Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to the wellness and wanderlust podcast. We're here to demystify wellness and help you add a little adventure to your life. Tune in for a new episode every week, where we'll hear from incredible guests and talk about ways to be happier and healthier in our new normal.
Speaker: I'm your host, Valerie Moses. Let's get started. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining me today at the Wellness and Wanderlust podcast. I am so grateful for this incredible community and I appreciate you spending this part of your day with me. I'm really excited to share that I was recently featured on the Being Unapologetically Authentic podcast with Jean Tien. For those of you who have been tuning in for a while, you may remember Jean as our guest on episode 113 of the podcast.
Speaker: where we talked about overcoming imposter syndrome and redefining what success means to us. I loved being on the other side of the interview this time on Jean's show and I hope you'll check out our conversation together. I have linked the episode in the show notes. This week we're exploring the intersection of environmental conservation and mindfulness
Speaker: and how protecting our planet relates to our overall wellness. Our guest is Joshua Sam Miller, founder of Embodied Sounds, who has performed all over the world, including Burning Man. With a background in sound healing, Joshua recently joined the International Film Festival Circuit with his Sounds of the Ocean immersive experience. In our conversation, we discuss the power of sound healing, how environmental activism and wellness go hand in hand, ways to incorporate mindfulness into our daily lives through sound, and much more.
Speaker: I'd like to thank Laird Superfood for sponsoring this episode. If you've been listening to the show for a while, you know that I'm always on the go and looking for quick lifestyle shifts that can make a major impact on my health. That is why I love Laird Superfood products. I'm a big fan of their functional mushroom coffee with Chaga and Lion's Mean. It's a great way to boost my energy for the day while getting a lot more out of my cup.
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Speaker: Now let's dive into this week's conversation. Joshua, thank you so much for joining us at Wellness and Wanderlust. Thank you for having me, Valerie. Well, I'm so excited to get to chat with you. You have such a unique story and the work that you do is really, really cool, something we haven't gotten into on this show before. So before we dive into that, I would love for you to introduce yourself to our listeners and tell us a little bit about your background.
Speaker: Absolutely. Well, my name is Joshua Sammiller and I'm a musician, a composer, filmmaker, and total ocean enthusiast. So I grew up in New York and was very disconnected from the natural environment.
Speaker: I was mostly a city guy. And in about my mid 20s, I started to go on very long camping trips where I would pretty much be out in the middle of nowhere for days or even weeks at a time. And the contrast from my life as a city guy was so profound and so inspiring that I started to really see the magic
Speaker: and the potential and the real importance of the natural world and realizing how disconnected I was from it. And like many people who've created projects or companies or just create as an artist on a regular basis, I started to realize that I'm probably not the only person who feels that way and could use some more connection back to nature in his life.
Speaker: So I started to explore how music, because I'm a musician, could be played with nature and have an integration between the two that would build more of that connection.
Speaker: which has been so exciting because it's allowed me to meet a lot of wonderful people, travel to a lot of beautiful places, and create very authentic experiences that I'm told really help people feel like they're in a different environment and receive a number of benefits from that, which has been so rewarding. So it's been a really wonderful journey up until this point, and probably like you, I'm excited to keep going.
Speaker: That's amazing. And I can completely relate when it comes to that disconnection. I think probably the majority of listeners can. I know that even when we got into the pandemic and we were spending so much more time on our computers than before, I found that I had a physical response to
Speaker: sitting on the computer and having, you know, all of that light on me at certain times and being inside. And I found that the only thing that really made me feel better because my skin would even break out from sitting by a computer to that extent was getting out
Speaker: outside, taking a walk, grounding in nature, even just seeing the ducks in my neighborhood, just getting outside and actually experiencing the natural sunlight and all of that. It really was so restorative and I love the idea of combining that with music. One of my favorite classical albums I would say was Carnival of the Animals. I love the
Speaker: carnival of the animals and kind of feeling like you're immersed in nature in that sense. And so I love that you take this to just another level with these immersive experiences that you do. And I'd love to know more about, first of all, how your work as a composer and musician, how you got into sound healing and how that lend itself to these immersive experiences that you've been creating.
Speaker: So happy we get to talk about this and that you have a fond appreciation for classical music such a rich art form there. WC being one of my favorite composers and someone who's really inspired me as an artist.
Speaker: I would say that my approach, my creative process is very organic, very improvisational, and very much a felt experience. I didn't have that much formal training in Western music and decided to pursue studies from Eastern traditions, mainly in India, Indonesia, a little bit of Pakistan, Japan,
Speaker: and Central Asia, Middle Eastern lineages as well, and decided to integrate that into my experience coming from the West and growing up in a very secular society. And this combination has been so rich because it's allowed me to see the similarities and I think highlight the differences in ways that help people feel relaxed and
Speaker: less stressed in their day -to -day lives. That's been mostly my goal and my intention. And I have to thank a few dear teachers for helping me understand that, namely one in particular who was really my first music teacher with sound as a therapeutic experience. And his name is Bruno and lives in Portugal.
Speaker: And I kid you not, I was on a surfing trip in Portugal and went to one concert that completely changed my life, I must say. And I was so inspired by the music that my dear friend Bruno was creating that night, that in that moment, I really understood this is something that I feel very called to do.
