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Using Sound to Facilitate Rest
This is something I use to help other people, generally, when I was using them more, back then. I have not got a big enough office here to have the seven big bowls that we have, the coloured ones, there is not enough room. So I have just got one smaller one that I occasionally use if I want to help someone focus, or in meditation. If you engage the sound, it can bring you into a place where you are at rest. So I do use it that way occasionally, but I have never really used it particularly for myself. It depends entirely really on what people need.
So I could use it to release a healing frequency. Again, it is my intention. When I play the sound, the sound carries my intention. If my intention is for you to experience peace or rest or joy or love or healing, then my intention is carried. And if you receive that intention and agree with it, and come into agreement for whatever it is I am releasing, then that begins to engage and touch you. You can use it in meditation just to focus your thinking and your mind on the sound, or you can use breathing techniques alongside it or independently of it, just to actually get your mind focused.
A lot of people struggle getting their mind to stop going round and round and round and thinking of things all the time. When it comes to meditation, you are fixing your thoughts on God to engage with God, and if there are lots of other thoughts going around, it can make it really quite difficult. So sometimes breaking the thought patterns that we have with a sound, so that we focus our thoughts on the sound, or even with breathing, slowly breathing in and breathing out very deeply and very slowly, can just get our mind off our thinking. Some people’s minds are like washing machines that just go round and round. They just cannot turn it off. They cannot come to a place of rest.
Sometimes people need something to distract them and to focus their thinking so that meditation becomes easier for them and engaging God becomes easier. I have used it in lots of different ways, and I have used it in activations. It is not as easy in an activation when you are on the other end of a computer and a microphone. Sometimes you do not feel quite the same as what I am feeling if I am playing it in the room, but my intention is the same. Sometimes it can be quite distorted when you are trying to record it, which is not always the best.
I have used it in groups of people to focus a healing intention so that they would receive healing. When I first started using the bowls, we had a group of people who were interested to try them out, and we just practised intention. We went around the room and each person would play the bowl. I showed how to do it, and then I encouraged each person to focus their intention on a word and then play the bowl and release the word through the bowl. The rest of us would just receive what word they released.
It really was quite amazing. One person got every single word spot on. Others got the impression of the word. So if the word was peace, some people would feel calm, some would feel different words describing a peaceful rest, or other words they felt the intention in a way that they related to with a particular word. Some would say tranquil, others would say restful, but most people got it. So then we started to use that in helping people, releasing those sounds over people.
But some people might find it helpful and some people might find it distracting. The first time I played it to someone, one person said, “That is really piercing,” because it was hitting against something in their mind, so it felt quite uncomfortable. Another person said, “Wow, that is amazing.” Not everyone experiences the sound or the frequency or the intention in the same way. Sometimes it made the recordings quite difficult to hear what was going on, so I do not do it that often now in recordings.
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Consciousness, Intention and Alignment
The way our consciousness is designed to choose a reality that is aligned to God’s heart, our intention and focus can work with things like [essential] oils and other frequencies to bring about change and to affect that change.
I think people are looking at different ways of engaging that in the quantum realm, the ether, that there is energy there that we can draw from that can bring energy to our bodies, that can repair them and recycle them in the cells. But also the cells themselves have capacity to repair built in, and it is just that communication needs to be restored so that everything works together in harmony as it was intended. So definitely, I think you will find all sorts of different people working in different aspects of the field.
Epigenetics is one aspect, which is a programming to the genetic material, not changing the genetic material, but causing memory and things to be passed on generationally or affecting the present. And when you are looking at how we can live in health, then seeing the balance between spirit, soul and body, and the harmony that we can live in, in rest effectively, can bring about health.
But our intention and focus is what is the most important thing. Yes, there are some frequencies in some oils that have an effect, because they cross the limbic system of the brain and they can affect the way we think, but when our intention, which people would call faith, is engaged with them, then that brings about a powerful agreement. And when we are in agreement with how something works, that agreement can be effectively outworked in a much more powerful way.
