■ What is our true potential? How powerful are we? Are we destined to live out our lives based on patterns that we were born into? Or can we rise above our alleged “genetically determined” fates and environment to become who we want to be?

Kelly Howell thinks we can. She credits meditation with helping her heal from a devastating car accident at age 22, when she broke her neck, which left her suffering from depression and headaches — not to mention a divorce, the loss of her mother and the loss of a job. Howell began experimenting with re-patterning thoughts and balancing the brain, and she developed a blend of brainwave therapy and guided meditations — collaborating with biofeedback therapists and neuroscientists in San Francisco — to create programs to treat depression, insomnia, obesity, ADHD and addiction.

The clinical feedback was so positive that in 1991 Howell founded Brain Sync (brainsync.com), a program that redirects brain activity to create a specific change in consciousness. With an 87% success rate, Brain Sync programs have been studied at Harvard Body Mind Medical School and UCLA, which concluded that it prompts brain activity into extraordinary body-mind states.

Today, she has more than two million listeners to her 50-plus audio programs, including the “Theatre of the Mind” podcast.

Howell spoke with Brain World from her home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

BRAIN WORLD: How does Brain Sync technology work on the brain?
KELLY HOWELL: The technology is based on biofeedback research to directly influence brainwave patterns. Research has shown that brain cells respond to binaural beats — pure and precisely tuned sound frequencies. The listener’s predominant bravewave patterns will move in the direction of the binaural-beat stimulus, where it guides — or actually drives — brain activity into states such as relaxation (alpha), meditation (theta), concentration (beta), and sleep (delta).

A binaural beat is generated through delivering two different tones to either ear using pure sine waves. For example, if we deliver a 100 Hz tone to the right ear and a 104 Hz tone to the left ear, when both tones are played together simultaneously the listener hears a third phantom beat pulsating at four cycles per second — the exact differential between the two tones. So here, 4 Hz is the frequency for theta, and as you listen your brain cells begin to resonate with the beat so that more and more parts of your brain are led into theta-wave [meditation] frequency.

Does this process use what is organic to the brain to get it to a particular place?
The sound frequencies balance both the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Let’s say you are in a very alert and stressed state of mind, in which case you would have a lot of beta activity going on, and as you listen to an alpha or theta program for meditation, the binaural beats will actually slow your brainwave activity to help relax you quicker and guide you into a deeper state of meditation. It also creates coherent — organized and focused — brainwave activity.

How do your guided meditations, such as “The Secret to Attracting Wealth” and “Positive Thinking,” work vis-à-vis brainwaves?
Theta, for example, will put the listener into a meditative state, which is also a deep trance state of consciousness. In theta, you’re more open and receptive to suggestion. Research has shown that children spend a lot of time in the theta state, because they are in a stage of constantly learning and being open to the world around them. So theta can be attributed to that state of learning and openness.

During the course of the day, we go in and out of different brain states, but to get into these deeper levels of consciousness you either need to practice meditation regularly or have something like brainwave therapy to guide you.

It’s belief creation, thought creation.

So just the fact that we believe in something — in some potential for our lives — that allows us to become it?
Absolutely. Belief is everything. There are a number of modalities I am working with in my guided meditation programs to help shift self-perception and perception of the world. As your perception changes, the world around you changes. It’s the clear windshield effect, where suddenly you can see things in a different light. We are able to see more possibilities, and even attract new opportunities to us.

On some of your guided meditations you use subliminal messaging, which might send a red flag up to some who worry if this is safe.
The subliminal messages in the brainwave subliminal programs are listed clearly on my website and in the CD packaging, so you can see what they are and you can work with those affirmations on a conscious level. Subliminal messages are recorded at a soft audible level and then masked by layers of music and brainwave frequencies. Even though they aren’t consciously audible, our perception is far more vast than we realize. We are absorbing so much more information in a day than we are aware of.

I have a very funny story. One day I recorded three of them in a row, which required me to sit in the studio for a few hours and say the affirmations over and over. That afternoon, when I took my son to his swimming lesson, I felt amazing. I was sitting there at the pool on cloud nine, and it was like sparkles were flying off the water and diamonds were flashing around my vision. I was in bliss. I knew then…this really works! It’s so easy to program our minds to change our attitude, our perception and experience of life.