Speaker: And I had already been collecting instruments for many years, very, very, very strange instruments like gongs and all kinds of random percussion instruments that you can think of. And when I was a child, I mostly used them, you know, to annoy my sister like any brother would do. But after experiencing that concert, I realized that all of these instruments that I had could be put to a much better use.
Speaker: And they can. And that was really what started me off on the field of music therapy. And it's so personal for me, which I love because at that same time, I was able to really help people who were very close to me as a sound healer and a musical artist to feel more joy
Speaker: more love, more connection, more happiness in their life. And I had many, many, many wonderful sessions with my grandmother actually, who was sick at the time with dementia. And I went over to her house on a pretty regular basis and just started to play basic stuff with her. And it lit up a part of her mind and her soul that was so hard to access in those final few years of her life.
Speaker: and really became like my own musical therapeutic training is working in that context, which was, as you can imagine, so, so rewarding for me and deeply touching on many levels and really inspired me around the potential of what sound can do for a person who is struggling. And from there I pursued a little bit more
Speaker: training and started hosting workshops in California, which is where I was living at the time, to help people relax and let go of anything that was kind of standing in their way of enjoying life to the fullest. And let's see, that was about six years ago. So since then, it's been really my full -time passion.
Speaker: That's so beautiful, first of all, how it gave you this experience with your grandmother and the way that music really does just bring us this sense of connection that I don't think a lot of other media can really do. I know when I listen to a lot of music, it makes me feel, you feel so just a depth of emotion, even sometimes when it's a sadder song.
Speaker: I think it just brings me that comfort to feel like I'm feeling almost like the full spectrum of the human experience. And with the type of music that you perform, the type of music that you use for this healing, I think when I've done any kind of sound healing through, through headphones, I feel like you feel so immersed and you feel like you're entering this other world and there really is that type of connection. And why do you think that is? Why does music and this type of healing provide that kind of therapeutic benefit to it?
Speaker: Well, I think there's many reasons for that. And we're still understanding the full power of sound as a therapeutic tool, a scientific way of seeing the world and understanding how vibration can be very helpful for us holistically on many levels. And I mostly focus on the impacts on our
Speaker: mental and emotional state, though there are other sound healers and scientists, sound therapists who focus on the physical benefits of frequency and vibration as well. And I once went to a session from another one of my teachers, his name is Dr. John Bulow, who works specifically with Tuning Forks. And I was so inspired by what
Speaker: you can do by placing different size and note tuning forks at different parts of your body on the joints, in particular, mostly on the wrists and the arms and your head, as well as other
Speaker: other places as well. And it's very powerful what those frequencies can do for all kinds of conditions, you know, things that would really surprise you. And the science research on this is so undeveloped and so hard to do that. I think there's a huge movement in the medical community to start to really see sound as a more valid
Speaker: and welcomed part of our overall health and well -being. And in combined with my work in the conservation space, I've also been inspired to see that sound is being used not only for our wellness, but also for the health of our
Speaker: planet as well. For example, I was just in Monaco for the Monaco Ocean Week and listened to a few presentations talking about how sound is actually being used underwater to help with coral regeneration. Isn't that amazing? Yeah.
Speaker: We've done a very good job of polluting the ocean. And now scientists are finding that if we play certain sounds in certain areas, it actually motivates fish to come back and repopulate those same locations that we once destroyed. I find this fascinating. Yeah. Well, I even think about with plants, when they say like talking and singing to plants, even just in your home, how that can promote their growth. And I have to believe there's some link there.
Speaker: Absolutely, absolutely. And like I say, the field is so un -researched that there are a lot of people who make quite a lot of claims, which can do some harm, I think, to the industry overall. But I have felt it myself, and I'm going to get too personal, but I'm sure anyone who's traveled, especially to places like India, know that sometimes you have some
Speaker: stomach aches and some problems with digestion. And that was certainly an experience for me on my first trip there. And a friend of mine took a giant singing bowl, put it on my back,
Speaker: and struck it as hard as she could and everything cleared out and I felt great a few hours later. It was really, really incredible and a very much felt experience that helped me realize how powerful the sound can be without taking any medication or, you know, substances that your body might not respond well to.
Speaker: So I always like to say to people who are interested in working with sound that it's a substance free way to unlock your holistic health and wellbeing. I think so too. And I really, I haven't experienced, I guess, the physical benefits of it in that sense. I hadn't, I never had heard of something like that to help with digestive, but certainly I think now everybody should bring a singing bowl when they travel. It's helpful or have a friend.
Speaker: Yeah, of course. But I do know that when I have done some sound healing, even just what I picture in my mind, it almost is like you're on a substance almost. I think that just the colors are brighter. And I think that it really unlocks a different part of the brain that you're not using, I'd say, throughout your day -to -day.
Speaker: Absolutely. Yeah, I've definitely found that developing a practice of listening and regularly playing music and also listening to music just really allows my mind to slow down, to relax, and me as a person to spend less time in my head
Speaker: and more time in the body, which I think is what many people who are struggling with mental illness are missing. I was definitely in that category for a long time with anxiety and really feeling like I just had to be thinking all the time. Music really helps to help me relax and stop always doing that.
Speaker: So powerful and so simple and I think very similar to what a person can achieve
