Sound Medicine: How to Use the Ancient Science of Sound to Heal the Body and Mind.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

If our computers have the capacity to make those wireless connections, why on earth would our body, which is far more complex than our computers, not have that capacity literally built to respond to sound? But we're not doing it deliberately. We're not doing it in a conscious way to use healing sounds as part of our medical arsenal. Why would you have surgery if you could shrink a tumor using sound? Like, why would we be that invasive if we don't have to be?

Health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show.

My guest today is Dr. Kulrit Choudhary. Yeah, say that 10 times fast. Sound medicine specialist. Sound medicine. Is that all? Woo. Well, normally you'd think so, but this is like a seriously smart MD talking to me about this stuff. And it's pretty impressive when you actually look at sound medicine and the actual effects of sound medicine. So I really wanted to get her on to talk about this, so I did. Well, folks, you've probably heard me talk about sound healing before, and your woo woo radar likely went off. If you're anything like me. When you hear things like tuning forks and sound tables and crazy things like that get mentioned as potential healing modalities. Rightly so, I think an eyebrow or two can get raised. But there is an entire kind of field of sound healing called sound medicine. Sound medicine that is a field that actually uses a lot of these ancient sciences when it comes to sound healing and weaves them into modern medicine. And a leading neurologist and a neuroscientist and also practitioner of Ayurvedic medicine, recently wrote a book that I read. It's called Sound how to Use the Ancient Science of Sound to Heal the Body and Mind. Now, I addressed sound healing quite a bit in my book Boundless, but didn't even scratch the surface of what this book gets into in terms of how different types of sound impact your body and your brain and the physiological effects of sound vibration for, you know, not just altering mood, but even healing disease. So I decided that I wanted to get the author of this book, Sound Medicine, on the show to explain this all to us simply because she is highly, highly qualified and has expertise in both modern neurology and the ancient science of health in Ayurveda. So her name that I am really hoping I don't butcher is Dr. Korit Chowdhury. Did I get that? All right, Dr. Choudhary, you got really, really close.

It's Kreet Chaudhary.

Kreet Choudhary. Okay. Kurit Choudhury. There we go. Hopefully I don't have to. I'm just gonna call you Korea, if that's cool.

That's fine.

Okay. That's right. All right. So she actually works with chronic neurological disorders, Ms. parkinson's, migraine headaches, and uses diet, uses behavior, uses stress, uses a lot of standard allopathic approaches, but is also open to this idea of Ayurveda and this ide sound medicine, which is why she is considered to be kind of a pioneer in the field of integrative medicine and was the director of Wellspring Health and Scripps Memorial Hospital for 10 years. You've probably seen her on the Dr. Oz show and this is, this is stuff that she knows inside and out. So we're pretty privileged to have Corey on the show. Corey, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much. And thank you so much for including an introduction that has the word woo in it that actually ends in a very flattering way. So good job.

Be careful sometimes. You never know where these podcasts go. You could be a tin foil hat wearing freak by the time we finish. Anyways. Oh, also for everybody listening, I'm gonna put the shownotes@bengreenfieldfitness.com soundmedicine and I'll include a link to Colreate's book there also BenGreenfulFitness.com SoundMedicine so what I thought was interesting, just jump around, Corey, is you're a neurologist, you're allopathically trained, and I'm just curious how you actually came into contact with sound medicine in the first place, because I know it's not part of formal medical training. So what was your path to becoming familiar with this form of healing particularly?

Well, I was lucky because I was introduced to it kind of somewhat unconsciously before my medical training. When I was nine years old, I was actually trained in mantra meditation, transcendental meditation, which probably a lot of people know. And it's a form of sound medicine. Only was introduced to it because my mom had developed a thyroid condition and she went to her just regular allopathic endocrinologist and he identified that it was a stress induced condition. So he recommended mantra meditation, the form of transcendental meditation. And six months later her thyroid had completely normalized, no medical intervention. And so she had. My sister and I also learn when we were very young. So this has been a part of my life since a very young age. But it, it Wasn't until after I became a neurologist and I started seeing the impact of stress on my patients lives and the impact on stress in conditions like multiple sclerosis, conditions like migraine headaches, epilepsy and Parkinson's, that I said, why am I not offering this to my patients? And so that was the first time that I took my own personal experience as well as so much of the medical literature that had been done at that time on mantra meditation and introduced it. And many people don't realize that, you know, meditation and using a mantra, that is a form of sound therapy when you're using.

Yeah, that's what I was going to ask you because you're, you're, are you actually making a sound in mantra meditation? Because I've taken TM and you have a, what's, what's it called?

Your, your personal mantra, Your Bija mantra.

Yeah, your word. But in many cases, you're not voicing it aloud, so you're not creating sound vibrations. So how would you classify something like TM as sound medicine?

