Music is one of the longest-standing self-prescribed therapy in history. – Erin Seibert (Music therapist).
Since ancient Greece, music has been considered an accessory for therapy to cure mental disorders and boost immune function. Over time, music as a therapy is increasingly used as a magic key to healing wounds, helping with cognitive rehabilitation, and promoting well-being involving perception and cognition. It can be considered the language of the spirit, mind, and body.
HEALING MUSIC – WHAT IT IS?
Healing music, also known as music therapy, is a broad musical spectrum of possibilities created by certified music therapists, master percussionists, and shamans, with a strategic purpose to help people and to heal them: to foster emotional expression and to create a dynamic balance, to influence thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and behaviors.
This music is the most potent form of sound, related to emotional health and self-awareness, and to the engagement of your brain’s reward system, releasing dopamine “a feel good” neurotransmitter.
It infiltrates your heart and frees your soul from the dungeon of your mind.
It can slow down and relax your mind to recover faster when you experience stress, anxiety, depression, or pain and improve your sleep. It energizes the body, makes you more productive, and can boost your psychological arousal and well-being, increasing the intuition, memory, and learning process.
HOW IT WORKS?
Healing music works its magic with the power of sound, a potent emotional driver and natural pain killer, to heal, transform, and inspire, using a combination of knowledge and a variety of therapy techniques, which can involve listening to the voice or music, to sing along the music, to move on the rhythm of the music, to meditate, to remain still and quiet, or to play an instrument.
HEALING INSTRUMENTS
The music and its many facets (physical, emotional, mental, social, spiritual) can be accompanied by voice, various percussion, hand, and wind instruments: singing bowls, tuning forks, bells, gongs, drums, pan flute, and bamboo flute, handpan, guitar, piano, harp, using depending on the intended purpose of healing, low sounds to relax and enter in a state of inner peace, or high sounds to energize and vitalize.
MUSICAL HEALING TECHNIQUES AND HOW THEY WORK
Without stepping into the medical field, I will present to you a few techniques that I use personally and in my profession, and they may be in hand for you to use as well and discover the real benefits and power of healing music.
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GUIDED MEDITATION
It is the best start to consciously activate attention and intention and induce peace, relaxation, and less anxiety and stress. It is a pleasant technique, a form of sound healing, easily perceived by beginners, following the fluency of the voice and the instruction in the session. Thus, they can enjoy the countless beneficial effects, which follow the line of the proposed goal: to reduce stress and pain, to improve memory, to decrease anxiety and depression, to combat insomnia, etc.
HEALING WITH SINGING BOWLS AND BELLS
In addition to the sound of the human voice, nonvocal vibrations bring strong attention during a meditation session, transforming the unique vibration into a chorus of harmonies.
Singing bowls emit pure vibrations that have a tremendous power of alignment and energy rebalancing as they touch every cell in the body. Their alignment occurs when the human body repeatedly encounters these pure vibrations, spread to every cell.
The vibrations can continue to spread in the body for several days, providing an aura-healing massage perceived like waves. The best known are the bowls from Tibet and Nepal or crystal bowls. Tibet and Nepal bowls are made of copper, tin, zinc, iron, gold, or silver.
When these bowls are touched, waves of pure healing vibrations are created, which transmit sounds from our body to the air and water, giving it a sonic massage. The power of these alloys lies in the fact that each vibrates at a different speed that spreads in the human body, producing the stage of relaxation and vitalization.
The crystal bowl is made of quartz crystal, whose shape and consistency allow the vibration to have an endless echo and the physical properties of quartz amplify, channel, and transform energy. Depending on its size and design, the bowl produces the desired vibration (sound or specific musical notes) corresponding to a particular energy center in the body.
Bells synchronize the body’s frequency, and their vibration helps treat mental imbalance (stress disorder, insomnia, depression, anxiety).
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MEDITATION WITH MANTRAS
The mantra is considered the vehicle of your mind (Sanskrit: “man”- mind and “tra”- vehicle), a tool that you use to transport your mind from a state of activity to one of peace at a much deeper level. Depending on the mantra, it can have different purposes: healing, spiritual, material, mystical, or devotional.
Mantras are based on the 50 letters of the Sanskrit alphabet and can consist of a single letter, a syllable or more, a word, or a sentence. But the actual value of mantras is not given by their meaning, whatever it may be, but by their vibration, most of them being sounds or syllables, which do not necessarily have a definition.
