Holosync: One year on

It’s hard to believe it’s almost exactly one year since I suddenly made the decision to spend a bit of spare cash on the Holosync Solution. I’ve written a few reviews here over the last year discussing some of the benefits and difficulties with it, but this time I thought I’d try to give a much more thorough rundown of how it works, and provide everything the many people who come here searching for information might need to know about what it does and how it works – apart from the very detailed material you can find on the Centerpointe Blog written by Bill Harris, the founder of the company.

I ordered the Awakening Prologue in July last year, on a Friday afternoon, after a friend told me she’d already started it and was impressed. The package arrived all the way from Oregon the following Monday, which I thought was quite smart timing. I dove straight in and started listening, and the immediate effects were noticed by both myself and friends who remarked that I seemed to be “floating”, looking incredibly confident and happy all the time. I myself felt as though I’d hit a real high. Suddenly I was relaxed, after living with a mind that never shuts up and is usually very angry with itself, and things became quieter and much easier. I’d been through a very difficult six months up until then, and the effect on my mood was dramatic.

Yet this “high” isn’t really what Holosync is all about. The website usually sells it as an easy way to meditate, but it’s actually a form of advanced healing that works directly on the brain and nervous system. I’ve seen people complain on websites that they experienced depression, anger and other “negative” emotions coming to the surface as they used it, and were consequently disappointed. They wanted the super-high to last, and thought they were getting something that they just sat and listened to and made them feel good. In the end, it’s true. Holosync heals anything deep down and dark you might well not want to face, and over time it has an incredible effect on self-esteem, confidence, ability to cope with difficult life changes and a raft of other benefits. But as a therapist once said to me, nothing that good comes without some kind of price, and it’s not just the dollar value I’m talking about here. Although it’s often said Holosync is the easy way to meditate, in order to deal with the more painful aspects of it, it’s necessary to learn a lot of the high-level “spiritual” techniques in order to manage the changes that happen.

This is, basically, how the Holosync system works. You buy the Awakening Prologue, which I believe retails at around $150-200. For two weeks, you listen for half an hour to the “Dive” soundtrack, which artificially regulates your brain wave frequencies through beta, alpha, theta and finally delta levels. The two week preparation period is important to follow. I have attempted to do one level without giving myself that and the overwhelm was very difficult to deal with. Rushing this program won’t make you better quicker, it’ll probably just bunch all the stuff that’s toughest to deal with up into one big lump and throw it at you in one go. Trust me, you don’t want that.

In the second stage of Awakening, you listen for an hour to “Dive” and then “Immersion”, which holds the brain at a steady delta frequency for half an hour. This is where you do most of the healing work deep down. During listening, I’ve experienced everything from floating off and feeling almost as though I was out of my own body (although that was after having spent the whole night up with the Ex-Boyfriend and I still had a lot of Coco Mania Rum and Stolly in my system, admittedly), to agitation, boredom and even an incredible inability to sit still. Most of the time, during the early phases, I just drifted off into something like sleep.

The third stage, which follows after you’ve spent a month listening to Dive and Immersion together (totaling one hour), you can add another half an hour of Immersion, which extends the time you spend in delta to a whole hour. In total, the Awakening Prologue takes about four months, and it’s only once you’ve bought it that you can start thinking about whether you want further levels or stop there. During the Prologue phase, you receive support letters every two weeks, and there’s a hotline or email you can use to ask for support if you need it. Along with the Prologue come a raft of freebies, including a book by Bill Harris that’s really only of use if you’re actually using Holosync seriously. I can see why some reviewers see it as nothing but an extended advert for the program. Once you’re doing it, it makes more sense.

Having completed the Prologue, the full program extends to twelve further levels: “Awakening” Levels 1-4, “Flowering” Levels 5-8 and “Purification” Levels 9-12. Each one takes the brain further down, using what is called a lower “carrier frequency”, which unfortunately I don’t have the space to explain here. During Level 1, you now continue to receive support letters once every four weeks, although since this has only been introduced in the last month, longer-term participants such as myself (I’m in the middle of Level 2), are able to receive them as well. There are usually a bunch of offers around for purchasing levels, including free books and CDs, or you can buy the whole lot for about $2100. They don’t send all the levels at once, however. The recommendation from Centerpointe is that you should alert them once you have about four weeks left of each level so you can order the next one, whether you’re in the Inner Circle or just purchasing a few at a time.