So that's such a great question because we tend to think about sound as something audible. But you know, when you look at the way that sound medicine is actually used already in allopathic medicine, it's all in audible sound. So like an ultrasound, which is, I'm sure everybody's familiar with, you know, we use it for diagnosis, we use it for different therapies and connective tissue injuries. Lithotripsy, which is a form of sound medicine in modern medicine to break up kidney stones, gallstones, and even a form of cosmetic therapy called Yule therapy. It's an FDA approved form of reversing aging. Those are all forms of inaudible sound. So you have to keep in mind that we call sound audible only because, you know, human ear is able to capture a certain range of frequencies and we're able to hear that, and so we call that sound. But sound is actually vibrations that are occurring in the environment. And when you are thinking, you know, everybody talks about that inner conversation, the inner dialogue, and that's one of the huge keys, right, to overcoming your limitations, is overcoming the negative rumor of thoughts that are playing in your head. That is sound. And so when you are making sound internally, that still has a vibratory impact on your body.

Yeah, and I want to get into the impact on the actual cells themselves, but you brought up a few good examples in the realm of ultrasound and lithotripsy. And you know, for me, probably one of the first places that I came into Contact with sound, I guess medicine, you would call it beyond something like ultrasound, was actually this, this, what's it called, extracorporeal shockwave therapy used for men with erectile dysfunction or Peyronie's that began to get marketed to men who might not have those conditions, but who wanted to perhaps increase sexual performance. And I actually tried it out for that and was impressed with it. My wife went in and did it for herself also. And that actually make a little bit of a jackhammer esque sound as you're getting worked on. But, but I believe the actual waves themselves are inaudible. And then recently I also, and I did a whole podcast on this. I came across this device called the Apollo Neuroscience or the Apollo Neuro. I don't know if you heard of this, but it's a wearable that produces an inaudible sound sensation that kind of travels at the long bone of your femur or your humerus, depending on whether you have it on your ankle or your wrist, respectively, and elicits specific brainwave signals like alpha or beta to help you meditate or relax and unwind or stay clear and focused. And again, you can't hear it, but it is an actual sound wave.

Yeah. And so these are actually modern technologies that have ancient origins. And so in, you know, ancient, in the ancient realms, they actually used many similar things. Like they used things like tuning verbs, they used things like singing bowls, but they also use things like mantras that also had the resonant frequency that would induce a certain vibration or a certain frequency within your body and within your mind. And so, you know, to me, it's really funny because when people go sound medicine, that sounds impossible. I'm like, well, we've actually been doing it for a long time. You know, we're already doing it in medicine. It's just we're not doing it in the form of really like the extremely potent ways of, you know, transforming the human mind into unleashing your absolute true potential, but also in fighting neurological and psychological conditions, because the brain in particular is really, really receptive to sound. So we're using it, we're just using it at a bare minimum. And part of that is because we don't yet have a scientific paradigm, a scientific model. Now those are starting to be created, but we don't have a scientific model to hold those technologies. And technology follows science. And just think for a moment that if we didn't have, if Benjamin Franklin didn't discover electricity, Thomas Edison couldn't have made the light bulb. Science has to come first before technology follows. So we're in this gap right now. We've got a few sound therapies, but the science is only now emerging. And then once that emerges, we're going to have all of these new sound therapies, and they're so much more powerful, and they're so much more safer to use.

Yeah, you know, I was talking about, like, that, that wearable that causes the sound to be conducted through the bone. And you mentioned in the book about how sound actually is transported through the bones. You see, the bones are so conductive that physicians can use tuning forks to determine whether someone has a bone fracture. Meaning, like, if you strike and there's a clear tone, you could have an uninjured bone, where if the sound is diminished or absent, it could indicate there's an interruption in the sound waves in the presence of a fracture. And that's how sound, for example, could be sensed by bones. But then you also. And of course, we know the ear has all the tiny bones in it. That's another perfect example, I suppose. But then you also talk about how we're able to hear these pressure away from sound through our skin. How would you actually explain how the skin can hear, so to speak?

So we are actually set up with receptors in our skin to pick up vibrations. And again, just think about it like if you are in proximity to a very, very loud sound, yes, you can hear it in your ears, but you can actually feel the pressure waves against your skin. Like, you can feel it vibrating inside of your body. And what people are oftentimes surprised by is that we're actually built to interact with sound even on a cellular level. We have these little structures called primary cilia, and they are on every cell of our body, and they quiver like tuning forks. And when they pick up sound, again in the form of vibration, what we call sound is just a certain level of freak, a certain range of frequency that the human ear can pick up. But that's like saying what a dog picks up is not sound. So just keep that in mind that we have a really strong human bias of what we can hear, we call sound, but what other animals we don't call sound. So there's a wide range of vibrations, and we're actually built to pick those up. So these primary cilia, when they get those vibratory information, they cause proteins to change their charge, and that actually changes the shape of their cells. And we know that if there's a problem with these primary cilia, it can actually result in conditions like arthritis Heart failure, cancer. And so sound is a part of our biology. And you know, I just tell people to think about it. Like, look, Ben, if you walked into a room and your wife was just furious and the first thing out of her mouth was, that never happens. Yeah, no, that never, ever, ever happened. This is completely hypothetical. But you know, if she said like something really, really, we'll use somebody else, we'll use your accountant. I don't want you to get in trouble with your wife. But like, you know, you walk in and somebody says something really angry, immediately there is a wave of a physiological, a biological response through your whole body. So we are literally built to respond to sound, but we're not doing it deliberately, we're not doing it in a conscious way to use healing sounds as part of our medical arsenal. And I think that this is going to be one of the big shifts in medicine over the next, you know, anywhere between 20 to 50 years is the introduction of vibratory medicine. Because it's just, it's a safer form of medicine and it's a more effective form of medicine. Medicine. Like, why would you have surgery if you could shrink a tumor using sound? Like, why would we be that invasive if we don't have to be?

