Ancient use of sound healing spans around the globe in all of our history. Scientific research reveals the benefits of particular sounds, repeating patterns, rhythms, and specific tones are sound healing that heal trauma, spiritual relationship issues, mental health concerns, and physical healing that simultaneously positively change not only consciousness but physical body regenerative response, mental and emotional regulation, and deepen our inner wisdom and spiritual inner connection. Watch the entire video above or read the shorter version below with the scientific references.
Ancient Sound Healing Practices Backed by Science
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, Theomystoklea. Theomystoklea 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.
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.
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!
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.
References
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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.
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
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