Singing the Soul Home:
Overtone Chanting and Classical Music, Drumbeats
and Vocalizations are all Proving to be
Sound Healing Methods
by Pythia Peay
When I recall my first meditation camp, memories come flooding back on waves of sound. Once again I hear the sweet strumming of a zither player intoning the wake-up call to prayer; the rustle of meditators gathering at dawn; the whirring of insects and chirping of birds that rose in pitch with the morning sun; and the ancient, mystical sound vibrations the Sufi teacher Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan conjured up. As he led the group in a litany of chants praising the divine attributes of God, guided us in meditation to the otherworldly tones of monks' voices on an outdoor sound system, and led a worship service that rang out in jubilation with the songs and prayers of the world's religions, my soul was sung awake. It would be years before I fully integrated the wisdom I heard from that long-ago retreat. Yet the balm of the chants, meditative silences, and communal singing penetrated deeply, evoking an immutable tranquility and initiating in me a lifelong commitment to the spiritual journey.
Indeed, Pir Vilayat -- like teachers of many other faiths -- is part of a continuum of mystical traditions that utilize sound as a technique to transform human consciousness. With repetitive percussive beats or the chanting of sacred songs or syllables, Native American shamans, Hindu sages, Tibetan monks, Christian contemplatives, Jewish mystics, and Sufi dervishes have been able to induce states of religious ecstacy, profound peace, and divine bliss. So powerful are the effects of sound and music that they could be said to be among humankind's most potent forms of soul medicine. With the right guidance and focused intention, sacred sound technologies have the power to propel spiritual explorers to the farthest reaches of inner space.
But as growing numbers of people are re-discovering, states of consciousness elicited by sound do more than nourish and mend the soul. The deep relaxation and positive feelings that are engendered can also treat physical illness and depression. Thus, along with other timeless techniques like meditation, sound and music are being increasingly utilized as potent sources of healing. Like a surging river or gusting wind, say holistic practitioners, vibratory currents of sound are forces of nature harnessed since time immemorial by healers to cure and soothe the sick and wounded.
Sound's awesome power is evidenced by the world's myths and religious traditions that describe vibration as the very stuff of creation. In fact, if a growing cadre of sound healers, music therapists, medical doctors, holistic pioneers, and composers have their way, "sound medicine" will soon be one more alternative healing addition to the mainstream medical bag. It is a field bursting with creative innovation and cultural cross-pollination, says editor Michael Taft of Sounds True, an audiotape and recording company in Boulder, Colorado. Musicians record esoteric forms of "overtoning" in state-of-the art sound studios, making them available to the general public. Music therapists sift through thousands of recordings of classical and modern music, listening for exactly the right piece to help patients release buried emotions. "Psychoacoustic engineers" -- the new science that studies the effects of sound on consciousness—create "beat frequencies" designed to stimulate certain brainwave patterns, such as those found in heightened states of mental activity or deep meditation. Ethno-musicologists travel the world recording ancient indigenous healing music; composers create original compositions to be used in healing specific diseases, such as AIDS or depression; and sound healers work to liberate the "true note" within each person.
To make sense of the many forms of sonic therapy, it helps to understand some of the fundamental ideas at work in this emerging branch of energy medicine. For proof that sound impacts matter, many healers cite experiments conducted by the Swiss scientist Hans Jenny. In his classic film "Cymatics," Jenny placed various types of materials, such as iron filings, molten plastic, oils, and wood pulp on a surface and then vibrated them with various tones and frequencies. The result: diamond-shaped mandalas, geometric spheres, and other intricate patterns. "When you see these films," says healing composer Kay Gardner, author of Sounding the Inner Landscape: Music as Medicine, "you realize that music has an organizing effect and that the same thing could be happening in our bodies." In other words, sound can encourage, support, and create harmony and balance.
When trying to explain how sound heals, many sound experts also refer to the work of French physician Alfred Tomatis, M.D., sometimes referred to as the "Einstein of sound." It was Tomatis who recognized the function of the ear and the importance of listening in maintaining the body's equilibrium and central nervous system's proper functioning. Believing that disorders ranging from learning disabilities to autism could be cured by learning to listen more actively, he invented the "electronic ear." This device utilizes specially filtered high-frequency sounds that, when listened to through headphones, help to retrain the ear, thus charging the central nervous system and the cortex of the brain.
