The Yule Collection

Posted on Dec 20, 2024

The Yule Collection

At Peace and Waters of Mnemosyne in the Space & Time theme, and Persephone Descends in Sacred Spaces.

By Stefan Chmelik

Our three December Soundscapes feature especially innovative infrasound orchestrations (received through the Sensate device) synchronised with the harmonic frequencies of the aural tracks (heard through headphones connected to the App). These are designed to create an integrated mind-body experience with the power to synchronise and harmonise ancient abilities deeply encoded into our cellular structures:

At Peace - an NSDR Soundscape
In the Space & Time theme. This soundscape is a holiday gift for all Sensaters.

Waters of Mnemosyne
In the Space & Time theme

Persephone Descends
In the Sacred Spaces theme

Using At Peace for NSDR (Non-Sleep Deep Rest)

For most people, the Yule holiday season is a time when it’s all too easy to be over-busy, it can be a time of stress and overwhelm. Taking a 10-minute NSDR session with At Peace is a really useful way to counter this.

NSDR is a relatively new term popularised by Dr. Andrew Huberman, a professor of neurobiology at the Stanford School of Medicine. NSDR refers to a protocol designed for resting your mind and body during the day to reduce stress, feel calm and fall asleep more easily, and it's backed by scientific research.

By learning how to relax through Non-Sleep Deep Rest protocols, you can learn to control the mind through the body, giving you the ability to control stress and anxiety. As Huberman says, ‘You can’t use the mind to control the mind’: You can’t control thinking with thinking. But we can calm the mind by relaxing the body.

Waters of Mnemosyne and Persephone Descends - The emotion of Transformation

I have written about the power of the melancholy and the bittersweet as the most transformative presence in our lives. In fact, without teaching ourselves the ability to face the bittersweet elements of life: the natural passing of things, loss, grief and change, we are likely to stand still. To stand still is to be left behind, and even to go backwards.

Two of our December Soundscapes: Waters of Mnemosyne and Persephone Descends, work on this principle. They combine special note sequences and key structures to activate emotional transformation. Perception of vibration as sound is an ancient sense, and has the power to evoke memory and change that is beyond brain-level sensing.

There is a particular technique I employ when writing the Sensate Signature Soundscapes and this is the characteristics of Emotional Affect. I divide this into Serenity, Rapturous & Bittersweet. Each Soundscape has a specific orientation towards one of these three:

The Serene fosters feelings of calm and deep relaxation
The Rapturous helps us feel joy and a sense of wonder
The Bittersweet enables the emotion of transformation

The addition of sound elements that evoke the Bittersweet, gently conjures feelings that present the potential for deeper reflection. These are often memories that relate to minor-key sounds, memories connected to lamentation, sorrow and melancholy. The experience of the Bittersweet helps to soothe the transition through these challenging thoughts and feelings to what lies on the other side of them.

It has been shown that the vagus nerve is the primary mediator for emotional processing. Our vagus nerve is the driver for compassion and empathy and one of the great powers of bittersweetness. (Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley)

Waters of Mnemosyne

The importance of story and myth is that they enable humans to remember and learn from the stories of the past. Waters of Mnemosyne is floating and ambient, drifting along with a wistful female voice and several instrumentations that go across the melody, including an emotive piano melody and celestial horn. This Soundscape combines a thrumming engaging drone underscore with moments of crescendo for powerful mind-body integration. I recommend using this as a pre-sleep ritual before getting into bed.

In classical mythology, Mnemosyne is a Titan, the goddess of memory and remembrance, and she is the daughter of Uranus (the Sky) and Gaia (the Earth) her name is the origin of the memory aid: mnemonic. She presides over the river of Memory, which is twinned with the opposite river of the underworld, Lethe (forgetfulness and oblivion). People would invoke the power of Mnemosyne to help them remember their dream visions on waking.

Persephone Descends

This Soundscape is highly atmospheric, like a resonant cosmic clock parsing the arrow of infinite time. I incorporated gong and bowl sounds with a deep ambient sense of deep sea or vacuum-space and an ethereal-haunting feel that references Hauntology (The idea that the presence of the past is always around us)

The story of Persephone, daughter of Zeus and Demeter, has resonated through the ages and been utilized as the backbone for parables and myths by many different cultures and authors. Persephone was abducted by her uncle Hades and taken into the Underworld. When Demeter discovered her daughter’s abduction, she was inconsolable in her misery and abandoned the harvest, causing famine across the world. In response to this, Zeus demanded that Hades released Persephone back to her mother. However, Persephone could never be truly freed because she ate a pomegranate seed while she was in the underworld. Because of this Persephone had to spend one third of every year in the Underworld, during which time Demeter would mourn her. This myth works to explain the origins of the seasons.

