Listening with your whole body
Illustrations: Lucile Farroni, Colagene, Creative Clinic
by Kim Thai
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My daily mindfulness practice looks like what you might expect when you hear the words daily mindfulness practice: I pray at my altar and then sit and meditate for 15 minutes. But through the years, I have tried a menu of different centering modalities. This has ranged from quirky to incredibly rich experiences.
What has been consistently effective in helping me through my struggles, sometimes almost instantaneously, has been the rapture of sound. Whether it be mantras, singing bowls, brown noise, or Maggie Rogers’ latest single, sound has always helped ease my suffering. Intentionally using sound to support well-being has now become a daily practice for me and one that I share with others as a mindfulness teacher. I start the day listening to practice songs from Buddhist Zen Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village Community, jam out to classical while I write (or to rap/ top-40 dance songs when I have to meet a deadline), and usually end the night with jazz music to unwind. Depending on the day, I play a little guitar, banjo, or harmonium to help me break up any mental monotony I might be feeling.
And, for me, it works.
Lucile Farroni
I’m not alone in my experience. Studies show that music may reduce actual pain. Though the methods might be slightly different, research has been demonstrating a connection between improved health and sound for some time now, like how Tibetan singing bowls and gongs might help reduce tension, anger, and fatigue. In many ways, this shouldn’t be a surprise. We’ve known for some time that music has been linked to furthering creativity and improving memory, and more historically speaking, “Sound has an ancient kinship with meditation and healing. Sound healing has ancient roots in cultures all over the world, including Australian Aboriginal tribes who used the didgeridoo as a sound healing instrument for over 40,000 years,” Marlynn Wei M.D., J.D. says in Psychology Today.
I was reminded of the powerful effects of mantra recently when I tested out a legend that the Heart Sutra — considered to be the penultimate teaching in Buddhism — can heal any kind of suffering. After receiving some challenging news, my head spun out, spiraling into anxiety. I could feel my body tightening, my legs tensing up, my teeth grinding.
Feeling panic set in, I quickly searched for the Heart Sutra on YouTube and hit play. And, like magic, it became a balm for my heavy heart. My feelings didn’t go away, but they did become smaller. As I listened to monastics chant an ancient sutra, the expansive sound made my thoughts feel minuscule in comparison. The rhythm created a gateway to spaciousness, enough for me to take a breath, check in with my body, and stop my nervous system from going into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn mode.
I wound up listening to the Heart Sutra for the rest of the day. Grateful for whatever medicine it provided me at that moment. Many people over the years have theorized about the healing properties of the mantra — Is it the tone? The rhythm of the chant? The deeply enigmatic philosophical words? After feeling its powerful effects, I too started searching for answers.
“If we accept that sound is vibration and we know that vibration touches every part of our physical being, then we understand that sound is heard not only through our ears but through every cell in our bodies,” writes Dr. Mitchell Gaynor in his book The Healing Power of Sound.
Lucile Farroni
Sound, hypothetically, can impact us on a cellular level. Thankfully, we now have the technology to map electronic brain waves via electroencephalography (EEG), which gives us a window into how sound is affecting us on a biological level and further validates how sound can be hugely beneficial for our mental health.
Researchers are now observing that sound frequencies at 7.8 Hz can help get us into a flow state, which might improve creativity and productivity. When beats emit a frequency between 4-7 Hz, it can help reduce anxiety. There has even been research supporting the notion that listening to classical music can, in some situations, help to reduce crime rates.
Despite the recent breakthroughs in science, we are just starting to scratch the surface of understanding how awesome and profound the supportive qualities of sound are. For me, I am comforted by the science and research that helps my logical and cognitive brain better understand what is happening to me on a biological and physiological level… but I also know that certain things are easier to feel than understand.
Feeling how my entire body relaxed, melted even, while I chanted Om Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha (translated to “Gone gone, gone beyond, gone utterly beyond, Enlightenment hail!” or simply heading to the Other Shore) was something I will never be able to fully explain.
But I think that’s the point.
We might not ever completely understand every aspect of sound healing, and that in itself is a great reminder for us to simply keep listening with our whole selves.
Practice: listening with your whole body
Choose something to listen to. This can be a song, a sound (white noise or a vibrating metal bowl), or just generally the sounds inside and outside of your space.
You can either sit in a meditative posture (in a seat or cross-legged, upright) or my recommendation — lie down on the floor.
Once in your position, take three deep breaths, exhaling out of your mouth.
Take a moment to feel where your body is making contact with the ground and let yourself feel supported in this moment.
Close your eyes.
Start bringing your attention to what you decided to listen to.
Let the waves of the sound run over and through you. Allow yourself to be lost in the sound.
What do you hear? What textures does the sound have? What colors?
See where the sound shows up in your body. See what arises when listening.
If your mind wanders, take a deep breath to recenter yourself and then come back to the sound. Keep listening.