It a few days, it will be exactly 10 months since I began listening daily to the Lifeflow files, and I have missed no more than 4 days during that interval. I will be 65 in August and my meditation background extends back to the '80s, when I began meditating using the Prayer of St. Frances as a mantra, after a book by Eknath Ekswaren, a Hindu teacher who lived in California at the time.
In 1993, I was introduced to Insight Meditation (Vipassana) at a retreat at which Steve Armstrong was the teacher. Subsequently, I attended retreats at the Insight Meditation Society at Barre, Mass. and other retreats taught by Mary Orr and Richard Travis. When I learned about binaural beats, I investigated Holoscan and several pieces of software for the iPhone. Holoscan was simply too expensive and the iPhone software obviously changed the beat frequency during a session, making entrainment difficult.
Lifeflow seemed like a good compromise, and if it didn't work, it would be better to be out the lesser price. So I signed up, and determined to give it a fair trial, I used it 40 minutes a day from then on.
First, let me give you the physiological results. My moderately-high blood pressure was reduced so much that my doctor asked me whether or not I was having fainting spells. By the 5th month I had quit taking hypertension medicine (Benicar) and was often running a pressure of 130/70.
After about 6 months, I had developed the gumption to undertake the weight-loss program of Dean Ornish. Ornish specifies a low-fat diet, meditation and exercise as the key to a healthy life (and especially a healthy cardio-vascular system). As of this morning, I am down 16 pounds from my weight on January 1, and expect to be down 30 lbs. by the end of the year. My ultimate goal is to lose a total of 60 lbs. over a 2-year period.
Although my professional training is in law and I earn a living as an oil landman, I also have played the violin off and on for 59 years. Last year, an organist-pianist friend of mine suggested that we play the 10 violin/piano sonatas of Beethoven in a recital series at the local art museum, and I agreed. Since then, I have been doing some heavy-duty training to get the lead out of my fingers and bow hand. I am convinced that meditating with Lifeflow has greatly improved my ability to address the music with one-pointed attention, and my technical and artistic improvement has surprised both me and musical colleagues. We have already performed the Sonata 9 (The "Kreutzer" Sonata) and Sonata 1. This coming season, we will be performing Sonatas 2 & 8.
Doing Insight meditation to LF can be difficult. I find that my mind wanders far more than when I meditate in silence. After this month, I will probably add a 20-minute file of silence followed by the sound of a gong to the playlist of each LF level on my iPhone. That is the best way I have found to extend the meditation time without actually editing the LF file. The player is designed to sequentially play each file in a playlist without interruption, so the changeover to silence is seamless.
One other practice I have found helpful is to enumerate all the things I have to be thankful for immediately after the LF session fades away. It takes 5-10 minutes and noticeably raises my vibrational level for the remainder of the day.
My wife tells me that I have become far easier to live with since I have started meditating with LF. My contrary impression is that she is the one who has become easier to live with and that I haven't changed all that much. So much for our perceptions.
My plans now are to continue to meditate with LF for the foreseeable future and I am looking forward to the 2 bonus recordings. It's been a great 10 months and the money I spent on Lifeflow was well-spent. Thanks for making it available.
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