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Category: Auditory
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Soul‘s Hearth Inner Flame Binaural Beats Meditation
The Soul’s Hearth Inner Flame Binaural Beats Meditation is a lovely, relaxing way to connect to your inner spark.
Designed as the first in a series of meditations to accompany ‘Sensing Magic – A Sensual Journey Through The Wheel of The Year’, Soul’s Hearth taps in to the spirit of Imbolc.
It takes you on a journey home to your inner hearth, and then out to the furthest reaches of the universe, and back again.
The guided journey helps you to remember your way home to yourself. It guides you to kindle your inner flame, that (often tiny) spark that illuminates and warms you from within. It encourages you to come back to tend to the embers that continue to burn, even when you feel that you’re in the darkest of times and have lost your way.
Here’s what one lovely journeyer had to say:
It’s gorgeous and tender and has a lovely pace and gentleness to it. Love the music you used too! I feel renewed, re-centred and uplifted.”
How Long Is The Meditation?
The meditation is 11 minutes long – long enough to relax and feel the benefits without being overwhelmingly time sucking. Something that’s an important consideration in these busy times.
What Makes It Special?
Soul’s Hearth Inner Flame Meditation utilises binaural beats – a sound wave technology that, according to healthline.com, is claimed to ‘induce the same mental state associated with a meditation practice, but much more quickly. ‘
Binaural beats are said to:
• reduce anxiety
• increase focus and concentration
• lower stress
• increase relaxation
• foster positive moods
• promote creativity
• help manage pain
Why Should You Trust Me To Create Something That Works?
As a Reiki Master/Teacher I include subtle energy work in my meditations too, so the woo credentials are strong (did you know there’s lots of science to back up Reiki – science + woo = a match made in heaven as far as I’m concerned). Whilst the jury seems to be out on whether the binaural beats claims can be validated, as a certified sound healer, I personally find they have merit – you’ll have to make up your own mind, having done your own research of course!
Here’s some science around binaural beats to get you started.
Whether the science backs the binaural beats claims or not, guided meditations accompanied by gentle, relaxing music, are good for the soul!
Previous Meditation Work
Soul’s Hearth is the second recorded meditation I’ve created; the first was part of a chocolate meditation kit that I created when Ayni Chocolate was running. It received some really lovely feedback :
… I feel brand new …I love your chocolate anyway but this was just something else divine, maybe because I was deep in and experienced the flavours more. I don’t know but it was heaven in my mouth.
I have never ever eaten and had such shivers through my body. I feel such a release within me from the experience I’ve just had with your set. I really needed this. I knew I’d like the experience but I didn’t expect to be as blown away as I am.
The Ayni Chocolate Meditation was intimately connected to the contents of the kit, so it’s not really suitable to release now that the kit is no longer available, but I‘m planning to release a more generic chocolate meditation in the near future.
If you’d like to know when the chocolate mediation and/or Sensing Magic go live, please join the waiting list here.
If you don’t want to join Sensing Magic but would like the mediation then simply click the button below to discover the way home to your Soul’s Hearth.
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Lavender Fields – Insta Heaven, Sensory Hell.
Have you visited a lavender farm recently? If not, chances are, if you use Instagram, you’ll have seen at least one beautiful photo of someone standing in a field of lavender.
Last summer I decided it would be fun to get some photos of me, in a lavender field, to use on this website. Yorkshire Lavender is about an hour and half away, so I persuaded the family it would be a fun day out (the promise of a pizza afterwards, at Pizza Express, was certainly not bribery…)
We didn’t have the best day for it, it was a dull and overcast, not ideal for the idyllic photos I had in mind, but hey … filters, right?
When we arrived the place was heaving. Who knew lavender fields were such a popular destination? Well, according to this article from the BBC, they’re doing a booming trade these days, thanks to instagram!
At Yorkshire Lavender there are terraced rows of lavender, with reasonably wide paths between them. It’s not the classic field full of flowers, like this one, that you might imagine seeing in France. So not such a wildly romantic photo op, but the paths make for easy access without damaging the plants, and there’s something appealing about the idea of walking down a lavender edged path. I imagined the heady aroma, wafting across, relaxing me as I enjoyed watching the flower stalks sway gently in the breeze…
Can you sense the but?
Before I start this little tale, I need you to understand something: I adore bees, I really do. But…..
Bees. Bees love lavender – I know this. I’ve planted it many times, to help save the bees. There’s some incredibly delicious lavender honey out there, that goes perfectly in a honey and lavender ice cream. I know all of this! But when I was thinking about standing for a photo in a field of lavender, bees were nowhere in my imaginings!
Have you seen the Michael McIntyre sketch about wasps and bees? If not, here you go, you might want to make sure your pelvic floor muscles are in full working order before hitting play.
My friend sent me the link because she recognised my type. She’s a wafter. I am a panicker! (Perhaps this should be a question in the Sensory Types Quiz..?)
Now before you imagine me running screaming through the lavender, I can assure you, I managed to contain myself. Bees I can just about cope with, wasps are what bring out the panicker in me.
No, the problem was something I couldn’t have anticipated.
It was the sound! I love the hum of bees, always have. But what I’ve never experienced before was walking down a bee runway!
The sound of humming surrounded me. It was incredibly loud, to the extent that I could feel it as a vibration.
It reminded me of the feeling of being on a ferry when the engine starts up.
Because the sound was constantly moving, it messed with my (very sensitive) sense of balance (vestibular system) even though I was on solid ground. It was the weirdest sensation, and I hated it!
Added to this was the fact that there were bees flying all around me as they moved from one row to another. I was desperately trying to control my panicker tendencies whilst feeling thoroughly discombobulated, which all added up to something that was pretty close to sensory hell! You may be able to detect some of that angst from the only photo that came out of the trip!
And to add insult to injury, the filters couldn’t magic away the effect of the dull skies. Hey ho. You live and learn.
I couldn’t have foreseen any of this, and to be honest, even if someone had told me it was a possibility, I probably wouldn’t have believed it could be so overwhelming.
Would it put me off visiting another lavender field? Probably not. Forewarned is forearmed after all. Having had the experience once, I’d be able to anticipate it, so wouldn’t be caught off guard. I could put some coping mechanisms in place, and go on a day when my sensory equilibrium was working in my favour. With all of those things in place, who knows, I might even ENJOY the experience!
Whilst I was disappointed that the experience hadn’t been the one I’d imagined, I didn’t beat myself up about it. I didn’t wonder what was wrong with me. I didn’t berate myself for days on end about ‘not being normal’ as I have countless times in the past. This time I just laughed, and chose to see it as another piece of the puzzle. That’s the gift that understanding my sensory sensitivities has given me, and my hope is that it’s the gift, as The Sensory Coach, I can give you too.