Welcome back to 🌿🌙 THE EARTHY WRITER: My Rewilding Year 🐝✨

This is episode ten, where we explore the magical benefits of sound and vibration. Inspired by Nikola Tesla’s insight into the universe’s secrets through “energy, frequency, and vibration,” this episode delves deep into how these elements influence our lives.

In this Rewilding Episode, you’ll learn:

  • The sounds of nature: I’ll share how my mornings now begin with the sounds of nature right outside my window, and how such simple acts can deepen mindfulness and connect us more intimately with our environment.
  • Musical healing: Discover the healing powers of sound through my personal return to playing the guitar, and how engaging with music daily can realign our energies and elevate our spirit.
  • Vibrational awareness: Learn about my experiences with sound bowls and other vibrational tools that enhance spatial awareness and contribute to a harmonious living environment.
  • Practical sound strategies: I’ll give practical advice on integrating sound into everyday life, such as using a nature-sound alarm clock and creating moments of silence to better engage with the surrounding world.
  • Special Song Share: To wrap it up, I’ll play a heartfelt song I recorded on a rainy day, which honours the memory of the women who came before us. 

About your host:

Hi 👋, I’m Gisele Stein. I’m a novelist and a nature-lover, writing magical women’s fiction from my cosy cabin on Wadandi Boodja in Western Australia.

Get my free novella ONE WILD EMBER, the prequel to an intoxicating new urban fantasy series. ‘Practical Magic’ meets ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ in this rich and rebellious story of magic and matriarchy, love and loss (series title & full blurb tba)❤️‍🔥

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Episode Links:

Kirtan Playlists:

Classic: 

Soulful: 

Uplifting 

Nature Sounds:

My own mix:

Australian:

Tropical: 

Cosy Thunderstorm Piano:

11 hours ocean waves:

Episode Transcript:

Happy New Moon! Thank you for being here with me. Today, I’m speaking from Wadandi Country, so let’s take a moment to acknowledge the salt water people, the traditional custodians of this land. I’d like to start this episode with a quote:

“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration.”

Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla once said this, and it’s this idea that I would like to dive into today. I’ve been exploring it as part of my rewilding challenge over the past moon cycle.

Life Updates during my rewilding year

Before I discuss what I’ve learned about sound and vibration in my rewilding challenge this month, I also want to update you on a few things happening in my life, especially now that I’m almost halfway through my rewilding year. First off, I’m deeply sorry that I skipped an episode. Initially, I was traveling, which you might have seen on Instagram, and then I got terribly sick. I really just needed to take a break to honor that rest and recovery time. But I’m back now, and I’m doing really well. I’m enjoying the winter months here in Western Australia—it’s really cozy with lots of campfires and rain, providing plenty of reading time.

I also want to update you on one of my most popular episodes to date, the one on the toxic side of social media. For those of you on Instagram, you know I’m still on the air and have been more active there than ever before. But that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in what I said a few episodes back. On the contrary, I still find social media extremely tricky to deal with. I dislike how these apps use our human psychology against us, making us addictive, etc.

Reflecting on the toxic side of Instagram & changes made

If you’d like to learn more about all of that, I highly recommend you listen to the social media episode, which I’ll link below. I’ve recently made a few changes regarding social media that have helped me a lot, so I wanted to share them with you today. The most effective change I’ve made is using Instagram almost exclusively from my laptop, which has been a game changer. I also schedule all my content, creating big batches, and I’ve unfollowed many accounts. Now, I’m making a conscious effort to turn Instagram into a place of inspiration and community rather than a place of exhaustion and competition. I also comment a lot more on other people’s content, trying to uplift other artists and authors that I adore.

I’ve also experimented with a few ads recently and found one that works for me. I’m paying a little money to find new readers and followers who are exactly suited to my work. Ads can be incredibly helpful because the algorithm has its own rules and shows your content to anyone; you have no control over it. But if you run a few ads, you can choose the person you’d like to serve your content to. If you’re new here, you might have found me through that ad, and I’m really glad that you’re here.

Other than that, I really don’t spend much time on Instagram anymore, and I have deleted my TikTok app. I only had a brief time on that platform, and it was always just an absolute nightmare for me, so I’m not going to bother with TikTok anymore.

The biggest shift I’ve done in terms of my business and social media is that I now center all my content around my website, my blog, and this podcast because all these spaces allow for evergreen content. This content only gets better with age, gets picked up by search engines, and is also in spaces that I own. My blog has become the main source of what you call long-form content, and I use both Instagram and Pinterest to share just short snippets of those blog articles and these podcast episodes.

So, this is mainly a mindset shift that has resulted in me having a lot more energy and being a lot more excited about my work, and just taking the focus off social media. I’ve automated a lot of stuff, and now I enjoy it more, and I enjoy my life more.