Additionally, research conducted by Melinda Maxfield, Ph.D., who specializes in cross-cultural healthcare, shows how various rhythmic drumbeats—such as those used by shamans—transmit sound frequencies along nerve pathways in the brain. She reports that results from pilot projects that she has initiated with stroke victims and dyslexia and attention deficit disorder patients suggest "that percussion can shift brain waves from the more rational beta state to slower alpha and theta states where hypnagogic imagery, guidance, and sudden insights arise that can facilitate the healing process."
But while sound therapy is being used with increasing frequency by many in the alternative health movement—from massage therapists to medical doctors to voice teachers— some experts say there is a need to clarify its role as a healing modality.
Mitchell Gaynor, M.D., director of medical oncology and the Integrative Medicine Program at the Strang Cancer Prevention Center in New York City, stresses that mind/body techniques that utilize breath and sound are not meant to replace conventional medical interventions, but to complement them. "A lot of people think that they have to choose between complementary and mainstream forms of medicine. But it's not an either/or thing—the two are not mutually exclusive."
For music therapist Barbara J. Crowe, a professor at Arizona State University in Tempe, what matters is that practitioners know the difference between sound healing and music therapy. Sound healing, she says, "is a looser amalgamation of approaches that looks at sound as a more direct curative agent than a music therapist might see it." In music therapy, however, Crowe says, music is "an equal partner with interpersonal therapeutic interaction. It has been in existence since 1950, and has a code-of-ethics, standards of practice, and credentials." In the music therapy field, healing occurs primarily through listening and playing music. In actual practice, however, practitioners more often than not draw from both traditions, using sound and music interchangeably.
Yet whether one uses sound healing, music therapy, or a combination of the two methods, there appears to be one core principle at work: the restoration of health and well-being through rhythm, balance, and harmony. For as the Sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan, an accomplished Indian musician whose mystical teachings on the topic have influenced both his son Pir Vilayat as well as the current generation of sound healers, once wrote: "Whether it is nervous illness, mental disorder, or physical illness, at the root of all these different aspects of illness there is one cause, and that cause is inharmony."
Healing the Body
In her vision of the drugstore of the future, composer Kay Gardner envisions patients being able "to pick out a [piece of music] instead of a pill. They will go into a special section, where there will be different pieces of music for different illnesses." Adds Don Campbell, author of The Mozart Effect®, "I believe the prescriptive method of ‘take the color yellow and a big dose of C sharp'" will soon be no different from conventional pharmaceutical prescriptions. Indeed, in an age of managed care when individuals need to find their own "usable tools," Campbell says, music is "on the forefront for use in rehabilitation, stress reduction, strokes, high blood pressure, and the release of emotional complexes." If it sounds like the proverbial magic bullet, he says -- "It is."
While the medical establishment awaits further hard evidence from controlled studies before confirming music's curative powers, some physicians are already using it as a complementary healing method. Gaynor recently completed a book titled Sounds of Healing: A Physician Reveals the Secret Power of Sound, Voice, and Music, based on his work with cancer patients. "What is important," he says, "is to view patients in their wholeness and to reestablish a harmony between mind and body and spirit—that's really the goal of sound healing. Disease is a form of disharmony. Even with cancer, there is a lack of rhythm of cells not knowing when to stop growing or dividing."
Thus, twice a month Gaynor leads support groups in which he teaches cancer patients how to use voice and tone, combined with imagery. Working with Tibetan "singing" bowls—brass bowls that emit sonorous, reverberating overtones when struck—as well as quartz crystal bowls and mantras from the Hindu yoga tradition, he helps patients move into states of relaxation that slow brain-wave patterns and alter states of consciousness. From this vantage point, patients can connect to their souls or higher selves, gaining a "healing perspective" that can give them the courage they need to confront difficult aspects of their illness. Re-establishing connection with one's inner essence is very important, adds Gaynor, because "when you're in that place you can't be afraid. And the most painful part of cancer patients' disease is the tidal wave of fear that overcomes them around undergoing chemotherapy, losing their hair...dying and the anguish about being separated from their children." Studies show, for instance, that there is a strong correlation between negative emotions such as stress, pessimism, and anxiety and a depressed immune system. Gaynor points to studies that show that "music positively affects various immune parameters."
