(#44) Finding Balance with Sound Healing for Stress and Anxiety Relief
May 29, 2024Episode 44
Rae The Somatic Coach
On today's episode of The Raediant Life Podcast, your host Rae shares about the healing qualities that sound healing has to offer for stress, anxiety relief, and finding balance in the mind body and soul! Tune in to receive:
Understand the difference between stress and anxiety and how sound healing can be transformative for both
Learn about what sound healing is and it's historical roots
The connection between the brain, the body, and sound for anxiety relief
How you can practically apply sound healing modalities in everyday life
Participate in Curious Convos. Share your questions and topic requests!
Disclaimer: Please remember that the information shared on this podcast is intended to inspire, educate, and support you on your personal journey. It does not substitute for professional mental health advice. I am not a psychologist or medical professional. If you are experiencing any emotional distress, mental health challenges, or medical conditions, please seek help from a qualified professional.
On today's episode of The Raediant Life Podcast, your host Rae shares about the healing qualities that sound healing has to offer for stress, anxiety relief, and finding balance in the mind body and soul! Tune in to receive:
Understand the difference between stress and anxiety and how sound healing can be transformative for both
Learn about what sound healing is and it's historical roots
The connection between the brain, the body, and sound for anxiety relief
How you can practically apply sound healing modalities in everyday life
Participate in Curious Convos. Share your questions and topic requests!
Disclaimer: Please remember that the information shared on this podcast is intended to inspire, educate, and support you on your personal journey. It does not substitute for professional mental health advice. I am not a psychologist or medical professional. If you are experiencing any emotional distress, mental health challenges, or medical conditions, please seek help from a qualified professional.
Speaker 1:
Welcome to the Radiant Life Podcast. I'm your host, rae, the Somatic Coach, and I'm here to support you in healing your past, living in the present and creating your future so that you can become the most centered, embodied and happiest version of yourself. Each week, I'll be bringing you episodes to help you navigate life's challenges, ease stress and tension and learn more about holistic healing, spirituality and wellness. If you're interested in becoming the best version of yourself so that you can live the life of your dreams, then you're in the right place. Subscribe to the podcast and the monthly newsletter and follow me on Instagram and TikTok to know when new episodes are released each week. I am so happy that you've landed here. Let's dive in. Welcome back to the podcast. If you are new here, I'm Rae, I'm a somatic coach and breathwork facilitator, and if you aren't new here, welcome back. I'm so glad that you're here tuning into today's episode. So, as we move into today's episode, I'm recording it this episode right before Memorial Day weekend. I can't believe it that it's this weekend and I'm really looking forward to just being on the beach. We're going to have good weather Hopefully that's what it's looking like and so, yeah, I'm excited to just spend some time on the beach, kick things off for summer. Yeah, I'm excited to just spend some time on the beach, kick things off for summer, and I hope that if you are in the Long Island area or in New York or wherever you are in the world, that you had a nice Memorial Day weekend as well. And for today's episode we'll be diving into sound healing, and I chose this topic for this week's episode because I've been incorporating sound healing more and more into my group classes, my in-person classes and I personally just I love sound healing in general. So today we'll be chatting about how it can be helpful for stress and anxiety, what it is, and just so much more. So I hope that you enjoy today's episode. So, to kick things off, I thought it would be helpful to talk a little bit about stress and anxiety and maybe the differences between them, and then why sound healing is so helpful for anxiety relief.
Speaker 1:
So stress is usually a response to any kind of external pressure that we might be experiencing. It's typically short-term and it might show up as feeling tension, irritability, fatigue. You might see it show up in having work deadlines, financial stress, relationship challenges, significant life changes, and then we have anxiety, which is a little bit more of a persistent feeling of worry or fear, without necessarily having an identifiable cause, and usually it's more long-lasting as well. So this might look like generally feeling restless, having excessive worry, maybe even some avoidance tendencies, and anxiety can be triggered by stress, but otherwise there's not usually always like a clear cause and it's more of a constant worry, and we can use work as an example. So with work, stress might show up as having deadlines, feeling pressure to perform, maybe having conflict with some of your co-workers or colleagues, and anxiety can show up as constantly worrying about your performance, being very fearful of making any mistakes and maybe even dreading any kind of projects because you feel that immediate pressure, even if the project isn't necessarily in that present moment. So we can see how they show up a little bit differently in our lives and some things that we can do about both of them. Of course, I always talk about breathwork, so breathwork is definitely my favorite modality for navigating stress and anxiety sound healing, which we'll be talking about today, somatic work, inner child work, mindset work. So I thought that that would be helpful to kind of just share a little bit about what the differences are between the two, because sometimes they can get meshed together, and today we'll be chatting and diving into sound healing as that modality that will help us with either of those areas. So what is sound healing? Sound healing is using a particular vibration as medicine to repair any imbalances that we might be experiencing in the mind, in the body, in the spirit, in the soul. So it's using the vibration as the quality of healing.
