Good vibrations

Good vibrations
Stephen Sellers - 04/18/2024

Greetings, dear readers! The last several months, I’ve been leaning into and celebrating the beautiful woo in our little town. Life is short! Eat at Turtle Lake Cafe! Hike barefoot! Get a flip phone! Personally, I’ve enjoyed a few ecstatic dances, crystal bowl sound baths and other sound-oriented gatherings. Consider me “sonically curious.” I mean, what if music, sound, even pure frequencies really are medicine after all? Surely this has been common knowledge in communities around the world for millennia, well before dorm-room binaural beats (sounds transmitted independently into each ear) playlists spread during COVID. Maybe for a really, really long time music was medicine … then the great banjo craze of the early 20th century put that to rest. Or, maybe it was when we started guzzling antidepressants and staring into screens? Seeing rather than listening, or certainly feeling. I do wonder… .

Illsley

For 14 years, Linda Illsley crafted plate after plate of inspired, authentic Mexican food in her colorful restaurant Cocina Linda, before closing one month after the untimely death of her sister. Propelled initially by that combined grief, Illsley has spent the last decade attending innumerable workshops, studying with Belgian neuroscientists and trying to get at the root causes of chronic health conditions and how we can prevent them. And it’s all led her to sound. 

Adding to Durango’s impressive list of sound-therapy offerings, Illsley has recently started offering “bio-tuning” sessions in the building just north of Louisa’s Electronics. I don’t have the word limit to give you the full run down here, but I’ve tried it twice and have loved every second of it. Imagine lying in a zero-gravity chair that gently vibrates and emits sound through your whole body, while you listen with headphones to the most amazing binaural beats mix you’ve ever heard. For me, it truly was transcendent. I recently sat down with Illsley to learn a little more about her backstory and how she got into bio-tuning.

How was Cocina Linda was born?

I decided to work at the Farmer’s Market because I had a bee in my bonnet about tamales. I wanted to prove that tamales could be light and fluffy. That started the journey for me here, thanks to Cookie and Joy, owners of Serious Texas BBQ. They sent me to talk to Casey Lynch who owned Mountain Waters Rafting, and that’s how Cocina Linda ended up (by Albertson’s on Mountain Water’s former boat barn). It became Linda’s Local Food Café. When my sister in Mexico got cancer, I decided to transition into local, organic food out of the understanding that pesticides and herbicides can trigger cancer. She passed away nine years ago, the October before I sold the building. With her dying, not only was there the loss and grief, and the impact on my mother, but also the fear that I was going to get cancer.

How did you find your way into thinking about sound as a healing modality?

During her illness, I had started looking at alternative modalities to support my sister: acupuncture, cranial sacral, herbs and things like that. It was only last April that I went to a workshop in Tennessee, and I befriended a psychiatric nurse. He is as soft and as kind as can be. At one point last summer he said, “You need to check this stuff out.” The more I learned, the more interested I became, especially since I’ve been studying the impact of stress on the brain and our bodies for many years now.

What is the 30,000 ft view of how bio-tuning works?

We use audio recordings specifically tailored to your unique sonic signature to help your nervous system reach homeostasis and help your brain make new neural connections. It’s all about finding the frequency that helps your nervous system … and relearning how to self-regulate. During the sessions in the chair, the vagus nerve (which carries carry signals between your brain, heart and digestive system) is getting stimulated and every cell in your body is getting the sound. It’s like a sonic massage. We want your nervous system flowing in and out of homeostasis. 

Who was Linda before sitting in the chair and after?

Well, first off, it’s not an overnight process. You need repetition to build up the neural networks that provide the change. When we’re stuck in a chronic sympathetic response, you’re producing lots of cortisol. Nothing can work the way it’s supposed to. So, me before the chair and after the chair, was going downstairs and being unsure of what I was doing in the first place. Or being highly reactive. Getting totally discombobulated with schedule changes and going right into an overblown stress response. Ultimately, the chair helps people relieve high stress and become more of a regulating person. It makes me walk more kindly in the world.

What have you seen in clients?

We normalize stress. We’re not even aware of how stressed we are, and it just becomes the way we are. Just because we can adapt to living with high levels of stress does not mean that we are necessarily thriving. Somebody who has trauma, the subconscious does the incredible thing of packaging and putting it down below until they can deal with it. The brain does this so we can continue to function. We do the same with stress. “This is life, I gotta do this to survive.” And that becomes the way you live, but it doesn’t mean that’s the way you have to live.

It seems like, at least in the West, there’s been more emphasis lately on sonic and somatic approaches to dealing with things like trauma and stress.

Exactly. Something like bio-tuning is not exclusive or meant to replace things like talk therapy. When we reduce stress, I believe the ability to access things at a deeper level will be greater. To be able to engage in reframing will be easier. It’s a beautiful way of getting yourself to a place where other modalities can come in and maximize their potential. It’s not an either or – it’s an “and.” Different people need different things. We are dynamic beings. ?

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