Yeah, it's fascinating. And the description of the cilia is I think, a really, really good way to explain this to people. Just these tiny hair like, or antenna like structures on every single cell membrane that can, you know, they can pick up vibration. You know, anybody who took whatever. I don't, I don't remember what grade it was in like sixth grade anatomy. But you've seen all of the tiny bones in the ear, for example, and how those can register vibrations. I mean from infrasonic all the way to ultrasonic frequencies. Your ear can pick those up and it's not that much of a stretch to begin to understand that your cells actually are just, I suppose you could say they're chock full of tiny ears or your skin is a giant ear.

That's exactly right. We're built to interact with our environment. We're actually like, we're built to get as much information from our environment as possible. And part of the research is when people go, well, there proof of this. I said, well, you don't start researching things again until you start having new scientific ideas develop. And so when people started to look at some of these ancient practices and go, wait a minute, sound and vibratory medicine, it's doing something, then they started to look for, well, what was the mechanism? And so it's only after we develop a new science that we start looking for the biology to explain the model for how it works.

Right. And the thing about the skin is, you know, not only is it a giant ear, but you see all these photoresections, receptors now that are being discovered, dictating that the skin is also an eye. So it's very able to sense light and dark cues to regulate circadian rhythm. And now it turns out it's able to detect sound cues that could also have a pretty important impact on health. So, you know, one thing, though, about this whole vibration potential of the cell membrane in response to sound is the idea that sounds obviously vibrate at different frequencies. Therefore, an argument that you make in the book is that if cells vibrate in response to different frequencies, we should be able to use frequencies for eliciting specific functions. And I'm just curious how that actually works, how we could target a cell or an organ with a specific hertz frequency and then elicit some kind of a response. Can you explain how that works and perhaps give some examples, whether from research or elsewhere? Were.

Yeah, so there's this, actually research that's being done now, and the researchers are applying for a patent. I don't know if they've already received it, but this is a researcher, the head researchers from ucla, and he has a team that he's working with actually from around the world. And what they have found out was that if you apply, like, you know, this is all on a microscopic level, but like a microscopic, microscopic amplifier, cells have a song. Okay, so that cells are actually singing. They produce a specific vibration that can be translated into audible sound for the human ear. Again, it's not that the world isn't vibrating and singing essentially. It's just that we can only hear certain frequencies. And so what they found was that you can translate these cellular vibrations into sound, and that different cells associated with different tissues carry different primary or resonant frequencies. That means they're in internal frequency.

So when you say resonant, what does resonant mean?

In this case, it means, like, your primary resonant frequency. So it's the sound of a liver cell, like, that is its unique vocal fingerprint. Okay, so it's very, very unique to that particular tissue. So what they theorize then is, okay, so if healthy liver cells are producing a particular frequency, just like if you have two tuning forks that should be, you know, the same frequency, if you tap one, the second one begins to resonate. And so the theory is, could you do this with unhealthy tissue that if you expose it to its own primary resonant frequency, can you return it to its healthy state? What they're finding is very, very positive. And that's why they're applying for, you know, a patent for this technology. But this is completely the same philosophy, the same science behind the ancient practices, which was that they figured out what were the frequencies of different aspects of the body, as well as the frequencies, you know, different frequencies of the mind. And so if somebody had a physical problem or they had a mental problem, they would include sound therapy as part of their treatment plan. And, you know, it's just like how I practice. It's not that I'm only giving people, like sound therapy, but like, I'm giving them dietary recommendations, I'm giving them herbal recommendations. I'm recommending the use of things like yoga and different kind of exercise. But in addition, we include sound. And so this was the way that people were treated in ancient times. And it was extremely, extremely effective. And one of the things that, you know, really shocked me because I'm in India right now doing research into some of these records that are 8,000 years old and have never been looked at by a medical physician. I think I'm actually one of the first medical physicians.

You're in India right now while we're talking.

I'm supposed to be in India, but then the world shut down, so I can't get back there. So I'm in San Diego. No complaints about being in San Diego. But I was working in India studying these records and the way that they describe the conditions that they were treating, treating cancer, treating things that we think are just treating paralysis and using this combination. And they were successfully treating these things, and they knew the different resonant frequencies for these different systems. I mean, it's just. It's absolutely spectacular, the amount of detail they had. And they also had like, specific resonant frequencies for, like, unlocking intuition, for making you, you know, more attractive to, like, financial well being. Like, they had different frequencies for in training the brain to be recept to those frequencies that then out in the world.

