What is a Sound Bath Meditation?
Sound bath meditations are a combination of restorative yoga, meditation and sacred sound concert. They have been shown to have many physical and emotional benefits. Sound Meditations slow down your brainwaves and guide you into a deep meditative state or altered state of consciousness (ASC). They have been shown to reduce stress, enable deep relaxation, enhance creativity, possibly uplift the spirit and help with insomnia.
A typical session:
A typical session:
- starts with a brief discussion about the instruments and how they will be played,
- followed by a short breathing meditation
- Mantra singing or Kirtan
- continues with either lying down, or sitting in a chair, for approximately 45 minutes while experiencing the playing of therapeutic sound instruments - Himalayan Singing bowls, Gongs, Crystal Bowls, Harmonium, Rainsticks, Bola Chimes, Koshi Chimes, Shamanist
- concludes with a brief checking of everyone's experience.
Benefits of Sound Healing with Himalayan Singing Bowls and Gongs.
“Whether or not we hear it, everything has a sound, a vibration all its own,” writes Joshua Leeds in The Power of Sound (Healing Arts Press, 2001).
That sound is called resonance, the frequency at which an object naturally vibrates. Each part of our bodies has its own natural resonance, and vibrational medicine is based on the idea that disease is a result of those natural resonances getting out of tune – whether due to stress, illness or environmental factors.
Getting In TuneBut does it work? Yes, say sound therapists, who have successfully treated everything from stress to Parkinson’s disease to hormonal problems. Jonathan Goldman, director of the Sound Healers Association in Boulder, Colo., has seen tuning forks alleviate many maladies, including headaches and misaligned vertebrae. Diáne Mandle, a certified sound healer in Encinitas, Calif., uses Tibetan singing bowls to bring her clients’ bodies back in tune.
In her article “Sound Healing With Tibetan Bowls,” first published by the Holistic Health Network, Mandle writes that her clients have experienced “relief from pain and discomfort, clearing of sinuses, shifting out of depression, [improved] ability to sleep . . . , revitalization and clarity, feeling of well-being, great connectedness, and deep personal transformation.”
Vibrations can lower heart-rate variability, relax brain-wave patterns and reduce respiratory rates.”Stress hormones decrease under these conditions. Mitchell Gaynor, MD, an oncologist and assistant clinical professor at Cornell University’s Weill Medical College in New York, uses singing bowls with his cancer patients. “I believe that sound can play a role in virtually any medical disorder, since it redresses imbalances on every level of physiologic functioning,” he writes in his book The Healing Power of Sound: Recovery from Life-Threatening Illness Using Sound, Voice and Music (Shambhala, 1999).
If every sound is vibration and if the vibration touches each and every cell of our body, we can understand that we don't perceive sound only with the ears, but with all cells in our body.
Stress reduction is one of the most important results of receiving sound therapy. Stress is the underlying cause of many physical conditions and it melts away with ease when you are bathed in a sea of sound healing vibrations.
Sound Healing is so effective because it influences our emotional bodies as well as our physical bodies. Emotional imbalances are at the root of many physical diseases and when we heal our emotional bodies, the physical symptoms disappear. Sound and emotions are deeply connected. Human emotions have their immediate expression through sound, and it is often the repression of the sound of the emotions that creates emotional blockages. Conversely, sound can be used to unlock the blocked emotions and release them with ease and grace.
An increasing number of mainstream medical and education institutions around the world use healing effects of Himalayan singing bowls and gongs as a vital process of cancer treatment. The Deepak Chopra Centre in California has found that the sound of Himalayan singing bowls is chemically metabolised in the body as the endogenous opioid, which works as internal medicine and pain reduction.
That sound is called resonance, the frequency at which an object naturally vibrates. Each part of our bodies has its own natural resonance, and vibrational medicine is based on the idea that disease is a result of those natural resonances getting out of tune – whether due to stress, illness or environmental factors.
Getting In TuneBut does it work? Yes, say sound therapists, who have successfully treated everything from stress to Parkinson’s disease to hormonal problems. Jonathan Goldman, director of the Sound Healers Association in Boulder, Colo., has seen tuning forks alleviate many maladies, including headaches and misaligned vertebrae. Diáne Mandle, a certified sound healer in Encinitas, Calif., uses Tibetan singing bowls to bring her clients’ bodies back in tune.
In her article “Sound Healing With Tibetan Bowls,” first published by the Holistic Health Network, Mandle writes that her clients have experienced “relief from pain and discomfort, clearing of sinuses, shifting out of depression, [improved] ability to sleep . . . , revitalization and clarity, feeling of well-being, great connectedness, and deep personal transformation.”
Vibrations can lower heart-rate variability, relax brain-wave patterns and reduce respiratory rates.”Stress hormones decrease under these conditions. Mitchell Gaynor, MD, an oncologist and assistant clinical professor at Cornell University’s Weill Medical College in New York, uses singing bowls with his cancer patients. “I believe that sound can play a role in virtually any medical disorder, since it redresses imbalances on every level of physiologic functioning,” he writes in his book The Healing Power of Sound: Recovery from Life-Threatening Illness Using Sound, Voice and Music (Shambhala, 1999).
If every sound is vibration and if the vibration touches each and every cell of our body, we can understand that we don't perceive sound only with the ears, but with all cells in our body.
Stress reduction is one of the most important results of receiving sound therapy. Stress is the underlying cause of many physical conditions and it melts away with ease when you are bathed in a sea of sound healing vibrations.
Sound Healing is so effective because it influences our emotional bodies as well as our physical bodies. Emotional imbalances are at the root of many physical diseases and when we heal our emotional bodies, the physical symptoms disappear. Sound and emotions are deeply connected. Human emotions have their immediate expression through sound, and it is often the repression of the sound of the emotions that creates emotional blockages. Conversely, sound can be used to unlock the blocked emotions and release them with ease and grace.
An increasing number of mainstream medical and education institutions around the world use healing effects of Himalayan singing bowls and gongs as a vital process of cancer treatment. The Deepak Chopra Centre in California has found that the sound of Himalayan singing bowls is chemically metabolised in the body as the endogenous opioid, which works as internal medicine and pain reduction.