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Natural Healing With Sound
Scientists have discovered an amazing fact about the sounds of the ebb and flow of ocean tides, people's voices, dolphin cries, and bird and cricket chirps. They sound the same! When researchers slow down voice recordings of people, they discover the people's voices sound like the ebb and flow of ocean tides. Then when researchers speed up the recordings, people's voices sound like dolphin cries. Speeded up more, like bird chirps. Even more like crickets. And guess what crickets chirps sound like slowed down? Yep. First like birds. Then dolphins. Then people.
But wait! There's more. While examining the recordings of spacecrafts Voyager I and II at the California Institute for Human Science, scientists discover the same sounds! NASA recordings from outer space sound remarkably like ocean sounds, choirs of voices singing, dolphins, birds and crickets. Additionally, sounds produced by the rings of Uranus are virtually identical to those produced by Tibetan bowls. Researchers believe that this similarity is no coincidence. Scientific medical studies are discovering that the sound vibrations of dolphins, Tibetan bowls and choirs have a profound healing effect. Could this be the collective unconscious that Carl Jung refers to? A living collective library that contains all the knowledge of the Universe?
- Center for Neuroacoustic Research and The California Institute for Human Science
Sound is a powerful, primitive force. For centuries, healers have intuitively used the therapeutic powers of sound. In the native traditions of ancient cultures, examples of sound and vibration--as elemental in creation and to wholeness--abound. Many tools have been used since the beginning of time to create music, and to aid healing: planetary gongs and Tibetan bowls, didgeridoos, rattles and drums. Today, a growing number of modern practitioners are rediscovering sound as a tool for healing and realignment. More modern sound therapy tools are--tuning forks, chimes, resonator plates, sound discs, and sound tables. All play an important role in healing. Sound is that which is produced when some object is vibrating in a random or periodic repeated motion. Every object has a frequency/vibration and therefore creates sound. All matter, broken down into subatomic particles consists of pulsing energy fields. This includes the human body in all its facets, from physical to emotional to spiritual; the body gives off and is affected by frequency/vibration.
Human tissues have the capacity to transduce pressure waves, (sound waves) into electrical stimuli primarily by means of the pacinian corpuscles (mechanoreceptors) located in the body tissues. The frequency range of the human body's transducing cells is said to lie between 50 and 800 cycles per second. Combined sonic frequencies can effect a state of resonance with specific cell structures, particularly for therapeutic purposes. The frequency transmission faculty of tissues will vary with their state of health, and with whatever extraneous energy that happens to be acting upon them at the time of transmission.
The human ear can hear sound when it vibrates between 20 and 20,000 cycles per second. We also hear and perceive sound by skin and bone conduction. We are sensitive to sounds in ways that most people do not even consider. Each celestial body, in fact, each and every atom, produces a particular sound on account of its movement, its rhythm or vibration. All these sounds and vibrations form universal harmony in which each element, while having its own function and character, contributes to the whole. Our bodies have lost connection to the power and the magic of the inner cycles and the great cycles of the universe that inform it. Imbalance and disease of the body occurs when the systems within it, which are holographic reflections of the cycles, patterns and pulses in the universe, are in a state of disharmony. The harmony in our body is a sacred balance between the world of the soma, psyche and soul and finds power and rhythm within the continuous cycles of the universe. Sound takes form...it can move into form and take shape. People report a variety of sensations during sound treatments--seeing forms, lights, colors, geometric shapes and other visions are frequently mentioned. It suggests they've entered a different healing state of consciousness. Modern science has shown that in the human body, auditory nerves are linked to our sense of proportion and balance, and have the power to shift our energy to the "center," bringing about a feeling of connection and serentity. With intuitive wisdom, healers and shamans of many cultures correctly sensed that listening to vibrational sound helps us access these auditory nerves in a way which may increase receptivity to healing energy. They knew sounds and music could induce trance states to help identify illness, and even open gateways for new healing energy to flow through. Healers of old, as of today, were concerned with body, mind and soul. The more enlightened of them worked to integrate all three.
Webster's defines healing as "to make sound" It might be more accurate if we were to say "to become sound." New healing views matter as consciousness; therefore the assumption that our physical bodies are solid material which eventually decays and dies is no longer valid. All matter belongs to the implicate (internal) order where everything is alive. What we call death is an abstraction. In so many tales of creation, it is sound which is the first and elemental form of creation. In Hinduism, it is the sound of "Om," which resonates as the elemental causal form of all creative manifestation. In Judaism, the ancient mystical Cabalistic roots of the culture teach us that each of the 22 letters of the alphabet not only symbolizes, but carries and emits through its enunciation, with pure intent, one of the principal aspects of the universal energy. Their interaction in letter configurations (words) is significant as to their interaction in universal flow and enfoldment. This was so clearly understood that it was considered sacrilege to enunciate the cryptic word for "God", the Anglicization of which is Jehovah, or Yahweh.
