ENTRAINMENT AND THE RHYTHM OF LIFE
By Stephan Rechtshtschaffen, MD

Artur Rubinstein was once asked by an ardent admire. How do you handle the notes as well as you do? The pianist answered, “I handle the notes no better than many others, but the pauses------ah! That is where the art resides.”

Everything moves in rhythm. Atomic particles, waves of electrons, molecules in wood and rocks, grass and trees, amoebas, mammals, and birds, fishes and reptiles, the earth, the moon, the sun and stars………..and we ourselves. All are dominated by rhythm.

In us, as in all animals, the heart is most noticeably rhythmic; but the blood pumped by our heart, along with the organs, muscles, and sinews nourished by our blood, also move in rhythm, whether we’re conscious of it or not. Our breath, the most obvious manifestation of our inner condition, quickens or slows according to our state of mind or level of physical excitement.

The world is thus alive with myriad of rhythms. “Entrainment” is the process by which these rhythms fall into synchronization with each other.

Rhythmic entrainment is one of the great organizing principles of the world, as inescapable as gravity. It explains how one rhythm works with another, and how separate entities, from molecules to stars, will fall into rhythm as automatically as a pulse beats or a butterfly flaps its wings.

If you set two out-of-sync pendulum clocks side by side, by the next day they’ll be keeping time together. In fact, it looks as if they want to be locked into sync with each other. When you adjust the knobs on your radio, you’re adjusting the set oscillators: When they come reasonably close to matching the frequency of a station’s signal, they suddenly lock and pulse together, and your program jumps into focus.

That moving bodies tend to entrain was discovered by the Dutch scientist Christian Huygens in 1665. Since then, entrainment has become a well-accepted concept in the physical and natural sciences, where our increasing understanding of it has led to fantastic technological achievements.

But we are still only beginning to understand, or even recognize, entrainment as it applies to people. In fact, most of us take it so much for granted that we don’t consciously realize it exists. Even if we’re aware of it, we don’t take the time to understand it.

Our entrainment----- our coming into sync with another person, object, sound, mood rhythm---can be short term or long. It can take the form of a shared smile; a dance either solo or with another; the act of love; an intense discussion; teamwork in sports, business, during a crisis; a feeling of community with a whole town or city against a common enemy or for a common cause, good, or bad (think of the way the nation wept when Christa McAuliffe died, or rejoiced when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon); a sense of kinship with nature in the woods or on a silent lake; or even a oneness with the great mysteries---- the rhythm of the spheres, the pulse of the universe, the flow of time.

Women who live together in college dormitories often find that their monthly menstrual cycles begin to coincide. Mothers and babies entrain when the baby is in utero. See a baby smile, and I dare you not to smile with it. And think of sex with and without entrainment. The first leads to bliss and the other produces frustration and anger.

Frederick Erickson of the Interaction Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania has shown that entrainment takes place even at the dinner table. When family members talk, the syllables they stress carry the same rhythm. When the conversation lapses, the shared rhythm continues: Someone reaches for the salt on a beat; a knife hits a plate on a beat; and, when the meal is over, the family members’ departing footsteps continue to tap out the beat.

Great orators are well aware of the power of the rhythm of their speech to pull people into their orbit. Members of his congregation said that just listening to the young Martin Luther King Jr., made you feel like part of a human wave, rising to what he was saying. John F. Kennedy had that kind of power as well----- so did Adolf Hitler. Entrainment in itself is neither right or wrong; it simply exists as a force of nature. (As the author Rene’ Daumal once wrote, in his Mount Analogue: “A knife is neither right or wrong, but he who holds it by the blade is surely in error.)

The African drummer, the great violinist playing Brahms, the orator, the politicians………… all use entrainment. They have caught the rhythm of the music or of the words, and they experience the same rhythm coming back at them from their audience. In my seminars, I know I’ve captured the right rhythm when I am actually so present that I’m not consciously monitoring what I’m saying---- I am just “being” in the flow of speaking. At such times, I get the palpable feeling from my listeners that they’re “with” me just as I am “with” them.

