Sound Medicine

Kulreet Chaudhary, M.D.

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780062867353
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Alternative & Complementary Medicine

From a leading neurologist, neuroscientist and practitioner of Ayurvedic medicine, comes a rigorous scientific investigation of the healing power of sound, showing readers how they can use it to improve their mental and physical wellbeing.

Why does a baby's cry instantaneously flood a mother's body with a myriad of stress hormones? How can a song on the radio stir up powerful emotions, from joy to anger, regret to desire? Why does sound itself evoke such primal and deeply felt emotions?

A vibration that travels through air, water and solids, sound is produced by all matter, and is a fundamental part of every species' survival. But there is a hidden power within sound that has only just begun to be investigated. Sound Medicine takes readers on a journey through the structure of the mouth, ears, and brain to understand how sound is translated from acoustic vibrations into meaningful neurological impulses. Renowned neurologist and Ayurvedic expert Dr. Kulreet Chaudhary explains how different types of sound impact the human body and brain uniquely, and explores the physiological effects of sound vibration, from altering mood to healing disease.

Blending ancient wisdom with modern science, Dr. Chaudhary traces the history of sound therapy and the use of specific mantras from previously unknown texts—traced back to the Siddhas, a group of enlightened yogis who created a healing tradition that served as the precursor to Ayurvedic medicine—to explain the therapeutic application of sounds for a wide range of conditions. Sound Medicine offers practical, step-by-step lessons for using music and mantras, whether you're a beginner or searching for a more advanced practice, to improve your health in body, mind, and spirit.

1

My Mantra

We are slowed down sound and light waves, a walking bundle of frequencies tuned to the cosmos.

—ALBERT EINSTEIN

Until I was four years old, I lived in Punjab, India, with my parents, my younger sister, my grandparents, and my great-grandparents all piled into one house, each generation looking after the next. Our green, three-story house was built by my great-grandfather and surrounded by acres of farmland; there were buffalo that lived in a little section of their own just beyond the back door with goats and chickens roaming beyond. Practically speaking, we were lucky because we had the means to live comfortably in India. Emotionally speaking, life felt charmed because our home was bursting with love. The door was unlocked in the morning and left open all day for neighbors and friends and family to come and go as they pleased. There was always something simmering in the kitchen, giving way to the most amazing smells—everything we ate was cooked from scratch, right down to the home-churned butter, and much of our food was harvested from the land surrounding our house. Our home was always filled with conversation, about daily matters such as what was happening with the farm but also searching ones, as we considered how to best care for our community or make the right choices in life.

Like most people in Punjab, we practiced Sikhism, a religion that originated in the region in the fifteenth century. Sikhs believe in one Supreme Being and practice compassion, honesty, and selfless service. The religion also encourages meditation as a means to feel God’s presence.

And yet, although my family went to the gurdwara, the Sikh temple, every Sunday and followed the basic tenets of the religion, we did not meditate. This was not unusual: Most Indians stopped meditating nearly a hundred years ago. In the decades following the installation of the British government in 1858, beginning their century-long rule, the spiritual lineage of India was disrupted. Many of the ancient practices, such as meditation, North India’s five-thousand-year-old Ayurvedic medical system, and the eight-thousand-year-old Siddha medicine tradition that had emerged in the south, slowly unraveled. The Brits considered their own systems to be superior and, over time, their governance eroded the ancient Indian customs and the faith with which they were practiced. The British even went so far as to destroy some of the ancient Indian spiritual records, literally obliterating the wisdom of the ages. Soon, Western medicine—with its focus on anatomy—had replaced the established holistic model combining body, mind, and spirit. An inferiority complex took hold in India and we began to look yearningly west, believing that there was something better in America, something perhaps even more prosperous and exceptional. It was a broad and shapeless promise—and all the more powerful for it. This yearning became a movement, and eventually it was simply what striving upper-middle-class Indian families did: They moved to America.