Healing, Memory and the Whole Person
I think God is unveiling all sorts of different revelation to different people in different ways to reach as many people as possible, so that as many people as possible can find the health that God intended them to have and find healing and wholeness in every area, spirit, soul and body.
Now what essential oils and other things do with the limbic system can also release memory and toxic emotions that are trapped within the body, both within the physical and within the memory of the soul. Those things can surface, because they are often buried within our subconscious, and we do not always remember the actual event or what happened, but they can be toxic to us. When those are released and brought to the surface, which can be enhanced by essential oils, then we can see healing and wholeness come into those areas.
This was recorded in 2018 at the Freedom Centre, Barnstaple. Kari Browning’s technique involves prayer, the laying on of hands, and the use of therapeutic-grade essential oils.
3 sessions = 6 hours, plus bonuses. Cost: £36 GBP.
So it is getting the balance of all of it. A lot of people focus on the soul, inner healing, which is good, but they do not always think about how that links to the body. There is a huge connection. Medical professionals are looking at disease and realising that so much of it is caused by emotional and mental issues, not just the physical. Some of it is purely physical, but a lot of it has a component which is mental and emotional. Therefore toxic emotions and trauma can have an effect on the physical body, even though they are memories of something that happened emotionally. Seeing things in a holistic way, and looking at how we can operate holistically, is really important.
What you will often find is that some people focus on one area, whether that is the body or the emotions, but we need to bring all of them together in a harmonious whole to see how it all works together for our health and wholeness. That is why it is worth looking at different ways of thinking, not just one area. Generally, one person gets revelation about one area and focuses on that, but does not always see that other areas are involved as well. So having a broader view of the whole way of thinking will give you some good perspective, and it looks like you have done some good research and are engaging with different ways of thinking. But in all of it, intention is the most important aspect.
There is a sense where some things have a physical effect on the body, and some essential oils carry a frequency that, when absorbed or breathed, can have a positive impact because they bring a frequency that counteracts negative frequencies that might be operating. But when we add our intention to it, then you have agreement. And when there is agreement, that brings an exponential increase in the effect of something. You can focus that agreement, that intention, and that works whether you use the oil or not.
I have used frequencies in bowls, crystal bowls, to focus intention to touch the body, not in a physical sense, but through sound. You have a sound bath, and when you are surrounded by sound, if that sound contains intention, then it can have an effect on your body without even touching you physically. If you do put the bowls on your body… I had a sound bath where a friend used smaller Tibetan singing bowls, and placed them on my back. As soon as one of them was struck, I went straight into a deep state. I was not even thinking about it, it just happened.
So there is a powerful way of engaging this, but if you are intentionally active in it, you are more open to what it can do. I was open to the sound bath. I did not know what it would do, and I did not feel I needed anything in particular, but I was open. That openness led into an encounter, and the experience was very positive. When you engage it intentionally for healing or wholeness, you are adding your faith to it. Some people in medical trials who receive placebos are engaging in hope, and when desire and hope come together, that itself can have a positive effect on the body.
Alongside that, the attitude of thanksgiving, gratitude, and living in a state of joy and peace can help the immune system function well and keep us in balance. When our emotions are out of sync with our desire, there is discord, and it is important to have coherence. There is a group called HeartMath that works with this concept, showing how having our thinking coherent with our emotions can bring about health and wholeness. It is quite a large field that people are exploring, and there are many positive things to discover.
The key is not to accept everything uncritically, but to go with what is in alignment with what you know to be the heart of God and love, and not to make it a formula. Engage with it relationally with God. If I am going to engage with it, God is my healer. He may use various things to bring about healing, but He is my healer. I am not going to put my trust in a technique that separates me from my relationship with Him as my healer. When people know God as Father, and know His desire to bless and to heal, that is far more powerful than trying to work a technique.
