Sound therapy helps people cope with stress and trauma

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As the grey, suede wand caressed the rim of the dark purple crystal alchemy bowl, a peaceful buzzing reverberated throughout the sound studio, as if a swarm of bees were singing a lullaby.

The two musicians started to play multiple bowls at the same time, each with different colors and unique sounds. Their pitches ranged from low to high like a middle school choir of adolescent teens going through puberty.

Along with singing bowls, they clashed together wooden chimes, waved spiritual wands and played percussion instruments that bathed the room with streams of sound.

To complement the blissful tunes of the instruments, the women used their voices to create a relaxing harmony.

Rebecca Dru and Misti Cooper are not just sound therapists. They serve as spiritual entrepreneurs prepared to take people on sound voyages with the purpose of releasing negative energy trapped in the crevasses of their bodies.

The truth of the matter is that all pain or trauma is stored in the molecules of your cells, Dru said. The only way to release that is through sound.

Sound therapy uses frequencies, music and special instruments played in therapeutic ways, combined with deep self-reflection techniques to improve health and well being, according to the British Academy of Sound Therapy (BAST).

Dr. Helen Lavretsky, a geriatric psychiatrist and professor in the Department of Psychiatry at University of California, Los Angeles, said there are many health benefits to sound healing. It is often used with people who have sleep disorders because it helps them relax.

People will buy sound machines so they can listen to classical music, or any relaxing musical preference or gongs in order to fall asleep, so there are multiple health effects to sound healing, Lavretsky said.

According to a 2016 medical study published in the Journal of Evidence-Based Integrative Medicine, participants reported significantly less tension, anger, fatigue and depressed mood.

According to Dru, a woman had developed a brain issue and lost all functions with her body to the point of spoon-feeding.  At the hospital, her mother felt an urge to start humming her daughter’s favorite songs.

In humming, the daughter was brought back and is fine now, Dru said. She can sing and do whatever because sound is transformative.

Sound is an effective method of therapy because the human bodies are virtually made of sound, according to Lavretsky.

Our body constantly vibrates at a certain frequency,§ Lavretsky said. If there is an erratic frequency, the way to calm down and bring it to a coherent state of relaxation is to play music.

The human body is made of sound Lavretsky said, so this means certain frequencies can alter or change cell structure.

Cooper said if a cancer cell decides to turn against itself in the body, sound can abolish that cell if the frequency is just right. Because the diseased cell would be dead, it would not be able to regenerate.

Think about an opera singer that holds up a crystal glass and she sings a pitch and the frequency breaks the glass, Cooper said. It is the same concept.

Despite using a plethora of sound healing instruments, the voice is Drus specialty. She uses it to open neural pathways in the brain.  

My favorite thing, is the voice because it doesn’t cost you anything, Dru said. It’s with you all the time and it＊s in your body. So it affects you probably like nothing else. You don＊t have to know how to sing in order to create sound either. What you have to learn how to do is create the harmonics in the sound.

Dru started playing piano at 2 and started working with kids when she was seven. She believes that by using sound, movement and rhythm with children, she can open up new neural pathways in the brain.

At elementary schools, Dru has worked with troubled youth who got behind in class because a new lesson would begin before they understood the last one. 

The kids that had the most problems were doing these rhythms I could never do, Dru said. I said let’s try doing your times tables or your spelling while doing the rhythms again, and they knew it. They remembered it.

By opening neural pathways in the brain, it releases the stress and trauma trapped in the cells of the body, Cooper said, and she added that this results in creating sounds that may come off as inhuman.

After you release them, all of a sudden you are lifted, you are lighter and you feel better,§ Cooper said. That is because you have allowed that sound, that frequency, that vibration to come out of the cells and tissues of the body.§

At 3, Cooper said she was awakened by a spirit in the middle of the night and instructed to head to the garage. When she opened the door, there was an energy that Cooper described as jagged, and it started throwing electricity at her.

It was like match sticks on my skin started burning,§ Cooper said. ※It got to a point where I thought I was going to die, but then all of a sudden I just go into a trance and I was lifted up and filled with so much electricity. Till this day, I can feel it running through my body.

After this experience, Cooper said she was able to see energy waves coming toward her off of people, which sparked her career as a spiritual alchemist.

When I had these out-of-body experiences, I became like a billion pieces of stars out in the universe,§ Cooper said. I was nothing,  and, yet, I was everything.

Cooper said the spirit showed her the sequencing of creation through her chakras.

According to Cooper, chakras are portals in the body that focus on something different in our lives. For example, the root chakra is about stability, grounding and being on the earth plane. It is about survival mode, food and shelter.

These chakras also spin just like how a galaxy spins, said Cooper, who added that because our bodies are made of sound, it is going to mirror everything that is in outer space.

By monitoring the rate of spin of your chakras, that actually will help you become a healthier person, Cooper said. So they shouldn’t be spinning too slow or too fast. It is all about being in balance.§

Cooper does her healing through chakras by using them as a portal. She said you can heal your body through sound instead of taking medicine.

Countries outside of the United States are more active in using this kind of therapy in a clinical setting, but the U.S. is slowly catching up to them according to Lavretsky.

The U.S. healthcare system is now picking up on recognizing alternative and integrative medicine, Lavretsky said. They are finding ways of improving outcomes of mainstream medicine.

With children living in an era of coping with their pain and trauma by turning to drugs and violence, Dru emphasized that the children need to find an outlet that is productive.

I have over a 1,000 kids that I have worked with, and I said to them that you have a choice in life, Dru said. You want to get into gangs? You want to do drugs? You want to get into fights? That’s your choice, or you can find an outlet.

Dru and Cooper believe that society is too busy finding everything wrong with each other instead of going about life in a simple loving way.

The basis of our meditations are sound, light and love, Cooper said. And I think that’s one thing that we as humanity forget.