Super interesting. And this kind of explains this whole idea that each cell has a song. The concept that I don't remember the author of a book that I read about tuning forks, but she actually had tuning forks that were targeted towards specific organs based on the actual sound that those tuning forks were producing. And what you're saying is that these cells, the cilia on the cell surface or the cell membrane is actually responding to a Specific frequency. And then based on that frequency, you can elicit a metabolic response within the cell.

Yes. And you know, and the cilia is only the first structure that we're really uncovering. We're going to uncover a lot more. And like Ben, the next wave of this, no pun intended, but the next wave of this research is going to be really looking at, at I believe, how sound actually results in electromagnetic waves in the body and that they then are also causing biochemical changes. And people might go like, electromagnetic waves. There's no way we produce electromagnetic waves. Yeah, we do. That's why we're able to do an eeg. That's why we're able to do an ekg. And where the research is going is it's showing that our biology, it's not this bumper car model that we had before of lock and key of this chemical comes and, you know, binds to some receptor that there's actually a electromagnetic waves that are generated. And that's why you can have a response in every single cell all at once to like a stressful response or a really pleasant response. But this is why the body is so fine tuned, why you can, you know, take a trillion cells and have them respond in unison. Because we're actually communicating at this ridiculously high speed of propagating electromagnetic waves. And this is being, you know, know, already proven. And so as we start to put these pieces together and we start to realize, like, wait a minute, how does sound result in electromagnetic waves that then result in biological responses? Now we're looking at the new science. You know, we're not looking at, oh, you've got a liver tumor, let's go in there, rip your body open, you know, scoop that thing out, hopefully we got it all, and then put you on months and months and months of chemotherapy. I mean, this is like caveman medicine, you know, in comparison to even what we were doing thousands of years ago. I mean, thousands of years ago they were treating these things non surgically. And they have, you know, extremely detailed records of how they did it. And that's why I am in rural India, you know, studying this. And this is why I'm writing these books. Because I have access to this information that is so ancient and that is so difficult really to tap into. And I'm trying to bring this out to the world just so at least in the future. Maybe it's not going to be during my lifetime, but at least in the future, we're planting the seeds that there is a better way to approach human health.

It's Just fascinating. And you talk about how far back a lot of this stuff goes. Well, I mean, for me, a practicer of Christianity, you even see elements in scripture where, you know, God speaks the world into existence and sonic vibrations are literally formed by that, by, you know, the mouth and the tongue. And, you know, we see other places where, you know, in proverbs, it talks a lot about like, death and life being in the power of the tongue or the tongue being mightier than the sword. And it is actually crazy that, yeah, part of it is, you know, what you're actually saying the words that you're forming the emotions that, that those are producing. But then part of it is the actual sonic vibrations of your tone, which, which of course, you know, many of us have experienced with music as well. So up until about probably, I don't know, 15 minutes ago, I would have said that the term resonant frequency was a total woo woo term. And now I understand what resonant frequency means when we're talking about the membranes and the cilia and the cells. But then there's another term that I think also gets an eyebrow raised at it, so to speak, and that is the biofield. The biofield. People hear that and they're like, take out a magic camera and film the light coming off my body or whatever. How would you describe as a neurologist, the biofield?

Well, so the biofield is actually a medical term. And this term came out of the National Institute for Health, the nih, because they had pulled together a group of scientists and physicians and said, look, look, there's a lot of research coming out that there's techniques like acupuncture, technique like energy healing. We have positive results for these studies. We cannot deny the science of it, but we don't have even a language to explain why this works. So I really congratulate the NIH because they came to a point of saying, we know that this works. We don't even want to necessarily admit that it works because it challenges our entire paradigm of medicine. But we now know that this works. So how do we explain that this works? So the term biofield is just a shortened form of biological field, which was actually coined by Dr. Beverly Rubik. And she's a biophysicist and brilliant woman. I mean, just absolutely brilliant woman. She's one of my personal heroes.

Beverly Rubik is her name?

Yes, Beverly Rubik. Just really, she's so, so ahead of her time. And essentially biophilic. It's a massless field. It's not necessarily electromagnetic. And I already describ to you some of the electromagnetic fields that we generate from the heart and the brain, which is why we have the ability to record EEGs and EKGs. But it's said to surround and permeate living bodies, and it actually affects the biology of the body. So again, even when we say things like, gosh, this sounds like really woo, the reality is, if you can't deny a biofield and go get an ekg, because then that would undermine the very science behind an ekg, because the EKG is measuring your electromagnetic field. And so a biofuel is just basically saying that, yes, there's parts of us that we can poke at. Like you can poke at your muscle, you can poke at your bones and say, okay, there I am, I'm solid. But there's parts of you that you can't poke at. But they still exist in you and around you, and they are affecting your biochemistry. And we now can measure them. And so as our measurements get better, it is challenging our science that we are only skin and bone and we are only the things that we can see. And I think, you know, the way Beverly Rubik described it is just, again, brilliant. She calls it nature's original wireless communication system. And so it'd be a little bit like saying, well, I don't believe that there's wireless communication. Well, I'm using it right now on my computer. I don't have anything plugged in, and yet I'm connected to this Internet. How am I connected to that? If our computers have the capacity to make those kinds of, you know, wireless connections, why on earth would our body, which is far more complex than our computers, not have that capacity? So it's always interesting to me that we use these technologies outside of medicine, but then when we apply them back to the human body, everybody goes, oh, you know, that's crazy. And it's like, why would that be crazy? If human beings are creating those technologies, why would we think that the creator of human beings didn't know how to do that? That why would we think we're somehow smarter than the creator of the universe?

