S7E11: Sound Healing

Ever wondered about the transformative effects of sound healing workshops? Today’s episode discusses sound healing workshops and the potential benefits sound healing has on physical and mental health. The episode highlights the untapped potential of using sound healing for mindset and behavior change through events. Be sure to watch out for our last episode next week!

Today we are discussing:
Why Sound Healing? (1:03)
The Science Behind Sound (2:39)
Sound Healing Examples and Certification (7:24)
Sound Healing in Events (14:06)

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Transcript

Dr. K:
You are listening to the Experience University podcast with Dr K. Season 7, Episode 11.

Speaker 2:
Welcome to Experience University, where we aim to educate, inspire, and empower individuals who wish to design transformational experiences. Now, your host, Dr. Kristin Malek.

Dr. K: 
Hello, hello my friends! Man. This is going to be a cray-cray episode. I'm still trying to decide how much and at what level I want to tell you about all the crazy things that I experienced at this Sound Healing workshop. 

So why sound? I want to start with, "Why sound?" And then we'll jump into the specifics of what this is. When you're working with mindset and behavior change, you're working with the entire body. It's been long shown and proven at this point that it's not just your brain that holds memory; it's every cell in your body. There are countless examples of this with organ transplants where somebody will get an organ from a donor, and then they'll start taking on some of the personification, habits, or some things from the previous person, whether they're passed away or alive, because that organ consists of cells, and those cells have memory.

It's also true and has been shown that your body is 70% water, and it's kind of hard to think about. You don't feel like a water bed, right? So we have all of this water in us, and there's just a lot of really fascinating things. I think we tend to think and focus on the words. We're very conscious heavy.

As I was continuing to explore all of these different areas because I specialize in mindset behavior change, so anything that has to do with the body. I'm Reiki Certified. I am learning about the meridians, your Qi points, and your energy. If that sounds very like Eastern medicine or very kind of woo-woo, I will tell you, I am a born and raised researcher. I have my doctorate; I do research every day, and there are a lot of things that I'm like, “I need to see it for myself,” and there’s many opportunities for that.

There's a lot of science behind sound, but what I experienced at the certification, it will sound totally not even believable. When we're talking about sound, what is that? Are we listening to the radio? Are we listening to the words? Yes and yes and yes and yes. So sound healing is in a lot of different modalities. So essentially, science has shown, and I'll talk about some different resources. Science has shown that every part of our body, every sector, every organ, every little area, all has a very specific frequency.

So when you think about frequency, you can think like the ‘do re mi fa so la ti do;’ you can think specific like hertz levels. So when we're saying frequency, it's like your organ, your heart frequency, your liver frequency, and your gallbladder frequency are all different. This has been used in a variety of different countries in terms of healing. So say you have an injured gallbladder and you're trying to get your gallbladder to health, you can listen to this certain frequency like eight minutes a day, or however long your protocol says, and listening to that frequency is essentially like taking medicine, and after however many days or weeks, depending on the severity, your gallbladder would be healed.

And I'm like, “Really? Okay, put it in the earbud, and then you're going to fix all my organs.” I need to see a lot of science here, and I was really surprised by all the research that has already been out there. It's interesting because you see sound being used in a lot of different industries right now. There are farmers who swear by having sounds, like frequencies, playing over their plants because their plants weren't doing good. Maybe they were rural farming, and then industry kind of came up around them, and then you didn't hear the sounds of the wildlife. So you'd play your frequency out in the morning, just have a speaker set up outside, and that frequency in the morning was maybe that specific sound of what those animals would sound like in the morning—whether those are birds chirping or whatever. At night, then you would be playing those frequencies of the crickets chirping or whatever would be in that area. There's been a lot of science to show that it makes a significant difference in how plants grow.

