Good vibrations
The categories of Sensate meditation music: Not as New Age-y as they look. Credit: Sensate
Many of us have this experience: When our heart is thumping and our thoughts are racing, basic meditation just can't cut through. Even a few minutes of trying to concentrate on our breathing at such moments can feel like an uncomfortable eternity. For people suffering from trauma, it can actually exacerbate symptoms — or lead to a "freeze" response similar to fight or flight. In the neurosculpting class, our teacher spent 20 minutes simply soothing our primitive brains and their hierarchy of needs (this room is safe, you've got a bottle of water, the bathroom is down the hall, lunch is coming) before the real meditation work could even begin.
What the Sensate appears to offer is a shortcut to that soothed state. The pebble sits in your sternum and vibrates in ever-changing ways. I was not prepared for how powerful the vibration felt in this spot, like my body had been designed to fit the Sensate rather than the other way around. (My wife had a similar experience with the Sensate, and offered one piece of advice: Do not wear a push-up bra while using it, or your breasts might absorb the vibrations that are supposed to reach your bones.)
The Sensate app is still very bare-bones. My main wish for the next update is for it to connect with the Apple Health app, so I can track my Mindfulness Minutes without having to keep a separate meditation timer running. Still, the Sensate app connects to the Sensate device with ease — press a button and you're there. Select a music track (the track determines the length of the meditation), adjust the volume and vibration level, and away you go.
My biggest fear around the Sensate was that the music would be too New Age-y for its own good. This was my experience recently with a popular music-based meditation app called Synctuition: Too much syrupy melody of the pan-flute variety left me more irked than when I started. The Sensate music, however, felt far more chill, constrained, even hypnotic.
Sensate's music employs binaural beats, which is something else we're just starting to study in a scientific context. Binaural beats — putting different frequencies of sound in each ear, basically — have been shown to reduce anxiety in pre-surgery patients and improve long-term memory in some cases. I've used binaural beat apps before, at the urging of friends who use them, with no noticeable results.
But with Sensate, something in the combination of the music and the on-chest vibrations — which seem deliberately out of sync with the music, just as the frequencies in each earphone are deliberately different — works like crazy. One odd result of this was that the time absolutely flew by. Normally the prospect of a 30-minute meditation fills me with dread. But when I meditate for that long with the Sensate, I have to check my watch afterwards to make sure a half-hour has actually passed.
And yes, Sensate meditation last thing at night made it easier to sleep afterwards. This is surely helped by the fact that I was lying down anyway (you can in theory meditate while standing or sitting using the Sensate lanyard around your neck, but it's much more comfortable in a prone position).
Interestingly, I haven't yet actually fallen asleep during a Sensate meditation, even in moments when my cat is snuggled up next to my chest, adding his own soporific purring to the mix. The purring chest pebble — much stronger than his efforts by comparison, sorry cat — is out of sync enough that it kept my brain focused. But it definitely put me into the half-awake state of hypnogogia beloved by dream hackers.
Bottom line: Is it worth it?
$250 still seems a steep price for what it is, and the Sensate benefits from having no major competitor in this space yet. Our lives are filled with so many vibrating high-tech objects already that surely one of them can be made to stimulate our vagus nerves too. Maybe one of these high-tech ********s on the right setting will work as well on the chest as in the nether regions. Or perhaps a special sternum-shaped smartphone case could make use of these things we all have buzzing away in our pockets incessantly anyway.
In the meantime, you're the best judge of what this level of potential calm is worth to you. The company does have a "try it worry-free for 40 days" policy, if that helps.
Personally, based on my experience, I'd choose a Sensate over a $70-a-year Calm or Headspace subscription. I'd even pick it over the Core meditation trainer or the $250 Muse 2, as much as I still love the Muse's biofeedback from within your brain. The Sensate's experience is something I actively crave, even now as I write this. My anxiety would like good vibes only, please.
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