The levels after the Prologue follow a different pattern to the original product. The two week half-hour listening to the “Dive” track remains the same at the beginning of each level. Once this is completed, the level consists of four sub-levels, each of which take six weeks to complete for the “Awakening” section of the course (that’s Levels 1-4), and then eight weeks for the levels beyond. Each time you listen for an hour. At the start of the first Level, you receive a book called “Managing Evolutionary Change” and I highly recommend, if you do Holosync, that you read it, and then read it again, and keep it handy because it’s useful to check back every now and again to see what’s going on. Each of the levels takes time to complete: up to six months for each level so even if it is accelerating the process of growth, change and healing, it still requires time and commitment. You really have to ask yourself if you want a quick fix solution, or if you really want to knuckle down to really serious development.

It’s also worth noting that although you think “Wow, it’s going to take four years to do this!” you can only manage a certain amount of change in your life at any one time. Although we might live in a society where we’re used to having everything instantly, if you actually got everything instantly, the chances are you might not be able to cope with it. The same is true here. Anything worth having or doing is worth effort and time. Which is where we come to the major complaint I’ve seen in reviews before: the amount of time they have to sit still and listen to Holosync every day. To be honest (and I’ll sound rude here, so be warned), I think if you really cannot spare an hour of your day just to sit, whether you listen to Holosync or not, or to do something for yourself, or commit to self-development, then it sounds painfully like an excuse. “I want perfection now but without any effort!” is a common theme in Western culture, and it extends to this as well. If you really want something, you will find the time to do it. I once balanced a full time job, full time PhD study and writing full time and still managed to get to bed at 11pm each night to wake up at 7am the next day. Holosync, once you get past the Prologue, is more about a commitment to personal growth and healing than the advertising lets on. And commitments require time and effort.

So, let’s talk about the last year. Being a chronic diary-keeper, I have records for every day of the last year, and they take a specific format which makes it easy to see how things have changed. I generally write little entries during the day with a note of the time, and for the sake of Holosync, focus on recording emotional, mental and physical responses. I learned to become very aware of what was going on with me, and I’m still learning how to detach from it and worry about it less. I make the effort to keep up with Bill Harris’ blog for the sake of adding more information, and keep re-reading the books I was given for free on the program.

A year ago I was in a phase where I suffered extreme bouts of emotional turmoil that would last about 15 hours and then die down. I felt like an emotional wreck, but I’m told by a friend that it was actually letting go of about 28 years of unfelt emotion. Growing up, I learned not to feel much of anything at all, and managed to bury an awful lot of pain which still had to be felt. The moment I started Holosync that stopped, but I did find that for the first month, I would have long periods of being settled followed by equally long spells of “mental release”, with a lot of internal mental chatter – most of which was negative. The trick to dealing with this is not to attach to the thoughts and chatter, but to let it just play itself out. Reminding myself that once it’s gone it’s gone for good was very relaxing. I also learned the Sedona Method and more recently The Work of Byron Katie, both of which are valuable tools for using with Holosync.

Last year I was struggling in every area of my life. I was working a contract but never had any money at all, since I had a lot of negative attitudes towards it and whenever I had it, managed to get rid of it pretty quickly. I’d been single for a very long time and freaked out when men actually approached me (as my friends can testify). I lived a very narrow life, intended to keep out as much emotional pressure as I could, and I did a job that was very routine, very constricted. If you think for a moment about the way that many autistic people stick to very tight, narrow regimes, I was very much like that. That was how I coped living in a very big, frightening world where I felt utterly out of my depth most of the time. I could put on a show of confidence, but deep down I fought very hard to maintain the status quo and keep myself out of people’s way.