There's a lot of research in dolphins and aquatic species. Now in surgeries and medical clinics, they play classical music because it stimulates calmness in your body. I like to think of sound as the carrier wave of consciousness. If you think about it like a bow and an arrow, the arrow is what your intention is, and the sound is the aiming. So you have an intention, and having the sound could be the “aiming.” And if you're like, "Oh my gosh, Kristin, you just skipped way too much; I'm not following that process." That's fine. Take it if it made sense, and if it didn't make sense, we'll continue explaining until you completely get it.

One of the interesting things about sound is it's totally three-dimensional. It's actually a sphere that's kind of going outwards in all directions. It's not just very linear. It's not just right in front of you. Our skin and our bones actually react to sound. They're very conductive to sound. When we think about sound, we can think about volume, and we could think about frequency; there's a lot of different things that involve sound, which is honestly why it's so complex. Throughout this training, the certification training, I really started to think of myself as an instrument.

I come from a band background; I started with the clarinet. By the time I graduated high school, I could play every woodwind, including double reeds, like the oboe. I could barely get by on the trumpet. I owned a flute, a piccolo, a clarinet, and oboe. I owned a bunch of instruments, and I sat there and said, "Okay, well, if I think of myself as an instrument, then some of the sayings that we say actually make a lot of sense." So, for example, one of those terms that we say that we don't know why we say it—it's been like that forever—is, "Are you in sound health?" And I was like, "Hm, that's an interesting concept." Or when we say, "Are you in harmony?” or “Are you out of sync?" Those are all musical terms because somewhere along the way, we knew that sound was really, really important. We kind of lost that. I could literally spend like 10 episodes talking about the science behind it because it's really fascinating.

The sound healing certification that I did—it was three days—and we talked about a variety of different instruments. We had Himalayan bowls, crystal bowls, chimes, gongs; drums; we had so many tuning forks and weighted tuning forks. Honestly, I had never even heard of those before this. We got to figure out what was good for what and what could be used. We learned different protocols, and I will say, I have to share these experiences. You're going to think it's just crazy. I wish you could see my face. I have my hands over my face. I'm rubbing my forehead. I'm like, "Do I even want to go here?" 

I have done a lot of work through my NLP, my IFS therapist, and my somatic therapist. I've done a lot of work. I've done a lot of healing. I've done a lot of letting go. The sound healing workshop was really fascinating because we would pair up at different points. We'd see a demo where the teacher did it—facilitated an experience for someone in the class— then we would pair up, and we would facilitate these experiences on each other. Around 60 or 70% of the class was all Reiki Certified, so we understood energy and how energy moves. When I was the person receiving the sound healing—listening to the sounds, feeling the energy of the vibrations and all these things—it felt good, but it wasn't transformational. I don’t have a lot of things—maybe not anything—that I'm really stuck on or trying to work through.

Now, that's not the same for some of the people in the class. There was a person in the class who had neuropathy. That means you can't feel sensations on the skin, right? You could step on a nail, and you wouldn't even feel it. If you're holding something in your hand that was hot, cold or sharp, you wouldn't feel it. You can't feel the sensations on the skin. She has neuropathy, and she'd been through a couple of the different experiences—we're on day two—and we did the one, I think it was with the gong, but it could have been with the drum. I wasn't her partner. She was with somebody else. She could start feeling things on the bottoms of her feet. She had this sound healing treatment. So yeah, she could start feeling things, and I was like, "What? What?” I wish you could see my face, like what, what is happening in the world right now? I literally don't even understand. We waved some bowls over you in a specific pattern and poured sound into you, and we changed the vibration, the energy, and the frequency, and then all of a sudden you could start feeling on your skin when you've had neuropathy for years. 

I don't know; it was just really crazy. I was like, "Okay, I'm gonna have to process that.” Maybe it was someone who was seeking attention. I don't know. I don't know who these people are, right? We had someone in the class who had a deviated septum and had surgery or was having surgery or something. She couldn't smell anything on the right-hand side or left-hand side of her nose. She couldn't smell anything, and there's a lot of pressure—like a lot of pressure—and that's part of the reason why she was going to go in for surgery. Something happened—was it the gong, maybe it was the crystal bowls, I don't know—I wasn't her partner, but she sneezed for like 26 minutes. We had to take a break. She sneezed for 26 minutes, and she felt it completely open, and she could smell out of that side of her nose again. She could smell oxygen, and she could smell all of these things that she hadn't smelt before.