Some people separate the techniques, and while they may work, they are far more effective when you are engaged with the healer, not just the method. I always want to remain connected to God as the source of my healing, not just an oil or a frequency or anything else. I engage with it through God as Father, not in an independent way.
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Understanding Love Through Experience
What do we mean when we use the word love? What do we think and feel when we hear the word love? The answer to those questions will have been influenced and affected by our personal experiences. For some, you hear the word love and it is a really hard thing to hear because you may have been affected by broken relationships and promises of love which never came to fruition.
John (who I believe experienced a depth of love) when he wrote John 14, was expressing something of his own personal experience and what Jesus was revealing to him. John also wrote in 1 John 4:16, “we have come to know,” and that means by personal experience, “and have believed.” When you have personal experience, you do believe. It is not that you believe and then that gives you the experience. The experience gives you the belief.
That is why faith is not based in what we experience, but in the realisation of what is already true. Therefore, we do not have to have faith. God has faith in us, or God imparts His faith to us. So as we experience it, we will inevitably believe it, unless we have a real problem with trust and we are suspicious, and that does happen.
I have seen miracles happen. I have seen miracles performed as I prayed for people, and people have watched and observed amazing things, people’s legs growing and things like that. And then they are sceptical of whether they really saw that, whether it was really true, whether it really happened. And they were there watching it, but they did not have the experience.
I guarantee that the person who had their leg grow, and therefore were not lopsided in their walk and no longer had a problem with their back and everything else that caused, did not have a problem believing that they were healed, because they experienced it themselves.
So this verse in 1 John 4:16, “we have come to know and believe the love which God has for us,” is the key to restoring first love. It is the love that God has for us from the beginning, that we knew in the beginning.
God is love, and the one who abides in love (abiding meaning dwelling, living) abides in God, and God abides in him. When we are abiding in this love relationship, we are abiding in God, and God abides in us. This is the way God described, and John described, what Jesus said in John 14. This relationship with love brings about an abiding where we live in love, and therefore we live in God, and God lives in us.
The Meaning of John 3:16
We know John 3:16 as a verse. It is probably one of the most famous verses there is. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish,” (or actually “be lost” is a better translation, because the word perish means lost) “but have eternal life.”
So God so loved everyone and everything that He gave, because He was totally committed to the restoration of us to that love, so that we could have eternal life, which is a return to the origin of life, the eternal nature of that origin. This does not just mean that we go to heaven one day when we die. It means a return to the true origin of what life was intended to be with God.
Love is one word in the English language with many different meanings. Other languages have multiple words that differentiate its meaning. Greek and Hebrew both have different words for love.
But in English, we have one word. I can say to someone, “I love you,” or I can say, “I love ice cream.” I do love ice cream. But does that carry the same weight as loving a person? No. The words are the same, but the context gives meaning. They are very different concepts, but we use the same word, and therefore it can be misunderstood.
Hebrew Words for Love
Hebrew words for love include:
Ahav – spontaneous, impulsive love
Hesed – deliberate choice of affection, kindness, covenant love
Racham – to have compassion, brotherly love
These are different words expressing something that in English we describe with one word.
Greek Words for Love
Greek also has multiple words for love.
Eros – Erotic love is not found in the New Testament, but is present in Greek literature. Other words include phileo and storge (pronounced stor-gay), which are found in the New Testament and have specific meanings.
Phileo love – means to have a special interest in someone or something, often with a focus on close association, affection, or friendship. It refers to a strong liking or friendship. We love things we strongly like. So I can say I love ice cream in that context. But I am not in love with ice cream. I might say I love my car or I love the way your hair looks. These uses of the word do not convey the full depth of what love is intended to mean.
Storge – refers to the love and affection that naturally occurs between parents and children. It can also exist between siblings and between husbands and wives in a good marriage. You can have storge love in a marriage, but if you add agape love to that marriage, it goes to a completely different level.