These can be said aloud or in your mind. When a mantra is uttered aloud, it aims to concentrate, intensify, and expand consciousness. A whispered mantra is a thousand times more beneficial than one said aloud, and a mantra repeated in the mind is a thousand times more potent than a whispered one.
Repeating the mantra brings the body into a state of deep peace, and its power lies in truly detaching from the thoughts in your mind, the sounds in the environment, and the physical sensations in the body. You breathe more slowly, feel more accessible, the past and the speculation about the future disappear, and you transform from a person who breathes into a silent witness and a unitary being, living the peace, supreme happiness where your Self is unconditional and pure.
BRAINWAVES-BINAURAL SOUNDS
Modern science confirms that certain sound waves can create different types of brainwaves. So, when a vibration is produced, your brain perceives and reacts by adapting.
Brainwave uses repetitive sounds or music to get the brain to “sync up” or entrain. Your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors create a brainwave frequency signature. You can control these brainwaves through sound and music, creating any state of mind you want.
This is the reason why people love music. Imagine the great feeling of improving yourself, your health, wealth, and abundance quickly and effortlessly.
Depending on the frequency, binaural sounds can produce different states of perception, induce relaxation and sleepiness, enhance focus, concentration, and creativity, or suppress pain. Powerful soundwaves clear negative thought patterns from the deepest level of your subconscious mind.
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Five sound waves, depending on the frequency of each, induce the brain into different states:
Beta Waves: 13-30 Hz is high and prominent when a person is alert, and its characteristic is the busy, restless mind and active concentration. It is used to access the state of focused attention when you work on tasks, while the programming happens at a background level.
Alpha Waves: 8-13 Hz induce a relaxed state of wakefulness. When activity is reduced, the rhythm of your brainwaves slows down, and you enter a deep state of mental and physical relaxation and emotional openness.
Theta Waves: 4-8 Hz. In the rhythm of the theta waves, the feeling of openness turns into a state of Universal awareness, which occurs just before falling asleep and right when you start to wake up. This state is excellent for learning, intuition, and imagination.
Delta Waves: 0-4 Hz are low-frequency waves that occur at the most profound meditative state of mind and cause deep unconscious sleep and relaxation to allow clearing emotional intelligence. These waves promote healing and regeneration.
Gamma Waves: 80-100 Hz represents the Universal knowledge in which the brain is in a state of maximum and fully conscious receptivity, but in which you are disconnected from its activity. In this state, you are less yourself and more the higher Self.
SONIC ACUPUNCTURE
It is a therapy in which, instead of using needles in specific energy meridians of the body, calibrated tuning forks apply particular vibrations at different stimulation points. Through this therapy, the vibration of tuning forks can heal organs, touch tissues and cells, release tension and energy, relieve muscle and bone pain, and treat emotional illness by bringing emotional balance.
Disclosure: Some of the links on this website are affiliate links. I may earn a commission if you click through any of them and purchase at no additional cost. I only recommend products or services I trust and believe will add value to my readers. For more information, read the entire affiliate disclosure here.
SHAMANISM
It is an ancient healing technique and way of life to help awaken and expand consciousness. The shamanic magical ceremonies use sound frequency, a vibration that enters an altered state of consciousness, and the body and spirit respond to self-healing in front of the physical illness. Their music, composed of maracas, drums, wind instruments, and prayers, can reach high levels of awareness, creating internal and external harmony with creation.
BONNY METHOD OF GUIDED IMAGERY AND MUSIC (GIM)
It was developed by a music therapist and researcher in the USA, on her name Helen Bonny. Her technique is a classical music and imagery approach to stimulate the journey of the imagination to explore inner experiences, consciousness, and transformation. This technique is used to improve psychological and physiological health.
It is for souls and hearts to dance and sing.
MY FINAL THOUGHTS
No matter what life throws at you, music will always soften the blow, so let it be a subconscious trigger to improve your emotional, spiritual, physical, and social health and enhance your mental well-being for a better quality of life.
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Till next time…
Heal The Wounds Of Your Soul and Mind!
Founder of Dare & Be.
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Nice article. Music heals i must say. Because the ability to engage with music remains intact late into the disease process, music therapy can help to evoke memories, reduce agitation, assist communication, and improve physical coordination. I think i will spend more time listening to music. I will follow the guidelines you gave in this article.Thanks for this
Hi David,
Thank you very much for stopping by and for your appreciation.
