Nancy Moneagle on Bob Monroe, Hemi-Sync, and the Early Years of the Workshops
By the early seventies, word had spread about Bob and the out-of-body experiences he described, and about his time at Esalen, if that name means anything to you. People there came to him with a request: would he teach a workshop so they could learn how he did what he did? He agreed, and in 1973 he led his first workshop built entirely around the out-of-body experience.
I finished college in 1974. By then his book, Journeys Out of the Body, had been in print since 1971, and the fan mail had piled up into something enormous. So that is where I came in. I started answering letters for him, then moved into the lab, helping shape the program that was taking form. He had run a weekend group at Esalen that went well, and from there the workshops kept multiplying.
I began traveling the country with the sound equipment in tow. The audio Bob worked with came to be called Hemi-Sync, short for hemispheric synchronization. It layers binaural beats, pink sound, and other more complicated patterns of sound on top of each other. What he discovered was that these layers could coax people into very deeply relaxed states of consciousness, the same states he had reached on his own, and guide them there reliably.
I will say this plainly, since it tends to be the first question anyone asks: we do not promise anyone an out-of-body experience. What we offer are techniques, delivered while we bring people into these deeply relaxed, wide-open states of awareness. Some do have out-of-body experiences. Many others arrive somewhere else entirely, a place where problem solving and creative thinking and decision making open up in ways they had never touched before. People also stumble onto new ways of handling stress.
These are mindful, meditative states, and the sound tends to get you there far faster than solo practice does. I have known meditators who sat with it for twenty years on their own, and when they tried Hemi-Sync, I keep going back to that word, they found it sped up the whole thing. We have been running these programs for more than forty years now. The people who come through all walks of life, and none of it hinges on belief. Religious or not, whether you pray to God or to Allah or to no one at all, it makes no difference.