Gaynor tells the story of a young woman with Hodgkin's disease who suffered from such severe "anticipatory nausea," getting so sick hours before her appointed time for chemotherapy that she began to refuse treatment. After using Tibetan bowls and other mind-body meditative techniques, "her fear and nausea were replaced by an amazing peacefulness. The chemotherapy had been a reminder that she might die; she was afraid that there might not be a tomorrow. But as a result of her sound meditations, she came to the realization that tomorrow was just a mental construct, and that it was possible to live one day at a time." Most importantly, she was able to continue with her treatments that would help her live through many tomorrows.
To sound healer Jonathan Goldman, author of Healing Sounds: The Power of Harmonics, music's ability to ease physical pain stems from its ability to transform matter at a vibrational level.
"Scientists are now validating what mystics have always known—that everything in creation is in a state of vibration and motion." When the body is in a state of perfect health, Goldman says, "every organ, bone, and tissue is putting out an extraordinary harmonic. If you picture the body as an orchestra that is playing in tune—what happens when the second violin begins to play out of harmony because it lost its sheet music? Eventually, the rest of the orchestra begins to sound off.
To continue the metaphor, that part of the body that is vibrating out-of-tune is where the ‘disease' is located." Thus, to Goldman, the basic principle of sound healing is to "restore that which is vibrating out of harmony back to its natural healthy frequency."
Working with ancient vowel sounds that correspond to the body's chakra system— such as "aaahhh" for the heart center— Goldman teaches people to resonate different parts of their body's subtle energy field and to use sound to move energy where it has become "stuck."
Goldman cautions, however, that sound alone doesn't work unless accompanied by "intention," the focused consciousness a person brings to his or her voice.
Although Goldman is reluctant to make claims about sound's power to heal, he says that students of his have "reported remarkable occurrences, such as shrinkages of tumors after an overtoning session. One nurse reported that a woman scheduled to undergo a kidney stone operation surprised her doctors when she was found, after an overtoning session by the nurse, to be free of problems."
Music's ability to heal by bringing order out of chaos is strikingly evident in the cases of late-stage Alzheimer's patients. Certain songs, for example, may penetrate the husk of individuals suffering from Alzheimer's disease, activating their memories and returning them momentarily to their personalities. Barbara Crowe tells the story of visiting a nursing home in Buffalo, where she and a colleague asked nurses to bring them their worst patient. "We could hear her coming down the hall, ranting and swearing," she recalls. "My colleague tried handing her an instrument and she began hitting him with it. Then he picked up his guitar and began strumming ‘You're a Grand Old Flag.' Suddenly her behavior switched and she began laughing and playing her instrument. The whole staff burst into tears; they had never seen this woman do anything but scream in terror."
While music therapists rely on popular songs to stimulate memory, musician Kay Gardner composes pieces for specific diseases, such as AIDS. Using various instruments, she musically duplicates the pulses, brain waves, and breath cycles of the body. "Because so many people with AIDS have pneumonia or lung problems," she explains, "I wrote in F sharp, which touches the chest area, using instruments like the cello and kettle drum that use the rhythm of the heartbeat."
Music therapist Pat Moffitt-Cook, who has travelled the globe researching and recording indigenous healing music for use by Western healthcare professionals, says Gardner is continuing a tradition that is millenniums-old. In India, for instance, there exist mantras for specific diseases like arthritis, smallpox, blindness, infertility, and senility. She cites a North Indian healer whose "musical repertoire is made up of devotional songs and secret mantras that are sung out loud, or repeated silently and blown out through the breath onto the patient. To him that is the injection of a sound remedy into the body or mind of the person who is suffering." So potent is the "live sound of a thousand-year old remedy," practiced by Babaji (the Hindi term for healer), says Moffitt-Cook, that she has witnessed extraordinary healing events such as a crippled woman getting up and walking, and a man with severe mental illness returning to his community restored to balance.