Am very Pleased to have found your website. Without Music the world would be empty and a dance without instrument there won’t be moves. i just listed to the musics and for sure i was relaxed. Music has always been my therapy especially when am missing home. Migrating to a new country leave alone to another continente. Loneliness and homesick make a lot of people to give up and get depressed, but listening to music of soothing and for your culture makes a day, months, and years pass by quickly. I agree There is always healing ,soothing, and smile. Keep on healing !!
Hello Eve,
What beautiful and profound words you said. I am glad to meet you, and I appreciate the fact that you shared with us a part of your story. I feel the same say as you, because also I have been out of my home country for 19 years.
I love music in general, for what it conveys to me, for what makes me feel; but also the special healing music that I use both for personal use and in therapies with my clients.
Hello, a big thanks to you for sharing this insightful post on healing music. It is very correct for one to say that music does helo create an emotional balance, to influence thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and behaviors. I am basically a lover of music, it has so many great effects. Anyways I really find this healing techniques and instruments interesting. I would try some of these techniques, because I am curious of the experience.
Hi Sheddy,
I am glad to see you here. Thank you for stopping by, and for showing interest for the topic of this article. I highly recommend you to start with a guided meditation, to get used to, and after a while you can meditate as well with Mantra. It will help you a lot for concentration and focus. You can use as well the brainwaves for different states that you want to experience.
Thank you for this content, Diana. In my personal experience when I listen to certain types of music, I get chills and can feel different emotions run through my body. Reading this article give me more understanding on how and why that happens. Can healing happen with all music, or does it have to be a specific type of music? Also when it comes to the binaural sounds how is that information determined? What methods to the scientists use to determine these things?
Hello Jerome,
Thank you for your interest and questions. And to give you the answers…
I think we all experienced listening to different styles of music, the emotions they convey to us. Like me, you could feel as well good mood, energy, or even sadness or irritation, depending on type of music and its chords; because the major chords produce positive emotions, and the minor chords produce negative emotions.
Instead, healing music is created by specialists in music therapy and percussion, who create musical chords that emit vibrations that resonate with the vibration of the human body, not only to influence positive, but also to heal our spirit, mind and body.
And as for the second question…according to my general knowledge, not medical because I am not in the field, I can give you as an exemple three ways by which brainwaves can be measured. The fisrt one, I know that is very risky and consists in the penetration of the electrocodes in the cortex; the second one, uses electrodes draped over the surface of the cortex, less risky; and the third and the best known, is EEG (electroencephalography) without any risk, and consists on placing electrocodes on the scalp.
I hope I gave you clear answers, and you are always welcome to interact at the new updates.
I’m always impressed with the power of music and the different ways music can improve our daily experiences and feelings. I know the bowls from Nepal, and even if I was skeptical the first time I heard about them, I can now affirm that their sound is extremely relaxing and the quality of their vibration can really change your mood. But I didn’t know the different types of waves, so thank you so much for teaching me something new!
Hello Rosalia,
Thank you for stopping by. I am happy to know that my article was useful for you. You are more than welcome to visit the website anytime for new updates.
Hi! I really like you website. It’s looks amazing! I wish I can crate a wonderful website like you too. Over all, I really like the way you write the article. It looks neat and beautiful. And about the content, it so much powerful for people who love music. It remind me of my dad. When he was in the hospital, he ask me to find him music and songs that he used to listen to it when he were kids. It’s so hard for me to do that for him. Because music are always update and people like to compose a new one everyday. However, I can feel that music can make a sick people feel better by listen to them. Also in my own experience, I love to listen to music when I feel weak and lonely. Then, I can feel that music becomes my close friends and comfort me. So I agree with your article 100 percent and love what you write it. Thanks and have a great day.
Hello Paw,
Thank you for taking the time to read the article, for your appreciation, and for your kindness to share your story. For many people, the music is the tool that touches their souls. The spectrum of music in general is so wide that everyone can resonate with their own style of music. It doesn’t matter if it’s classical music, pop, rock, or specially created healing music as mantras, brainwaves music, it is important to bring that emotional state that can heal, relax, bring joy, energize, and bring comfort to every person who listens to it. Thank you for stopping by.