Judith Pennington, IAM & The Meditation Center

 

Judith Pennington, founder of the Institute for the Awakened Mind (IAM) and co-developer of the Vilistus Mind Mirror 6, is a certified Awakened Mind Consciousness Trainer who studied with Anna Wise in 2005-2006 and assisted with her seminars at Esalen Institute until her passing in 2010, after which Judith founded IAM, an international consortium of Awakened Mind Consciousness Trainers. In 2011, she partnered with Vilistus to develop a state-of-the-art Mind Mirror operating on a research-grade neurofeedback/biofeedback device.

 

Judith is an internationally published journalist, singer, the author of two books on meditation and spirituality, and the composer of four guided meditation CDs. To the Meditation Center she adds three new albums of her own.

 

Following in the footsteps of her illustrious teachers, she uses their meditation structures in her compositions and adds techniques of her own design to evoke the two gamma patterns she discovered on the Mind Mirror 6: Gamma Synchrony and Universal Consciousness. Her meditations, enriched by beautiful music and gamma audio technology, also directly introduce the element of love, which in most people naturally awakens gamma and is the wide-open portal to higher awareness.  

 

The mother of two children and the grandmother of five, Judith loves to write, play guitar, sing harmonies with her daughters and grandkids, and walk through wild places in nature. Her mission is to guide people to the inner voice of the soul for creative insight and self-actualized lives of peace, happiness, health, and prosperity. She reaches out to others through her books, meditation CDs, three online publications, and her YouTube channel, all accessible through her personal website, JudithPennington.com.

 

The Mind Mirror Portal and its Meditation Center, as tools for consciousness development, accomplish her musical mission mega forte. 

Stephen Clark

Mind Mirror Software Developer

 

Born in West London, Stephen Clark is the entrepreneurial software engineer who took a chance on the orphaned Mind Mirror back in 2011 and developed it into an award-winning technology that evolves us and the world. 

 

The only child of an engineer and an accountant, Steve was a self-avowed nerd drawn to the predictability of computers. At age 18, he joined the computer programming team at British Aerospace and emerged five years later knowledgeable enough to work as a computer consultant for the next 20 years. 

 

Steve took a deep dive into holistic healing after his wife Helen smashed her ankle in a debilitating accident in 1998. He studied NLP, cranio-sacral therapy, neurofeedback, biofeedback, hypnotherapy, and Reiki then took those skills into private practice in Edinburgh and London as a holistic therapist from 2002 to 2008. “I’d seen neurofeedback work well for my wife,” he said, “so I knew it would help other people.” During that time, he served as a psychotherapist to the parents of autistic children.  

 

Amidst the global financial crisis of 2008, he saw an opportunity to start a company offering affordable neurofeedback equipment. His work in healing and computer programming came together in Vilistus. He partnered with electronics engineer Nigel Walker, “a genius” who runs the factory, and today the company sells to universities, clinicians, therapists, and meditators healing people all over the world.

 

Since the 2012 release of the Vilistus Mind Mirror 6, Steve has been invested in helping it grow and succeed. In addition to the current development of a cloud platform called Mindstream, the Vilistus team—which often includes Steve’s son David, a graphic designer—is working on a Mind Mirror phone app and a small DSU (the “peanut”) that will be priced for mainstream sales. The Mindstream, linked to the cloud and the Portal through a wireless phone app, is a very exciting next frontier for the Mind Mirror. 

 

“Anything that can relax the mind and give insight into people’s lives is a good thing,” Steve said. “I’m all for enlightenment. We’re looking forward to the next phase of the Mind Mirror—the peanut, the phone app, and spiritual enlightenment on the tube in the morning.” 

 

Steve and Helen live at Newby, a charming 1780s farmhouse located in the Lake District of England between the lakes and the Pennines. For relaxation, Steve enjoy long walks with his dog, Kai. The beautiful countryside that surrounds his home and business are his meditation.

Rachel Allman, Artist

 

Rachel Allman is a natural-born artist, writer, and singer who works in a wide variety of media to make the world a more beautiful, calm, and loving place. In addition to the Portal's logo, she created the Meditation Center's striking album covers and copied 78 meditation scripts into the Meditation Viewer then time-annotated them, a job that required tremendous patience and tenacity. Her contribution to the Portal is immense and deeply appreciated.