My parents were no exception. In 1977, they left the comfort and steadiness of our life in Punjab and set up a new home for just the four of us in Southern California. Within a year, they both had steady, well-paying jobs—my father as an engineer, my mother as a physical therapist (both occupations they’d had in India). Within five years, we were living in a five-bedroom house in Riverside County, my parents each drove their own Mercedes, and my sister and I were thriving at school. In short, my parents had achieved the American dream.

And they were totally stressed out.

Not long after they’d moved to the United States and achieved their goals (the house, the cars, a stellar education for their children), my mother got profoundly sick for the first time in her life. She was run down; her weight dropped suddenly, she experienced heart palpitations, and she felt a general sense of anxiety. Her physician referred her to an endocrinologist, who told her she’d developed a thyroid condition. After prescribing medication for the palpitations she was experiencing as a result of her thyroid condition, he surprised my mother by recommending that she begin practicing Transcendental Meditation. He was not a doctor of integrative medicine, a practice that was just starting to gain a foothold in the United States at that time, so it was a matter of chance, or perhaps fate, that this American doctor would hand her the name of a meditation teacher, thus beginning my mother’s journey—and subsequently my own—into the ancient traditions of our native culture.

Within six months, my mother’s thyroid had normalized, the bold sparkle was back in her eye, and she was convinced that silently chanting a mantra had played a significant role in her recovery. She was so convinced, in fact, that she brought my sister and me to see her teacher, too. We were only seven and nine years old, respectively, at the time. I’ll never forget the details of that day: Sitting in a home filled with lush, green plants with a strong smell of incense filling the room, my mother introduced us to Norma, a dark-haired woman with warm eyes and a constant smile.

When Norma leaned over to whisper my bija mantra into my ear, it sounded like beautiful nonsense, a sound without meaning. I felt certain Norma was offering some kind of enchantment. Which is, in a way, what the bija mantra can feel like. Bija means “seed” in Sanskrit, and in the Vedic tradition, one of the oldest recorded spiritual practices in India, this mantra prompts growth and transformation. This “seed mantra” was created to encompass sounds that cannot be translated into literal meaning but that utilize the power of tonal vibration to create balance and peace in the body and mind. Many of us, in fact, have already chanted a bija mantra at some point in our lives: The Om intoned at the beginning and end of yoga classes is a classic example. More broadly, the Vedic disciples believed that bija mantras intimately connect a person to the energy field we call universal consciousness that runs through—and connects—all matter in the universe. Sound medicine, particularly as practiced by the ancients, uses the tones of nature—which vibrate at a specific frequency—to help restore balance within us, and also to forge a connection with this larger energy field.

I have chanted this mantra nearly every day since Norma offered it to me thirty-six years ago, and it has profoundly altered my life in ways that I could not have anticipated. Initially, my bija mantra gave me access to a protected place that I would not have ever found otherwise. For a child to sit in complete silence for ten minutes twice a day—the amount of time, initially, that I silently chanted this mantra—is a challenging endeavor. But in learning to do so, I became aware of an inner reality I had not discovered before. At only nine years old, I found there was a place within me that was also outside of me—which was my childlike way of understanding my connection to the life force. Over time, this place became a centering retreat. I came to understand that I was something more than what I saw or felt or perceived in the world around me. And whatever that something more was, it was profoundly quiet and calming. My bija mantra was the key to a space inside of me that was always peaceful, independent of anything that was happening in my life. Once I learned that this existed, the physical world could no longer dominate me.

As my mother’s commitment to ancient Indian tradition grew, she began to explore possible explanations for the mystical world that was unfolding before her. She had come to profoundly believe in a universal consciousness, and the notion that there is a sea of energy that connects us. She had also come to accept, as Vedic tradition proposes, that our individual spiritual efforts can create consequential change not only in ourselves but also in the world. As part of her exploration into this concept, she began attending lectures at local meditation centers and universities on how meditation and spiritual practices can create a shift on a quantum level, which is to say down at the particle and wave level of the universe, the very base of existence. (Everything in the universe, a quantum physicist will tell you, is both particle and wave by nature.)