Entrainment need have nothing to do with words or sound, though. The great basketball player Bill Russell writes in his autobiography, Second Wind, of those moments in a game when team-mates and opponents are playing to the maximum of their ability, when they’re entrained not only with each other, but with the game itself. At those moments, says Russell, winning or losing doesn’t matter. What is sublime is the act of basketball, players united in sport on the highest level.

Earlier religious leaders and shamans knew the power of rhythm to transform mundane or profane time into sacred time, where contemplation supersedes pace, where timelessness overcomes social time. Ceremonies and religious rituals have always relied on a drumbeat or choral chant to induce a state that brings the community into a slower rhythmic frequency, enabling a more profound and spiritual experience of existence.

In some cultures, the trance state is induced through the ritual of drumming. Anthropologist Michael Harner has researched many different cultures and found that a specific and particular kind of drumming brings an entire group into a shared rhythm that is considered sacred, and thus an opening to the “other world”. Shamans speak of the drum as the “canoe” that carries them to the other shore.

In Africa, the drum was and still is used not only in religious ceremonies, but also in dances and other ceremonies to create a rhythm that reflects a story or an aspect of the environment. When there was no written history, the drum and its accompanying dance carried the story. If there was drought, or harvest, or birth or a war, the drum conveyed the appropriate rhythm. It was not a measured beat as we have known it in the West, but a rhythm that reflected the changing natural environment. It created an entrainment field for those involved. Even today, each village often will have its own dances and rhythms, reflecting the differences between communities, indicating that each community is entrained to its own particular beat. Even cities have their own particular rhythms. The pace of life in Seattle, say is far different from the pace of Los Angeles.

A drum beats at an African festival. Slowly at first, then faster and faster goes the beat; then it slows, then speeds up again. The dancers, moving in a circle around a fire, match their pace to the drums. Some of the onlookers, caught in the rhythm of the dance, tap their feet in time with the drum; others clap their hands. Soon, each of the participants, onlookers as well as drummers and dancers, has lost consciousness of his immediate surroundings, indeed, there is no thinking at all but rather entrainment with the rhythm, which in fact contains every beat, every rhythm in the world.

The drummer, if inspired, is tuning in to the rhythm of the moment, of the universe becoming an instrument himself, relaying the rhythm to the crowd. Babatunde Olatunji, who introduced the African drum to the West, once told me that the rhythm moves through him, but he feels no sense of domination or power. It is merely given to him to be the messenger.

In the West, too since early times, societies have used the rhythm of song to reflect and determine the tempo of life. Farmers sang in the fields, guests danced at a wedding, bells tolled the hours, rowers chanted as they pulled their boats through the water. People gathered for songfests, both religious and secular. In ancient Greece, Homer sang his stories rather than recited them. In the middle Ages, each German guild had its own song to depict its own rhythm.

Everywhere, music--- not solid sound, but sound and pause, with the rhythm of silence as well as sound---- has always been, and still is, the most effective entrainer. And its power is enormous. My father told me of a performance of Beethoven’s Fidelioin Salzburg, with Toscanini conducting, where the audience—and elite and sedate crowd if there ever was one---was so moved that they danced in the aisles, much to the surprise of the singers onstage.

The trumpet player Miles Evans told me, “Miles Davis created great music by opening the space between the notes and stepping inside” And percussionist Tony Vacca says, “If you can’t find your rhythm, you can’t find your soul.”

But today we have little time for any music that doesn’t draw on narrow range of accelerated rhythms. Today our music, like our society, has grown more raucous; rock and rap dominate our airwaves. And according to anthropologist Edward T. Hall, our popular music doesn’t determine, but rather reflects, the pace of our lives:

Music can be seen as sort of rhythmic consensus. One reason you get hit tunes is that someone composes something that is so close to what people are doing, feeling and the rhythms they use that they recognize it immediately. The music releases feeling and rhythms that people are familiar with.