Romans 10:12 talks about philo storgos, encouraging us to be loving and kind to each other, expressing that brotherly and familial love.
Agape: The Nature of God’s Love
Then there is the Greek word agape, which was seldom used in Greek literature but is used extensively in the Bible. It refers to the love of God, the kind of love God has for us, and the love we are to have for God and for people.
You can agape love your enemies, but you cannot phileo love them. That is because agape is not motivated by feelings or emotions. Agape is the very nature of God, who is love.
Agape love is known by the action it prompts towards others. It motivates positive action. It is not about doing things because of feelings, obligation, or duty. It is the motivation and empowerment to love; but it must be received in order to be expressed. Agape love is not simply an impulse generated from feelings. It is an exercise of the will, a deliberate choice.
That is why God can encourage us to love our enemies. We can choose to do what God has done for us, not based on whether they deserve it, or how we feel, but because of His love. He is not commanding us to feel something towards our enemies, but to act in a loving way towards them. Forgiveness is one way of expressing that.
Agape love is therefore related to choice and commitment, not just emotion.
Biblical Expressions of Love
Loving someone is to be like God towards them, seeking their long-term blessing and good.
There are many biblical references to agape love:
Matthew 5:43–44 – love your enemies
Matthew 22:36–40 – the great commandment, love God
John 3:16 – God so loved the world
John 13:34 – a new commandment, love one another
John 17:26 – that the love with which You loved Me may be in them
Romans 5:5 – the love of God poured out within our hearts
Did we feel it? Did we experience it? Do we know it? It is important that we do. Even if we have not experienced it yet, we can still come into that experience.
Love as Fulfilment and Empowerment
Romans 13:10 says love is the fulfilment of the law. 1 Corinthians 13 says the greatest of these is love. 2 Corinthians 5:14 says the love of Christ controls us; not in the sense of forcing us, but empowering us, inspiring and motivating us. Galatians 5:6 speaks of faith working through love. Galatians 5:22 says the fruit of the Spirit is love. 1 John 4:7 says everyone who loves is born of God.
God expresses His character through restoring first love, to inspire us, motivate us, and empower us to love Him, ourselves, and others. If you do not love yourself, then you have not experienced God’s love. That raises an important question: how comfortable are we with loving ourselves? How do we even think about that concept?
Some people struggle with that, but God wants us to know His love so that we can love ourselves, knowing how loved, valuable, and worthy we are, and from that place, love others.
What Love Is, and Is Not
Love is not just a virtue, a value, an ideal, or a moral principle. It is not just a feeling, a sentiment, an impulse, or a passion. It is not just romance, benevolence, or amicability. Love is the most powerful force in the whole of creation.
John 13:34 says, “I am giving you a new commandment, that you love one another.” And the most important part is this: “just as I have loved you.”
It is impossible to agape love someone without first experiencing God’s love. We may have emotions, and we may even sacrifice for others, but when we know we are loved by God, we are empowered in a completely different dimension to love others. That is the key. That is how the world awakens to love: when people feel and see others loving them and one another the way God intends.
Only God can express His character through love to us, to inspire and motivate us to love ourselves and others with agape. Love is not a psychological predisposition or a genetically produced social habit. That is what you will often find if you look for explanations of love. Agape love can only be expressed by us when it is derived from God.
Love is the essence, nature, and character of God, experienced by us and then expressed through our lives. God’s love has practical features to be expressed and demonstrated. Love is not defined by the act, but by the character of God within the act.
You can do something that appears loving, but not be motivated by God’s heart in doing it.
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Pursuit, Priority and Intimacy
Lives of the Mystics
Most people in history who have had a mystic, intimate relationship with God have been those who were able to dedicate the time to it. Julian of Norwich lived in a cell attached to a monastery, or whatever it was. She lived in a small place with no TV or things to distract her in the same way as we do today. She did not have modern conveniences to make things quicker either, but that was her life. She focused on that.