Healing the Mind and Emotions
As most music lovers can attest, compositions as varied as the sentimental movie score "Love Story" and Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" have the ability to release buried emotions, evoking tears of despair or sublime joy. It is this simple magic that makes music a natural medicine for the psychological healing process. For instance, Julia Cameron, author of The Vein of Gold and other books on creativity, tells of her own encounter with the power of sound to heal grief. In a session with a sound healer, she recalls, she was asked to identify where she was stuck emotionally. "I thought, ‘I love my mother and I never weep. I have not wept about her death.' I was then asked to think about my mother and start making sounds. Within minutes I was weeping and in touch with the beauty of my mother and that relationship." Years later when her father died, Cameron says, "I immediately took to the land, singing through my father's death." Like the keening and wailing of the bereaved around the world, Cameron had tapped into her voice to release suffering.
In the same way that Cameron used singing as a unique kind of sonic therapy to cope with her parent's deaths so, too, do music therapists and sound healers use auditory tools to ease emotional pain and release psychological blocks. Perhaps the best-known form of music therapy is Guided Imagery and Music (GIM). It was created by Helen Bonny 25 years ago and originated out of her work with transpersonal psychiatrist Stanislav Grof at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center during the early 1970s. Her experience working as a music specialist with cancer patients undergoing LSD sessions triggered her awareness of the connection between healing images and altered states of consciousness, as well as the concept that music was a "powerful way to get into deeper emotions."
A typical GIM session, Bonny explains, begins with the therapist taking down the client's personal history. This is followed by a relaxation exercise and then, based on the client's personal issues, the therapist selects music from among 25 different programs Bonny has created. As they listen to the music, clients are encouraged to verbalize the images as they arise from the unconscious. "After a while," Bonny says, "the music drops away and people don't listen as much to the music as to the images themselves. Music raises the emotions, the emotions give rise to images, and the images facilitate more emotion."
Bonny is adamant that only "the greatest music written" —classical music—be used in GIM sessions. And not just any recording will do, she says, as "all performances are not equal." Hours of listening go into choosing and arranging those pieces that work best for specific emotional issues. For instance, someone suffering from depression, Bonny says, "will need music that is quiet, restful, and caring—so I might choose a Haydn concerto for cello and orchestra." Bonny also created a program called "Caring" for those who aren't ready to delve too deeply, while another program called "Recollection" stimulates childhood memories.
Richard Yensen, a psychologist who also worked with Bonny and Grof, developed his own process, "Perceptual Affective Therapy," which also uses sound and imagery. At the Orenda Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, where he is the director, Yensen uses multimedia slides and a 20-channel sound system to create "visionary journeys" for clients that depict birth, death, terror, sex, peace, war, and happiness— "all the material that forms a part of the transpersonal consciousness," he says.
Like a kind of therapeutic "virtual reality," he says, this environment "holds a person so that it mirrors his innermost feelings.... People feel held, so they can regress back to childhood. Music plays a very important role in inducing that state—it is one of many ways of unhooking the ego from its stranglehold on time and space."
Yensen illustrates how his method works with the story of a client named June who had suffered intense rejection in childhood. After a period of time during which he established a relationship of trust with her—and after asking her permission— Yensen says he presented June with a montage of childhood pictures intermingled with pictures of starvation and violence. Then she put on eye shades and listened to music; soon, she was flooded with images from her childhood. After a journey through her unconscious that, at one point, included her vomiting out her "deep sense of worthlessness," Yensen says June eventually arrived at a place of profound self- acceptance, describing her rebirth as "a quality dot...a tiny real worth from before the time of my parents...."
Unlike Bonny, who relies only on classical music, Yensen draws on music from a variety of traditions, including a "chaos" trance technique that is a disruptive audio montage of dive bombers, subway sounds, native ceremonies, and raucous voices. "Like a surgeon who uses a scalpel, I use a chaotic mixture of sound to release what a client is holding onto." After a client has been through a chaos state, in which he or she may have opened up to vulnerable emotions, Yensen says he then plays something calming like the "Brezairola" lullaby from the "Songs of the Auvergne." He, too, chooses his recordings carefully, saying that this particular version, performed by Netania Davrath and arranged by Joseph Canteloube (Vanguard Classics), is "sung with a great deal of emotion—you have a sense of a flock of lambs in a pasture being mothered by a strong feminine spirit."
