My Sound Healing Journey
A bit to my surprise, people seemed to really like hearing these sounds. They didn’t jump up from the Reiki table and run screaming from the room, though I half expected it. Instead, they began telling me how they even felt certain tones I made – or rather that were made through me – in certain places in their bodies. And they told me how they felt deeply comforted by the tones. This came at first as quite a surprise to me; I had thought maybe I was just exorcising some inner demons of my own, by allowing their sounds to come out.
Often these sounds were loud enough to frighten the timid, in which category I certainly put myself – at least soundwise – in those early days. I spent considerable time second-guessing my newfound inner voice. Interestingly, I found that when I tried to suppress the sounds, usually because I was afraid I might look foolish making them, I would actually feel a constriction, even a soreness, in my throat. It was as if my spirit wasn’t going to let me get away with holding back what wanted to be expressed. So my next step was to say, “Okay, if this is supposed to be happening, even if it’s just to clear my own throat chakra of long-held repressed energy, I guess I need to let it come out.” I became more bold with this toning process, and still people liked it.
I also began studying the work of a number of sound healers, and I found there was precedence for what was happening through me. (Here’s a Sound Healing Anthology I have compiled from much of that research.) Many people with Ph.D.’s and the like after their names even said the sounds were “therapeutic”. They said that particular tones vibrate in people’s bodies and help them release deep-seated emotions, fears, etc. And they gave a lot of scientific reasons why sounds did these things – even told how sound has been used in these ways for centuries. I read that both mystics and scientists say the entire universe may actually run on sound. That everything vibrates to some frequency, and that these frequencies determine form and shape and color and even consciousness itself. Now this was taking me way beyond fifth grade band class, which by the way I dropped because I was sure I would never be a musician, even a drummer.
This was taking sound to a whole new level. Sound as the creator of the universe? Could this really be the purpose of sound? Is this why I was always so attracted to sound, especially music? Was sound trying to tell me something by coming through me in these ways? I have to admit that the tones coming through me were very powerful. That I could feel them deeply in my own body when they happened. Besides allowing them to surface during sessions with clients, I was also doing considerable practice on my own. The sounds were so powerful at times that I was convinced they were going to shatter the windows and wake the neighbors. Still, they kept coming, as if they weren’t going to stop until I’d relearned my birthright. That I had indeed come here, at least in part, to be this new thing called a “sound healer”.
