Several people have asked me recently how exactly sound healing works. Exactly? I’m not sure that word is the one we’re looking for, but okay. I’ll do my best.
Humans, and all things, from stars and nebulas to dust bunnies to dogs and cats to rock formations, vibrate. We’re made of very dense energy. Matter and energy, as our old pal Mr. Einstein so astutely pointed out, are the same thing. The denser the energy, the more solid it is. We’re pretty solid. A little squishy here and there, sure, but pretty darn solid.
More recently, a few adventurous scientists have been able to establish that emotions are also a frequency of energy – and all of these researchers have found the same thing: Emotional energy is a kind of magnetic energy. It isn’t the same as refrigerator magnets, of course, and not nearly as powerful. But emotions magnetically attract more of their own frequency, or frequencies that are resonant with them, and repel what is not in harmony with them. This is definitely a good news-bad news scenario.
Happy emotions attract more happy (and repel sad), and sad emotions attract more sad (but repel happy).
Sad emotions vibrate at a lower frequency than happy ones, so they are hard to get rid of. People with depression have a hell of a time moving past emotional pain, because the energy of those emotions is dense, sticky, and doesn’t want to let go of them. Very few interventions will actually break up and shift that dense energy. Sound, being nothing but pure frequency, has the best shot, but if a person is really stuck hard, it’s going to take a long time and a lot of work. R. Leichtman, in the book Einstein Returns, says,
The difficulty in treating many emotional illnesses stems, in part, from the fact that the emotions which cause the problems tend to be magnetically responsive to a kind of astral matter which easily glues itself both to our own feelings and more of its kind. The magnetic action makes it very difficult to get rid of the ‘bad’ astral matter–and the emotional problem.
This is where sound healing can be of enormous benefit. Sound healers are trained to hear subtle differences in the texture of the biofield, by listening to the way our diagnostic tools react. I can hear, and sometimes feel, densities and distortions in the biofield that tell me there are dense, and usually unhappy, traumatic or painful memories that need to be broken up and cleared away. Often I will choose a gong, because it is so frequency rich that very few of these kinds of thoughtforms can even survive it. But sometimes I will use a combination of tuning forks tapped together to ring with some dissonance, which is kind of like sandpaper to a thoughtform. I can feel them hook on to my fork, and I can pull them away or break them up. After they have broken, I use a good old Feng Shui harmony ball to clear the residue more completely. Then I’ll follow up with a shaker, or maybe a drum, to repattern. Chimes are great to replace the thoughtforms with beautiful sound frequencies.
After a session where I have been able to clear a lot of old sticky thoughtforms, clients will get up off the table and literally start to spin around in wonder, commenting on how incredibly light they feel.
It’s one of the most rewarding moments in a sound healer’s life, to watch somebody bloom like Scrooge on Christmas morning.
We also do a lot of pain management, and pain relief. We can’t help everybody, but I would say 60-70% of my clients have significant functional relief, while others simply find their pain much more bearable. Relieving stress and releasing tension will do wonders, and doing it gently, with a tuning fork or a singing bowl on the body, is an approach people with migraines and fibromyalgia find easier to tolerate than massage or chiropractic. Sound healing can become an incredible complement to another therapy in this instance; the sound healing releases enough muscle tension to make a massage, or chiropractic, bearable.
Pain from injuries can be significantly eased with 128Hz tuning forks used gently around the area, and sometimes chronic fascia-related pain can be relieved completely with a 10-15 minute tuning fork session. Stiffness and pain from arthritis can be brought down to where a person can do things they haven’t been able to do in years. One client was having incredible knee trouble and was contemplating getting a cane, but after one session they were able to walk, climb stairs, and even squat down to pick things up off the floor without even thinking about it. We do a maintenance session once a month, and improvement continues, slow but sure.
People with PTSD tell me that the hour on my table is the most relaxed they have been in years, even decades. When I am able to help them get into a Theta brainwave state, they are reconnected to their deepest well-being, and they can let go of fear and start to heal. After working with one soldier for just a few weeks, the change in outlook, temperament, and ability to cope increased dramatically; a trigger used to put them in a rage state that would last for around two weeks, but now it’s two to three days.
How does it work, exactly? Well, it’s an art. There is no exactly. The only thing that I can say for sure is, like nearly everything else including allopathic medicine, if you don’t believe it’s going to help you, it probably won’t. But if you have an open mind and are willing to try it and see, it will help. Maybe it won’t relieve all your pain in the first hour, maybe it won’t have you dancing for joy immediately; but it will calm and relax you, take your anxiety down a few notches, relieve some of your physical symptoms at least somewhat, and make things feel a whole lot easier. Or you may be a miracle waiting to happen, and of course I’d love to facilitate that! Over time, small progress becomes big progress, especially when you can feel it working and you start to trust your feelings.
Shameless plug: feel free to schedule a session by going to my contact page. If you don’t live here in the Iowa City area, send me a note, because I have worked with clients as far away as Australia, and had amazing results. Energy is energy, and spirit travels faster than the speed of light. Let’s make some magic. And yes, we have gift cards, so you can share the magic with your nearest and dearest!