I’m very interested in the use of sound as
a mean of healing.
Just like most of us will take medicine if our body is sick, sound – if used correctly – is medicine for your mind and since it's well established that your mind controls your body, sound, in form of ‘music’ can make your body feel better, heal you, cure you.
Let me try to explain that a little better:
Listening to music is like swimming in the
ocean! Most of us will ‘go for a swim’ – flap around of the surface of the
ocean but only for a few minutes and only on a hot summer day. Few of us bother
to actually stick our head under water and hardly anybody at all ever dives in
and goes down. We are blissfully ignorant of what is ‘down there’.
Most people today will acknowledge that
seaweed is actually good for you. However, music is still considered of no real
importance and with few, if any, benefits at all, to your health. What a sad
mis-conception.
If we only dared to dive in…to the ocean,
to the world of music…we’d see the entire world of benefits from all the
plants…from the source of sound and music. Instead, our ignorance have us
flopping around on the surface, sick on pollutants and toxins, popping pills
that are nothing but a combination of chemicals in order to cure the symptom of
our illness rather than to eliminate the cause of it.
It’s not like the use of sounds…music…is
some new, freaky phenomenon. It’s been around for thousands of years. Tibetan
temple bells, Japanese gongs, bowls and mantras…you name it! And still, most of
us have no clue, because we simply just don’t know how to listen. We ‘hear’
stuff, but we never listen, intensely.
Allow me, please, to enter a quote that
well explains how to listen and what it is that happens to us, when we listen
intensely:
“”Listen
to the furthest away sound” were his instructions as he struck a large Japanese
temple bowl. The deep reverberations became a magic carpet of sonic vibrations,
leading us inward to the silence. Without the structure of melody or rhythm we
are encouraged to “be here, now”, as Ram Dass famously phrased it. As you tune
in, you will hear the subtle high overtones and sub-harmonics that are missed
with casual listening”
If you want to do something good for
yourself, invest in a set of head-phones with a soft cushioning rim (imagine a
tea-cup covering your entire ear without touching it) and start listening to
music. Everyone knows how music can relax you, but that’s about as far as
anybody will admit the benefits of music reach. Personally, I believe there are
much, much more benefits to music and sounds than mere relaxation. But first we
have to open our minds (and most of us are incredibly narrow minded) and learn
to listen…intensely.
Lots of scientific studies has been done on
pregnant mothers-to-be who played soft music and sounds to their unborn babies,
and every single study showed that when you played soft music to the unborn
baby, it’s heart-rate slowed right down, the baby (read: fetus) became calm and
peaceful.
Anyway! So there we are, splashing around on the surface, too dumb to clue in to the fact that we are sitting on (or swimming around of top of) a true chest of treasures that can cure you, heal you and bring you general well being through it’s abundance of richness and sources, whether you call them ‘medicine’, ‘nutrition’, ‘boosters’ or mere ‘snacks’.
Same thing with music. Music has a psychological effect that will often trigger a physical reaction. Music will calm you down or pump you up. It’s widely used by sports psychologists and other lay people, to calm people down as well as to rev them up, psych them up and get them to top performance.
Music is used as aphrodisiacs, in supermarkets, in malls, in elevators, on phones, in offices…anywhere! All to influence your mind and put you in the right mood. The potential for music is unfathomably incomprehensible, given the right application. It’s like trying to learn the entire galaxy and all it’s planets. It’s just…beyond comprehension for the human brain.
If you listen…intensely…to the right music
or even simple sounds, you will achieve feelings that are to impossible describe,
even for us who have tried it, but those feelings will be directly beneficial
to your physical well being. Taken to extremes, you can say that in some
instances, music can even save your life. Here I am thinking of the stressed
out junk food eating manager, fat and out of shape, who is just “waiting for a
heart attack to strike”. Losing weight and changing his diet would take a
little longer, but the kick-start would be to learn to relax by listening to,
say, new-age music and the heart rate would be guaranteed to drop dramatically.
I’m not always
good at expressing my thoughts, but I think that if we opened out minds and
listened to more music of the right kind…and learned to really listen properly…our
lives would be much better and we’d be much happier.
Whether music or sound, there is a whole World out there, waiting for you to discover it, take it into your life, your heart, nurture it and enrich your life from it.
You know best what types of music works for you, but it's high time to visit a few new planets in the galaxy. I'm already there, in deep space 9.
No comments:
Post a Comment