Yeah. In this whole idea of biofield science, or us being more than just flesh and blood and also being vibratory beings. And I know that I was kind of joking about the light cameras, but they actually have shown that human beings produce infrared light, for example, and other light particles. It's something that is now slowly being proven. And I think that anybody who has dabbled in, for example, let's say something like, you know, Plant medicine. Certainly, you know, if you are in a state where you're looking at another human being with your eyes open in more of a medicine space, you also see people in a very different light. Pun intended, since you were throwing puns around earlier. I will. And, you know, you see vibrations, and you see different colors and different lights coming off of that person. And you see them as something far more different than the flesh and blood that we might be looking at. If we reduce everything to scientism or to the way that, let's say, modern allopathic medicine might look at a human being, so to speak. We are a human being of light and of sound and of vibratory frequencies. That does go beyond flesh and blood. As difficult as that is for a lot of people to wrap their heads around. I think that part of the magic behind it and the idea that we are able to interact with each other almost down to a quantum physics level is something that. Because it's difficult to prove. That's one of the reasons that it's so darn cool. And can cause, for example, something like my wife to be in the bedroom 15ft away from me and me. For me to be able to detect that something might be off with her because of the electromagnetic field that her heart might be sending or that her brain might be sending.

Exactly right. And it's actually, these are the fields that connect us as human beings. And, you know, when you said we don't have to be scientific about it, it actually is science. It's just a new science. We're holding onto our old science, but this is actually being proved. And, you know, what's kind of interesting is so much of this was proved in quantum physics last century. And so many of the quantum physicists that realized this, they had predicted that eventually biology is going to catch up with this. That what's missing now is an application of the quantum reality to biological systems. But they saw that the next step is eventually going to be understanding mass as a vibratory reality. And so it's actually not a lack of proof. It is a lack of. People always ask me, why is science so slow to change? I said, science is the most widely practiced religion on the planet. Because what happens is that when there is new information, people hold onto the old information like dogma. Oh, that's the only thing that can be true. And science is something that is ever evolving. Because, you know, human consciousness is something that is ever evolving. So I'm not a proponent of, like, not being scientifically rooted. I'm actually the exact opposite. I love the science. I am just shocked that there were, you know, masters in India 8,000 years ago that were describing the subatomic nature of reality in these ancient texts. They were describing the atom, they were describing the electron, the proton, that they were describing this 8,000 years ago. And they were highly scientific, but they were, were applying those quantum principles now to biology. That is what fascinates me. And so my draw there is not only as like a spiritual being being fascinated about who am I really, but also as a neuroscientist, go like, how did they know this? You know, how were they able to peer into this before they had the technology that we would recognize as being advanced?

Yeah. One of the examples that you give, by the way of the biofield that I thought was kind of interesting was heparin, the anti clotting medication, or I guess you'd call it the anticoagulant medication. There was one researcher who you mentioned who actually tested the frequency that could be produced by say, a medication. Can you describe that work on heparin?

Yeah. So again, brilliant researcher, and he was not necessarily wanting to go down this field. He was very well respected for the work that he had done in other areas of biomedicine. And there was an error that happened in his lab, which he originally thought was an error, that he realized it wasn't an error. It's just showing that there's some kind of information that is being kept in some kind of a massless field. And so he then further expanded his experiments to looking at do medications essentially produce a biofield. And what he found was that when they looked at the resonant frequency of heparin. Now remember, and this is according to Kant, physics, all of life has a frequency. And so if you can apply the correct tools, you can make those frequencies audible to the human ear. And so he used technology that essentially used amplifiers for the human ear to be able to hear the frequency that heparin makes. And what they did is they just applied that frequency to water. So there's something about water that contains the memory of sound. And this is also a very, very ancient finding. And they talk about this regularly in old texts of how to use water and sound for healing. And so if he applied the frequency, the audible sound of the resonant frequency of heparin to water, if a person drank that water, and so no heparin has been added to the water, if the person drank that water in their body, they had the exact same effect as if they took the Medicine?

That's crazy. And isn't that kind of sort of what homeopathic medicine is, based around this idea that certain liquids, such as water, can carry the frequency of the element that they've been exposed to or the medication they've been exposed to? Has there actually been research that shows that just because it carries the frequency, it can have a similar effect? Like, could you, for example, take water that had been imprinted with, let's say, the same frequency as the anticoagulant medication heparin, and still see some type of anticoagulant effect, even if it were weaker from consuming that water?