Is this like a shortcut to reach a state that takes years of meditation to reach?
Absolutely! It’s easy. I came to this work after having learned to meditate, where I sat every day for an hour, and it took me about a year until I came to the point where I enjoyed meditation. And I thought, “If I could find a way to make meditation easy for people, this would be a great life’s work.”

On some of your programs you say that someone can listen to your voice and follow along with the guided meditations, or the listener can just kind of zone out or fall asleep, and it works either way, regardless of the amount of listener participation.
As you are falling asleep and drifting into that state, you are drifting down into a deeper level of consciousness, where you are very open and suggestible. On your way into deep sleep, you pass through theta — a deep hypnotic state — so if you begin to fall asleep [while listening], at some point you will reach that deep hypnotic state of mind, that theta state that you want to be in, because it’s ideal for reprogramming. Theta is associated with long-term memory as well, so what gets learned in theta gets stored in long-term memory. It becomes a part of us.

Research has shown that children, for example, up to the point where they start to read and write, are primarily in the theta state. That’s why we learn so much more in the first few years of our life than we do in our entire lives. So you have to think of this theta state of mind as being the most absolute open state you can be in. You are a total sponge for new ideas, beliefs and knowledge.

You say that this can be used for chemical dependency, depression, eating disorders. Is there is a broader implication for physical healing?
I wouldn’t say that this technology can cause you to heal, but it can help trigger the healing response in your body. Meditation and even relaxation are proven to boost the immune system. Our bodies have all the neurochemicals and hormones we need to heal any disease. It’s just a matter of opening that pill box. I hear stories all the time about people who are diagnosed with cancer and then it’s just gone.

The brain is the front door to change. It does open the door to being available to healing.

Most of us seem to come to these things — meditation, positive thinking, or what you do with Brain Sync — because of tragedy. It seems that we end up here, at the frontier of science and spirituality, because of some kind of life crisis.
Crisis can be a real gift. When I started I was my own guinea pig. I began experimenting with all kinds of things — meditation, visualization, holotropic breathing [a group process of intensified breathing to access non-ordinary states of consciousness]. In the ’80s there were all these wild human-potential workshops going on. There was re-birthing, actualizations, EST, and Ecstasy was legally being prescribed by psychiatrists. There was a float-tank center on 19th Street off of Broadway [in New York] I used to go to regularly. I had a deal with the owner, so I could float in that tank all night. For me it was like being on the wildest treasure hunt, experiencing all these things.

Louise Hay, author of You Can Heal Your Life, believes that with affirmations you can retrain your mind. Can we really retrain our minds?
Yes. We can retrain it. Completely. It’s being able to work with thought. When you recognize you have a pattern in your life and you see that pattern, you source it back to a thought or belief, and then you begin to work with it, transmute it, actually turn the thought around.

In the beginning I would just write affirmations down 20 times before going to bed, repeat them like a mantra, or in meditation I’d work with an affirmation and a visualization. When you’re in that deeper meditative theta state, thought is amplified, there isn’t as much static. You quiet your mind down to the point that whatever you hold in that very peaceful, calm, quiet place has way more power. It becomes amplified.

The brain doesn’t know the difference between what is happening outside of us and what is just in our imaginations, so if you can vividly create something in your mind — some kind of experience you want to happen in your life — it’ll start to show up in your life. That’s how visualization works, it’s a whole biochemical reaction in your body.

There are these very set ways of thinking in Western medicine, and if you don’t fit clearly into those standards, is it hard to be taken seriously? Have your ideas been accepted by mainstream medicine?
They are definitely moving into mainstream medicine. Brain Sync ended up getting into places like Sloan Kettering [a cancer treatment center in New York] and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute [in Boston] because of a woman who healed herself from cancer. She had terminal cancer and was told her chances of surviving were extremely slim. She listened to my program “Healing Meditation” every day and said it gave her the faith and strength she needed to heal. She overcame the cancer.

So many people have unexplained healing experiences and just go out and tell people. They are living proof. They show everyone what we are all truly capable of. bw

Only select articles available online. For more content, subscribe to our print edition.