In Christianity, the Book of John, written by one of his principal disciples, opens with the verse, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John I:1-2). Sound is a vehicle through which light moves. The "word", the sound, is the first manifestation of creative vibration, or intent, and holds in its resonance, the very essence of the Divine. In Greek, from which we get much of the New Testament script, and from which we get the origin of word, word means to say. This implies, further, an innate understanding that the very resonance of sound, of "the word," draws power to it, and carries power through it. We have often heard of the power of the spoken word, but we may not have given much credence to it. It is our thought, our will, and intention that give power to the spoken word, and to sound in all of its forms and uses. Sound is a profoundly powerful tool. The nature of its power rests in the conscious, and unconscious, intent of its beholder.
Great musicians of all time have known of and written about the transcendental nature of sound and its power to bring the listener to a divine state. Beethoven claimed about his own music that, "No evil fate can touch my music. He who divines its secret is freed from the unhappiness that haunts the whole world of men." Saying any word produces an actual physical vibration. Over time, if we know what the effect of that vibration is, then the word may come to have meaning associated with the effect of saying that vibration or word. This is one level of energy basis for words. Another level is intent. If the actual physical vibration is coupled with a mental intention, the vibration then contains an additional mental component, which influences the result of saying it. The sound is the carrier wave and the intent is overlaid upon the waveform, just as a colored gel influences the appearance and effect of a white light. In either instance, the word is based upon energy. Nowhere is this idea truer than for Sanskrit mantra. Although there is a general meaning, which comes to be associated with mantras, the only lasting definition is the result or effect of saying the mantra.
The sounds that are used in a healing session induce a shift in consciousness that helps the clients to get unstuck from their belief in disease or misfortune. Actually, it is not the sounds; it is the no-tone in between tones that has a healing effect. It is the silence that takes clients back to their pure state of being. Silence; this is not the absence of sound. Silence is the distant residue of sound (just like space is the distant residue of matter). In order to have the patient experience the silence, there has to be sound first. Since the source of creation is sound (in the beginning was the word), this condition is always met. The use of sound in a healing session is therefore not necessary, if the healer can tune in to the source of creation. In doing so, the healer will resonate with the silence and induce this resonance in the clients also. The clients will experience, however shortly, their pure state of being. To able to tune in to the silence, to still use sound, helps to disorient and quiet the mental chatter of patients. But true healing comes through silence. Vibrational healing is healing through the use of silence.
The body is an orchestra receiving and producing a symphony of sounds, chemicals, electrical charges, colors, and images. When we are in good health, the instruments in our orchestra perform fluidly and in tune. When we are sick or ailing, one or more instrument is flat or sharp, unstrung, deficient in tone. Part of our body may be in harmony and part out of tune, or each section of the ensemble may be playing its part well--except that the whole is out of sync. Imagine all the instruments of the body playing at their loudest--that's the worst of all possible sounds. But the opposite extreme--absolute silence--suggests a body without life. Bringing a body into balance requires observing the orchestra in its entirety and assessing it accurately--its current condition and past experience, its inherent strengths, its potential for improvement. And the real genius of healing lies in teaching the body, mind, and heart to discover and play their own music--not the score that has been dictated by social norms. Healing is not always synonymous with curing. Although relieving a disease or eliminating pain may be the ultimate goal, the immediate one is learning to integrate our conscious and unconscious life--an ongoing process and an end in itself.
Any object living or non-living, real or a product of someone's imagination, has its unique energetic vibrational field. When two vibrational fields meet, they strengthen each other if they vibrate in harmony, and weaken if there is vibrational disharmony. Illnesses also have their vibrations. There are two ways to heal an ill person using vibrational structures: by harmony with patient and by disharmony with disease. Music has been used in birthing, counseling, and massage rooms; during physical therapy; in helping stroke, burn, and cancer victims; with brain damaged and multiply handicapped children; and in psychiatric hospitals, addiction treatment centers, and prisons. To the public, music therapy is generally an unknown field. Music holds a prominent position in our society and educational systems as a performing, entertaining art. It may be considered to have positive side effects of transformation, but these are not thought to be essential. Historically, music has been a primary tool for spiritual and physical alignment, used at political and social gatherings, as well as for family, civic, or educational ceremonies.