Looking through history, the mystics are those who have gone and lived in a cave or whatever, and they have this relationship with God because they have not lived what we would call normal everyday life. But I do think it is possible to have an everyday life and live that from the relationship that we prioritise with God. So that everyday life is so much better than it would be without it.
Priority and Discipline
You are never going to have an intimate relationship with God if you do not pursue it as a priority, even if it is a small measure of time. For me, I always wanted to give God the best of my time. That would be when I got up, because nothing had happened in the day. I had slept all night, and I was ready to engage with God for the new day: new mercies every day, fresh mercies. Some people find the end of the day better. For me, it never was. So I chose to give that time at the beginning.
There is a sense of discipline in saying, “I am going to make this happen,” but not because I have to, or because I fear not doing it. That would be the wrong motive. It was because I wanted to, because I desired that relationship and intimacy. So for me, I would get up early and spend time with God before the house got busy with all the children and everything happening.
When I was a child, I was never a morning person. If I got up at eight o’clock, it felt early. But as I became an adult, I trained myself to be a morning person. When I wake up, I wake up. I do not stay in bed for another hour. I get up, alert and ready. I would go downstairs, find a quiet, comfortable place, sit in a chair, and engage with God. At the beginning, that looked like reading the Bible, praying, doing the things I had been taught. But God used that time to transform it into an intimate time of relationship, communication, and conversation.
I started where I started, but that discipline served me well. When I then encountered heaven and began to engage God from a heavenly perspective, it was like, “Wow, I want more of this.” At first, I tried to record everything I was experiencing, which doubled the time it took. Until I learned to journal as I was going, I would finish and then write it all down.
So in the beginning, I thought, “I am going to get up an hour earlier.” I was not going to cut the time short. I was not going to lose the time I was having with God. So I got up earlier. As I learned to journal during the experience, I did not need to double the time anymore, so I did not need to get up quite as early.
The time I had with God reached a natural limit. An hour, or an hour and a half, was about as much as I could contain in terms of the revelation, the conversation, and what was happening. Three or four hours would have been too much. Having a mystic relationship where you spend five hours with God—there is so much happening, especially if heaven operates on a different timescale. How do you absorb all that? For me, I was able to engage within an hour and a half to two hours, depending on the day.
Pursuit Is the Evidence of Desire
But I had to pursue it. I think that is the key. A friend of mine used to say, “Pursuit is the evidence of desire.” You can say you desire something, but if you do not do anything about it, you do not really desire it. You might wish for it.
A true desire is a motivating force. With the right motive of heart, that desire led me to pursue it, and I experienced it. And that experience changed me.
That pursuit created a dynamic where I could live in the consciousness of that relationship without needing to spend all that structured time. It became a constant dwelling, an indwelling, an abiding presence: me abiding in that spiritual reality, learning to dwell in a multi-dimensional sense. That came out of pursuit.
Now I spend less time in what would traditionally be called a quiet time, but I have a deeper, more intimate relationship with God, because it is a constant awareness and sensitivity to His presence. That has meant I am enjoying life in its fullness, in its abundance, in a way I was not before.
If you do not pursue something, you are not going to find it. Why you pursue it is the key. Do not do it out of duty, obligation, fear, or performance. Do it out of desire: “I desire intimacy with God. I desire a deeper relationship.”
“God, do whatever you need to do in my life to bring me to that point. Get rid of everything that needs to be got rid of. Change my thinking. Heal my heart. Do whatever you need to do. I present myself as a living sacrifice. You prepare me.” And He did.
Every day, I would say, “God, I do not want my will today. I do not want to do things because I want to do them. I do not want a free will. I want to outwork Your heart.” For years, I would say, “I do not want a free will today. I do not want independent choices. I want to be intimate with You.” That shaped what I did, but it took a long time.