A year on, a great deal has happened in my life. I used to feel terrified all the time about money, about survival and the thought of not being able to survive kept me in a permanent state of fear. I’d wake up in the middle of every night – and this was when I was in a year-long contract with a steady paycheck – feeling overwhelming rushes of fear. As I progressed through Holosync, I gradually became more confident, and better able to talk to people. I found myself doing things I’d never have expected myself to do, and to be able to manage the feelings of fear and overwhelm when I stepped wildly outside my comfort zone.

From a contract with a tight routine and no real responsibility, I then spent eight months writing full time, living hand-to-mouth and gradually overcame my fear of having nothing. Once you’ve really had a good look at the thing you fear the most, it becomes less frightening, and you feel more confident. I never thought I’d be able to sit in front of a microphone and gob off to the online world for a podcast every week, but I managed it, and over the last few months of doing the weekly Amnar podcasts I’ve been able to simply ad lib without any need for notes about what to say.

Last week I began a new, short-term contract. It feels very different – I don’t feel desperate or afraid of not having money, and now I’m having to learn not to be afraid of the responsibility and pressure that comes with having more than I know what to do with. When I got in touch with my father and let him know how much I could save per month, he pretty much fell off his chair. I’ve never seen a man who shows less emotion than your average rock use so many exclamation marks in his emails to me. The job is also different. There’s no routine, the hours vary dramatically, so I can’t stick to set routine for living, and I am no longer doing “analytics”. Instead I’m a “business adviser”, and spend much of my time completing reports that I research myself. I spend a lot of time on the phone talking to people – it’s not long since I found phoning strangers a pretty frightening prospect. In some previous jobs I’ve hardly been able to do it at all and will put it off until the last possible minute.

I’ve also been in and out of a relationship, all of which happened very unexpectedly. I’m not yet living my dream as a full-time author, but there’s still plenty of time. I’ve become much more relaxed, and although I still have a long way to go, I guess, I’ve been incredibly impressed by what’s happened over the last twelve months. Sufficiently so that I’ve decided to buy the whole program and join the Inner Circle. As far as I’m concerned, learning to manage the spells of “negative emotion” and watching it gradually ebb out of my life forever, is worth the long-term benefits. I think that’s a decision that everybody has to make for themselves, to be honest. You could read a hundred thousand reviews, and all of them will say different things, discuss different symptoms but they’ll never tell you how you’ll respond to the program. As I’ve said for other reviews, once you buy into the main body of the Holosync Solution, it’s worth making a commitment to a bit of self-knowledge and development, and being willing to learn more about yourself. This is not, as I always say, for people who want a quick fix or to feel happy every day. Real growth does take time and effort, but as far as I’m concerned, after one year on the program, it’s been more than worth it. Knowing I can handle so much more than I could a year before is benefit enough – especially as I now wonder what I’ll be like a year from now.

For those who are just starting, or looking for advice, here are some tips for surviving, based on my experience:

1. Keep a diary of what you experience during and after sessions. It helps you work out how far you’ve come, and also to learn more about the issues that have been holding you back in your life so far.

2. Read and re-read material sent to you by Centerpointe. It’s always useful to have that knowledge to hand.

3. Be aware that it can make “anything happen”, so if you suddenly find yourself crying randomly or feeling unduly elated, remember it’s probably your reaction to Holosync and nothing to worry about.

4. Learn something like the Release Technique or the Sedona Method to help you deal with periods of overwhelm (Release Technique and Sedona Method are the children of the same basic methodology).

5. Learn to be concerned less with running from pain and running to joy. It’s a basic principle of Buddhism that we get wrapped up in the “acceptable” and the “unacceptable”. Holosync is much easier if you don’t judge the responses you give to the program.

6. Give yourself time and patience, especially if you have a lot of emotional issues to resolve. Take the advice you’re given if you use the support system provided by Centerpointe.

Note: I decided at the start of this contract that I would put aside money and buy into the Inner Circle. However, I’m also going to be purchasing the new Sedona Method course, based on the book, so I will do a review of that once I’ve been using it for a month, since I’ve been using their old course for too long now.