How Sound Frequencies Heal
Marisa Tighe’s Story
Hema Sounds
Did you know that it has been proven by a growing body of scientific research, that different sound healing frequencies can treat many ailments, ranging from anxiety and depression, all the way through to chronic pain and beyond?
In this blog, you will find out how sound frequencies can heal and you will hear a true life story from one of our therapists about how sound has transformed her life and the lives of many of her clients.
What is Sound Healing?
Sound Healing is an effective way of improving our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well-being by being immersed in different combinations of continuous sound frequencies and intervals using very particular instruments and voices.
Sound Therapy has been found to help:
Lower blood pressure
Reduce the stress response and the many symptoms of chronic stress, including heart, endocrine, and digestive disorders.
Sleep
Reduce pain
Promote cell renewal in recovery from physical injury or illness
Support the immune systems
Support times of change and upheaval
Promote creativity, inspiration, focus and clarity
Bereavement
Headaches
Mood regulation
How does sound healing actually work?
Sound vibrations affect us on a physical, emotional, mental and, often, spiritual level. In fact, we are neurologically wired up to respond to sound in order to survive and so instinctively react to it. For example, we are moved emotionally by music, we jump to alertness with sudden sounds and fall asleep to the gentle, repetitive rhythms and the sound of a car or a train’s engine. This is something very interesting known as ‘entrainment’ and discovered as long ago as 1665 by a Dutch scientist, Christian Huygens. More recently, Itzhak Bentov illustrates this phenomenon in his book ‘Stalking the Wild Pendulum’ about consciousness, showing that if a number of grandfather clocks are hung on a wall with pendulums all swinging at different rates, they will all be swinging at the same speed within a few hours!
In a similar way, during sound baths the speed of our heartbeat and brain waves often change near certain drum rhythms and frequencies. This means that specific sounds can help us drop into a meditative, Theta state of consciousness just before sleep, in which our natural self-healing systems are activated.
Acoustic physic researchers are now able to show what alternative and eastern medicine has believed, since ancient times; that sound waves have great powers to nourish and heal. For example, John Stuart Reid (2019, Can music influence the longevity of human blood cells?” ) observed that blood cells stay healthy and live longer when exposed to certain sound frequencies. After being exposed to live sounds, blood samples contained a greater number of healthy, live cells than the control samples. The rhythmic pulses of sound vibrations pump and press oxygen through the blood cell membranes and stimulate the release of nitric oxide which helps our muscles relax and is part of our natural cell renewal and healing process.
We are sound sensitive beings with every organ, every bone, every cell in the body vibrating with its own particular resonant frequency. Each frequency is thought to have a different effect on the body. For example, low frequencies can be beneficial for pain relief, while high frequencies can be helpful for anxiety and depression. The human body is made up of about 70% water and is therefore, a very good conductor of sound. In addition, our bones and skeleton are crystalline structures that resonate particularly well with crystal singing bowls and tuning forks.
When bowls and tuning forks are placed on the bones they can not only nourish them and increase bone density, but also give a feeling of being massaged from the inside out. Tuning forks at specific frequencies, when placed either side of the ears or on the body itself along meridian lines, on some acupuncture points or the Vagus nerve, can significantly help settle the nervous system, reduce pain, improve circulation, and promote overall well being. When one organ in the body is struggling, it is like being out of tune which can affect the whole body. So sound healing is about returning the body to harmony and balance like tuning an orchestra.
What actually happens in a sound therapy session?
Sound healing sessions can happen on an individual or a group basis. Each therapist runs sessions a little differently, bringing in something of themselves and working from the heart. I trained with the Sound Healing Academy for over a year and there is a specific 10-step process we follow when offering an individual sound healing session. The experienced sound therapist will not rush the first step of helping you to settle into the present moment and connect with the therapist and the space around you.
You will be invited to relax on the floor or wherever you are most comfortable and wrap up in a blanket with pillows and perhaps an eye-mask. I will guide you gently through visualisations accompanied by sound from beautiful instruments such as Tibetan singing bowls, gongs, crystal singing bowls, flutes, chimes and more to help open the mind and heart to the experience.
We also use the power of intention to enhance the effect of the sound vibrations. Some people may relate to this better as positive thinking, identifying a wish, a desire, an affirmation or manifesting a desired state of being for after the session. Jonathan Goldman, international authority on sound healing, says “FREQUENCY + INTENT = HEALING”.
Then, all you have to do is lie back and listen, letting the sound vibrations do the rest for you. It’s like meditating without having to learn how to. By the end of the sessions people often feel deeply relaxed and almost unable to describe the feeling in words. When they do, they often say something like ‘wow that was powerful’, ‘I saw beautiful colours, shapes and images’, ‘I couldn’t feel my body’, ‘I have never relaxed like that before’, ‘I felt tingles all through my body’ … When I first had one, I described the resulting feeling as both calm and energised at the same time which I later realised could more accurately be described as ‘balanced’.
Marisa Tighe’s story
From Education Consultant to Sound Healing Practitioner
I qualified as a certified sound healing practitioner in April 2020 and now assist on the Sound Healing Academy’s Level 1 and 2 sound healing training programmes in Brighton. I live in Lewes, East Sussex. I have a BSc degree in Psychology, many teaching qualifications and an active research MA in Education from Sussex University.