The modern association with the Underworld (Hades) as a literal hell is a relatively modern interpretation. Traditionally, the Underworld was more representative of another side of the human experience and psyche. The more hidden and darker side that required a journey, and usually a sacrifice, to enter into and learn from. This place can be accessed through our dreams, which is the subject of our November Soundscapes, Dreams Like Ether and Morpheus Dreaming.

More on Hauntology

A "nostalgia for lost futures"

There is little consistency in how most define the term, which was derived from philosopher Jacques Derrida's concept of the same name. This idea evokes a similar feel to the Welsh word Hiraeth: ‘A spiritual longing for a home which maybe never was. Nostalgia for ancient places to which we cannot return. It is the echo of the lost places of our soul’s past and our grief for them. It is in the wind, and the rocks, and the waves. It is nowhere and everywhere.’

Hauntology is also a loosely defined stylistic feature turned music genre that evokes cultural memory and aesthetics of the past. It developed in the 2000s primarily among British electronic musicians. It typically draws on British cultural sources from the 1940s to the 1970s, including library music, film and TV soundtracks, psychedelia, and public information films, often through the use of sampling.

The Arrow of Time and the Heat of Transformation:

In his book The Order of Time, physicist Carlo Rovelli describes how the latest findings of quantum physicists show that heat and time are deeply linked. In fact, when scientists look at what actually creates a differentiation between past present and future on a subatomic level, all they can point to is heat: ‘the distinction between the past and the future does not exist in the elementary equations of motion. In physics this difference emerges only in connection with heat. Every time a difference is manifested between the past and future, heat is involved’. The entire structure of time is connected to the presence of heat, without heat time does not exist. and Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine says “The arrow of time is a result of the irreversibility of processes in thermodynamic systems.” Let's say it more poetically, time is a movement of the cosmic fire.

Sensate is a tool for self transformation. All transformation requires heat, from the heat of digestion to the heat of the expanding cosmos. Even deep space has a temperature of around 3 degrees, said to be the residual heat of the ‘Big Bang’, and there is no known absolute zero in the universe!

On every continent where humans have lived there is a version of the fire origin story, usually stolen by some trickster and unleashed as a great power that is as dangerous as it is illuminating and transformational: Coyote, rabbit, bird, raven, crow, mantis, spider, possum, Prometheus, Maui, and humankind. In the Ancient Greek Pantheon, the first offering is always to Hestia, the Goddess of the Hearth, the keeper of home fire and homefire, whose fire must never be allowed to go out, must always be tended and attended to.

Transformation of something crude into something precious is the process that we are doing when we attend to ourselves through reflection and meditation. We need to tend and grow in ourselves to be able to transform our inner world. But when the heat of transformation is not directed in the right way it can damage and burn out everything around it. This is just like stress and feelings of overwhelm.

‘Sorrow prepares you for joy ’ - Rumi

The Power of Music

There have always been stories about the wisdom of music, and the power of certain structures and frequencies. In particular those that heal the mind and body. Leonard Cohen refers to this in his much loved song, Hallelujah (1984):

“I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, now the major lift
The baffled king composing hallelujah”

King Saul, the first king of Israel, was tormented and possessed by an evil spirit that beset him when he lost his faith and fell into jealousy of the achievements of others. Today we might think of this as a deep depression, perhaps due to the trauma of conflict. David was a simple shepherd, but also a gifted musician and lyre player, and he was brought to Saul. As Saul writhed and paced in his madness and depression, David sat in the corner and played his harp: ‘David took up a harp and played with his hand, and Saul was refreshed, eased and was well and the evil spirit departed from him’, 1 Samuel 16:14-23.

In this parable, as with all stories, there is an opportunity to learn something, namely here the wisdom and healing properties of music. Cohen captures the idea of the certain structures and frequencies that can heal the mind and body when he wrote ‘a secret chord’.

I hope The Yule Collection will have that ‘secret chord’ which will bring peace, healing and transformation to every Sensater this month.

Sensately Yours,

Stefan

Stefan Chmelik is co-founder of and inventor of the Sensate stress reduction system, which is based on his over three decades of clinical experience working with anxiety, stress and trauma.

Articles page HERE

Get Your Sensate Device

NSDR: https://www.getsensate.com/blogs/news/nsdr-non-sleep-deep-rest

Bittersweet:https://www.getsensate.com/blogs/news/bittersweet-understanding-the-emotion-of-growth-leveraging-tech-for-the-inner-landscape