Yes. No, that is. And it wasn't weaker. It was the same. That was exactly what his research showed.

Oh, this research showed that the water was the same?

Yes, that the water was the same. And so. And he didn't, you know, he didn't intend to be the researcher who did this. And it created a huge stir, like, in the scientific community, and people didn't want to believe it, and they really attacked him. And, you know, it was really only because of his previous reputation that people, you know, took him seriously. And this, this experiment was replicated in multiple different countries by multiple independent labs, you know, and it kept showing the same thing over and over. And so, like the field, you know, fields like homeopath, which also was, you know, one of the ancient sciences that originated from India and was eventually taken, I believe it was, to Germany and then given the title of homeopathy. But these are the kinds of things that people were doing in these ancient civilizations thousands and thousands of years ago. But even like within Christianity, when we look at many of the, you know, miraculous acts that Jesus performed, when you look at things from a quantum level, when you look at them from a vibratory level level, what you realize is there is actually a science behind this and that, you know, these individuals that were elevated kind of to that divine level, they had a intimate understanding of how nature worked. And so they were able to approach nature in the same way that we would approach, you know, like, electricity, of, like, going, oh, well, we know how to take electricity and do with it what we want because we understand the concept of electricity. Electricity. So these, these are. These are bodies of knowledge that we find over and over and over in ancient civilizations that are being used by what we, you know, what I would consider, like, enlightened masters. They understood that this is the true reality of the world.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, and, and for me, you know, again, like, like, as a Christian, sometimes I'm called out because I like to use things like Tibetan singing bowls. And I play hand pan. I find the hand pan camp had to be incredibly therapeutic, especially in the evening, you know, And I love the concept of gongs and sound healing. And I've gone to see folks like my previous podcast guest, Por Nguy down in Sedona, Arizona, and had him blast me with didgeridoos and drums and all manner of different instruments while doing deep tissue work and breath work. And I play things like, you know. Another former podcast guest, Michael Tyrrell, he is actually a composer who composes these healing tracks called whole tones, which are conducted at a specific hertz frequency that's just absolutely relaxing to the entire body. My pets, both my dogs, Dasher and Comet, they'll come downstairs to the living room from getting a massage and play these sounds, these musics from Michael Tyrell, just because the sound seems so therapeutic to the body. And so, yeah, there's definitely something to be said for all the different ways that these frequencies can be used, used. But of course, one thing that's often tied to, say, singing bowls, for example, you could buy a set of seven different singing bowls like Tibetan singing bowls, and you'll get exposed to the idea that each one is tuned to a different chakra, a different chakra in the human body. You tackle chakras a little bit and actually give an argument in the book that they are related to major bundles of nerves that travel along the spine. Can you talk about that a little bit? Whether chakras have actually been proven to exist, and if so, what might be the underlying biological mechanism for them?

Sure. So first, let me just kind of explain the way that chakras are viewed. Kind of from Eastern philosophy. Chakras are basically looked at as merging points of energy and matter. So now that makes sense. When we start talking about the fields that are surrounding and permeating the human body, it makes sense that there would be certain points where those energy, you know, energy fields would suddenly condense and. And communicate with the physical body. And there are seven major chakras. There's actually much, much more than that. There's seven major chakras that we tend to talk about. And I always thought it was really interesting that the location of those chakras were always next to major nerve bundles. And the nervous system is the one system. I think this is why this is so easy for me to think about vibratory medicine, because as a neurologist, the nervous system runs off of electricity. It's not hard to go from Electrical impulse to vibr impulses. So to me as a neurologist, it would make sense that if there were merging points of, you know, the energy bodies or the biofield surrounding the physical body and permeating this physical body, that you would have these highways that would then, you know, possibly translate that information to major nerve bundles, possibly in the form of electromagnetic waves, because the nervous system is really built for that kind of communication. And so when you say something like have chakras been proven to exist? You have to remember that in order to prove something, you have to be looking for it. And so, you know, we haven't had researchers in the past who are like, well, let's actually look at this, let's see if we can measure it. But because of this new field of medicine, biofield, there's an entirely new set of equipment that is emerging from this. And this is really exciting to me. And they, we actually had some researchers that came to India and what they were meant measuring were just, were there areas in the human body where the electromagnetic field suddenly became very, very dense. And when they were doing these measurements, as people were being exposed to some of these very ancient sounds, you know, these ancient mantras and these ancient forms of musical instruments, what they found was that those areas that coalesced in the exact same areas that people described as the chakras from the past, that those areas became bigger. And so there is this new equipment, this new technology that is emerging that is starting to substantiate that. But you know, when you don't have people who, number one, even believe in chakras, it's hard then to do research around it. And I think as we demystify all of this, like if we stop looking at chakras as something that you are only experiencing, like you know, in states of deep meditation, but you just start looking at the human body and go, huh, that is weird that you have these major nerve bundles in the exact same area where ancient medical systems described where the chakras would be located. And huh, that really is interesting that you have this nervous system that has a capacity of generating electromagnetic waves. And we know now that there are fields that we are now just trying to measure. Like, wow, what if they knew that those were the areas where information was suddenly being past from kind of like the non physical fields to the actual physical body? Like that to me just doesn't sound like, oh, well, that's impossible to conceive of. I think like, hey, that's a really interesting model, let's start to test it. Let's start to measure it.