 

Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Rachel showed a mechanical bent and artistic talent in early childhood. She won art contests and sang solos in choir, which ultimately led to her singing onstage and trying her hand at songwriting. At age 13, she won a national poetry contest and later went on to review music for an alternative newspaper in Baton Rouge.

 

Rachel is the mother of two talented children, a daughter in high school and a son in college who, like her, are gifted in art, music, and writing. She studied Fine Art at Mohave Community College in Arizona and Northampton Community College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, her current home, but is mostly self-taught. She creates exquisite stained glass works, mosaics, pottery, jewelry, furniture, and street art, and is currently working with her husband to launch a business specializing in unique mixed media and collectible art.  

  

In 2019, she trained as an Awakened Mind Practitioner and began to assist her mother, Judith Pennington, in practitioner trainings and group Mind Mirror monitoring at The Monroe Institute. As a practitioner, she will specialize in helping people with addiction disorders. Her goal of making the world a more beautiful, gentle, and loving place is well met in the Portal.

 

Robert Holbrook, Audio Engineer 

Gamma Brainwave Entrainment

 

Robert Holbrook, based in Chicago, is a sound artist whose gamma entrainment recordings orchestrate a new kind of music in the brain: that is, frequencies which expand the mind’s awareness to a higher plane.

 

Director of Innovation for The Monroe Institute, Bob uses a variety of audio techniques to deliver high-frequency gamma beats in his six programs there per year and in other Monroe programs and recordings. With special licensing by Monroe, he composed 40- and 80-hertz gamma-enhanced audio tracks for five Portal meditations, including Judith Pennington’s “Superconscious Mind” album and The Timeline track in the “Pure Consciousness” album.

 

Like an orchestra conductor, Bob weaves Fibonacci carrier tones and music that is harmonic to the 432Hz scale into gamma and other bandwidths to produce a 3-D sound with arcs and parameters that people love. The lower music scale of 432Hz is richer and warmer, he explains, and it “draws the brain in.” Bob's compositions work as beautifully for excursions into higher states as for the PTSD and addiction-challenged war veterans he has worked with in Chicago, for whom he includes low-delta frequencies that “defragment and clean up the circuits” and stimulate neuroplasticity.

 

At Monroe, his audio compositions provide an organic, safe, and comfortable ride into insight, healing, happiness, and mystical union. His research-oriented Discovery programs, which have involved Mind Mirror trainers measuring participant brainwaves since 2018, are extraordinarily successful in supporting target attainment during remote viewing exercises and out-of-body travel.

 

A lifelong student of consciousness, Bob was educated in anthropology, psychology, and archaeology. His work in the U.S., South America, Africa, and the Middle East was rich and rewarding. But what shifted him to much higher perspectives was a near-fatal 1995 automobile accident that resulted in a DOA, numerous near-death experiences, and 21 reconstructive surgeries. He was lying in a hospital bed, barely alive, yet receiving “unbelievable downloads of energy and information” when a friend brought in Monroe audio-support tracks and wrapped headphones around his head. “I could literally feel my consciousness restructuring, coming back to this awareness,” he says. “I was totally rewired, in a positive way.”

 

Before the accident, Bob had an IQ of 132; after, it was 150. While recovering, he heard stories and saw medical situations where Monroe audio support made the difference between life and death, so naturally he gravitated to The Monroe Institute. While meditating during a Lifelines program, he was told to apply “right now” for a position there and was immediately hired as a residential trainer. He learned SAM technology from then-research director Skip Atwater and over the years refined it to make the gamma entrainment more powerful and beneficial.

 

Today, Bob is an active member of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness and The Institute of Noetic Sciences. He is a certified provider for the Institute of HeartMath and uses that technology, plus HemiSync and SAM, in Chicago and elsewhere to help people suffering from addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder, particularly war veterans. 

 

At The Monroe Institute, he is a well-loved program creator who guides his groups with deep wisdom and irrepressible humor. A guitar player from a musical family, he is married to and at times co-facilitates programs with his South African wife Marinda. His good, high-minded vibes translate into his consciousness-raising work and thus into the Portal. 

