BW: Is this like a shortcut to reach a state that takes years of meditation to reach?
KH: 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.”
BW: 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.
KH: 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.
BW: You say that this can be used for chemical dependency, depression, eating disorders. Is there is a broader implication for physical healing?
KH: 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.
BW: 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.
KH: 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 rebirthing, 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.
BW: Louise Hay, author of “You Can Heal Your Life,” believes that with affirmations you can retrain your mind. Can we really retrain our minds?
KH: 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.
BW: 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?
KH: They are definitely moving into mainstream medicine. Brain Sync ended up getting into places like Sloan Kettering 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.
For more information visit brainsync.com.