While music provides a cathartic release for buried emotions, one of the more cutting-edge forms of sonic therapy helps people change their lives by changing their voices. Sound healer Mimi O'Neil, a singer and Sufi teacher in Albany, New York, has taught workshops on music and health around the world for nearly 30 years. Clients as diverse as policemen, lawyers, and businesswomen often come to her studio, she says, "with an intuitive sense that they don't sound right. What this really means is that they don't feel that their voice is expressing their true self." Northern Virginia voice expert and Sufi singer Sheila Dhani Spring Rain echoes a similar refrain, saying that "the voice is the lifeline to the soul. Like a blueprint, it can show us where we're not connected to our own emotions or bodies."
Just by listening to people's voices, Spring Rain says she can hear a person's spirit—how they process emotions or where might need healing. One man who came to see her, for example, "had both his lower and upper voice open—but his middle notes were gone." After working with him for several weeks she received the image of a coffin; after telling her client this, he confirmed that he had lost both his parents when he was a teenager —the time of puberty when the voice changes.
She recommended that he go into psychotherapy to work on his unresolved grief, and within six months his voice had regained its middle range.
The disconnection between the voice and the self, says O'Neil, typically occurs during childhood or adolescence, when a person may not have sufficient resources to deal with emotional wounding. As a result, "a child may tense muscles in the body in order to repress the pain, building up body armor that eventually constricts her voice." This can lead to dysfunctional voice patterns. The "throat-catching" voice, says O'Neil, may signify issues around emotional control and anger; the "child's voice" indicates a person with a fear of expressing power; the "tunnel voice" is generally found in people who rarely felt safe or experienced trust; and the "split voice"—a voice that rises up and down—describes someone trapped between childhood and adulthood.
O'Neil describes a client with a tightly clenched, "throat-grabbing" voice. "Instead of opening naturally he was controlling his emotions by constricting his voice. His breathing was high up in his body, rather than integrated throughout his whole system." O'Neil taught him to breathe properly from the bottom of the spine, and to open the "mask of his face" by opening the sinus passages, throat cavity, and air pipe down to the lungs. Soon, she says, "this enormous voice emerged." Yet while her client freely expressed himself with her, he confided in O'Neil that at home "he sang softly in the bathroom at night because I can't let anybody hear me."
In fact, fears around power arise naturally when a person's real voice begins to emerge, says O'Neil, because "when we work with the voice, we work with our essential power." Spring Rain says she has also noticed that women who speak in girlish voices tend to "have a problem being grounded in their own power." Both sound healers view their work as returning to people the gift of their unique natures—what O'Neil calls a person's "soulsong" and Julia Cameron calls their "true note."
"Many of the tools I work with are aimed at getting people to excavate an inner mine of riches," adds Cameron, "so that they are working in the area that is most fulfilling to them. When people work with toning or melody, they come ‘into tune' and it brings them to their vein of gold."
Singing the Soul Home
As physically and emotionally healing as "music medicine" can be, say sound experts, it ultimately leads a person full circle—home to the abode of their soul. "Our wounds are the portals to the transcendent," says Richard Yensen. "One doesn't get to the transcendent by going beyond, but by going through the great dramas of our lives that make us who we are—and music has a profound capacity to address the themes of tragedy, joy, and love that run through our lives."
In fact, say most practitioners, peak spiritual experiences are a commonplace occurrence in music therapy. Helen Bonny says that although she didn't talk about it much, "I knew from the beginning that this was a very spiritual process. For some, it's a life-changing experience that comes from a oneness with God that they hadn't even guessed was a possibility—and that is the source of real healing."
Not only clients, but music therapists can have peak experiences during sessions, says Barbara Crowe—something that is rarely acknowledged. She says that for a long time "the transpersonal level has been deliberately edited out of music therapy because there hasn't been a model to help us frame it." Crowe calls for a more open discussion within the profession about the spiritual dimension of their practice, saying that even before she became interested in transpersonal psychology she would notice that clients were "inadvertently having spiritual experiences, with archetypal images that blew them away." Her own approach with clients, she says, is that "it's best to let those experiences stand on their own. It isn't a technique where you do a lot of verbal processing, because to talk about it is to diminish the experience. The music both holds the experience and becomes the expression of the experience."