Since music is the great entrainer, our music had to speed up. Our society was telling it to Entrainment is something that’s so much a part of our lives that we don’t usually notice it--- but sometimes we catch a glimpse of it. For instance, when my son Eli was two and half, he wanted to listen to the tape of Aladdin again and again, as small children do. Unfortunately for me, even when the tape was off, it was still going round and round in my head, It would be playing inside my skull and I wouldn’t even realize it; things would quiet down and all of a sudden the Aladdin theme would pop up back, full blast. It was actually there all the time, as sort of an undercurrent rhythm--- and I was unwittingly moving to the resident rhythm. Most of us haven’t internalized Aladdin, but we are intimately in touch with the ambient clip of society. We’re living a rhythm that goes snap-snap-snap- all the time--- and it’s there all the time even when we don’t notice it. Unconsciously, like a poison ingested by our bodies in deceptively sweet syrup, we have entrained with a faster rhythm. It controls the way we walk, the way we speak, the way we respond to intimates and strangers, the way we don’t relax. Just notice your annoyance when someone sitting in a meeting with you is tapping his pen on his desk, or his foot on the floor.

This habituation to simply skim the surface of experience then move on permeates our life. For instance, we may go to the zoo to watch the animals. But a recent study of zoo-goers at the National Zoo in Washington DC., found that the average time people spend looking at any one exhibit of animals is barely a blink of an eye: five to ten seconds. You might as well be flipping through a picture book for all the experience that amount of time can give you on how an animal acts, reacts, moves, eats, or communicates. In the same study, a tour guide at the National Zoo Washington, DC. noted that many people assume hippos stay underwater for long periods of time. “Actually,” he explained, “the average is ninety seconds and the maximum is five minutes. Tourists just don’t stay around long enough to watch them emerge.” Our press to move on virtually guarantees that we miss what we came for.

This absurdly fast internalized rhythm, this rhythm, we scarcely notice because it is so pervasive, is urged on us by our society. And modern society’s rhythm provides perhaps the most powerful—and potentially the most pernicious--- entrainment of all.

For the last hundred years or so. Western society has set an overly fast rhythm that varies only in that it is continually getting faster, urging us to do more, produce more, learn more. All our machines are geared to the acceleration of an already too-frantic speed. Computers, faxes, voicemail-mail, the internet, portable phones, automatic redial: These are handy for business and sometimes convenient, but they each add to the speed of the rhythm around us, constantly increasing the pressure--- allowing us little time for reflection, and none for feelings.

This rhythm of fast and still faster is a relatively new phenomenon, and no one seems to know how to vary it. Most of us don’t even think of varying it, because society judges it” productive,” and because we as individuals are so entrained with it that we don’t consciously realize we want to change it.

Even if we recognize something is wrong, we don’t know how to change the rhythm, how to entrain with something slower, more “human.” Most of us don’t know how to shift time. We don’t know how to entrain with a slower rhythms when society hammers at us relentlessly. We don’t know how to pause for contemplation, to take time for ourselves, to go from the frenetic to the peaceful, to truly relax, to take note, to feel!!!

Let’s look at the life of a colonial family, circa 1750. Those were tough times. The land had to be tilled, the crops planted and harvested, the clothes washed by hand, the bread baked without benefit of electricity, the children reared, the clothes washed, the (rudimentary) machinery kept in working order. There were no timesaving devices, no home appliances, and no boxes of one minute rice or TV dinners.

Yet how do we explain that wedding ceremonies often lasted five days, celebrations of holidays or the harvest, a week? Where did those oppressed, overworked Colonials find the time to enjoy themselves--- which all their literature suggests they did? Why did they have so much more time than we have for religion and meditation? Why was there more joy, more friendliness, and more consideration than in our angst-ridden, angry no-time-for-civility society?

The Colonials were working within the rhythm of their society’s time, one completely different from ours. Of course the Colonials struggle, but usually not against time. The stress disorders that plague so many of us today were essentially unknown then, relaxation was built into their lives. They were in peaceful rhythm with the daily course of events. Their rhythms were defined not so much by days, hours, and minutes as by seasons.