Come on. They haven't studied that at Cedar Sinai. It's impossible. I get what you're saying. And, you know, when it comes to the chakras, you know, for example, you know, my boys and I will often do breathwork sessions, and some of the breathwork sessions that we do, especially using the strength form of breathwork called Soma, which was designed actually by another former podcast guest of mine, Niraj Naik. It involves that omming, that omming at the end of some of the long inhales, where you're drawing the breath from the root chakra up to the crown chakra, trapping it, similar to something you might do during Tantric breath from the sexual organs all the way up to the top of the head. And then when you're releasing that energy, you're doing that AWM type of sound with, from what I understand, each of those different sounds of om, basically relating to the, the root chakra, the A, and then the, The U being the heart chakra, and the M, I believe, is the. What's. What's the third eye?

The Ajna chakra.

Yeah, chakra. And so you're. You're basically using sound, using, Using the. Reverberate, the, The. The vibrations of your voice to move and energy through the chakras. However, that's, of course, three chakras, you know, the heart, the crown, and the third eye. And you get into, in the book this idea of a chakra mantra for balancing all of the chakras. And I'd love to hear you explain that, because one really interesting thing is I have this thing called a biocharger. One of the settings on the biocharger, which uses pulse selector, electromagnetic frequency, negative ions, RF and light, is it produces these sounds that go up and down in seven different frequencies with seven different kind of light variations. And so chakra balancing, they call it a chakra balancing recipe. And sometimes I'll sit in front of that and meditate. But then you also have a mantra that I would imagine using your own sound could do something similar. Can you describe your, your chakra mantra?

Yeah. So it does something. It's not only that, it does something similar. This is where that technology came from. This is what I was saying is that as we start to look at how sound produces electromagnetic fields, and then we start to understand what these energy centers are, that they are a meeting point for energy and the body, that then as we apply particular sounds to open up these centers, there's, you know, it's going to Generate electromagnetic fields which, which then are propagated through the nervous system to the entire body. This is the ancient science that these new technologies are using. And I think it's perfectly fine to use equipment for it, but you are actually built to do this. I mean, that was the whole purpose of us being able to vocalize and for us.

Yeah, but I mean, it's fun to spend $12,000 and biohack it too.

Yeah, no, that's totally fun too. Absolutely. Yeah. I could also give you a free mantra, but up to you, right?

I personally like both. I like both. I like to play with the technology and then I like to just strip things down and totally unplug.

I'm actually the same. I like doing both for some of the stuff that are mind related. I like some of the technology. But then I really love diving into the ancient stuff. So the chakra mantra, it's a very, very old. It's an ancient chakra mantra and it just holds the resonant frequency for every major chakra. Now we say that the crown chak, it doesn't actually have a sound, but all the other six chakras have a resonant frequency. And so what you're doing is you're just repeating the sounds. And you can first start with doing this out loud. And then as you get to know it better, you can just start to do it silently. It's actually more powerful when you do it silently. And my husband, I actually recorded this on a CD if people want it. It's just on iTunes under Dr. Chaudhary's Chakra Mantra. And you can just do this first. Start with 5 minutes, then 10 minutes and 15 minutes and 20 minutes. And we typically don't recommend more 20 minutes because it is releasing also a lot of blocked energy. And the sounds are, they just go like this. It's hari om nam lam mam vam simram vam yam yam ham shiva om swah. And so that is just the sound of it. And I'm happy, Ben, if you would like me to give you like something written if you want to, you know, share with people. But those are just the sounds of your energy centers. And so as you start to do this on a regular basis, people are usually really surprised when they start having like detoxification symptoms in the body from doing the chakra mantra. And they're like, how could this be happening? I said, well, you're opening up all of the blocks in that area. You're having energy move. And when energy moves, neuro Impulses are moving. And when those impulses are moving, they're going out to your organs and releasing, you know, messaging that is shifting your biochemistry. So of course you would be having changes.

Yeah, yeah. So, and I'll link to this in the at bengreed for fitness.com soundmedicine if you send over to me the link to that audio. Correct. But yeah, I mean, what you describe, you know, as you saying, haryam nan lam mam vam simram vam yam yamham shiva om swaha. You know, it's just doing that. And how long would you actually chant that mantra to really say balance the chakras? Like, what's this look like?

Logistically, you only need 20, maximum 20 minutes. And that's why I said we don't even Recommend More than 20 minutes because that's usually too much energy for the majority of people. So not more than 20 minutes. And I look at this chakra mantra as like, you give your physical body a shower every day to keep it clean. This is the same shower you give to your energetic body. It's the meditation that I do every single day. And if there's a reason, for some reason, like if I miss, if I'm traveling or something happens, I can just feel the difference. Just like you would feel a difference if you don't take a shower.