Music can be a primary force for healing, because music is simultaneously a structured and a transcendent event. Throughout history, we have used music in all forms of worship to set a reverent mood and a mental state, open to the influence of deity. Music therapy represents that human activity where we work closest with the angels. It demands the ability to listen; ear listening, heart listening, bone listening and blood listening. Truly religious music awakens and stimulates the spiritual seeds that exist in every one of us, waiting to come to life. It lifts us above the level of everyday consciousness, up into those higher realms where light, love and joy ever reign. The healing properties of music were well known by the ancient civilizations, and they deliberately used it for such purpose. Among primitive peoples, songs and musical instruments, such as the drum and the rattle, were used not only in order to increase the effect of herbs or drugs, but also as independent means of healing. As the deep understanding of the non-verbal medulla oblongata and the limbic system, which held this knowledge, was replaced by the verbal, logical processing of our upper cortex, this understanding of the power of music to heal was lost.
Pythagoras based musical education in the first place on certain melodies and rhythms that exercised a healing, purifying influence on human actions and passions, restoring the pristine harmony of the soul's faculties. He applied the same means to the curing of diseases of both body and mind. Plato accorded just as much importance to music as a powerful means of mentaltherapy and education. Aristotle mentions among the various functions of music that of emotional catharsis. In the nineteenth century, owing to the prevailing materialistic trend, this method of mental therapy was comparatively neglected. The tonic effect of music came to be more appreciated by the military than by the medical profession--every regiment with its own band made use of martial music, of spirited marches to raise and keep up the morale of the soldiers.
The goal of music therapy is not to provide entertainment. The goal is the reduction of psychophysiologic stress, pain, anxiety, and isolation. It helps clients achieve a state of deep relaxation, develop self-awareness and creativity, improve learning, clarify personal values, and cope with a variety of psychophysiologic dysfunctions. Appropriate music serves in achieving the relaxation response by removing one's inner restlessness and quieting ceaseless thinking. It can be used as a healing ritual to stop the mind from running away and enable thinking to become still so that one can achieve inner quietness and relaxation.
Music as a healing tool has three basic components: tone, rhythm, and harmony. The initial sound is the tone; it is the utterance of a sound. Rhythm gives definition, pattern and boundary to the tone. Rhythmic patterns can be constant, syncopated or completely chaotic. Harmony is the ratio and relationship between the tones and their rhythmic patterns. Rhythm structures tone and sound. It gives shape to speech, melody, dance, poetry and the human body. Rhythm defines the eternal principle of sound and tone. Without rhythm energy, sound, light, and forms could not be differentiated from one another, as it is their frequency or rhythmic waveforms that define them. Changing rhythm can alter and change the medium to which it is applied.
There is no agent so powerful in giving us real rest as true music. It does for the heart and mind, and also for the body, what sleep does for the body alone. There is a great many persons who have an undeveloped or repressed emotional nature, which is apt to make them arid, dissatisfied, shut-up within themselves. To them, music may give the magic touch, which reawakens and warms the heart, and restores communion with nature, humanity, and God. Then there is a kind of music, both instrumental and vocal, of a strong and virile nature, which arouses the will and incites to action. Such music has stimulated innumerable individuals to noble deeds, to heroic self-sacrifice for an ideal. Against all negative and depressive emotions, such as despondency, pessimism, bitterness, and even hate, music of vivacious and sparkling character and also music that expresses true humor, acts as a true counter-poison. It cheers and gladdens, smoothing the wrinkled foreheads and softening into smiles, the hard lines of tightly closed lips. What more efficacious, genial and acceptable means than music could a doctor devise for giving joy; that joy which the intuition of the ancients and the investigations of modern science alike declare to be a powerful tonic, both for the mind and for the body?
Music can quicken and facilitate intellectual activity and favor artistic and creative inspiration. Music can have a still more definite and specific healing effect of a psychoanalytic character. It can help in eliminating repressions and resistances and bring into the field of waking consciousness many drives, emotions and complexes that were creating difficulties in the unconscious. Music can transmute and sublimate those impulses and emotional energies so as to render them not only harmless, but make them contribute to the deepening of experience and the broadening and enriching of the personality. Though highly organized and regular, music moves us into the transcendent, transpersonal state. Once an individual has reached a point where awareness of the transcendent is the necessary healing component, music can serve as an agent of change, providing a vehicle to reach beyond ordinary consciousness and ego functioning to new awareness and new ways of viewing the self in the universe.