Speaker 1:
Just last week, I was watching Netflix with my husband and we were watching Dinner Time Live with David Chang, which is this show where he's this chef and he hosts these two different guests and each time there are two different people and the show is streamed live on Netflix, so it can be very funny. He has a lot of comedians on there and my husband and I were watching just a few weeks ago and he had Little John and Jay Pharoah, and Jay Pharoah is like an actor, comedian and impressionist and it was so cool to watch him give all these different impressions, while David Chang was like cooking for him and it was really cool. Little John talks about how he has a meditation album now, which I had no idea, and that he meditates before each of his performances, and he also talked about sound healing and I was so excited and he talked about the specific hertz which we'll get into, which is 285 hertz, and he used that to physically heal. I don't remember if he had surgery or if it was from COVID, but it was something physical that he was talking about, where he suggested to he's like oh like, use 285 hertz, and I thought that was cool, that it's that it was just something that was on Netflix being talked about.
Speaker 1:
So sound healing specifically has been practiced over thousands of years by so many different cultures. The most ancient is from shamanic practices, but it's believed that illnesses were caused by evil and that using the right sound would rid the body of the evil and bring it back into balance. And one of the oldest instruments known was from the Australian Aborigines and they created the didgeridoo, which is such a fun word to say didgeridoo, so you can Google that and see what it looks like. But music in general was used for healing in so many different cultures Greece, china, egyptians, india, native Americans. Native Americans believed that the drum was the heartbeat of Mother Earth and if you've ever been to a sound bath session where someone has a drum, it's such a cool experience and I went to one a few months ago where the drum was more of the center of the experience. When I do sound healing I use crystal quartz bowls and I'll go into that in a little bit, but having the sound of the drum was really really cool. To that in a little bit, but having the sound of the drum was really really cool.
Speaker 1:
And hearing the sound, it has an effect on our brain and our body. So sound is a little bit. You know it's different. It needs a medium to flow through, like air or water, whereas light it can travel through space. And so what the sound is doing it's reducing our pain by activating an endorphin pathway and blocking any pain signals that might be being transmitted to the brain. And what this does? It lowers anxiety, it lowers stress and it boosts the immune system. And you'll even see today, in more modern practices, you'll see that sometimes they use music and sound to help patients even with childbirth, which is pretty cool. So labor, childbirth and recovery, and so when it comes to sound healing and anxiety relief, there are three things that I'll highlight from the more science perspective that explain what exactly is happening with a sound healing session for stress and anxiety relief.
Speaker 1:
So the first is this term. That's called entrainment, and this is when the brain synchronizes its frequency to an external rhythm. So the brain's electrical activity matches the rhythm of the sound, and if you've heard of different sound waves, I'll go through each of them right now. This is why these waves are suggested and what's exactly happening in the body when you go to a sound healing or you listen to a sound frequency on your headphones or something. So the first is delta waves. This is used for deep sleep and relaxation. Then you have theta waves. This is great for meditative states, creativity and intuition. You have alpha waves, which is for relaxation while awake, meditative states as well. Beta waves, which is active thinking and focus, and too much of the beta waves is what actually can lead to anxiety, and sound healing is bringing you into the alpha and theta brainwaves. So sound healing is bringing you into the meditative state, the creativity, the intuition and the relaxation while you're awake, and meditative state while you're awake as well.
Speaker 1:
And what the sound healing is also doing is bringing your body into a parasympathetic nervous system state. So this is something that I've talked about in the past, but this is the part of the body that is responsible for rest and digest, so it counteracts that fight or flight response. So this is what I mean when I say that breathwork will change the landscape of your nervous system. It's because it's putting you in a parasympathetic state, and that's also what sound healing is doing. So with sound, it allows your body to move into that parasympathetic nervous system state, which will reduce your heart rate, it will lower your blood pressure and it will help you to feel very calm. And I'll put a link in the show notes for what's considered the most relaxing song in the world. That's pretty cool, but we've all experienced some sort of shift, whether it was listening to a song or music, and that song or music elicits some emotional response from us or it brings back a powerful memory. And that is the same exact concept that you can use with sound and with music for feeling calm and feeling less of an anxious state or an anxious mind. So I'll leave that link in the show notes and definitely check it out.
