What did ancient people know about sound healing that we need today
Independent of each other, different cultures worldwide have developed the ancient use of particular instruments, depth of sounds, repeating patterns, and frequencies that shift the listeners perspective profoundly. The intentional changes bridge waking consciousness, as a sound healing therapy to heal trauma, spiritual relationship issues, mental health concerns, and physical healing. These sound patterns facilitate shifts in consciousness that are transformational.
In ancient Greece, about 200 years before the common era, Pythagoras has been identified to be the first person to discover the relationship between musical harmony and the mathematical harmony of numbers. More historical recordings site Pythagoras to be the first person to recognize the value of music and learned to prescribe music for sound healing for the physical body and ailments of the mind. In digging deeper, Pythagoras was trained in Delphi, Greece by the seer/priestess, and prophet, Theomystoclea. Theomystoclea today would be called an extremely gifted medicine woman, and shaman.
Like the early mention of the use of sound healing of Theomystiklea, in what is now India, Vedic mantras were begun around 1000 years before the common era. A mantra allows your mind to project an aspect of itself, get focus, attract different things to your life and to keep a healthier state of mind, and this is why it’s used as a therapeutic resource. In some applications a mantra is considered to cure illnesses and emotional problems, to improve your mind’s performance, achieve higher levels of consciousness, and transcending regular perceptions of space and time. Mantra repetition, sound and tone are considered a spiritual formula of magical resonance, that evoke a feeling and inner connection, shifting consciousness, aiding in spiritual awakening and transformation.
While mantras were being used in India in 1000 B.C. an even older tradition of northern Australian aborigines is the didgeridoo that induces relaxing brainwaves, pain relief, release of emotions, and increases in circulation based on research of modern science. This 60,000-year-old tradition accesses the three brains, the brain of the stomach, the brain of the heart, and the brain of the mind (or head) using the didgeridoo’s vibration. The vibration enters the body and shakes the cells. This allows access to the cellular memory and breaks down blocked energy. The didgeridoo sounds also transfer into other states of consciousness including the dreamtime. Aboriginal healers also use traditional chants, repetitions to remove energies from the body into the Spirit World for release.
Repeating sound patterns, in the same tones, creates and develops the relationship with the process that allows the person to go deeper, relax more easily and quicker, and access the simultaneous, beneath conscious awareness occurrence, of positive changes in brain waves, heart rate, and respiration that inspire the immune system, and create happy feelings and well-being, sinking into the body, mind, and spirit developing the inner relationship with personal spirituality.
The same profound influence and role of sound healing for transformation are found in areas of Africa including Ethiopia, Sudan, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Madagascar. In these different locations, healing ceremonies use sound healing for spiritual relationships and resolving sickness within the mind and body. The core of the use of sound and music patterns is the use of music for consciousness transformation.
These Ancient practices morphed when slaves were transported to the US where different African cultures and their medicine people, shamans, and wisdom keepers were thrown together. Their resources led them to create sound healing practices to heal the daily wrath of their slave owners, that included rape, PTSD, and trauma in the Ring Shout style. This ancient transformative sound healing became woven into what we know as Negro Spirituals, including group circular movements with clockwise rotation, foot movement-connection to the Earth, call, and response, offered profound sound healing. All the layers involving sound frequency, repeating patterns, and tones, carried the participant/listeners into altered states.
Although across the US there are over 574 recognized different tribes their shared deep connection to the use of sound and music for connection and healing continues through drum rhythm sounds, songs and chants, and other instruments that accompany the practices. Indigenous peoples of the Americas consider music to carry the ancestors’ wisdom across time, transmitting sacred memory. These deep significance special songs are forms of sound healing that pass knowledge, teachings, and wisdom to the song keepers through generations.
When we awaken our ancient sacred memory through listening to special music patterns, they evoke our connection to the ancient wisdom within and connection with others. Listening occurs through our ears but also the rest of our body, our skin and bones and knowing. The way we know sound healing is creating change and transformation is through the feeling which often deepens with repeated listening because the healing sounds transport the listener with repetition and familiarity. The deeper layers and applications of sound healing including specific tones, patterns, frequencies are now being revealed as energy symbols for connection to our higher selves, activations, in trauma healing, spiritual awakening and our evolution.
As we move further into the changes transforming our world, science is revealing what ancient peoples practiced as components of healing, connection, accessing levels of consciousness that created entrainment, inner resonance, and harmony. More contemporary research is showing significant applications of specific musical listening on all of our systems! But there is a great deal more research that needs to be done to take us beyond this and prove what ancient cultures have been practicing all along.
As time goes on, deeper, more insightful research will show more complex applications of music and sound as components of our healing, release from the modern-day physical, mental, emotional, spiritual maladies that plague us, while also contributing to our growth and accessing critical components that elevate and accelerate our development.
Past Science Research
Over ten years ago, a group of researchers wrote in the Nutrition Journal, on The impact of music on metabolism. In this meta-analysis research they were documenting the value of particular sound and music, already researched, in regulating the hypothalamic-pituitary-axis which controls response to stress and recovery from stress, body processes like digestion and sexuality, and energy storage and expenditure which is related to exercise and post exercise recovery, and mood and emotions and pain. Other findings include sound and music listening reduce the release of cortisol (the stress hormone), increased release of the growth hormone, increase of the immune system response, decreased need for sedatives and pain reduction medicines and reduced pain, decreased self-rated anxiety, and decreases in anger, and beneficial in healing cancer and cancer recovery.
Yet, to date there is nearly zero information to medical, mental health providers, or holistic health providers about how to draw upon these non-invasive, powerful methods or access to the sound and music research or how to draw upon its healing abilities for areas mentioned above!
Why are meditative states linked to specific musical listening?