And since my mother had developed a personal philosophy that if something was helpful or meaningful to her, it should also be introduced to my sister and me, she began to take us with her to these lectures. At seven and nine years old, respectively, neither Harleen nor I always understood what these people were discussing; sometimes it just seemed plain weird. I remember one meeting in which we were each asked to bend the fork that had been placed on the table before us—they meant for the group to try to do this with their minds, but my sister and I, unaware of that part of the instructions, simply bent our forks with our hands. As the leader went around to examine what each person had done, he stopped abruptly at the bent forks sitting before my sister and me. Stunned, and perhaps believing he’d come across two young Jedis, he asked us to please teach them how we’d done it. “Easy,” I said, and reached out to bend my fork some more. You could almost hear the deflation of hope in that moment!

Other lectures, though, did linger in my mind as a kid—particularly those that focused on the larger mystery at work in the universe, somehow linking everyone in energy and spirit. Later, when we were teenagers, my mother started to take my sister and me to meditation retreats. The first one felt as if she’d taken us to Paris after having studied French throughout our childhoods. We had become more fluent in meditation than we had realized, thanks to our mantras, and being given the chance to immerse ourselves in this world exclusively for a stretch of time felt expansive and revelatory in the best possible way.

Meanwhile, my mother had also begun to educate herself in Indian music and theory. She began playing different ragas, a type of ancient, often improvised classical music, throughout the day, each one meant to balance the energy of the environment at that specific time. In the evenings, when we were going to sleep, she would play the Samaveda, which contains some of the world’s oldest surviving melodies, made up of Sanskrit verses meant to increase creativity and relaxation. For my eighteenth birthday, my mother sent me, along with my sister (for her sixteenth birthday), to a camp in the mountains of Northern California to learn about Gandharva Veda from the masters who lived in India. Gandharva (which means “skilled singer” in Sanskrit) Veda is a specific teaching from Vedic science about the influence of sound and music. These musicians and scholars taught me about how different types of Indian classical music are used to affect the body and mind and that Indian musicians were sometimes called upon to elicit changes in the natural environment such as to bring rain during a drought or even to fight natural disasters such as wildfires and storms.

Once, at 5 a.m., these masters, or Gandharvas, put on a concert—with only my sister and myself as their audience—in the forest. As they played, animals began to emerge, fluttering down from branches and peeking out from behind trees, drawn forth by the music. Birds, rabbits, even the skittish deer stood quietly and listened to the music. To this day, I can see the attentive poses and expressions of those animals clearly in my mind’s eye; it convinced me of the possibility and significance in attuning oneself to nature through music.

My mother had not grown up with any of the Indian traditions she was now seriously practicing, but somehow they spoke to her from across the generations. She not only had felt immediately at home with them but also had an inherent confidence that they would benefit our physical and spiritual well-being. Of course, the irony of this development was not lost on my mother: Achieving the American dream had led her back to ancient India.

Meanwhile, I was on the path to achieving my own American dream. As my mother delved into these mystical pursuits, I doubled down on my schoolwork and ambitions. Though I did enjoy, and profit from, many of the experiences that my mother opened up for me, I also viewed them as separate from my primary goals. I was there to learn English, succeed at school, and become a professional. I was a straight-A student with straight-ahead ambitions. I had declared I would go into medicine when I was four years old. Despite my belief in my bija mantra, my culture was still about becoming as American as possible.

