Sound Healing as Timeless Treatment Modality

February 06, 2020

Sound Healing as Timeless Treatment Modality

I enjoy looking to indigenous medicines around the world to learn about how to be more fully human and a better practitioner of medicine. What I am always struck by is how many traditional medicines steep a patient deeply in their senses as a way of diagnosing and treating dis-ease. It’s easy to see why; the senses are our connection to the world and each other. It’s how we take in our experience, how we know where we are, and who we are, that we are both awake and alive. Being in our senses is how we become embodied. The use of mindfulness does just that- steeps us in our present moment experience. There’s something deeply humanizing about the practice of being in our senses.

Indigenous healers in Peru will go out into the forest with a question about a patient and return with an icaros, or healing song, given to them by a plant spirit. This is then given to the patient as their song which remains with a person for the duration of their treatment.

When praying for help, support, and guidance, Tibetan doctors will use the Medicine Buddha mantra and offer their patients songs for purification, remembrance, and protection.

What I’d like to discuss is a way to connect to one of those senses more deeply through sound. Sound healing, as a modality, often gets overlooked. We are inundated with sound nearly every moment of our lives. But how much of what we hear every day provokes self awareness, stress reduction, or focus? Many of us have to escape sound in order to find respite from the stress of the world.

Everything we take in has medicine for us. Sound healing is a way to dig in a little deeper, to focus the senses, to relax and drop in to a more parasympathetic state, to relieve anxiety, and to create safety in ourselves to get through a difficult moment. It also has demonstrated the ability to boost the immune system, lower blood pressure, increase memory recall, and reduce chronic pain. I often feel inspired to offer a specific chant or play music to create a safe and personal container for my patients. In the future, I’d love to share medicinal chants or even simple drumming with my patients as practices they can take home with them that reinforce the work we have done together in treatment.

Drumming actually has been found to help rewire the brain after trauma. Isn’t that wild? The practice of producing complex rhythms can actually stimulate the production of new neural connections. It can help us out of places of “stuckness.” Interestingly enough, in Chinese medicine, the Lung is responsible for setting a rhythm for the body via the inhale and the exhale. We can understand that connection through Polyvagal Theory and the function of our inhalation and exhalation as regulatory agents of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. Yet, the Lung is also said to hold the emotion of grief. As the most delicate of organs its functions are easily affected by depression and feelings of loss. When the breath is affected by difficult emotions, it’s as if the rhythm of the body is lost and our connection to ourselves and others becomes dampened or hard to define. The breath, which underlies the production of sound, powerfully reveals the state of our nervous system. By listening to the breath we can know something about the mind, body, and emotions of a person.

Neurologist Barry Bittman, who co-developed a program called Health Rhythms with music therapist Christine Stevens, found that “group drumming and recreational music making increases the body’s production of cancer killing t-cells, decreases stress, and can change the genomic stress marker.” Bittman says drumming “tunes our biology, orchestrates our immunity, and enables healing to begin.”

A New York University professor and clinical psychologist Shari Geller reports that through her clinical work combined with drumming technique she discovered that healing can occur when emotions are enhanced through music making. She says it allows people to process trauma with greater ease and that through the facilitation of mindful drumming, people can express difficult emotions without feelings of judgement. Additionally, research of drumming has also turned up benefits for women dealing with eating disorders, children with autism, cancer patients, war veterans living with PTSD individuals with anger management issues, people with addictions, and even Alzheimer’s patients, drumming offers physical and emotional benefits.

Music and the practice of using sound as healing modality encourages us to look within ourselves. By turning the eye inward, there we can find connection to a greater whole, a belonging to ourselves and to a shared human experience.

Resources:

1) Effects of Singing Bowl Sound Meditation on Mood, Tension, and Well-being: An Observational Study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5871151/

2) 10 Health Reasons to Start Drumming:

https://www.drnorthrup.com/health-benefits-drumming/

3) Ancient Healing Approach: Drum Therapy

Therapeutic Effects of Drumming

https://www.learnreligions.com/drum-therapy-1729574

4) The Neuroscience of Drumming: Researchers Discover the Secrets of Drumming & The Human Brain

http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/the-neuroscience-of-drumming.html

5) The Benefits of Drumming

https://project-resiliency.org/resiliency/the-benefits-of-druming/

6) Music Therapy for Post-traumatic Stress in Adults: A Theoretical Review

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5744879/

7) Neuroscience, Somatic Psychology and Sound Healing