Create Your Own Healing Sound
You as an Agent of Shamanic Sound Healing
Engaging in shamanic sound healing is a mystical, creative, liberating experience. We watch and visualize and imagine the sound we make flows out and around our energy field and those around us, creating shifts. As we journey deeper into sound and the relationships with our compassionate helping spirits, we discover how sound carries intention out into the universe to be heard and acted upon. We experience directly how spirit ride sound in from non-ordinary reality to bring wisdom and power into ordinary reality, us, the room, the people we are working with, the Earth. We become attuned to Sound and its flow through us, very much like a Reiki attunement. We begin to hear and interpret the information and interpret the spiritual power that are encoded in the sounds that channel through us. Becoming the sound and enveloped in the divine, our perceptions of our worlds change, which results in powerful new ways of walking on Earth–supported, loved, safe, purposeful, intentional, unstoppable!
I hold your soul, consciousness and heart very tenderly, and honor the time and resources it takes to come into my healing space. And how much courage and drive. And I thank you, and bow deeply to you, in advance.
Setting an Altar:
Shamans tend to carry around a lot of “stuff”—altar items, sacreds, blankets, drums, rattles. Shamanic sound healers also carry their families of singing bowls, bells, gongs, and other sound-making instruments. You can begin very simply with a candle (which is optional) and your voice! Or you can place a cloth and meaningful objects around a candle and consider this an altar.
The Healing Process as Releasing and Filling: Catalytic vs Coherent Sound
At a fundamental level, healing involves two very basic processes: 1) releasing things that do not belong in the mind-body-spirit energetic system, and 2) filling with that which does belong– divine essence, high vibrational qualities, energies lost along the way of life’s circumstances and occurrences, that are in need of coming into being at this time.
Thus, in sound healing, we ask for and make sound that helps us with the release process— dense energies that are blocking us from wellness, negative or limiting thought-forms, obsolete ideas and beliefs that impede our progress, unproductive emotions and their energy signatures. We facilitate release of these by using “catalytic” sounds– sounds that you might experience as abrasive, unsettling, a little jarring. Most rattles provide catalytic sound, as do abrupt vocalizations, growling, sharp or staccato sounds. Catalytic sounds break up bound energy and create movement so that densities, unwanted and unneeded things can be released.
Once we have released, we then invite divine energies to fill us. We ask for power and wisdom to come from the spirit realms, from nature, from wherever you source high vibrational benevolent energies, qualities, ideas, thoughts, feelings. Inviting and filling is most effectively facilitated by sweet, melodious, gentle, powerfully harmonious “coherent” sound. Chants of the deities, lullabies, choir music, lovely songs and sounds are of coherent nature. Power, wisdom, high vibrational energies ride these sweet sounds into your system, filling any voids that may have been created through the releasing process. It is essential that when we release, we then fill.
The Ceremony
Creating Sacred Space: Inviting the Unseen Compassionate Realms
We begin by creating sacred space, imbuing the healing environment with Spirit. We call, sing, pray to those ones we know of and are familiar with, and also include those that may come who are new. We always call to the benevolent, compassionate helpers, no matter what level of experience we have. We say this explicitly as we call.
Most often we work with power animals, deities, gods and goddesses of the ages (Isis, Athena, Ganesh, Horus, Buddha, Allah, Christ, eg.) and other human-form spirits that come when we call for benevolent help. Light Beings, Intergalactic beings, the power of the planets, stars, the Earth, the sun, the elements are also often invoked to help with the healing. Your heart will guide you; your experience and willingness will expand your perceptions of who and what comes when you call.
How we then participate with these divine helpers that come varies and deepens with experience and time. We may become aware of their presence in a vague sense (“I sense something energetically shifting in the room”). We may have the experience of actively watching, feeling, hearing specific spiritual forms with our heart and minds eye (“ I sense Lion, Isis, Buddha, grandmother moon here in the room with me”). They may show us things in our mind’s eye that help direct the healing. We may go further and “merge” with them –internally joining with their energies and becoming one with them.
In this discussion, we begin simply by inviting the helping, compassionate benevolent spirits to come and be present. You can be as aware or unaware of their presence as your process unfolds. They may guide you through providing imagery or sensations, information /messages, or making you feel better, brighter. My temperature usually goes up noticeably as the room fills with spirits.
A Sound Healing Session with You:
1. Start by setting a side a bit of time, even 20 minutes.
2. Stand and greet the four directions (East, South, West, North), Above and Below, and ask for their compassion and benevolence to bless you. Ask them to guide you, and ride in on the sounds you make. Or call to the compassionate ones with whom you are familiar or are moved to call to.
3. Close your eyes and feel, and accept, where you are right now. Notice and appreciate your body, your mind, your feelings, your overall state of energy. Say thank you to you, and all of the gifts of your life.
4. Form an intention for yourself. State the positive version of this intention. If you want the pain in your knee to go away, a positive intention would be “may I walk with grace, ease, pain- free”. If you want to release something like stress or grief about a relationship, an intention could be stated like “please release this stress—its root energies and thoughts— and replace it with acceptance, ease, gratitude for the lessons from this relationship” or something similar.
Note that when we seek to release things, we must invite and fill with higher vibrational qualities—“nature abhors a vacuum”.
5. Close your eyes and begin to breathe deeply. Feel your rib cage and belly go up and down, in and out. Open your lips a bit and breathe out through your mouth. Now add some sound gently, to warm up your vocal instrument. Now, call to mind and hold in your heart the healing intention you formed. Ask the spirits to assist you in setting those intentions into motion.
6. Begin making sound. Let the sound come up from your belly…let it swirl around and past your heart, and then out. There is no mistake that our lungs and heart are in such proximity from an energetic perspective. Feel what it would be like to have your intention fulfilled, manifested, and make those sounds. Allow yourself an abstract, creative experience. You may find yourself at first self-conscious. This witnessing (and perhaps, judging) is totally normal. Just bring your awareness back to your heart, the feelings of your fulfilled intentions. Visualize from your heart’s perspective your manifesting wellness, new situation, eg.
Notice if some part of your body begins to vibrate. The thread of your intention may emerge in this initial part. Use the sound you are making to go deeper into your intention and pull out its form. Create with the sound you are making.
7. Experiment with coherent and catalytic sounds. If the barriers or impediments to your intentions could make sound, what would it be? Then invite catalytic sounds to break up these barriers and impediments to manifesting your intention. Sound with force, with abandon. As you feel the energy of these barriers begin to recede, call in grace, the divine light, the great mystery, Spirit, to fill you, your life, the new situation with sweet, coherent, melodious sound. Create anew with sound. Experiment, let yourself go.
8. When you feel like you are complete, stop and invite silence to carry the sounds into your beingness, and out into the universe to have their creative magical effects.
9. Write about how you feel now, what you noticed.
10. When we call the spirits in, we always thank them, and release them. You can simply say something like: “Thank you to all of the spirits that came, for your miraculous healing and for setting my intentions into motion in the most benevolent way. I release you from this healing ceremony, knowing that you are with me, out ahead of me on my path. Thank you!’