Yeah, I love to do these things with my kids. So if you send that audio, I'll put it in the show notes. And for those of you listening in, I'll try it a few times with my boys, river and Taren, because I just love to share stuff like this with them and wish I'd have learned a lot more of this type of thing when I was a kid. So we'll probably sit in the sauna and just do it for 20 minutes and then I usually will talk with them for a few minutes afterwards and see how they feel about it and what they experienced. And I just think it's wonderful not only to learn about this stuff on a podcast, but then to just play with it. And I understand. I do a lot of interviews, a lot of people, and some stuff will stick and some stuff. Some stuff won't, but I really love to simply try things. And some stuff does stick and really does make your life better. So I think that trying out a mantra based meditation just to see what doing your own type of sound healing would actually feel like is something that might be really interesting for a lot of people. Now you're an integrative neurologist. Corey. And you practice sound medicine and include it in the treatment of chronic disease. Disease. But I don't really know how to find other practitioners who would do something like this. You're in San Diego, obviously, so if we had somebody who lived in San Diego and they're listening in, maybe they could look you up. But are there other people that do what you do? I mean, how could people find someone who uses an approach similar to you? Or do you know of others who do? Are you just like a total unicorn?

I think I'm a unicorn in the neurology field. There might be like one or two more like, like me. But it's not that I'm a unicorn in the medical field, not at all. And, you know, the nice thing is. Well, first of all, I mean, just with how many consultations people are now starting to do, like, via Skype and so forth, like, you now have more access to practitioners, you know, that were maybe regional, that are now seeing people. Like, I see people from all over the world because I'm sometimes here and I'm sometimes, you know, in India. And I think that's happening more and more, that people are becoming global physicians. But there's also, just, like you mentioned, you know, there's certain musicians like Deva, Premal and Mitten, they record healing sounds using different mantras. You know, they're available just on cd. I mentioned the CD that, you know, my husband, I made just to help people understand how to make the pronunciations for the chakra mantra. But there's also meditation teachers, like transcendental meditation is a bija mantra meditation technique. And there's also music therapy. I mean, that is an actual legitimate, you know, career that is being recognized by the medical community. And there's music therapists that are there to help conditions like PTSD and anxiety. And so it partly just depends on how do you want to approach this. You know, people have heard, like, sound baths, but I go, that's, you know, if the only time you took a bath was when it was available in public, like, you wouldn't be bathing every single day. Day. So a sound bath is great once in a while, but you should be doing something, you know, on a daily basis. And if you don't know where to start, this chakra mantra is a really, really phenomenal place to begin your sound medicine daily practice. Because there's. There's very few sound medicine practice that are this holistic, where they actually literally tune the entire body.

Hmm, interesting. So there's not. Is there like a practitioner directory or Anything like that. Kind of like the Institute for Functional Medicine has if you to find a.

Functional medicine practitioner, you know, not for sound therapy because. Or sound medicine because it's still something that is early on in being recognized as an actual therapy. And I think it's more in the form of music therapy. But music is only one type of sound healing. And so this is a very, very kind of ironically very young and extremely ancient field at the same time. So it has not yet been organized in that way.

But I mean you could probably do a Google search and find some interesting things like sound healing hemorrhoids and just see what comes up and perhaps you could just start there finding some different sound frequencies or mantras or tips. And I realized that the comments section of blog posts and deep dark forums and Reddit are probably not the best place to go if you are experiencing a serious medical, medical issue yet. You might be able to do a little bit of research and find some interesting things. And obviously Corey, your book is a very good place to start. In my book Boundless, I actually have a small section, I believe it's in the recovery chapter on sound healing. And I recommend some other books there in that chapter of Boundless. And so that might be a couple of places for folks to get started. And then everything thing that the good doctor and I have talked about, I'm also going to link it to@bengreedfulfitness.com soundmedicine Cole Reed I think my assistant has your email address and if you email her that audio or anything else, any links you want me to add, I'll do that for folks. So they've also got access to that stuff. If you think there's anything interesting that people might like in terms of a pre recorded mantra meditation or anything like that, I'll definitely make that happen.

Sure, I'll send the links. And you know, one of the reasons why I wrote the book was so that people did have like a reliable, safe and scientifically based resource for entering into this world so that they didn't feel like they were lost. I mean, I can't be there for, you know, everybody, you know, all over the place. And that's the beautiful thing about writing books, as you know, is you take all of your expertise and condense it down, down into these pages so that anybody has access to it. You know Ben, some of these mantras before they were kept so hidden, so secret and the whole goal of my work in India is just for people to have access to very ancient tools that have been so effective just to reduce suffering in their life.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I love what you're doing. I love the book. I'm glad I got it. I don't know where I got it or who sent it to me, but it's wonderful. So thank you for writing it, Corey. And again, for those of you listening in, just go to bengreetlefitness.com soundmedicine and I'll link to the book and everything else that we discussed. And until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Dr. Korit Chowdhury. How close did I get, by the way, during this?

You nailed it. You got it. You got it, right.

Maryland. Signing up from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week.

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