Virtual time is perceived in a left-brain mode and is characterized by hours, minutes, and seconds. Experiential time is perceived through the memory. Experiential time exists because we experience both a state of tension and resolution. Tensions and resolutions are perceived by our memory in a linear sequence that is called a disturbance or an event. An emotion or a sound is a disturbance that can produce tension, which is followed by a return to equilibrium or resolution. Perception of time is influenced by the rate of these linear sequences or events. In a relaxed state, abstract thinking is slowed. Music can assist the individual in moving through six states of consciousness: normal waking state, expanded sensory threshold, daydreaming, trance, transcendental states, and rapture. During relaxation, music is first perceived in a normal wakeful state. As relaxation continues, sensory thresholds are lowered, and expanded awareness states predominate.
Music can suppress verbal, cognitive functioning and open the symbolic, metaphorical subconscious, which is our link with the great cosmic oneness. The precise language of music directly communicates what cannot be said with words. The experience at the moment of crossing a threshold with music is one of surrender. Our controlling nature gives up to a creative presence. Musically, some aspect of sound becomes so complicated or boring that we surrender control. Our ego opens for that moment and a more complete awareness enters, attention focuses on a musical event too fast or complicated for the thinking mind to encompass. Musical traditions recognize the transcendent function of music and identify four ways in which music can open the human mind to a wider perception. The first is repetitive and/or complex rhythms, because of the action of the reticular activating system (RAS) located in the brain stem. This serves to alert the entire brain to incoming sensory stimulation. Loud, repetitive sound such as drumming floods the brain with input and successfully competes for attention over other sensory channels. Normal verbal activity is suppressed, and consciousness is freed to explore other forms of perception and information processing. Melodic subtlety is the second way in which sound has been used to create an open, contemplative frame of mind. Raga singing in India is an example with its emphasis on minute changes of pitch, which fall between the notes of the Western scale. Small changes of pitch are perceived in the lowest parts of our brain, eliminating altogether the need for cognitive processing.
A third element, sound complexity or resonance, has been used as a gateway to the subconscious. The resonant quality of sounds is produced by the vibratory characteristics of an instrument. It is the pattern of frequencies produced, but not heard as separate pitches, that give an instrument or voice its distinctive tone quality. The use of gongs, metal bowls, and overtone singing all come from contemplative traditions where sound complexity and the resonance of the human body are vital components in the production of a contemplative mental state. Full-spectrum harmony, the patterns of consonant and dissonant note combinations, is the fourth musical element found to serve an opening function. A highly developed vertical structure envelops the listener in sound characterized by rapid movement from one tonal center to another. This shifting of center and perception of movement creates a mental state receptive to new awareness because the cognitive mind is flooded with complex sensory information that it cannot completely process. Humans respond to music deeply and profoundly and it clearly can open minds to new perceptions.
The potential for music to heal comes not just from music's ability to break through normal consciousness and open us to transcendent awareness, but, from the fact that music is the ultimate manifestation of this wholeness. Sound is the force of creation, the true whole. Music, then, becomes the voice of the great cosmic oneness and therefore the optimal way to reach this final state of healing. Music becomes the ultimate healer--it is simultaneously a structured ordering of chaos and a transcendent event--both a transpersonal opening and a direct manifestation of oneness. Because the process of growth and health is never linear but spiraling, first moving forward, then back on itself, and forward again, music in all its aspects is available at whatever levels are needed at a given time, until the healing can occur.
The following seven vowel sounds are basic to transformative teachings of both East and West: Ooh, Oh, Aw, Ah, Ay, Ee, and Eh. These universal sounds are used as the bases of simple exercises for keeping the body-mind system highly energized and for raising the consciousness to transformative levels. There are definite correspondences between each of the seven vowel sounds and specific areas of the human body and their representative subtle counterparts (chakras). These correspondences are as follows:
Ooh--Base of Spine--Muladhara
Oh--Navel--Manipura
Aw--Spleen--Svadhisthana
Ah--Heart--Anahata
Ay--Throat--Visuddha
Ee--Between Eyebrows--Ajna
Eh--Top of Head--Sahasrara
There is a sacred syllable AUM (OM). Aum is intoned in the following manner: "Ah-Ooh-Mm." The vowel Ah is intoned on an outgoing breath; then, breathing smoothly, without pause, add the Ooh sound to the Ah; then close the lips gently to form an Mm sound.
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