 

Jim McGee, Recording Artist & Sound Engineer

 

Jim McGee is a professional jazz musician and the sound engineer who recorded, mixed, and mastered the Portal’s 54 meditations and exercises at his award-winning studio, Spectra Sound Recording LLC, in Quakertown, Pennsylvania. His superb sound equipment, musicianship, recording expertise, and all-around good humor made the project a pleasure and, we think, a great success.

 

As a child, Jim had such an affinity for music that his father asked if he wanted to play in a band and found a music teacher for him. The teacher said he could get Jim, age eight, ready for a performance in two weeks, and sure enough, he was playing bass onstage with The Hot Dogs, dressed in a red overcoat, two weeks later. The teacher sat in the audience, miming the chord changes, with Jim following along.

 

At age nine, Jim found himself overdubbing music on a pair of miniature Norelco reel-to-reel players. Thus was born his love for audio technology. He recorded bands in high school, and in the eleventh grade fell in love with jazz while listening to Chick Corea’s “Return to Forever” albums. He attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston for two years, studying music composition and arrangement, but recording technology pulled him into the field of electronics to build and install sound systems, and then to his philosophically minded mentor, Peter Helffrich, in whose studio he worked as a recording engineer for nine years.

 

The late 1980s saw the release of Jim’s rock- and Latin-infused jazz LP, “Paradise Blue,” featuring his band Music for People. Jazz remained Jim’s bailiwick in his group Funky Business and his current quintet, New Kind of Talk. Jim has composed and released several highly accessible jazz CDs, including “New Kind of Talk: Change in Time” and “Cup of Joe, Vol. 1,” with volume two scheduled for release in the summer of 2020.  

 

Jim married a professional dance-band singer, Sharon, and is the father of two grown sons. Patrick, a soprano sax player, was graduated from the Manhattan School of Music and performs under the name Acid Head. Daniel, who attends the New England Conservatory of Music, writes and plays twenty-first century classical music.

 

Jim has recorded dozens of music and voice albums at Spectra Sound since 1986. His goal in music and music production is “to make something sound as good as it possibly can.” For the Meditation Center recordings, he used a super-sensitive Neumann U87 microphone for its “warmth, richness, intimacy, and the feel of a soft voice in the head.” 

 

We deeply appreciate Jim’s hard work on this project, especially in the editing stage, where he spent countless hours patiently re-drawing waveforms to edit out the ticks, pops, and hissing s’s which are inevitable in soft meditation voicing. Judith calls Jim the DaVinci of waveform editing. He is a consummate artist whose musicality is our treasure.

 

Christopher Lloyd Clarke, Music Composer

Enlightened Audio

 

A resident of Apollo Bay on the southern coast of Australia, Christopher is the gifted composer of the beautifully spacious, heartwarming, and spiritually uplifting music that accompanies most of the recordings in the Higher States and Energy Mastery category in the Meditation Center. He has been creating music and practicing meditation since 1997. The wondrous depths and heights of his spirit can be heard and felt in every composition on his superb Enlightened Audio website.

 

Christopher, at 6’3,” calls himself a “tall, bald-headed science geek” with an educational background in biology, metaphysics, and audio production, as well as psychoacoustics, Reiki, and sound healing. His involvement with a global network of therapists and healers has given him deep insight and understanding of how to create music that encourages relaxation, spiritual awakening, healing, and altered states of consciousness. His royalty-free music inspires and elevates awareness around the world through the recordings of therapists, meditation teachers, spiritual growth counselors, and holistic healers.

 

His work brings peace and healing to cancer patients served by The Australian Cancer Council, soldiers on U.S. Army bases suffering from PTSD, and students who are better able to relax and focus in some of the world’s more progressive schools. Luminaries such as Deepak Chopra, Oprah Winfrey, Neale Donald Walsch, and Julian Lennon have used his compositions in their work.

 

Christopher lives an idyllic life of deep connection with music and nature. When he is not writing music, he practices yoga, surfs, takes afternoon naps, and “eats too much cake,” he says.

 

His goal in life is to help people experience inner peace, healing, and joy. We deeply appreciate the great beauty and light his music brings to the Meditation Center. Thank you, Christopher, for all that you are and do. 

 

C. Maxwell Cade, Scientist and Electronic Guru

 

A British biophysicist, psychobiologist, master hypnotist, and Zen master, Max  Cade was an early pioneer in the field of mind-body studies and is widely known today as the father of instrument-led meditation. His 1976 co-invention of the Mind Mirror EEG led to his discovery of the Awakened Mind of the masters, an ideal brainwave pattern which he helped many students and hands-on healers train and maintain.

 

Max mapped the brainwaves of more than 4,000 people over a period of nine years. Starting out in the early 1970s with an Electrical Skin Response (ESR) meter and a single-channel EEG then temperature meters and the multi-frequency, dual-hemisphere Mind Mirror, he investigated the brainwaves and physiology of advanced meditators, psychics, healers, Indian swamis, and other highly developed and spiritually aware people. Many would agree that his groundbreaking book, The Awakened Mind: Biofeedback and the Development of Higher States of Awareness, published in 1979, is still the most enlightening research ever done on meditation and consciousness.

 

Electronics engineer and Tibetan Buddhist Geoffrey Blundell, co-inventor of the Mind Mirror, dubbed Max the “electronic guru.” He was precisely that: a wise and brilliant teacher, mentor to healers, inspiration to the readers of his books and papers, and eloquent speaker at workshops and on conference stages, radio, and television.

 

For three decades, prior to his invention of the Mind Mirror, Max worked as a physicist for the British government and major industries. He wrote 150 scientific papers on navigation, radiation physics, thermography, and clinical psychology which were published in specialist journals. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and Royal Society of Health, and a member of the Institution of Biology and the Institute of Physics, among many other professional organizations. He made lasting contributions to the fields of radar and medical thermography.

 

Scientist and mystic, psychologist, hypnotherapist, and a Zen Buddhist meditator from the age of 12, Max brought both intellectual acuity and intuitive awareness to his career in meditation and mind-body self-control. His highly effective brainwave exercises and profound meditations help people awaken to "the voice of the soul," says the back cover of his book, and a felt awareness of universal light. Even his alpha-development meditations are multidimensional in effect.

 

The author of a 1960s book on the possibility of life on other planets, titled Other Worlds Than Ours, Max had an untethered imagination. Several of his meditations carry listeners from the stillness of inner space to timelessness. Others activate the subtle energies of chi which Max knew so well from his lifetime practice of meditation and several martial arts forms.

 

Without a doubt, Max Cade was a scientific genius and an enlightened being. The Portal is pleased and proud to present his finest works in the Meditation Center. As you experience them, may the force be with you.

 

Read an in-depth biography of Max's life and the fascinating development of this work

 

Anna Wise: Meditation Master, Beloved Guide

 

Anna Wise was a dancer, music-lover, visionary, master meditator, humanistic psychologist, and one of the most influential teachers of EEG-led meditation in the world. The protegee of Max Cade, she brought her beloved teacher’s work to America in 1981, published two classic books, recorded the still-popular High-Performance Mind CD set, and taught at Esalen Institute, the oldest and most respected human growth center, for 30 years.

 

Above all, Anna was a mind researcher with an insatiable curiosity about the depths and heights of consciousness. She travelled around the world to monitor people on the Mind Mirror and taught her unique combination of real-time brainwave biofeedback and guided meditation to thousands of adherents in the United States, Europe and Asia. Through decades of hands-on experience with the Mind Mirror, she created the Anna Wise Protocol which is the basis of the Awakened Mind Practitioner Program taught by the Institute for the Awakened Mind today.

 

The Anna Wise meditations and exercises in the Meditation Center display her personal mastery and her highly intuitive ability to guide meditators as if she were in their heads. Her brilliant intellect and warm, loving heart made her a superb meditation guide, as did her incredibly rich and economical meditation writing. Her work is unparalleled among meditation writers today.

 

Anna was fond of saying that “Enlightenment doesn’t come in a box.” By that she meant that mastering the state and content of consciousness takes diligent practice and work. She defined mastery as “being in the state you want to be in, when you want to be there, knowing what to do with that state, and being able to accomplish it.” Personal mastery, she promised, “often leads to peace of mind, greater meaning in life and an authentic sense of self.”

 

Her writings and meditation recordings are portals to personal mastery and the higher states of consciousness she lived in. One of her greatest contributions to the field of brainwave biofeedback was her validation that not just spiritual people, but anyone can attain the ideal Awakened Mind pattern and higher levels of awareness. We agree, and look forward to your enjoyment of them.

 

Read more about Anna Wise: Her Life and Her Work