How did you move from Education to Sound Healing?
I had a 30 year, very rewarding career, as a specialist teacher and education consultant but funding cuts and restructuring of services began to take the joy out of the work. I began exploring ways to remain resilient and manage my stress. This led to me trying a sound bath to relax. It had a profound effect on me and inspired me to research ways that I could use sound with the children I worked with, to improve attention and aid communication. By just drawing upon my ‘mindfulness in schools’ training, personal meditation practices and my own musical knowledge, I began to see striking changes in the children’s ability to communicate and think creatively after just one half hour immersion in the soundscape I had created. On another occasion, when working with a six year-old (significantly autistic and preverbal child) who was normally unable to sit for more than about five minutes, I enabled him to lie down peacefully for a full 20 minutes for the first time in school. These profound experiences led me to complete my Practitioner Diploma in Integral Sound Healing and to retire from education!
I had left my education job to work more freely, flexibly, intuitively and holistically through sound, to help people of any age and ability. By taking that leap of faith and trusting my intuition I now have a working life filled with interest, positivity and transformation.
The Open Door has played an important part in my transformational journey to sound healing and will therefore always be a special place to me. I had heard good things about it and one day spontaneously decided to pop in to find out more and I got chatting to the lovely Louise at reception. After seeing the meeting room and daring to dream about holding sound baths in there one day, I went home to make the final decision to embark on sound healing training. Upon qualifying, it seemed only right then, to hold my first official sound bath at the venue where the seed of a new life had been sown. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Will, Louise and all who have encouraged and supported me to listen to my heart and begin running regular sound baths there.
What would you recommend to others who feel stressed and burned out and are considering studying and practising sound healing?
I would say what are you waiting for? Find out what works for you in terms of managing stress and ask yourself what brings you most joy and follow that.
If you train, you will learn so many simple techniques that will calm not only other people's nervous systems but also your own and help you recharge for sure. You will also learn how to protect yourself from absorbing other people’s troubling energies.
When I am stressed out, I often lie down, put a Tibetan bowl on my stomach or head, and tap it rhythmically. I also love to just sit in front of my gong, hum and feel the vibrations through my whole body. It is amazing how quickly my mood completely resets. When I was particularly anxious during Covid I used the tuning forks every day, morning and night, either side of my ears, for a month. My anxiety gradually faded. The vibrations have a cumulative effect.
What would you say it’s the most rewarding part of making this change in your life?
It is incredibly rewarding that I am doing something I love that also helps others in such profound ways. I am continually amazed by how grateful people are, after the treatment or my group sound baths. To see how some people have committed to incorporating soundbaths into their self-care routines by returning every month, is so heartwarming. In my past work in education, I could never be entirely sure how much a success was down to just my efforts, as there is usually a whole team of people supporting a pupil’s learning. In sound healing it is so uplifting to know that any change in my client’s state of well being is more directly related to what I alone do to enable others to open and receive the healing vibrations of sound.
I have seen people make wonderful life changes after a series of sound healing sessions, such as having renewed confidence to start a relationship or move house, seen people’s pain reduce (and sometimes completely disappear), and often see changes come to fruition unexpectedly a few months later. One little girl I helped didn’t want to continue having sound baths but told me six months later that she used a personalised script of a visualisation I wrote for her, every night to help her sleep.
I also love the creativity of developing my own heart-led business and connecting with others in the wellbeing field who are doing likewise. I run a support group for such people called ‘Connect and Inspire’ and we meet monthly. Please enquire for more details.
How has sound healing impacted your overall life and well-being?
Sound healing has offered me opportunities to incorporate many of my most valued interests in life: talking with people, playing instruments, dance, creativity, nature, contributing to society, psychology and finding a way of being spiritual without a religion. As someone who always found it hard to justify my own self-care above meeting others’ needs, I am incredibly grateful that I have now found a way to work that actually necessitates prioritising personal growth and self-care in order to better serve others.
Also, by swapping treatment tasters with other therapists, I have benefitted and grown so much from having the opportunity to try many other healing modalities that I never had access to before. This has deeply enriched my life and I now feel stressed far less frequently.
Final Thoughts
The use of sound frequencies to heal goes back centuries and technology is now able to show how our bodies emit their own unique vibrational field.
https://www.academyofsoundhealing.com/blog/sound-healing-ancient-roots-modern-science
As sensory beings, we can use sound frequencies to help calm dis-ease, re-harmonise our bodies and bring a state of ease. I invite you to bring some balance into your life by allowing the magic of sound to embrace you and remember… you don’t need to do anything except have an open heart and listen. The vibrations do the rest for you!
To sum up:
The Sound Healing Academy says:
‘Sound healing is a powerful therapy that combines different healing sounds, music and sound healing instruments to improve our multidimensional well-being by creating a beautiful experience where all layers of our luminous energy field (body, mind, soul, spirit) are awakened gently and lovingly’
Sound Healing is very gentle
It kickstarts the natural self-healing process
It is very easy for a wide variety of people of any age or ability to access most aspects of it.
You can use your own voice and start sound healing straight away at home by just humming!
If you’d like to find out more and to start your journey in healing with sound please contact Marisa of Hema Sounds at:
