What's the Buzz? Sound Therapy
The New Work Times, Published: November
24, 2005
CAROL
HARADA lay on her back, eyes closed, on cushions strewn across the floor of a
studio in Emeryville, Calif. Several people, some clutching musical
instruments, quietly gathered around. It was her turn to receive a group
healing.
Dr.
Mitchell L. Gaynor, a New York oncologist, strikes one of his Tibetan singing
bowls with a mallet to produce soothing tones; he might add rice to change the
sound. Dr. Gaynor, the author of a book on sound healing, considers it a
complement to traditional Western medicine.
One person held her feet. Another
touched her head. Someone placed a hand on her shoulder. Ms. Harada, 40, then
stated that her intention was to release the dull pain in her left shoulder.
"The
physical touch was important, to remind me I was safe and directly connected to
people doing healing work on my behalf," she wrote in an e-mail describing
her experience last spring. Then,
using their voices and acoustic instruments - bowls made from crystals, an
Australian didgeridoo, bells and drums - the participants gently bathed Ms.
Harada in sound. When
the sonic massage ended several minutes later, Ms. Harada's eyes fluttered
open. She felt grateful, peaceful and when she stood up, found that the range
of motion in her shoulder had increased.
For
decades people have relaxed and meditated to soothing sounds, including
recordings of waves lapping, desktop waterfalls and wind chimes. Lately a new
kind of sound therapy, often called sound healing, has begun to attract a
following. Also known as vibrational medicine, the practice employs the
vibrations of the human voice as well as objects that resonate - tuning forks,
gongs, Tibetan singing bowls - to go beyond relaxation and stimulate healing.
"It's like meditation was 20 years ago and yoga was 10 to 15 years
ago," said Amrita Cottrell, the founder and director of the Healing Music
Organization in Santa Cruz, Calif., and the leader of the class that Ms. Harada
attended.
While
many people are only just discovering it, sound healing is actually a return to
ancient cultural practices that used chants and singing bowls to restore health
and relieve pain. It is often introduced at mind-body or wellness festivals.
Thousands of healers from almost every state and many countries have created
Web sites about sound healing.
Schools
for certification have sprung up too, though certification is hardly
standardized. The healers include medical doctors, academics and people with no
medical or scientific background at all. What they have in common is a belief
in the potency of sound to not only promote relaxation, but relieve ailments,
from common aches and pains to the anxiety that accompanies chemotherapy.
People
who have tried sound healing say they like it because it is non invasive and
relaxing. And lying on a cushion, exercising only the ears, is decidedly easier
than stretching into the downward dog pose. But
can chanting "om lam hu" or blowing into a didgeridoo really loosen a
stiff neck? No
controlled clinical trials have been done to show that sound healing works,
said Dr. Vijay B. Vad, a sports medicine specialist at the Hospital for Special
Surgery in Manhattan and a doctor for the P.G.A. Tour. But those who try sound
healing may feel their pain diminish, because pain is notoriously subjective,
Dr. Vad said. Some 35 percent of people with back pain find relief from a
placebo, he noted.
Sound
healing, like other mind-body treatments, he said, could act as a placebo, or
it may distract the mind, breaking a stress cycle. "Even if it breaks your
cycle for 15 minutes, that's sometimes enough to have a therapeutic
effect," Dr. Vad said. Sylvia
Pelcz-Larsen of Boulder, Colo., an acupuncturist who was suffering from
excruciating back pain, tried a form of sound healing called Acutonics, which
involves applying tuning forks to acupressure points on the body. "I
got a 10-minute session, and my back was about 80 percent better," she
said. "It changed my life." Ms. Pelcz-Larsen now teaches classes through
the Kairos Institute of Sound Healing, which is based in New Mexico but offers
classes throughout the world, and has incorporated tuning forks into her
acupuncture practice, along with Tibetan singing bowls, planetary gongs and
chimes.
Using
forks and bowls for anything other than dinner may seem to some people like New
Age nonsense. But healers, sometimes called sounders, argue that sound can have
physiological effects because its vibrations are not merely heard but also
felt. And vibrations, they say, can lower heart rate variability, relax brain
wave patterns and reduce respiratory rates. When
the heart rate is relatively steady, and breathing is deep and slow, stress
hormones decrease, said Dr. Mitchell L. Gaynor, an oncologist and clinical assistant
professor of medicine at Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New
York and the author of "The Healing Power of Sound." That is
significant, he said, because stress can depress every aspect of the immune
system, "including those that protect us against flu and against
cancer."
Ms.
Cottrell pointed out that ultrasound, which employs vibrations in frequencies
above the range of human hearing, has been used therapeutically. "When the
body is sick - it could be a cold, a broken bone, an ulcer, a tumor, or an
emotional or mental illness - it's all a matter of the frequencies of the body
being out of tune, off balance, out of synch," she said. "Vibration
can help bring that back into balance."
Sound
healing works like the cry you make when you stub your toe, said Jonathan
Goldman, the director of the Sound Healers Association in Boulder, and the
author of "Healing Sounds: The Power of Harmonics." "Have you
ever been able to stub your toe and not make a sound?" he asked. "It
hurts a lot more." The
cry, he suggested, may stimulate endorphins or create resonance with the part
of the body that is in pain and lessen it. Or, he said, the cry you emit may
simply distract you from the pain.
Dr.
Gaynor distinguishes between curing and healing. To "cure" means
physically to fix something, whereas "healing" refers to wholeness, a
union of the mind, body and spirit, he said. Dr. Gaynor, who has an oncology
practice in Manhattan, considers sound healing integrative medicine: not an
alternative to science but a complement to it. He
leads free biweekly support groups for his patients that involve chanting and
playing Tibetan singing bowls. The bowls are made of several kinds of metal;
when struck gently on the rim with a wood baton, they vibrate at different
frequencies, making sounds not unlike church bells.
When
Marisa Harris of Manhattan first saw Dr. Gaynor with one of his Tibetan bowls
she thought he was going to prepare pasta. But when he began to play them, she
said, it was the first time since she had been diagnosed with Stage 4
pancreatic cancer that she could hear something other than the words
"you're going to die." "It
was as if all of a sudden there was room for possibility," she said. The
sound, Ms. Harris said, penetrated her body and made her feel as if it were not
only her thoughts about death that were breaking up, "but these poisonous
cells, these cancer cells, were breaking up and I experienced something very
healing."
More
than seven years later she plays her own singing bowls every day, often chanting
the names of her three children, her husband and other loved ones. The bowls,
she said, helped her express feelings she had bottled up inside. Sometimes, she
said, she talks to the bowls about her fears. "The sound would take them
away," she said, "out of my being, out of my existence."
Mr.
Goldman draws an analogy between sound healing and prayer. Many cultures, he
said, believe that vocalizing a prayer amplifies it. By the same token, he
said, expressing what you want a sound to accomplish (Ms. Harada's wish to
release the pain in her left shoulder, for example), can help you heal yourself
- or someone else. Dr.
Gaynor likens sound healing to music therapy. In "The Healing Power of
Sound" he cites studies indicating that music can lower blood pressure,
reduce cardiac complications among patients who have recently suffered heart
attacks, reduce stress hormones during medical testing and boost natural
opiates. But
not everyone who partakes in sound healing is in need of medical treatment. Ms.
Harada's husband, Greg Bergere, attended the sound healing classes in
Emeryville even though he had no physical ailments. They left him feeling
refreshed. "It felt like I just had a really relaxing night's sleep,"
he said. For some people, that alone may be worth the price of a singing bowl.
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