Burnt Out? Why Sound Healing Is the Reset Your Nervous System Needs | Rooted in Sound Podcast

Podcast Transcript: Rooted in Sound

This page contains the full transcript of the Rooted in Sound podcast conversation between Wyatt and Jeremy Mikush, two of our sound healing practitioners. The two of them talk about what finally pushes people to try sound therapy, holistic healing, or coaching, and why so many of us arrive at that moment burnt out, dysregulated, or sensing that something just doesn't feel right.

In this episode, Wyatt and Jeremy talk about moving from "human doing" to "human being." They explore sound therapy as acoustic induced meditation, how the body regulates itself when we give it space, and where science, quantum thinking, and ancient traditions meet. Each also shares a personal story about burnout, nature, community, and learning that joy is an inside job.

The conversation also explores:

• the life moments that lead people to try sound healing and holistic wellness

• pharmaceuticals, trauma, and why doing the deeper work matters

• sound therapy as "acoustic induced meditation"

• nervous system regulation and the "garden of the body"

• warrior culture and why rest and balance are essential

• why joy and happiness are two different things

• the sacredness of solitude and time in nature

• why community makes healing last

Below you can read the full transcript of the podcast episode. You can also watch the full video above.

Wyatt: Hello, I'm Wyatt with Rooted in Sound, and this is Jeremy.

Jeremy: Hello, everybody.

Wyatt: Jeremy is also here with Rooted in Sound, and with his many other ventures as well. Today we wanted to talk about what that trigger is for many people that says, "You know what, I think I want to try sound therapy," or some kind of holistic healing modality, or maybe even coaching. There's something that doesn't feel right. What are some of the situations people find themselves in that shift them into trying a new perspective?

Jeremy: When we were discussing this, I liked thinking of going from the very logistical and physical elements. For example, there's a lot of talk about autoimmune and inflammatory issues, something I experience myself. I'm not so interested in supplying my body with lots of physical chemicals that rush in and do the job. We know that with modern pharmaceuticals there are side effects, and it starts to create this web and entanglement of "I'm taking this, but there are side effects, so I'm mediating that with this other thing." If you need it, do it. But if you don't want to engage with that complicating issue, then the question becomes: what am I doing in my habits? What are ways to calm down my nervous system?

There are things we would move into traditional therapy or talk therapy, where I'm aware of my thoughts and my feelings, and I bring myself more vulnerably to the fact that these things are happening because I have habits I need to disrupt and habits I need to reinstate, in a way that is loving and compassionate. I'm interested in something that's not just physically going to do the work. You could say it's from the top down, from energy to matter, or from matter to energy, and we just find the ways that work for us.

Wyatt: My opinion about pharmaceuticals is that they're a Band-Aid. They're needed for some things. For instance, if we have an infection and need an antibiotic, antibiotics are one of the very few drugs that actually fix the problem, because they kill the vector causing the disease. When we're talking about depression or anxiety and we take pills for that, there are cases where the brain is wired in a depressive state and we need medication. But because of harm reduction, we tend to jump to that first, or use it as a crutch instead of doing the work to actually rehabilitate ourselves.

I have a couple of friends with brain injuries, some from accidents, one from a stroke. When they switch medications they have a really hard time, and eventually medications stop working. It requires a lot of work. They go to brain rehab, and they continually have to find out for themselves how far they can push the line without going so far that they can't think for days. There's always this struggle and balance in order to keep getting better.

I was with my friend yesterday and I said, it sounds a lot like going to the gym. We push our bodies to the limit where we're enduring it slightly, beyond what's comfortable, and then that new level of output becomes comfortable because our bodies adapt. The same is true with emotional issues. I think medications are extremely helpful and great for short-term balancing, but we still need to figure out what's underneath. Just like with the antibiotic, the bacteria causing the infection needs to be killed off. What are the things in our lives causing the stress and the depression? How do we look at those individual things? And it's usually trauma.

Jeremy: Yes. And I think it's good to compassionately assert that finally, here in the twenty-first century, wellness is where science and spirituality meet, along with the things we've learned to build in the physical world, like medication and the search for chemicals and therapeutics. I've also been realizing that the more we let quantum science, which is very real, in, the more we get beyond the subatomic, which is where a sound therapist often gets to the point of saying: this is vibration, this is energy, and so are our choices and the dynamics of our experiences and our relationships. The quantum inroad is a fully holistic inroad.

Once things become more material, we make categories: this is our liver, this is our lungs, this is our nervous system. But as we go from the cellular to the molecular to the atomic to the subatomic, those things are all real. That's why I was mentioning going from the physical to the energetic level. That's what a lot of medical and pharmaceutical traditions do, and also, to be respectful, what we would call some of the alchemical traditions do. Alchemy is pre-chemistry, pre-biology. People centuries ago observed nature and watched how something that was a poison could also be a medicine, a plant or a mineral. That was from the physical to the energetic.

