Name:	Meri Lehtinen
Phone:	505-776-3122
Fax:	none
Email:	merilehti@aol.com
Lives:	Taos, New Mexico and Helsinki. Finland
Travel to :	Anywhere (contact me for details)

 

Testimony of Meri Lehtinen,

In March 2001, I went to get my SoulNote from Nicole at her Colorado retreat. She asked me to speak for half a minute about something that really touched my heart. I did so, and she expected her SoulNote program to give her my note - but it didn't! At first she was quite puzzled and a little concerned, but then she remembered that English isn't my native language, even though I speak it so naturally that people seldom realize that. Then she told me to speak again in my mother tongue, Finnish. After I did, my SoulNote came right up. I found this very moving and convincing, because I feel a deeper soul connection with my native tongue, even though I've been completely bilingual since I was eleven years old.

When I listened to the tape of my SoulNote, I immediately felt that it put me in touch with my true self and gave me a sense of balance and gentle power. Ever since, I find that playing my SoulNote returns me to my center and to good feelings if I'm upset or feeling down. It has truly been like a magic wand that has the power to return me to my essential truth when I feel lost and confused.

While I was at Nicole's I was so impressed with everything I saw and heard about her work with the Sound Wave Energies, that I decided to buy all four of her 12-CD series, even though originally I had only meant to get my SoulNote. My first strong experience with the CD's came in April, when I got over a serious flu in just two days by playing the Prana CD over and over on just a little travel CD player while I was traveling in Scotland. Everyone else that got that bug was very sick for at least ten days to two weeks.

I have now been using the CD's with good equipment for several months, and my well-being has improved dramatically, even though I had thought I was in quite good health before I started. I feel about 20 years younger, my eyesight has improved so much that I've had to change to weaker glasses, I sleep better, my digestion, which used to be quite tempermental, has steadied, and my mood and energy are generally up. If I ever do feel down, I can always use my SoulNote, the Relaxation & Calmness, or the Love CD to bring me back to center. As an interesting specific hormonal effect, I've observed that a few long hairs on my chin, which I've grown like many older women, have become so weak and thin that they can hardly be noticed. And a 79-year-old friend of mine, who has been using the CD's for some time, has had the same experience with her chin hairs.

One of the most wonderful things about the frequencies is that they can be used so conveniently. I have three frequencies going right now as I write this, and I'm very sure that I'm having an easier time doing it because of that, and I'm not getting fatigued. Every night I have at least two frequencies on and I wake up refreshed and in a good mood. Although at times using the frequencies has brought me to a "healing crisis" of one kind or another, it has always proved to be a clearing that I was grateful for, and the frequencies themselves have helped me to deal with whatever was coming up. Altogether, in my thirty years of experience in alternative healing, and in spiritual practice, I haven't found anything else that is such a powerful and simple aid to every kind of healing or meditation work. I feel very blessed to have found this and to be able to offer it to others. Altogether, I feel very grateful for my Sound Wave Energy CD's, and wouldn't want to be without them ever.

Background

I was born in Helsinki, Finland but when I was ten years old my father was sent to the Finnish Embassy in Washington, D.C. and I spent five years there learning English and adjusting to American life. I went to high school in Finland, but returned to the U.S.A. for my higher education. I was good at languages and my bilingual childhood had made me interested in linguistic structures, and eventually I got a Ph.D. in linguistics. I taught at universities for eight years, but I was never happy in the academic world. It was too competitive and heady for me, and I felt so stressed that I developed a psychosomatic disease, ulcerative colitis, a very painful and serious inflammation of the colon. My doctors told me they knew this disease had a big psychological component, and advised me to go for therapy, but at the same time they admitted that verbal therapy seldom helps. Nice to know! So I started looking for alternatives. I tried yoga, hypnosis, encounter groups…nothing really seemed to touch my problem. Then in the fall of 1969 I went to a Bioenergetic workshop. When the leader started to talk about human energy fields, about the pulsation and flow in them, and about how it's the energy field that is the real life in the person, it was like a revelation to me. I felt that I had always known this, and couldn't understand why nobody talked about it. Then he explained the relationship of the breath, and of emotions, to the energy field and suggested breath-and-motion exercises. I threw myself into them with all my heart and soul. After one exercise I experienced a tremendous emotional release, which deepened into a spiritual opening where love and light seemed to be streaming all around me, and I felt a profound peace. After this, I never had ulcerative colitis again.

All the same, I wouldn't necessarily wish that kind of "miracle cure" on anybody. The transformation of my emotions and consciousness was so radical that I couldn't really handle it, and I think I was more or less crazy for at least six months. What I was clear about though, was that I would leave my academic career and get trained as a Bioenergetic therapist.

It took me a couple of years to get my courage and finances in order, and then in January 1973, I moved to Los Angeles where good training was available. I lived in Los Angeles for about eight years, studying and practicing various kinds of massage, breathing techniques, emotional release, group processes. It was wonderfully rewarding and exciting to be doing something that involved all parts of myself in deep connection with other people. I felt as though my real life had only begun then. While I was in Los Angeles, I also became interested in a breath-movement-voice meditation called Continuum, which has remained an essential part of my life since then. It's a way of connecting with the primordial intelligence and spirituality of oneself at a profound, cellular level. I also started going to Buddhist meditation retreats, and found myself in harmony with the Buddhist vision, and have maintained a sporadic practice of Buddhist meditation, although I haven't converted to Buddhism.

By the early eighties, I had gotten fed up with living in Los Angeles, and had moved to a small village in northern California. It was lovely country, but the problem was that I didn't have any income there, so when an opportunity came to do some workshops in my native Finland, I was delighted. At that time, people in Finland were just opening up to the "New Age," and many were hungry for new ways of working with themselves. I was simply mobbed with clients wanting to do both individual and group work, and little by little I spent more time in Finland, until I wound up living and working there full time from about 1985 to 1995. It was another great adventure and opening for me, reconnecting with my native language and culture, and actually being able to have very intimate insights into the people and their feelings through the kind of work I was doing. After ten years of hard work there, I felt ready for a new phase of life, community living. I spent two winters living and working at a Sufi community in New York State, then two winters living and studying at a Quaker institute near Philadelphia, while spending summers in Europe. I was fascinated by the different ways that the various spiritual traditions have of connecting us to our inner truth. I suppose I'm an example of the kind of "New Age" person deplored by most religious teachers, skipping from one practice and tradition to another, rather than deepening my devotion to one. But I find in the end it all boils down to the same thing: getting still and out of my usual habits of mind and body, and allowing a deeper connection to emerge.

What I want now is to find a place to settle down, closely connected to a spiritual community that lives in an ecological way, and working again in some way that I feel helps to heal myself and other beings. Right now, the Taos area of New Mexico, and Nicole La Voie's Sound Wave Energy feel to me like what I've been searching for.