While we may think of meditation as an introduction from the east to the west, meditation has been part of nearly every world culture and religion as sacred music application has. Ancient people understood the value of meditation in its different forms which often were sound and musical listening as a method of transporting the listener(s) into other states where their receptivity, and intuitive awareness were heightened, healing, resilience, and restoration occurs, as well as their sense of inner peace.
In mainstream science research memory, cognition, attention, the sense of self, consciousness, and social-emotional intelligence are different domains of how our brain functions. Other research shows heart coherence occurs during deep exhalation and inhalation and are related to alpha brain waves, where relaxation occurs and also to positive emotional states. Positive emotional states promote health and occur during meditation where brain waves, heart rate, and respiration are positively changed. The coherence with changes in the heart rhythm also shifts brainwaves that release depression and depression. The findings of coherence with heart rate and brain waves are also supported by the research of HeartMath Institute.
The Connection of Specific Sound Meditations and Sound Healing
And one more significant component, in sound and musical listening meditation and sound healing; the person is transported through the patterns and tones of the sound. Human beings are wired to respond to repetition. Repetition is considered the mother of all learning. The repetition of sound patterns cues our heart rate, respiration, and brain waves as it continues, to stay in the receptive state, trusting the sound pattern unfolding because it holds the space through the repeating patterns for brain waves, heart rate, and respiration-the sustained relaxed and receptive state. It is the profound nature of these patterns that changes us, carries us, enlightens us, and transforms.
An additional component of sound healing meditation, (the combination of sound healing and meditation) is the use of guided imagery. Guided imagery meditation means there is a narration that takes the listener into the process through vocalized directions. Listening to the story unfold allows the listener to create their imagery whether that is something they see internally, experience, feel, know, or sense in another way. In the act of listening to guided imagery there is creation, connection, and ownership. The expectation of the process of guidance is another level of the process of sound healing meditation. There is little effort because the listener is occupied by the sound patterns and the unfolding of the narration. This is another layer of the ancient magic of storytelling at work!
Since science has already proven the value of musical and sound listening, although we know there is more research to come that will include a deeper and more comprehensive understanding and application, medical and mental health providers, and holistic health providers as well as the public need to access these non-invasive, powerful methods. Sound healing methods, supported by science and ancient wisdom, require the following
- a delivery method that is easy and accessible
- address some of the most dire issues of healing today including, depression, anxiety, mental health concerns, cancer, pain, immune compromised illnesses.
- develop neuroplasticity, and our capacity for higher-level functioning including compassion, resilience, restoration, intuition, insight, creativity, and problem-solving.
- Tools for spiritual awakening and transformation, including psychedelic assisted therapy
- transformation, spiritual awakening, and evolution.
Check out the 3Melete meditations that fulfill these requirements and more!
References
A History of Women Philosophers. (1987). Waithe, MaryEllen.
Bush medicine: Aboriginal healing, holistic practices, and psychic surgery. (2021). Robertson, Carole. Well-Being Wild.https://www.wellbeing.com.au/wild/bush-medicine-aboriginal-healing
Central and autonomic nervous system interaction is altered by short-term meditation. (2009). Tang, Y.Y., Ma, Y., Fan, Y., Geng, H., Wang, J., Fend, S., et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the USA. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0904031106
Effects of music on the cardiovascular system. (2022). Jacquelyn Kulinski a, Ernest Kwesi Ofori, Alexis Visotcky, Aaron Smith, Rodney Sparapani, Jerome L. Fleg. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tcm.2021.06.004
Exploring the Role of the Heart in Human Performance. (2023). An Overview of Research Conducted by the HeartMath Institute. https://www.heartmath.org/research/science-of-the-heart/
Dynamic correlations between heart and brain rhythm during Autogenic meditation. (2014). Dae-Keun Kim 1, Kyung-Mi Lee, Jongwha Kim, Min-Cheol Whang, Seung Wan Kang. Frontiers of Human Neuroscience and Cognitive Science. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00414
How Indian Classical Music can Help in Healing.
https://meditativemind.org/how-indian-classical-music-can-help-in-healing/
Indigenous song keepers reveal traditional ecological knowledge in music. (January 2, 2020). Bert Crowfoot. https://theconversation.com/indigenous-song-keepers-reveal-traditional-ecological-knowledge-in-music-123573
Informing via Research: Methods, challenges and successes when using a multi-disciplinary team and reverse engineering analysis processes to answer a 200-year-old question. (2014) Melinda H. Connor. Department of Complimentary Medicine, Akamai University, Hilo, Hawaii, USA Science Advisor, Spirituals for the 21st Century, Georgia and Nolan Payton Archive of Sacred Music, California State University, Dominquez Hills, Los Angeles, The Journal of Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281494529_Informing_via_Research_Methods_challenges_and_successes_when_using_a_multi-disciplinary_team_and_reverse_engineering_analysis_processes_to_answer_a_200_year_old_question/citation/downloadCA. USA.
Neuroscience Reveals the Secrets of Meditation’s Benefits Contemplative practices that extend back thousands of years show a multitude of benefits for both body and mind. (2014). Matthieu, Ricard, Antoine, Lutz, Richard J. Davidson.
The impact of music on metabolism. (2012). Alisa Yamasaki B.A., Abigail Booker B.A., Varun Kapur M.D., Alexandra Tilt B.A., Hanno Niess M.D., Keith D. Lillemoe M.D., Andrew L. Warshaw M.D., Claudius Conrad M.D., Ph.D. Nutrition Journal. doi: 10.1016/j.nut.2012.01.020
The Multiple Uses of Guided Imagery. (2020). Stephen D Krau. The Nursing Clinic of North America. doi: 10.1016/j.cnur.2020.06.013