It was only when I went off to college that I began to glimpse just how second nature, and beneficial, the traditional Indian beliefs my mother had woven into our lives had become. As I started to get to know my classmates at Loma Linda University in Southern California, sitting with them in coffee shops and dorm rooms, discussing life in an adult way with people outside of my family for the first time, our conversations often circled the usual lofty topics of college students just finding their footing in the world: the meaning of life, the nature of reality. I found there was a major distinction between the others and me. I was drawing on the inner reality I’d cultivated throughout a childhood of meditation, while they were drawing on what they could see, hear, and touch in the world. In the classroom, when we were studying Western philosophy, we debated René Descartes’s famous conclusion, ending his search for a statement that could not be doubted: “I think therefore I am.” Yet I did doubt it. I don’t think for large periods of time while I meditate, I told my professor, and I still exist!

I was able to assimilate opposing views, to bring together the mystic and the academic, whereas others often felt it was an either/or proposition. (It’s perhaps not surprising then that I declared a double major of English and biology.) And, though I did well academically, it felt a little socially isolating to come up against this divide between my peers and me time and again.

I discovered my upbringing had made me an outlier in another way as well. Whereas my peers, finally out from underneath their parents’ rule, would blow off steam or release stress by drinking a ton or doing drugs at parties, I realized I didn’t feel I had anything to let loose from. With my mantra, I had cultivated a kind of “reset” button that allowed me to clear my mind and emotions twice a day, had quieted my fight-or-flight impulses, and kept stress from building up in my nervous system. Meditation had become as rote and essential to me as taking a shower; if I skipped it for a few days, I began to feel as if my brain were coated in a layer of grime, just as my body would feel if I hadn’t bathed.

Once I reached medical school, however, the rigor and demands of my schedule made it challenging to keep up my daily meditation practice. The last three years of my neurology residency were the most difficult: An unpredictable schedule and brutally long work hours meant I meditated only sporadically. Those were, without a doubt, the darkest years of my life. I noticed a change in everything. I became more emotionally and psychologically fragile—which, frankly, is true of most medical students and residents—but I also felt more nuanced and intimate changes in myself. Where I had always been able to wash it all away no matter what had happened when I entered into that sacred, universal space, without regular meditation I felt out of control, trapped on the roller coaster of my moods. If I had a good day, I felt good; if it was bad, I felt bad. I was ruled by the physical world—and I realized for the first time that a large portion of humanity experiences life this way all the time.

I began my own clinical practice as a neurologist immediately after finishing my residency, in 2006. I was lucky enough to be given the chance to take over a successful neurology practice at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, California, when the head physician retired. It was an unusual and tremendous opportunity: What most neurologists spend ten to fifteen years creating, I inherited from the start. This still meant working fifteen- to eighteen-hour days—but not having to build the practice from scratch meant I was able to completely give myself over to my patients, which I happily did.

But, six months into my newly realized version of the American dream, my own health began to plummet. And, like my mother, I found myself, for the first time, seriously debilitated by a condition. For me, this came in the form of crippling migraine headaches.

I tried to manage it myself with standard medication for about a year with no luck. So I consulted with a leading expert, someone who not only could offer invaluable advice but also knew me better than anyone else: my mother. She reminded me of the Ayurvedic medicine she’d exposed me to in my youth, which she had introduced to our family at around the same time she’d encouraged my sister and me to start meditating. This required that I change my diet, altering not only what I ate (avoiding processed foods, not combining certain foods, and adding turmeric, cumin, and coriander powder to just about everything, it seemed) but also when I ate, which was determined according to my digestive “fire,” when the metabolism is more or less able to break down food (it is strongest at lunch and weakest at dinner). Also at my mother’s counsel, I renewed my meditation practice.

My migraines vanished after three months.

My own experience reminded me—or perhaps it made me truly aware for the first time—of how effective these rituals had been for keeping my health in balance. And, of course, I’d long known that my meditation practice had kept me not only emotionally steady but also connected—to myself, to the universe, to a nourishing energy—throughout my life. How could I have lost sight of that? And, more important, how could I not share these practices with my patients?

Two months after being headache free, I’d restructured my practice in order to offer integrative medicine. I started recommending—just as the American endocrinologist had done with my mother more than two decades earlier—that my patients see a meditation teacher and receive a mantra. I also began to prescribe ...