jhana?

I’m told by some expert-level meditators that eventually the knots stop re-forming. Edges might appear and disappear as they move their body, or experience an emotion, but their default state is dissolved. Honestly I don’t know how they’re able to ride a bike or put food in their mouth, but I’ve had enough first-hand experience with these states that I trust their reports.

I’ve already drawn some loose parallels between singing bowls, meditation, and psychedelics. For me, all three are part of what I’d call an introspective practice. And increasingly, I’m interpreting my experiences in terms of jhana.

The first jhana is characterized by—you guessed it—tactile sensations. Practitioners look to identify and amplify pīti, pleasant tingling found anywhere in the body. The metaphor of “champagne bubbles” comes up frequently. For me, nothing conjures pīti more than staticky white noise.

The next two jhanas are traditionally described more in terms of emotion (“joy” and “peace”) than in terms of physiological sensation. But again, I’ll assert that emotions are tactile sensations. My map isn’t great here, but the spreading and smoothing of the champagne bubbles seem to roughly correlate, respectively, with those two emotions.

In the fourth jhana, the field of tactile sensation becomes so smooth and undifferentiated that (a) there’s not much sense of a body left over, and (b) there’s not much emotion lingering around. It’s a state of deep equanimity.

My map ends at the fifth jhana—the first of the subtle jhanas. It’s described as “boundless space”, which feels impossible to describe, but I’ll try. In the fourth jhana, there’s still a bit of a shell surrounding me, a sense that there’s a hard edge at the periphery of my awareness. But sometimes—especially with the help of those vibrating crystal bowls—that hard edge dissolves, and I’m left floating in a void. You might imagine the ocean rising above the continents; with no more shores to lap up against, the waves just roll along.

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I think this is what the Buddha meant when he said “Life is dukkha,” aka suffering: you need a body to live, the body has hard edges, and hard edges are unpleasant.

I haven’t yet figured out how to exist without dukkha. Some claim it’s possible, and a combination of empirical evidence and naive hope leads me to believe them.

For now, I’ll continue gathering with strangers, laying on the floor, and basking in the dissolutory vibrations of a crystal singing bowl.

1. There’s an important observation here: the tactile sensations are caused both by the sound itself (as in the jump scares), and by the anticipation of sound. This is very much like my experience of music: my brain is constantly reaching for the next note, and the confirmation or rejection of those predictions is what gives the music its flavor.

2. Meditation instructor Shinzen Young takes a slightly more expansive view, saying that emotions are body sensations plus thoughts—but attributes the “feeling” part to the body. Here’s a brief quote, from Using Mindfulness Practice to Deal with Negative Urges

It is important to remember that all emotions consists of a mixture of thoughts and body sensations. The actual feeling part of the emotion is a pattern of sensation in your body. That sensation may be in just one location of your body, but often it fills your whole body.