A Moderate Review of Holosync

Edit on 15.08.09: You can now find regular updates on my Holosync experience at Zen In Heels blog.

I thought perhaps I would do something a little bit different with the next few posts. I’ve noticed that quite a lot of hits come in from people looking up Holosync and the Sedona Method, two things I’ve discussed vaguely over the past nine months of writing here. I’ve also noticed, when I’ve searched these things, and indeed anything on the internet, that it’s almost impossible to find a moderate review. Two positions exist on the net for anything you care to name: absolute adoration or absolute hate. Nobody ever says “It was all right, a bit niggly sometimes, and you should watch out for that bit, but otherwise, I think it was fine.” On the internet, everybody has to be fervent. I thought what I might do was write little reviews about my experiences with both, to inform those who hit my site looking for information.

I have to admit most of the Holosync related searches are phrased along the lines of “Holosync dangerous” or “Holosync horror stories” and it’s unlikely that you’ll find anything especially moderate in your results there. I tried out some of these searches recently and it’s difficult to find anything particularly informative. “Horror story” has never, to my mind, been correlated with information designed to give you a reasoned and balanced viewpoint on anything. I personally can’t give you any dramatic stories either: it didn’t melt my brain, cause any limbs to fall off, and neither have I been transformed into the next Buddha.

Holosync was the first thing I’ve ever bought where I read all the instructions and accompanying material several times, very thoroughly. I’m not somebody who normally reads the instructions for anything. I like things to be easily understood if you press the “on” button and it goes. My mobile phone, for example, came with a manual that dwarfed Tolstoy’s War and Peace but was far less comprehensible.  That might actually be a literary achievement. I need my mobile phone to send and receive texts, and send and receive phone calls. I don’t require it to provide me with internet access because the screen is so small the pages are unreadable and anyway, I have a laptop for that kind of thing. So far I have survived without needing internet access wherever I happen to be. Neither do I require GPS to tell me where I am. I’m a geographer, I have maps. My laptop and iPod are very easy to understand. You press labeled buttons that do what you tell them. No manual needed.

Holosync, on the other hand, was a little bit different. I understood the principle of sitting for an amount of time listening to water noises and Tibetan bowls, but I wanted to make sure I knew what to expect from this activity. I noticed, during one of my searches, a complaint made that it causes depression, mood swings and a host of other interesting symptoms. These are all mentioned in the instructions, and the bits of information you receive (and you receive an awful lot from them), over and over again. I’d actually expected this to happen; after all, when you’ve been in therapy or counselling you understand that digging up unhappy material may well make you feel miserable. The instructions for Holosync point out that the reason why you feel miserable is because you resist how you feel: you feel sad and you don’t want that, so you try to push it away, making yourself more unhappy in the process. Removing the problem of judging your emotions as “good”, “bad”, “positive” or “negative” eliminates a lot of the unhappiness straight away.

After my first two weeks of Holosync, two things happened. I’d had one major blow-out where I burst into tears and was very unhappy, and I’d met a friend for the first time in a month who said I looked radiant and incredibly confident. I began to notice as I progressed through the “Prologue”, as it’s called, that things went in cycles. I’d feel very upbeat for a while, then something would come up and I’d feel bad for a while. The dips, however, became less and less pronounced, and the highs more stable, more solid and more familiar. I developed a way of dealing with negative thinking or feeling by reminding myself that it was just a symptom of Holosync. This would make it very easy to deal with and most of the time the feeling would just evaporate there and then.

I’m now on Level One of the program. I’m doing things with my life that I never imagined I’d have the courage to face, and notice that I’m much more confident and more at ease with myself than at any other time in my life. On the down side, I still get bouts of dark feeling and thoughts, but I tend to think that’s a natural part of living. I am aware of somebody who, based on my experiences, had a go at Holosync and had a reaction that he didn’t like at all, so decided to stop the program. He kept saying he would take it up again and “just use it to relax”, but of course you can’t choose how to use the program and stop it from doing what it does, which I think is part of the problem. You have to start from the view point of wanting to change, and being prepared to let go of issues, problems, thought patterns and anything else that might come up to be released. I personally have found the whole process quite liberating, and I recommend it with the warning that you should be prepared to face these things as they arise.

Tomorrow I’ll write something about the Sedona Method. It’s nice sometimes to take a break from writing about writing all the time.