For them (as for all people until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and for most people in non-Western societies today), time was circular. It was marked by changes, certainly. Wet seasons and dry. Heat and cold, Birth and death. Planting, cultivating, and harvesting (each part of the cycle marked by celebration). But existence went on fundamentally changing. The cycle of the years started over again as surely as day followed night, and babies were born as surely as people died.

We can see a sudden, dramatic shift from this sort of circular time to modern, linear time in a place called Ladakh, a district of North India high in the Himalayas.

Ladakh was totally isolated until the mid-seventies, and work was hard. Its citizens used the simplest tools, grew their own food, raised their own animals, and made their own clothing. But, as Swedish linguist Helena Norberg-Hodge noted in Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh, work was done collaboratively, usually accompanied by singing, and there was a tremendous amount of time, particularly during the winter, which was spent in virtual nonstop partying and celebration. In 1974, the Indian government built a road to Ladakh, encouraging tourists and “development experts” to visit. The Ladakhis quickly got caught up in a money economy. And now, although they had never needed money before, many cannot imagine how they had gotten along without it. They now buy timesaving devices, goods from other countries--- the ways of the western world.

This sudden entry into modernity has changed every aspect of life in Ladakh—right down to the basic level of human relationships. As a Ladakhi friend told Norberg-Hodge:
I can’t understand it. My sister in the capital, she now has all these things that do the work faster. She just buys her clothes in a shop; she has a jeep, a telephone, a gas cooker. All of these things save her so much time, and yet when I go to visit her, she doesn’t have time to talk to me. The Ladakhis had, unconsciously, shifted from, shifted from circular to linear time. I wonder how many of them would be happier if they could shift back.

I encountered the concept of circular time myself when reading about the Hopi people of the Southwest United States. Like most Native American societies, the Hopi dwell in circular time, a concept peculiar to our modern linear sense of the flow of time. In circular time, just as day comes after night, the seasons continually repeat themselves, the crops are yearly planted, grown, and harvested--- so the future is seen as a return of what has already occurred in the past. The present moment is the center of continually repetitive flow of past events that will recur in the future once again. Changes take place against a backdrop of constancy.

Thus for the Hopi’s, if the days, the seasons, even lifetimes, come around again, then time never runs out. What is not completed in the circle of today may be accomplished tomorrow. If not this year, then next; if not in this lifetime, then another. Things don’t progress as you look to the future, nor do they get worse.

The present is where life happens.

By contrast, our modern rhythm is distinctly unnatural, mirroring society’s pull, not the magnetism of the earth. We’re taught to think quickly, act quickly, accomplish quickly. Buy quickly, our televisions sets implore us: only ten more shopping days till Christmas!! We have superimposed on nature the rhythms of greed, of materialism, of “having it all”

We do this even in childhood. A Friend described with chagrin how his daughter tends to react to Christmas:
Sarah goes through this absolute frenzy of anticipation. Instead of looking at each gift, handling it and thinking about it and really getting into it, she goes through this little cyclone of opening things. She’ll tear the wrapping paper off one present—and then immediately she puts it down and frantically digs into the next one. It’s like a feeding frenzy.

Sarah, of course, is acting out her own entrainment to the weird speed at which we live. She is picking up her cues from us, for we too, anticipate what’s to come, and then ignore what’s actually here. I’m not suggesting that we become Colonials, or shape our lives like the Hopis. We couldn’t, even if we tried. I am advocating only that we learn from them. For they lived--- and many still live their lives in the flow of time, rather than racing to be on time, racing against time. We have forgotten what the vast majority of people who ever lived—who are living now, in fact—knew and still know.

We have forgotten that life itself—times itself—is the unfolding of myriad of rhythms. Like music, the pulse of the universe is filled with sound and silence, activity and rest.

We have forgotten how to rest!!!!

