How I Got Into Sound Therapy

I am often asked the question of how I became involved with tuning forks. Here is the story of what led me to become a sound therapist.

I have been interested in the healing arts and human potential since I was 17 and stumbled across a copy of "TNT- The Power Within You". Up until that I had been a voracious reader of fiction; from that point on, I have continued to read obsessively, but books of the non-fiction self-help, health and wellness, science and spirituality sort.

I am a researcher by nature, and when I come across a subject that catches my interest, I will read a stack of books on the subject and then perhaps write an article, or, as has been the case the last few years because I have been in school, a paper.

In 1996, I was reading a stack of books on the use of color and sound healing. Having read some pop quantum physics I had ascertained that I was not, after all I had been taught in school, living in a billiard ball mechanistic universe of cause and effect, but rather in a dynamic living changing interacting soup of energy and vibration.

If we humans were fundamentally vibration, I reasoned,  it made a lot of sense to therapeutically treat vibration with vibration.

About 2/3 of the way through the stack, I (coincidentally) received a catalog in the mail with a set of "tuning forks for healing" in it. On impulse I ordered them.

At the time, I was part owner of the Vanilla Bean Cafe that I had started with my family in 1989. After 4 years of working crazy hours to build the restaurant and suffering from burnout and debilitating back pain, I decided to take a year off to go to massage school. I returned to the restaurant committed to working less hours and taking better care of myself, and started a small massage therapy practice on the side.

I had some massage clients who were willing to be guinea pigs and so I began to play with the tuning forks with them. The forks- the octave of C Major - came with very simple instructions: use the note of C over the root chakra, D over the 2nd chakra, E over the 3rd chakra, and so on.

So I did. I struck the forks and held them, one by one, over the chakras of my clients. And much to my surprise, the sound and the quality of the tone produced changed, depending on who and where I was holding it over. Sometimes it would sound flat, sometimes sharp, or dull, or fuzzy, or muted, or staticy, or pulsing, or any number of other strange and unexpected sounds.

You would think a tuning fork is a tuning fork is a tuning fork -it produces an objective sound, right? But that is not what I found at all. For example, if I held it over a place where someone claimed to be feeling pain, very often the note would sound full of static and noise. And if I contintinued to hold it there, after a while the static would sort of quiet down and the tone would clear and brighten.

And then the next week the person would come back and tell me that all of their pain had disappeared after our session. I started hearing fascinating feedback: "I felt calmer and clearer", "I haven't had a stomach ache since I saw you", "I haven't craved sugar at all", "I slept better than I have in a long time", and so on. Over time I had people requesting more sound and less massage and my process sort of evolved into a sound therapy practice.

So, this went on for a number of years, always just part time, more of a hobby than anything else. Then, in 2006, my life changed direction.  I was living in Vermont  (having sold my share of the Vanilla Bean and moved here in 2002) and intently growing a promising specialty food business making organic kettle corn.

 I was at work on  a business plan to take it to the next level, from hand-made to automated, when I had the somewhat mystical experience of hearing these words: "the World needs harmony more than it needs another snack food. Go to college, get degrees, and learn and teach about sound".

It felt agreeable to me. I was like, "OK", and within 6 weeks I had sold my business and enrolled in college. Happily, I am currently engaged in my last semester of graduate school where I am pursuring a "Masters in Integrative Education", and am about to conduct empirical research on Body Tuning as my thesis.

 So, what does this research entail? We'll save that for another post...

Time for a blog

This blog will provide me with an opportunity to share with people some updates on the sound therapy research I will be conducting over the next few months (and probably decades :)

Many people have expressed an interest in hearing about my outcomes, so this seems like an easy way to share without having to update my website continuously.

I'm also happy to use this forum to answer any questions you have about my work, my research, or sound healing in general. Stay posted!