72 WDDTY | ISSUE 01 | AUG/SEP 2019 FACEBOOK.COM/WDDTYAUNZ
ALTERNATIVESTuneful healings
L.L., a 57-year-old woman from
Phoenix, Arizona, suffered from
brain fog, fatigue, migraines, chronic
vertigo and chronic pain, with
symptoms lasting for over two years.
“I thought I was dying,” she says. “I
went to every doctor under the sun
including naturopaths. I had blood
work done, MRIs, allergy tests. I have
a folder full of appointments.”
A qualified yoga instructor and
professional pilot, she ended up
diagnosed with fibromyalgia,
vestibular migraines and aerotoxic
poisoning from airplane fuel. She
couldn’t walk, drive, read or even
watch television.
“I knew that something was out
of harmony in my body. It just came
to me one night that vibration is
everything.” She began to research
sound and vibrational healing and
quickly started doing work with
chanting. That same week she found
a gong therapist right next door.
“Friends helped me to walk over
there, and that was it. When I heard
the gong, I just knew intuitively that
it was going to heal me.”
It took a couple of weeks of working
with the gongs, playing them for
hours every day, before she noticed
her daily migraines weren’t occurring
as often. “I still couldn’t walk well,”
she says. “I sat on a chair and played
gongs every day for two years.”
Today she is completely out
of pain, has no vertigo and onlyrarely has a migraine. Her balance
continues to get better every
day. She plays gongs for classes,
workshops, and events all over the
US and Europe and is building her
own Sound Sanctuary in Scottsdale,
Arizona.“Sophie” is a 26-year-old woman
from New York City who suffers from
anxiety and depression. A patient of
Dr David Perez-Martinez, she says
that when he initially introduced her
to the idea of using sound to help
with her symptoms that it seemed
pretty “out there.” But she thought,
“Why not give it a try?”
She says she has found the sound
sessions to be consistently positive.
“I have never had a session where
I left feeling anything less than
freed,” she says.
“He calls it ‘tuning up.’ Personally,
I feel it is a returning to a primal
equilibrium, like deleting your
browser history or restoring your
computer to an earlier setting. Our
brain can return, through sound
healing, to a state akin to how it
functioned before mental illness
took hold.”
She says sound healing plus
her meditation practice have
empowered her to manage her
mental and emotional fluctuations.
“Although it is not a once-and-done
solution, I credit sound healing and
meditation for my steadily improving
mental health.”as well as rhythms and melodies over time, and thus
a whole tapestry of tonal characteristics in musical
intervals, which creates varying emotional effects. The
last, most subtle effect, he says, is the energy of intention
with which the tone is created.
Without a doubt, sound healing is an incredibly
diverse and nuanced field with many promising
applications for improving health and wellbeing. And
yet, so far science has barely scratched the surface in
terms of understanding how sound affects the body (see
box, page 59).
Sharry Edwards, M.Ed., director of Sound Health
Research Institute, Inc., in Albany, Ohio, has developed
a method of conducting spectral analysis of the human
voice. Spectral analysis is the electronic analysis of
related frequencies, which there are many of in every
human voice, as well as various qualitative timbres that
make each human voice unique.
Spectral analysis uses mathematical equations to
break down and precisely describe voice patterns into a
mathematical language that can be “read,”and Edwards
claims that such an analysis can reveal abnormal or
missing vibrations in the body indicating disease, which
can be normalized by the presentation of the missing
sound frequencies. Her work suggests just how subtle a
vibratory dance is going on within the human body.
Edwards has found that different people respond
differently to the same sounds. “I have yet to discover a
universal sound that is beneficial to everyone,” she says.
“Not only that, people respond differently to sounds
depending on their geographical location.” She also
claims that these fundamental vibrational relationships
dictate such things as the behaviors guiding complex
chemical interactions in the body.
Mainstream medical science has a long way to go to
catch up to all the possibilities that sound healing offers.
But slowly, more and more doctors are coming around.
As Perez-Martinez puts it, sound vibrations have
worked where other medicine has failed. “Sound turned
my medical practice into a healing practice.”See the next page for a list of some common forms
of sound healing and what’s known about their
mechanisms and effects.REFERENCES
1 South Med J, 1988; 81: 48–51
2 Am J Phys Med Rehabil, 2011; 90:
1068–73
3 Scand J Caring Sci, 1997; 11: 176–82
4 Transl Psychiatry, 2018; 8: 231
5 J Clin Oncol, 2015; 33: 3162–8
6 Libyan J Med, 2017; 12: 1260886
7 Altern Complement Ther, 2003;
9: 257–63
8 Reumatologia, 2014; 52, 5: 292–8
9 J Phys Ther Sci, 2012; 24: 291–4
10 J Evid Based Complementary Altern
Med, 2017; 22: 401–6
11 PLoS One, 2016; 11: e0151136
12 Cell. 2019 Apr 4;177(2):256-271.
e22RESOURCES
Cymatics:
http://www.cymatics.co.uk
David Gibson, Globe
Institute:
http://www.soundhealingcenter.
com
Jonathan Goldman,
Healing Sounds:
http://www.healingsounds.com
David Perez-Martinez MD:
http://www.psychsonic.com