What is Sound Therapy? | The Sonic Shala

Sound & Its Power To Heal

You are vibration therefore you are sound.

“Sound is the most powerful tool because we are only sound.” ~ Dr. Alarik Arenander (Neuroscientist)

Why is sound so important?

The emerging field of sound work or sound therapy, which is different from music therapy, is based on the theory of vibration: how frequency resonates and affects our nervous system.

Sound therapy is neurological in nature, working with vibrations to create a charge in the brain and the nervous system.

Everything in the world functions at an optimal frequency or has its own sound—even a virus. When a person is operating at optimal health, his or her “tones” are attuned with each other and aligned with the external world.

Brainwaves & Sound

Brainwaves and Stress

In our modern world the words stress and cortisol are household knowns. Survival is no more just about food, water, shelter, and community but also, single parenting, the loss of a job, relationship struggles, lack of resources, etc. In other words, we are alert yet always anticipating "a threat".

Most of us operate in the mid to high range Beta. Cortisol is elevated in this brainwave state and short term helps reduce pain in the body so you can run away. NOTE: Beta brainwave state is certainly not bad as it's a natural state of our physiology with many benefits. Although, most of us are not experiencing short term mid to high Beta brainwave states but rather daily elevated states of stress. This means long term exposure to cortisol.

This long term exposure of cortisol begins to break the immune system down and is very toxic. In this state, all your energy is going toward your external environment and there’s no energy for growth and repair. Your body is interpreting a threat in the external environment so it’s not a time to go within, not a time for healing.

The brain is particularly responsive to certain sounds, depending on pitch and tempo, among other factors.

One of the most important ways music and sounds affect the body is by altering brain waves. Different frequencies of sound entrain the brain to different brain waves. For instance, a drumbeat, frequently used by shamans during healing, typically operates at 240 to 270 bpm and shifts brain waves from beta to theta.

The brain has four basic waves-

Beta: 14 Hz and above, normal waking state

Alpha: 8-13Hz, dreaming and light meditation

Theta: 4-7 Hz; inward focus and transitions

Delta: .5-3 Hz; deep sleep

How We Heal with Sound

The ear is truly a remarkable instrument that feeds our brain important information through electrical impulses which affect our entire being.

The brain’s internal communication system, or its language, is based on frequency. When we speak this language by influencing external frequencies through music and sound, we’re communicating to the brain to initiate a desired mental state.

How it works

Sympathetic resonance:

When the vibrations in one object produce vibrations in another. For example, if you have two tuning forks close to one another, if you strike one, it will cause the other tuning fork to vibrate at a similar frequency.

This is the principle that causes the body to vibrate at the same frequency as the sounds produced by crystal bowls, gongs, tuning forks and other sound healing instruments.

Entrainment:

In the context of psychacoustics, concerns changing the rate of brain waves, breaths or heartbeats from one speed to another (train = rhythm). ALSO, the “effect of one system on another”

Scientist have recently discovered that brain entrainment can balance the right and left hemispheres in remarkable ways.

Any atomic matter can be affected by external pulses
Music alters the performance of the nervous system primarily because of entrainment.

Binaural Beats:

Crystal Singing Bowls mimic binaural beats. It’s in one ear and then the other, continuously. Takes you into an Alpha brainwave state, some people go to Theta and even Delta. These are made with about 99.999% Quartz. Quartz has properties that both stores, focuses, transfers, and magnifies electricity. When I play them, the vibrations are coming right off the bowl and into your body. It is particularly effective on the crystalline structure of your body, your water, the collagen, your pineal gland, bones. We know all this from our digital electronics, it is why we use quartz in our computers, radios, microphones, watches.

Sonic Shala