HELLO magazine: Somadome Pod
Every week I write a column for Hello Magazine, and am on a mission to cut through the noise and find out what really works, in order to help you become the happiest, healthy version of yourself. I set out to explore everything and anything I can to increase happiness, and promise not to hold back.
Living in a world that’s constantly pushing and pulling us to achieve more, do more or earn more – can be overwhelming to say the least. One thing we can all agree we want more of, and let’s be honest, need, is happiness. The quest to be happy can feel both all-consuming and never-ending, and often we don’t know where to start to reach those desired dopamine levels or feel energised by joy.
There’s a lot of noise out there in the wellness industry, with an abundance of treatments, therapies and professionals on offer – all promising to boost our general wellbeing and in turn make us happier. But what really works? How do you know where to start? This week I tried the world’s first Somadome Pod.
Something many of us seem to struggle with is calming our busy minds, especially after a long day in the office or trying to juggle too many things at once. Carving out the time to manage our home life, families, careers and relationships, all while looking after ourselves can often feel like an uphill battle. The result? Feeling overwhelmed, burnt out, or like we just can’t seem to get anything done. We all know that meditation can help you keep your thoughts in check and your mind calm, but finding the time or knowing where to start with a new practice can sometimes feel like another chore on the to-do-list.
I’m no stranger to a guided meditation, and as a qualified clinical hypnotherapist, I have seen clients transform their lives through implementing a daily practice into their routine. I work with clients on forming healthier habits, sleep, trauma, confidence, public speaking and anxiety – and each session contains an element of guided meditation.
Wanting to experience a guided meditation in a more intense, and tech-enabled environment, I spent 20minutes in a Somadome at RePlace. Here’s what happened.
What is a Somadome?
The Somadome is a world-first, tech-enabled, standalone meditation pod, which combines LED light therapy, healing magnets, binaural beats and guided meditation to facilitate deep relaxation and enhance your meditation practice. The pod claims to help realign our disrupted EMF frequencies with our body’s natural electromagnetic signals, which improves our ability to heal, focus and rest.
How does it work?
Once you’re settled in the pod, there’s a small touch-screen on which you can choose your meditation for the session – beginning with mind, body or spirit. There are lots of different options and meditations available, depending on what outcome you want from the session, including ‘confidence’, ‘recharge’, ‘clarity’, ‘focus’, ‘relax’ and ‘snooze’. Either guided or unguided, the pod will brilliantly match the experience to the meditation.
The Somadome uses binaural beats (sounds produced by the brain when the right ear and left hear sounds at different frequencies), to help guide you into the desired meditative state. Different brain frequencies offer different healing properties, and so each programme is uniquely tailored to deliver varying results. For example; the sleep track uses Delta soundwaves to help guide you into a restful state, as this is the brain state of deep sleep. Beta waves are said to gradually wake you up. These ‘naps’ are meant to provide a fresh burst of energy and help eliminate the need for caffeine during the working day. The colour of the light will also change throughout, as different colours are said to cause different chemical reactions in our brains.
What happens during the session?
The futuristic style pod is opened, and once inside you recline on a comfortable leather seat with both your head and feet supported. When you’re ready, you close the egg-shaped dome by pulling it down over your head. Due to the shape of the pod, it feels really cosy, safe and strangely spacious once inside, so there are no worries of feeling claustrophobic. It is also an option to leave the pod open, if that feels more comfortable. Once you’ve selected your meditation, you put the noise-cancelling headphones on, close your eyes and begin to relax.
Did it work?
With meditation, the more you do it, the easier it becomes. The difficult part can be switching off to let your mind enter that meditative state, which can be particularly hard for beginners. With the Somadome, most people fall into a meditative state within the first couple of minutes. I was dubious to start with as it can take me a long time to feel like my mind is relaxed enough, but in the pod it happened almost instantly.
I chose the ‘healing’ session which was fully guided, and honestly it surpassed my expectations and I found the whole experience really incredible. The combination of the light, soundwaves and atmosphere in the pod made sure that I entered the meditative state almost immediately, and my twenty minutes felt like twenty seconds. My mind drifted in and out of consciousness throughout, so my memory of what happened inside feels hazy. It’s a similar feeling to when you’re drifting in and out of sleep. At times I felt wide awake, and my whole body tingled as the soundwaves increased and decreased. Overall it was quite intense, and during my session I felt very alert at times. I can confirm – it was a fully immersive experience! Once it ended I felt remarkably calm and had a sense of clarity, but also felt energised and invigorated. The immediate sensation afterwards was powerful, and I emerged feeling lighter and brighter. The rest of my afternoon was spent with higher levels of concentration and focus. Twenty minutes is the optimal time needed to reset- and that’s exactly how I felt.
I’d really recommend booking a session at the RePlace Somadome, for anyone wanting to experience an immersive mediation or enhance their existing practice. It’s remarkable how much progress you can make in twenty minutes towards calming a busy mind, replenishing your energy or just taking a general step towards looking after yourself.