It is not like the Matrix, where you plug something into the back of your neck and suddenly you can do kung fu. If you want to learn kung fu, you have to train. You have to practise. You need a teacher. You go through a process. It is the same with God.
My desire meant I gave myself to whatever the process would be to bring me into a place of intimacy and identity, knowing who I am. But that is not why I went into it. I did not pursue God to find out who I am. That was a consequence of discovering who God is. Because in the mirror of His face, I began to see a different person from who I thought I was.
I did not pursue Him thinking, “I want to find my identity” or “I want to fulfil my destiny,” because that would be motivated by me. I just wanted Him.
A Normal Life, Not an Exceptional One
I do not believe I am out of the ordinary. I am a normal person who likes normal everyday things. I like sports. I like movies. I like making things. I like the garden. I enjoy normal life. I am not a mystic living in a cave somewhere. I have a very normal everyday life.
If I can do this, coming from the background I came from (which did not believe in the gifts of the Spirit, and had no real intimacy with God, or even a concept of what that might be), then I believe it is possible for everybody.
I am not more special than anyone else. We are all special to God. We are all created in His image. We are all His children. He wants all of us to enter into the fullness of our relationship with Him as our Dad.
No Excuses, Only Possibility
I do not think anyone can say, “Well, I cannot do that.” I believe all of us can pursue it to the degree that is possible within the circumstances of our lives, or make changes to how we use our time to prioritise it. I understand that people have different circumstances, different seasons of life, and different pressures.
But when I first started to engage heaven, I said, “God, I want to do this every day. I do not want this to be a one-off. I do not want to be telling the same testimony twenty years later about one experience.” I asked Him, “How do I live this? How does this become my life?”
He said to me, “You do it the way everyone else would have to do it.”
Because as a church leader, some people might say, “Well, that is easy for you. You can do whatever you like. You can sit in your office and pray all day.” But God said, do it in the same time that they would have to do it, before they go to work, so no one could say it was easier for me.
I did not develop that personal, intimate relationship in my office. I did it at home, in my chair. I outworked it in the office, but I did not develop it there. That was wise, because it removed the excuse that it was easier for me.
When It Feels Difficult
Some people say it is dry, it is hard, it does not seem to work. It was like that for me at times. There were times when I was trying to hear God’s voice and I could not hear anything. I was trying to meditate and did not know what I was doing. But I did not give up.
There was something inside me that wanted more. I always felt there must be more than this. That desire kept me going.
It took years to learn how to hear God’s voice. There were months where I was not hearing anything, but I kept going. Eventually, I learned to tune in, to listen, and to recognise His voice.
I am quite tenacious, and I do not give up easily. Some people give up too quickly if it does not happen straight away. We live in an instant, push-button culture: people want immediate results but with God, it is not like that. You cannot have an instant relationship with God. It is not a takeaway meal. You have to make it from scratch.
Some people find that difficult, and I understand that. But ultimately, there is no excuse. I started from a place that was quite disadvantaged when it came to anything mystical. I had no expectation, no emotional experience, no sense of intimacy with God. I believed it was true, but I did not feel anything.
The Turning Point: Encounter
That changed when I was baptised in the Spirit. Suddenly I began to feel—love, acceptance, connection. I remember thinking, “How did I live all my Christian life up to this point without feeling this?” But I had come from a background where feelings were frowned upon. People would say, “Do not go by your feelings, brother. Go by the Word.” That was the culture.
There were a few people who were emotional. There was one man, Howard, who was in the same men’s choir as me. He would cry and become emotional when singing about God’s love and grace.
People would say, “That is just Howard.” But actually, he was experiencing something real: the rest of us were just singing the words.
In the Methodist church, I did not see much emotional expression. In the Brethren church, even less, so that was not normal for me. But God overcame all those obstacles and barriers. He brought me into an emotional relationship with Him that went deeper and deeper and deeper.
So I do believe it is possible for everybody.
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Sons of Issachar 