On the healing power of sound

Last night, Nicole treated me to a sound therapy session as part of her certification requirements. She’s working on her Level II Practitioner’s diploma to become a certified Sound Therapist through the Sound Healing Academy; as part of that, she has to practice with diagnosis techniques and then come up with the right sound therapy treatment.

I laid on the massage table, and she used her “grail,” a heart chakra-tuned quartz bowl with a handle that looks like, well, a grail. When she gets it ringing, it will hold the tone for minutes at a time. When she’s using it to diagnose, it changes tone when it passes over an area of the body that needs help.

I couldn’t hear it change tone, but she could. I was under a blanket, it was a little chilly in the room, but when she got to my heart chakra, I got so hot I had to take the blanket off. It stayed hot until she moved to the next, and then I got cold again almost immediately. It seemed weird, so I mentioned it, and we went on.

I was pretty tired from work, so I kind of fell a little asleep while she finished practicing diagnosing me, first with the grail, then a pendulum, and then she woke me up for muscle testing.

All the woo-tech agreed, my sacral chakra was tight, my solar chakra was over-energized, and my heart chakra was deficient. I certainly wasn’t going to argue, it’s srs woo bsns.

She had me lay down on a therapeutic warmed mat, and started playing the tones that were supposed to heal me. I slipped in and out of consciousness, but through the whole time I was laying there while she rang the bowls, there was a story unfolding about something important that I can’t remember now, about finding at last something I had lost, and letting something else go.

When she was done, I felt waaaaaaaay out of it. I sat up on the couch and just looked around, thinking nothing, feeling warm, heavy, relaxed, and still drifting in and out of consciousness. She walked me to bed and I laid down, and woke up this morning in the exact position I was in when I closed my eyes.

But something was different.

My brain is always spinning. I was born like this, but it got worse my whole life. I drank a lot trying to mute it, but then my liver broke. Now I deal with it without booze.

With meds and therapy, regular occult practices, the grace of the gods, and stubborn fucking pride, I make it work.

But my brain … it never really stops. If I take more meds than I take now, I get fat and disincarnational; I take just barely enough to stay productive without spinning out of control, and not so much that I slow down to the point of wanting to quit altogether.

But this morning I woke up to peace.

I just laid there, not thinking anything. I waited for a couple of minutes, for the hypomania to start. I wasn’t even scared or even tense waiting for it to come back, just at ease, watching my brain. Waiting. But the spins didn’t come back.

And it wasn’t even a big deal. I just went about the day, with smooches, and coffee, and work.

There’s something different today. My mind goes where I want. I can be interrupted while I’m thinking, and still remember where I was at in my head. Even now, I’m just sitting here reading what I wrote. I’m just doing what I’m doing, and I’m thinking about what I want to think about.

I’m not about to go off my meds, stop therapy, or anything radical. I don’t think sounds cured my mental illness. But the treatment had a palpable, lasting effect.

I haven’t felt like this since I was a child.