Over the past centuries we're realizing the energetic also wants balance and equilibrium. The things we've used for millennia as humans, song, dance, drumming, collaboration with our plants and minerals, taking rest and breaks when needed, and the care of our clans and tribes and communities around us, we're coming back to that. And we're asking these different entities to sit at the table and discuss how to collaborate.

Wyatt: We know, simply by turning on the radio, that whatever music we're listening to changes our mood. That's a no-brainer. When we look at that at a deeper level, one term I use to explain sound therapy is "acoustic induced meditation." We're inducing a meditative or trance state using acoustic instruments like gongs, singing bowls, or our voice.

There's some magic that happens in that state. There's a doctor, I think his name is Uwe, and I might be mixing up the letters in his last name, who says the true way to healing is perceiving our subtle body: being able to perceive our breath, the gurgling of our belly, just to bring us into that state of noticing. The body wants to regulate itself. But when we're bombarded...

Jeremy: Hyper-interacted with.

Wyatt: Yeah, we're not giving it time to regulate. That's why deep meditation is so powerful, and I think it's why every culture around the world has some kind of prayer or meditation practice integrated into it. We are spiritual creatures in these fleshly bodies. The Vedic tradition talks about us as the antenna between heaven and earth. So it's about finding that balance and giving ourselves that space, on a spiritual level as well as an energetic relaxation level, and letting the body know it's okay. Sleep is that daily recharge, but it's not necessarily that maintenance, right?

Jeremy: Right, right. The metaphor I like is a garden. Weeding will be needed. You have to assess the health of the different plants and the relationships between them. Then you take something as simple as a garden and go to the garden of the body. Our bodies know how to heal when we give them what they need: the combination of nutrition and rest and the kinds of stimuli, whether through sound or the hugs we get from family, friends, and community. We talk so much about regulation, but regulation is another way of saying homeostasis, a balance.

What may be a little harder, though I don't think it's controversial: if something is bombarding the body, like you said, a bacterial infection, or even cancer metastasizing, there's an equal force that chemotherapy and other therapies can bring. But that's still a warrior consciousness. Our immune system is a kind of warrior consciousness. It goes and does its job, and then we go back to homeostasis. But our culture, especially Western culture, is very warrior-like. Our medicine has become warrior-like. Our sense of heroism is "I got the job, I'm going up, I'm going to get more power." There's a bit of a Catch-22: when a society or a person identifies so much with warrior consciousness, they're going to tire out. Where's the rest? Where's the balance? Where's the relational part?

That's just one example of how a culture out of balance creates a body out of balance. It's like the Hermetic tradition says: as above, so below. What's working on a macro level is also working on a micro level. These are the things our passions in sound therapeutics, healing, and holistic wellness are attending to.

Wyatt: Coming back to the question of what situations people find themselves in, I think about myself first. I was out of balance. I was burnt out. I had steeped myself for a couple of years, intimately, in gay culture, and there was a point where I realized I had forgotten how to have fun without being at a party, without a drink in my hand. I didn't come out, nor did I start drinking, until I was twenty-seven. So I had memories of hiking, camping, being in the woods, flying a kite, playing games, all without alcohol, and truly enjoying myself. But those memories became like another life, and it was really hard to integrate them back in.

A friend and I started a Meetup group called the Gay Unscene. We did some game nights, and it was centered on things that weren't "the scene." We had a really nice time. Unfortunately, those things don't last when you're not doing the work to really change yourself. It becomes a little bit of dabbling.

Jeremy: And there's a kind of sparkle or magic ingredient you can notice: is the habit rote, or is there even a little spark of intentionality?

Wyatt: Yes. Toward the end of 2013 I started doing yoga, and earlier that year I'd been introduced to sound therapy, but that's when I really started pursuing yoga on a regular basis. I went to a retreat and had a profound emotional and spiritual response. As intense and beautiful as that was, I still didn't know how to shift my life outside of the gay scene. When things got difficult, I fled back to the scene instead of continuing with yoga. I didn't have the tools or a support system. Going to a yoga class, meeting an instructor, doing private sessions, or learning sound therapy is great, but that's not really a community. That's a couple of people.

Jeremy: Those are colleagues and professional scenarios.

Wyatt: Right. I just didn't have the community of people I needed to make it lasting and sustainable. That came later, in 2015, when some other shifts happened in my life.

When I think about my clients, I think about people going through divorce, major health issues, or a family member's cancer. They're almost forced to make a change, or they're dysregulated. Burnout is a huge one. I have a lot of professionals and professors who come to me because they're burnt out and need a weekly recharge in order to keep going, and to keep going with joy.