To remember, we must entrain with the rhythms other than societies. And we are best off, I think, starting with our own

Take your pulse. Run for ten minutes. Take it again. Rest for a minute. Take it again. Your pulse will of course beat to different rhythms, faster when you’re active, slower when you’re calm. We are born through a series of contractions and rests, not just one continuous cramp. Our muscle cells must relax to work again. As it is with the human pulse, so it is with human emotion. Anger, fear, love, peace: All produce a different pulse rate, a different rhythm.

And as it is with us, so it is with the universe. Quantum physics and chaos theory verify what an ancient sage once said: A butterfly beatings wings can affect the weather half a world away. The sun and stars burn, not with a steady heat, but cooler and hotter as their inner gasses explode. If our pulse beats in different rhythms—if life does, if the universe does—why is it, then that we feel we must spend our lives at one speed? Why do we wish only to go faster, since we don’t have enough time to accomplish everything we’re “supposed” to do?

The answer is that society dictates it. We are creatures of habit who have become habituated to society’s pulse. But society is our master only if we allow it to be. Even the most ingrained habit can be broken.

As we shift our rhythms, serenity is the reward.

Rhythm is powerful; sometimes you must fight against it, sometimes let yourself flow with it. Knowing whether to fight it or flow with it depends, first on recognizing it for what it is. Later on, I will suggest various ways of finding serenity by shifting rhythms and forming different entrainment patterns. For the moment, I ask that you begin by simply becoming aware of different rhythms as you go through your days. Do that and you can learn to change them, and by so doing, set your own pace.

I’m asking you to be proactive rather than reactive. I’m asking you to take conscious responsibility for the rhythms you entrain with. Taking responsibility begins with slowing down. It begins with experiencing the now, entraining with the people and environment we are with in this moment. We can only entrain effectively with different rhythms by being consciously in the present.

In every fulfilling relationship, the parties are entrained in the rhythm, have fallen into its flow, and are in the same present. Then and only then is true communication possible.

Being consciously aware of rhythms, you’re own and those of the people around you, will allow you to shift the rhythms, and therefore, shift time. But you must slow down in order to listen and feel. Understanding is impossible without serenity; serenity only exists when time moves slowly.

Feeling rushed? Take a deep breath before you continue. In a fierce argument? Prescribe silence so you can both reflect on what you’ve been saying. Worried about the future? Come into the present moment.

These are simple----even simplistic—suggestions, but they are the first steps toward becoming aware of ourselves in the rhythmic flow of the present moment. With this awareness, through the conscious focus on the present, we can regain the mastery of the speed and rhythm of our lives.

We can choose to create a slower rhythm that will allow us the time to feel and sense and enjoy the ordinary. Or we can choose to be in sync with the faster rhythms of the world around us, but we can do this consciously, with a sense or being present with the knowledge that if we want to, we can always get off the runaway train.

Indeed, I’m not suggesting that the slowing down is the sole aim of mastering rhythm. Time shifting, in fact means constantly changing our rhythm, slowing or accelerating in order to feel present and in the flow of time. A rock band is meant to produce a frenzied ecstasy--- and frenzy can be fun if it’s joined with awareness—just as a band at a football game is used to make the spectators cheer and the athletes “fight.” Throughout history, countless troops have been “psyched up” by the driving rhythms of a trumpet or military band.

In a world where faster is automatically better, timeshifting is essential if we are to thrive in the business of everyday life. Still, given the rhythm of modern life, I believe that slowing down—through awareness of time, consciousness of the present, and knowledge of the sublte, poisonious entrainment society imposes—is more often than not what we must strive for.

I believe that just being conscious of our ability to shift our rhytms within the fabric of a frenetic society will make our hours less anxious, our days less stressful, and our lives more complete. It will simply enough make us happier

Happiness has a rhythm too. Happy people seem to live less frenetically. They have more time in their lives. They are more in the moment. This happiness is available to all of us.

For Information on services please, contact Roberta at: by email: cosmicparty2012@hotmail.com