Speaker 1:
And another element of sound healing that I'll mention is called resonance, and this builds off of the entrainment aspect that I was speaking about just a few moments ago, but it basically means that the body has its own natural frequency and what the sound healing is doing is bringing the body's frequency and vibration into balance and harmony. So if there would be any part of your body like a chakra, an energy center, that is out of balance, the sound will help with balancing all of the chakras out. And what's cool is you don't necessarily need to use a specific frequency for a specific chakra. All of the frequencies will balance out the whole body, which I think is pretty cool.
Speaker 1:
And another part of what is happening in the body, in the brain, and how sound is helpful for anxiety relief, is something that's called the sulfeggio tones, and the sulfeggio tones were used by Gregorian monks, and there was a set of tones that each tone was believed to have a specific healing property, either psychological, emotional, spiritual or physical. And when this was first discovered at the time, like so many years ago, the Pope had considered them to be too sacred to share with other people, and so they were banned. And once they were rediscovered, research now shows that each of these frequencies can create positive effects on your DNA and on your physical body. So I'll go through each of each of them now. So the first is 396 hertz, and this is for guilt and fear. You have 417, and that's for facilitating change and new beginnings. 528, which is good for DNA repair, transformation, facilitating miracles. 639, which is relationships and communication. 741, which is awakening intuition. 852, which is spiritual awakening and alignment. 174, which is for pain relief, and then 285, which is the same frequency that little John mentioned on that Netflix series, which is helpful for healing tissues and organs and physical injuries. And so what that means is when you're facilitating sound at that specific frequency, your body will find resonance with that frequency and be able to heal in that way.
Speaker 1:
And there are so many different forms of sound healing. There's binaural beats, tuning forks, sound bath, the crystal sound bath. That's what I facilitate music therapy, tibetan singing bowls, gongs, nature sounds, chanting and mantras, and I use the crystal singing bowls. Currently this is what I do in my in-person classes. So typically what I'll do is a meditation in the beginning of the class, we'll do some meditative breath work and then we'll do sound healing and we'll close the class with some shares and experiences, close the class with some shares and experiences. But the resonance of the bowls is what helps to balance the body's energy, to help you feel deeply relaxed, release stress and find balance in all of your different energy centers in the body, and what's great about sound is that you can incorporate this modality into your daily life for stress relief, for anxiety relief. So that could look like doing morning meditations with binaural beats, using them before you go to sleep, listening to relaxing, calming music before bed, coming to a sound bath session, coming to a sound healing and then there are so many different offerings on YouTube. They do have sound baths online that you can listen to, and so really kind of exploring and seeing how sound can support you with anxiety and stress would be really cool.
Speaker 1:
So a quick recap of what we went over in today's episode we talked about stress and anxiety. We talked about what sounds healing is and the history to it, how it's been used in so many different cultures over the years, the effects that sound has on the brain and the body, and what exactly is happening in the body when our stress is decreasing and our anxiety is decreasing and why that is physically showing up in the body. We talked about the parasympathetic nervous system, the different forms of sound healing and crystal singing bowls, which is what I use in my classes. So to close out today's episode, I'd love to share with you a few different events that I have coming up over the next few weeks. So next week I'll be teaching breathwork and sound healing for anxiety relief at Yoga Shack. This is an in-person class and it's in Bethpage, new York. And then the following week there are a few different classes. One is a virtual masterclass collaboration with Rachie Jo, who was also on the podcast earlier this year, and that masterclass is virtual online and it's all about relieving stress and being bloat-free for the summer. So Rachie Jo is a nutrition and health coach and so she's going to be bringing that aspect of it and I'll be bringing breathwork, nervous system regulation, stress relief into the masterclass as well. So I'm excited for that one. It should be fun. There's also a mini retreat that's coming up called Jupiter and Gemini, where you'll receive a personalized astrological reading of what that means for you, and you'll also experience sound healing, breath work, communing with your divine team, which is really cool. So spiritual connection and I'm not an expert in astrology by any means, but I can share that. My chart shows that this upcoming year will be very expansive for me spiritually, so I'm excited to tap into more of my spiritual gifts and see what's in store for me this year.
Speaker 1:
So thank you so much for tuning into today's episode. I absolutely love recording these for you. I hope that you enjoyed this one. If you want to chat about anything that I've mentioned, send me a DM and I'll put all the links of the upcoming events in the show notes as well. So definitely check those out, and I hope that you have an incredible rest of your week. I hope you have an incredible rest of your day and I will talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:
Thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode. If you were moved or inspired, please share with me by leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. It means the world to me and I am so appreciative for your support in helping my podcast grow. If we aren't already connected on social media, head over to Instagram and TikTok and follow me at Ray the Somatic Coach. Make sure you check out the show notes of today's episode for links to freebies, opportunities to work with me and ways we can stay connected outside of the podcast. I'm so happy that you're here and I can now wait to talk with you on our next episode of the Radiant Life Podcast.
