The healing vibrations of sound are beneficial for physical healing, enhancing emotional wellbeing, boosting creativity and expanding consciousness. Read on to discover ways that you can implement sound healing into your life.
Sound as a Healing Tool
To look at sound as a healing tool, we need to first recognise that everything in the universe, including sound, is vibrating.
Vibrations travel in waves, and the intensity of these waves determines the frequency. When these waves reach the eyes or ears, the brain converts them to images or sounds. The waves also vibrate through the entire body and affect skin, bones, organs, emotions and energy field.
Some waves travel in frequencies that are within the human range of detection, others travel beyond our range and we cannot perceive them. Regardless of whether we perceive the waves, they continue to vibrate and affect change. Ultrasound is an excellent illustration of sound waves that are undetectable to our human ears, that are being used by doctors to accelerate the healing of bones and wounds.
Science recognises that sound vibrations affect our emotions, as well as induce physiological responses in the body.
Your body is also in a state of vibration, and every part that makes up your body is vibrating. For example each organ in your body vibrates at its own frequency: the heart’s frequency is measured as a pulse and the brain’s frequency is measured in brainwaves. Similarly thoughts, emotions and even the chakras in your energy body vibrate with their own frequency. Combined these frequencies determine your body’s overall resonant frequency.
Your body is like an orchestra and when all parts are playing in perfect harmony you are said to be in “sound health”. You will be healthy and feel good. Likewise, when there is disharmony in your body there will be illness and disease. We can use sound to bring the body, mind and spirit back into harmony.
Creating Healing with Sound
There are many tools in the sound healer’s toolbox. From Tibetan or crystal singing bowls, to gongs, chimes and bells. There’s drums and didgeridoos. Singing, chanting and toning. There’s music and tuning forks. And we cannot underestimate the healing sounds of nature.
Sound is also part of Reiki training, teaching the practitioner sacred sounds to support their spiritual development.
But an easy way to introduce sound healing into your life is through a simple technique called “Toning”. Toning requires no special tools, just the power of your own voice. And the beauty of this technique is that you don’t need to be able to sing to perform it!
Toning is making one, long, continuous sound. No words or tune, just one sustained tone - usually a vowel sound. The vibrations created by making the sound seem to massage you from the inside out, helping you to focus and relax, and return to balance.
Self-Healing with Toning
To perform toning for yourself simply:
Find a quiet place to sit where you won’t be disturbed. Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths to centre yourself.
Set the intention to bring healing to yourself with toning.
Take in a deep breath and on the exhale, open your mouth and allow sound to emerge from you. Don’t think about hitting the “right” note. Trust that whatever sound that emerges from you will create the right healing vibration for you.
Focus all your attention on the sound and it’s vibrations rippling through you.
Take a moment before taking another deep breath, and as you exhale repeat the toning. Do this at least three times, but more if you want to, keeping all your attention on the sound and it’s vibrations.
When you feel finished, keep your eyes closed and take a moment to notice the silence. Experience how this feels.
When you are ready, bring your attention back to your body and slowly open your eyes.
The Sound of Silence
But what about the healing sound of silence? Does silence have a sound?
Gordon Hempton, the Sound Tracker, spends his time travelling the world capturing Earth’s rarest sounds. As well as considering the Earth to be a “solar powered jukebox”, he wisely proclaims:
Silence is not the absence of something, but the presence of everything.
But what does that really mean? It means that silence may not be what we expect. It is not the removal of all sound. It is not being “apart” from something, but being “a part of” everything.
If we consider that every part of us - every cell, organ, emotion and thought - vibrates within us, and our body also vibrates as a whole unit. We can expand this concept to say our body vibrates as part of the world and that the world vibrates as a whole unit, and further still to say that the world vibrates as part of All That Is, and All That Is vibrates as a whole unit.
It is in silence that we connect to All That Is, where we can experience this oneness, where there is not just one frequency but all frequencies. All sound, all vibrations, all healing potential, All That Is.
So perhaps, silence is the most powerful healing sound of all.
If you'd like to connect in silence to All That Is, join me for a Trauma Informed Reiki Healing session. Or join a Reiki Class and learn to heal with the Sacred Sounds & Symbols of Reiki.
With love and gratitude,
Charisse