Rebecca White Raven’s sound therapy setup. Photo: Ryan Pepper/The Fulcrum
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Wellness Week at the University of Oregon offers a variety of meditation experiences
First off, I’ll say that I’m not a New Age person, nor am I a wellness, meditation, or feel-good person. Feeling at peace and tranquility with the universe is not my thing. Nevertheless, I’ve been interested in sound healing for years, and thanks to Wellness Week at the University of Ottawa, I was finally able to give it a try.
And then just 20 minutes or so after someone told me to relax, the anxiety started to hit me.
Sound healing, also known as sound bath, is exactly what it sounds like: healing through sound. Healers use a variety of percussion instruments, primarily gongs, singing bowls and other oriental instruments, to help you relax. It is a form of meditation with an auditory component.
The principle of sound healing is that the healing equipment used puts a person into a sleep-like state: the sounds aim to calm the brain into a “theta wave” space, just like when you are asleep.
“The purpose of these types of instruments is to get you into that state,” said Rebecca White Raven, who led the session. “You have to have the intention to go there, but if you go with that intention, it goes a long way in relaxing yourself so much.”
White Raven said the goal was to hit the sweet spot between sleep and wakefulness. Maybe that was my problem; reaching that point didn’t make me feel relaxed. Judging by the questions and photo requests that followed after the session, it seems that sound healing really worked for the other participants in the room; I’m happy for them. But for me, that “sweet spot” felt like a six-hour overnight Greyhound ride that brought me pretty close to sleep without actually falling asleep.
So, I left the store feeling oddly unwell. If you’re a normal person who eats a decent breakfast and doesn’t buy a crappy drink at Starbucks when you know your preferences but can’t resist trying something new, you might be able to enter theta state. It’s worth a try.
But sound healing is not just about taking a nap. White Raven emphasized that a sound healing session is a place to release many of the negative and trapped emotions we carry with us.
“It comes from ourselves and what we’re ready to do. Sometimes we need to let things go. So if you’re holding on to an emotional pattern, something that you’ve never felt fully in your life, sound can help you bring it out, feel it, and send it out into the earth.”
White Raven plays a variety of instruments, and the centerpiece of her ensemble is a quartz singing bowl or a gong, depending on the class she teaches, although gongs are more powerful than bowls and not everyone prefers them.
White Raven also uses tingshas (small, high-pitched cymbals that originate from Tibetan Buddhist practices), Tibetan metal bowls that are more polyphonic than quartz bowls, frame drums, tuning forks, ocean drums that mimic the sound of waves crashing on the shore incredibly well, steel tongue drums, small rain sticks, and koshi chimes (basically wind chimes).
While the sound therapy session didn’t do anything particularly good for me, it didn’t dampen my interest in meditation, and as someone who has never meditated before, sound therapy had the added bonus of giving me some sounds to focus on when my mind inevitably started to wander.
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