The Benefits of Sound Healing and How it is Used in a Therapy Session

What is Sound Healing Therapy? In a nutshell it’s a modality that utilizes sound frequencies and sound vibrations in order to help relax body, mind and spirit, and assist the body’s own natural inner healing process.

It is believed that the sound of tuning forks, bells, chimes and gongs plus most sound healing instruments create powerful resonance when played and have the power to affect the body’s energy and produce a healing effect on many levels, physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.

An experienced sound healing therapist / healer will have learned how to use a variety of sound healing instruments and how to apply these to a client or patient who may have injury, sickness, disease or ill-health, or to help improve the person's immune system.

Sound healing therapy can be used as a standalone therapy or can be integrated and used in conjunction with other treatments or modalities or with other body centered therapies such as:

Some of the sound healing instruments which can be used during sound therapy sessions include:

Sound healing therapy does not only include the use of physical instruments but also can and very often includes the use of the human voice. The use of the human voice was probably the very first instrument used by our ancestors not just for communicating but also as a healing instrument for meditating, chanting and singing. There is a long association between sound and healing. Tibetan and Christian religious rituals and ceremonies include sound and music from bells, drums, gongs, chimes, tingshas, singing and voice chanting.

Recent research reports that music and sound can stimulate the release of many healing chemicals in the body.

"There's just something about music — particularly live music — that excites and activates the body," says Joanne Loewy, director of the Armstrong center and co-editor of the journal Music and Medicine.

Loewy, whose work is part of a growing movement of music therapists and psychologists who are investigating the use of music in medicine to help patients dealing with pain, depression and possibly even Alzheimer's disease. "Music very much has a way of enhancing quality of life and can, in addition, promote recovery."

While music has long been recognized as an effective form of therapy to provide an outlet for emotions, the notion of using song, sound frequencies and rhythm to treat physical ailments is a relatively new domain, says psychologist Daniel J. Levitin, PhD, who studies the neuroscience of music at McGill University in Montreal. A wealth of new studies is touting the benefits of music on mental and physical health.

Music therapy and Sound healing therapy have been used to help:

Our own experience has taught us the importance of empathy on the part of the therapist / practitioner when using sound as a therapy. The sound vibrations of the instruments can enhance or magnify the healer’s empathy as it is directed to the client or patient.

Healing with music and sound is understood to date back to ancient times and is reported to have been used throughout many cultures in an attempt to heal physical, emotional and mental health concerns.

Nowadays it’s hard to imagine any healing session without some form of music to enhance the ambience and relaxing atmosphere of a therapy room. We’ve come a long way from era of silent movies to the emotional impact of the sounds and the music that surrounds us today throughout social media, films, tv, advertisements, stage productions, concerts, radio and phones augmenting and intensifying visual imagery everywhere we turn. Music and sound have become the accepted soundscape and backdrop to our everyday lives in a world that would be meaningless without it.