Halfway Mark in My Rewilding Year

In other news, I’m now almost halfway through my rewilding year. While at times it’s a challenge to commit to these recordings, I’m also quite proud of myself for sticking to it. As I said, I’m almost halfway through, so I think the second half will go by rather quickly. The older I get—I’m 37 now—the more quickly time seems to pass, and I can’t believe I’m already halfway through.

As you’ve noticed, I’ve also stopped with the video recordings because editing the video was such a pain for me. It was so much work, and doing audio only has totally simplified the process. Now, I’m actually looking forward to this. Like I said in the beginning, this is supposed to be something that should enrich my life and make it better, not worse. So, I feel like I’ve achieved that now.

My previous challenges, I must say, have really had a huge effect on my life so far. I’m still doing the wild swimming often, not every day, but often. Now it’s the middle of the winter, so now it’s really ice cold, the water, and it’s really a challenge over here. So I’m not going to lie, I’m not going that often, especially not when it’s pouring down rain, but I have included it in my life. And it’s just—it adds such a nice layer, I find, to my daily life, to make the effort to go, even just seeing the water or putting my toes in.

I also still talk to my plants and the trees and the birds and the kangaroos out there. And I’m also learning more and more about the stars and the moon. I’m still using the moon app and keeping a moon journal, and I find that my life has become a lot richer ever since I’ve started this year. I live more consciously, more mindfully, and I feel like I’m slowly becoming the woman that I always wanted to be. And I just said I’m 37 now, and I feel very grounded in my life, in my new home here in the southwest of Australia, and also in my body.

Embracing Sound and Vibration in Daily Life

And this brings me very elegantly to my latest rewilding challenge, which was, as I said earlier, the meaning of sound and vibration in our daily life. So what I’ve been trying to do over the past four weeks is to be a lot more conscious of sounds and the energy that flows all around me. I’ve tried to find ways to consciously notice sound in my life because everything in this world is alive with energy and vibration. And that energy also moves through us, through our own bodies all the time.

And you know by now that I’m a lover of music and I really believe in the power of song and of singing. So that’s just something I really wanted to explore on this deeper level. And although sound, energy, and vibration are so important in our modern, connected lives, I would say we have become quite deaf to those natural sounds, to that natural flow of energy that’s all around us. It’s still very much present, make no mistake. And it’s part of our lives. But because we ignore it, it can also turn into something negative, and the positive we simply fail to notice these days because we are so distracted and because we are so busy.

So this challenge was all about giving myself a moment—or several moments—every day to pause and to simply be. And yes. So that’s what I’ve been doing lately. And of course, as always, I’ll share with you now all the tricks that I’ve implemented. They are all tiny little things, and most of them are totally free, or they just cost very, very little. So they’re very accessible. But all combined, I found they make a huge difference.

Practical Tips to Incorporate Sound and Vibration into Everyday Life

So what have I done? The first thing I’m doing now is that immediately after waking up, I open my window to hear the birds outside or to hear the rain. I am fortunate because I live in a cabin in the woods now. But if you live in the city, well, I find it can also be nice. When I still lived in Berlin in Germany, to open the windows and hear the busy street and the noises from outside. But if you would like to give nature sounds, you know what to do. You can simply listen to nature ambient sounds. Instead, there’s a lot on Spotify and on YouTube for free.

And that is actually the second thing that I’ve implemented. I’ve gotten myself a nightlight with an alarm clock that has nature sounds. So now I fall asleep to the sound of ocean waves each night, and then I wake up to the bird songs as soon as I open my window.

Another thing I’ve done is I’m finally playing guitar again. I’ve always played a little bit of guitar over the years since I was 12 or 13, I think, but I haven’t been consistent with it for quite a while. You know, when you play guitar, you need to grow a bit of calluses on your fingers so that it doesn’t hurt anymore. And I’ve been dreading that for a bit. But now I’m back in training, and my fingers have hardened a bit because every day after work, instead of going to the TV straight away and watching Netflix or whatever, I sat down and just played a couple of songs every day, old ones that I already knew, and I tried to learn one new song every week. So by now, I know four new songs, and that has also made such a big difference to my energy levels in general, like learning something new. I think you call it active relaxation. So like you’re actively doing something that’s good for you rather than just passively numbing yourself with consuming something. And that has made a really big difference for me.

And on that note, because of my new alarm clock, I also no longer have my phone in my bedroom. And as a result, I’ve been reading a lot more last month as well, which is also active relaxation. And that has been really good for me.

But the most important thing I’ve implemented, and that’s actually the smallest of them all, and you can do this too, is that every morning with my morning tea or coffee, I sit outside on my porch and I do absolutely nothing. I just sit there with my eyes closed and I listen to my own thoughts, to the sounds around me, to any feelings that might be coming up. And then I always engage in another conversation with the universe, with the highest self. Call it what you want. So if there’s something that’s bothering me, I get out my journal and I write that down. Sometimes I say a couple of things out loud. I must be looking like a lunatic sitting there on my porch. But yeah, I just get into conversation. I try to have an active, conscious relationship with the universe, with everything that’s around me, with that all that goodness, that highest self that is available to us all the time. Because I find it’s very important to make that conscious and to actively live in that relationship.

And after I’m done outside, I move inside into my little story factory, and then I do this: I use a sound bowl. I got this one a while ago and I never really used it. And it’s just been standing here and I keep my favorite shells in there, actually. But I have been using this one again, and I really enjoy it. I’m trying to get better at the rotation. It wasn’t perfect just now, but that’s just another little ritual. This is now living on my desk where I can sit and wait, where I can use it. So it doesn’t just sit there and dust settles on it. I’m actually using it every day now, which has been really nice.

Then while I am working, I’ve been, I mean, I listen to music all the time. I’m not one of those writers that can’t bear the thought of music while I’m working, or like some writers actually can’t handle singing. They can listen to classical music and stuff that doesn’t have words. But I’m not like that. I actually quite enjoy listening to all kinds of music while I’m working. But now, during this month, I listen to a lot of kirtan music and actually also signed up to a live kirtan event here in the area, which is also keeping the challenge that I had last month, the life of community and land and getting involved here in this area that I enjoy so very much.

So in case you don’t know what kirtan is, it’s kind of a devotional music. It comes from yogic traditions and is also a very important part of Hindu spirituality, and it involves singing and chanting. It’s a lot about hymns and prayers, and it’s even more powerful when you do it in the group, when everybody just keeps repeating the same mantras and you just freely let loose and let it all out. It’s not for everybody, but I mean, I love music and I really enjoy this song. I’m looking forward to going to another kirtan session, and I actually was introduced to kirtan during my yoga teacher training, which I did on the east coast of Australia five years ago.

Yeah, I think it was five years ago. And it was actually during this training that I discovered the meaning of sound. And I thought about it more because one of the most important forms in yogic practices is that sacred syllable, OM. During my yoga training, we also did a practice called the Bumble Bee Hum, the bumblebee breath. And what that is, is you curl up in a child’s pose and then you hum deep from your solar plexus. You go, “Hmmmm.” And this OM sound, this syllable, is considered the essence of all sound, and it’s sort of a direct connection to the universe.

So it’s all very—I’m sure you’ve heard of this before. It’s used a lot in meditation and in chanting as a way to align the mind and connect with the universe and with your highest self. To this day, this is actually the best way that I know to stop intrusive thoughts and relieve tension I might be feeling in my mind or in my body. So I usually feel tension and stress even in the heart, like I really get this heart pain or in the belly. And whenever I do the bumblebee hum, not only does that release the tension immediately, but as long as I hum—and this is the most amazing part of this set—as long as I hum, I cannot think. Like, try this right now. Go hum. As long as you do that, the thoughts cannot enter your mind.

I just heard the kookaburra outside. Oh, the noise in the evenings. It’s so fun. So yeah, I hum a lot, and I’ve really included all of these practices into my everyday life. And I actually sometimes am quite amazed because these things, as I said, they don’t cost you anything and they also don’t take a lot of time. But somehow, it’s still a riddle to me why these things are so hard to implement, so hard to be consistent with stuff, but I guess that’s what this rewilding year is about. It really is about holding myself accountable to do these things, to make every moment, to make every day better and richer, and to include sound in that way has been a very important part of it, I must say.

Next Month’s Challenge & a musical gift at the end…

So this episode’s links will include some playlists for Nature Sounds and my favorite kirtan playlists. And then before I leave you for today, I’m going to do something very brave. I’m going to play you a recording of a song that I’ve recently rediscovered. It’s a song that honors the memory of the women who have come before us. It’s a very meaningful song to me. I’ve rediscovered it as part of writing my witch trilogy that I’m currently working on, and so I’m going to play you that. I recorded it the other day out in the rain. I was sitting out on the porch with my guitar and it was raining and the birdsong was all around. So it was a really, really lovely moment that I wanted to share with you. After I play that, I’m going to say goodbye. And of course, there’s one more little piece of housekeeping that I need to do.

I need to introduce to you next month’s challenge, next month’s rewilding challenge. And it’s something that I’ve been looking forward to a lot. I think it’s going to be one of the most fun ones throughout this entire year. I’m going to embark on some herbal studies, so I’m going to learn about herbs and medicinal plants, and I’m going to try—I don’t want to give too much away—but I’m going to try and make a little something, make a little natural medicine for myself. So this is going to be really fun. And as always, I’m going to share with you everything I’ve learned. I think my schedule is a bit out of whack now because I’ve skipped one. So I really need to look at when I’m sharing water and what is happening now. But you will hear all about this here on the podcast.

Thank you so much for listening. I’m going to play you that recording now, and until next time, have a lovely day. Bye bye.

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