Jeremy: Yes, that's ritual. As you were saying these things, I'm bringing in what a filmmaker would call the hero's or heroine's journey, and what in my mystical tradition we'd call the prodigal reckoning. Being from Pittsburgh, from the Mon Valley, whenever things were uncomfortable with family dynamics or I was annoyed with my siblings, I'd go out into the forest in Finleyville. Once I was an adolescent and had my bike, I could go be in nature, and nature was a haven and a refuge. And when you awaken as a queer person, those things often don't come together in high school, or in college, or in your early twenties. There's so much that's projected and cast upon you. [unclear] You find your tribe in the city. For many artists, creatives, and queer people, and for people who don't match their blood relatives, we go to the cities. That's okay. But identity formation is happening when your identity isn't who you really are, shaped by all these projections from local culture and family culture. So I try to hold a lot of compassion in our community for wherever we are in this journey.

For me, I had to really build up my mind. I have a great mind. Go to undergrad, go to grad school, study things, be excellent in the mind. That's also very much a Western value: be as good in your mind as you can. But as you've spoken to, the mind is going to get burnt out. The other thing I remember from growing up is how open-hearted I was. I see the magic and uniqueness of queer people. We don't quite see a space for ourselves, so we're very willing to shape ourselves for others. My body language isn't like others', either. I didn't have parents who monitored my hand gestures. I have Italian in me, and we express a little more full-body than some other cultures. I was musical, and I was intelligent. [unclear] Then you start to go into queer cultures and build identities, and you start to move out of your center. As children we have a natural center. Having worked in education, I see how children, over the course of development, start to lose their natural embodied center. Queer people lose their center looking for acceptance, looking to the hierarchies of lookism, of having the right qualities and attributes in order to be loved from without.

And now our stories are that we get burnt out and need to go back within. We need to say, "Oh, I'm enough for myself. I'm someone who's always had these wonderful, radiant, magical qualities, whether or not someone else is looking for them." The healing journey, that prodigal coming back to nature, to the self that had openness and wonder and joy, is a human birthright, I would think. Now, after all the burnt-outness and seeing the ways we've been unjust to ourselves and to those around us, healing is the pathway to being who we truly are again.

Wyatt: One thing that's important to remember is that we lose track of what joy is. I remember sitting and playing with stones as a little kid, just as content and happy as can be, or playing in the woods. As we develop, especially in queer culture, I think it becomes about intensity. We think intensity is joy, or that intensity matters more than intimacy. And to me, happiness and joy are two different things. If you give me flowers, you'll make me happy. But joy is more of an inside job. Nobody can bring me joy except myself.

Paddleboarding is one of the places where I find joy and sink into a place of healing. For years I paddleboarded with a few people all the time. One got sick, one had some issues, one started dating someone, and the year before last and last year I found myself without anyone to paddleboard with. I made myself get out there and do it. I thought I was paddleboarding by myself because I loved to paddleboard, not necessarily because I loved to paddleboard by myself. Some of those people came back into my life this year, and I've been paddleboarding a lot, but not by myself. And I'm like, I miss paddleboarding by myself.

Jeremy: That's a wonderful mystical realization. One of the latest chapters of my life has helped me glean much more wisdom about the okayness of solitude. Solitude is sacred, and solitude in nature is where we're naturally bathed, with the plants and the river and the stream and the rocks. You can quote Mary Oliver or Rumi or Khalil Gibran, and they all say that when it's just me and the divine, I don't need a distraction. We worry about this scary void, but I'm like, no, that's everything. That's the pregnant present moment.

And that's very much to the point of sound therapy and sound healing: a way to bridge from our linguistic world, the world of words and poetry and music and schedules, into sound, which isn't about a reference or a meaning. Your body just gets to listen. And from listening, once that sound evaporates, you get to go into the pregnant, vital present moment. When we're young, we blissfully avoid that unconsciously. As we get older, we subconsciously and self-consciously feel like we need to be productive, there's something we should be doing, doing, doing. I've become a human doing instead of a human being, as the maxim goes.

So, coming back to being. Another of my teachers was recently teaching that we forget what a miracle it is, at a quantum level, that humans are experiencing all this: our awareness in these bodies, with the tools and challenges and possibilities, and life is not boring. We are simply perceiving, and then making choices about how to engage with our environment in a particular version of reality. The quantum thinkers and the Vedics and the mystics all have different inroads to say that being present with oneself is a powerful way to be your best self and bring your best self into your life.

Wyatt: Well, we're just about out of time for today, and I want to thank you all for joining us. If you want to learn more about Rooted in Sound or the services we offer, you can visit us at rootedinsound.com. Thank you again, Jeremy, for joining me.

Jeremy: Thank you so much, Wyatt.