The issue of how to handle spiritual experiences as they arise within healing sessions is not so pronounced in the field of sound healing. Its basis in mystical traditions of chant and overtoning techniques culminates naturally in sublime experiences of the transcendent. The danger, however, says Mimi O'Neil, may lie in overlooking the psychological dimension. She warns against an over-emphasis on altered states that bypass the ego, creating a "spiritual split" that may unintentionally foster grandiosity or inflation. Ultimately, however, says Pat Moffitt-Cook, it is a balanced combination of both sound therapy with a spiritual perspective that heals because "without the foundation of a sacred attunement, healing cannot be sustained—the disease or confusion returns." Concludes Yensen, the brush with God that may occur during sound therapy cures because "it provides us with a sense that we're not alone anymore—we've come to the home of the human spirit, that place from which we have come and to which we will ultimately return to."
Singing the Earth Home
In times of war, musicians have been called upon to inspire soldiers with a fighting spirit—using martial drumbeats or national anthems to summon forth their courage and patriotism. Today, with a world fractured by ethnic diversity and environmental devastation, many musicians are heeding the call to perform, compose, or record music that harmonizes differences and fosters peace.
There exist many diverse expressions of this impulse to seek world healing through music. For example, one of her missions at Sounds True, says part-owner and publisher Tami Simon, is to distribute the "sacred documents" of the world's religious traditions. Thus, she has created a new world music label called "Sacred Music of the World" with such recordings as "Bismillah: Highlights from the Festival of World Sacred Music," an annual world music festival in Morocco.
Pat Moffitt-Cook sees global healing in the fact that cross-cultural music helps breaks down prejudices. "Sometimes people are too culturally conditioned to the rhythms, melodies, and cadences of the particular culture that formed them." she says. Especially in the multicultural landscape of contemporary America, she says, it is "arrogant not to bring in world music for therapeutic treatment. When I walk down a hospital hallway, half of all patients may have migrated from Vietnam, Mexico, or Japan. Thus we need a repertoire of music that can help heal people from all cultures—which America is."
In addition, says Moffitt-Cook, all cultures find common ground in the universal desire to use sound and music for healing. This ancient instinct is finding contemporary expression in weekly "chant" circles. Tami Simon, for instance, describes the Boulder circle she recently joined as a non- denominational group that chants and sings "sound rounds" from different traditions. Kay Gardner has also organized several singing groups in her hometown. When a woman was dying in a nursing home, members sang hymns around her bedside to accompany her soul's passing. At one point in their singing, the woman woke up from a coma in time to say goodbye to family members.
Jonathan Goldman explains the healing power of group singing by saying that "when you make sound together you create a group consciousness and begin to understand the community of all things." Especially when chanting harmonics, he says, "sounds that you weren't creating begin to occur; it's an incredible phenomenon as the creation is greater than the sum of its parts."
Indeed, though it may seem esoteric to some, it is the view of many sonic practitioners that sound healing not only treats individual wounds but is helping to accomplish what Goldman describes as a global "vibrational shift." There is an "evolutionary impulse at work," he believes, "that is trying to get us to vibrate at higher levels of peace, compassion, and love." Julia Cameron agrees, saying that "we're in the middle of a spiritual revolution that is galvanized by sound." In some "deep and startling spiritual experiences" she had several years ago, Cameron says she heard repeatedly the words "body of sound, body of light" and saw visions of amphitheaters of people "toning" together.
Today, she wears a large medallion around her neck with an image of the earth in the center and concentric rings of people around it. "I always say the medallion is a picture of my job; that is to get people to remember their music, to sing us back to health—to sing the earth home."
MORE INFORMATION
Contributing editor and book editor, Pythia Peay, is a freelance writer and a columnist for Religion News Service. Common Boundary is no longer in print and they no longer have a website.
Music without words means leaving behind the mind. And leaving behind the mind is meditation.
Meditation returns you to the source. And the source of all is sound. — Kabir
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