And I'm like, “What? What is even happening? This is so crazy.” I wish y'all could have been there with me because the research scientist in my brain was like, "I don't understand what's happening. I need an experiment. I need a control. I need a test, right?" I'm like, "Okay, maybe who knows what these situations are." But then it happened to my partner. I was facilitating an experience for this lovely woman, and she was kind of deaf. She had a hearing aid in both ears, and in one ear, her hearing aid could only hear the high pitches, and in the other ear, she could only hear the low pitches. That's how the hearing aids were set up. By the end of the sound healing treatment, which was a mixture of different bowls, gongs, and drums, different instruments, she could hear low sounds in the ear that was her high hearing aid. She actually unplugged it and took it out. So it wasn't on, and she could hear. I was like, “What? What is happening?” I couldn’t figure it out. 

At the end of the session, I'm just needing to process and needing to figure things out. We had two hours that we were paired up with someone, and we did a full treatment. In that treatment, I was paired with someone, and this particular individual was talking a lot about anxiety and being more grounded. I facilitated a mini meditation, some intention, some of my other trainings, and then went into the sound healing. I swear, y'all, I wish you could see my face. I swear. I felt like I was giving an exorcism in there. I did the little assessment, which they don't actually teach you in this particular one, you learn it in the next level up, but we were kind of taught a little bit about assessment. If you did Reiki, you understand what the assessment is anyway. 

So I did an assessment, and there were two points that needed some work. When I got to the one, and I started doing the work with the Himalayan bowls or the Tibetan bowls, whatever you want to call them, he literally started vibrating, pulsating, on the massage table. I was like, “What is happening? I have no idea. Are you okay?” And the same with the headspace. Then he said, when I did the big bowl at his feet, and banged the bowl, which was a really deep rooting sound, he could feel that energy shoot from the top of his head all the way down to the feet. I'm explaining it to you if you've never heard about it. Most people have actually probably heard of the weighted tuning forks because it's really good for aches and pains. If your hip hurts or you have chronic issues, a weighted tuning fork is like a deep tissue massage, and a lot of people really enjoy that because you can facilitate that on yourself.

But, y'all, the potential for this. Like the potential for this in small groups, the potential for this in big groups. I love the idea of the sound bath. I'm getting certified actually through this particular institute that's from London, which is where my sound healing came from this time. I am super excited to see because they have 15 different sound bath modalities based on who your target user is. If you're dealing with elderly populations, dementia, children or whatever, they have different kinds of sounds and suggestions. The change, the miracles, all of the things that I experienced—wow—I'm just blown away. Think about what we can do in terms of events, think about how we can get someone to lay down on a yoga mat, and we can play the right frequencies that release literally years of built-up, maybe negativity or even apathy, like getting people to feel. There's just so much potential. 

I want to share this experience, so you could kind of hear the lingo. I will be talking more about sound baths in the spring and some of my future episodes. I want you to really, first of all, if you're interested, look it up or shoot me a message, and I can get you hooked up with who my teachers were because they're really great. Don't overlook sound; make a plan for sound in your event design. Make a plan for the frequencies and the pitches. Don't focus as much on having quote-unquote elevator music or quote-unquote background music; look up the specific frequencies for clarity, concentration, focus, the specific frequencies for relaxing, for socialization or for extra energy and make sure those frequencies are playing. I think there's a ton of potential in sound in mindset and behavior change that I've only scratched the surface of even before the certification. So try that hat on. We have one more episode left of the season, episode 12. And it's a topic that's come from actually a listener request. So stay tuned for next week, and until then, have a wonderful week.

Speaker 2:
Thanks for listening to the Experience University Podcast. Stay tuned for our next episode.