A sound bath allows you to relax, and you don’t have to achieve anything. If you haven’t heard about a sound bath before, we’ll look at what it is, how they are created and how they heal us.
A sound bath sounds deliciously relaxing, and you don’t even really have to ‘achieve’ anything. If you haven’t heard about a sound bath before, we’ll look at what it is, how they are created and how they relax and heal us.
No water required
The most important thing that you need to know is that when you do ‘take’ a sound bath, the only thing you have “to do” is to hear and feel the music. Immerse yourself into the experience. It’s more than hearing; it’s listening with your whole beingness. Allow the sound to move through you and around you. Listening can bring you into a meditative state.
What is a sound bath?
It’s really quite simple. A sound bath is a variety of tones that are played live or recorded and intended usually towards relaxation and healing. They can be generated with a variety of instruments but are more commonly created using singing bowls, bells and tuning forks. They can be considered a form of meditation.
When they are intended to generate relaxing and healing tones, sound meditations are known to help with insomnia, anxiety, chronic pain, and even depression. But it is not just sound baths that are known to produce therapeutic effects. Other forms of music and sound equally possess healing effects. Music or, more specifically, the frequencies of sound have the capacity to heal and soothe.
We design musical instruments to manipulate the sound waves they produce. Even when we use our voice, we can control the sound through our tone. The vibrations that emanate from singing bowls are sound waves that vibrate and travel through matter.
What’s important here is not merely do we hear frequencies we feel them.
Benefits of a sound bath
When we are relaxed, we breathe more slowly and deeply. This relaxed state of beingness allows us to come into a synergistic state between our heart and brain – when they are harmonized, our nervous systems can listen to our bodies’ internal cues and work towards restoration. In addition, the vibrations of a tuning fork or singing bowl can restore balance to distinct parts of your body.
Studies show that sounds physically enter our bodies before being processed by the brain, unlike vision which must be filtered through the centers of the brain first before we react to it physically.
Listen to this extended version of our sound bath:
Sound baths reduce stress and relax the body
Below you’ll find a 10-minute sound bath. This piece primarily uses crystal singing bowls to produce tones to relax and soothe the mind-body. You don’t need to know how to meditate to experience the benefits of a sound bath meditation. You can bathe your home in this sound bath or yourself or fall asleep to it. This piece will place you in a relaxed meditative state.
Completely relax into the sound and allow it to wash over you.
This musical composition was created exclusively for Amy Adams/Mindful Soul Center, formerly known as Conscious Life Space, by Dmitry Zhbanov.
Crystal bowls are made from quartz crystal, and crystal has a variety of physical properties. It can amplify, focus, store, and transform energy. Sounds emanating from them have the ability to positively shift one’s consciousness and release stagnant energy. When played together, the effects are magnified. Many crystal singing bowls, the instruments themselves, are tuned to the chakras. Each chakra has a corresponding frequency.
What are sound bowls or singing bowls?
Singing bowls are essentially inverted bells without a clapper attached to their interior. They are designed to sit and look like a bowl. They are large bowls that generate sonic waves of sound that vibrate and travel through any and all substances, including your body.
Typically a clapper strikes the bell from within itself. In the case of singing bowls or standing bells, the bowl is struck from the exterior with a baton-like instrument which essentially acts as a clapper, and it is detached from the instrument.
The baton-like piece is sometimes referred to as a mallet and can be made from a variety of materials (usually wood for metal), and it is sometimes called a wand. From my early experience with them, the mallets for the crystal bowls had suede or felt-like material on them and were more like a bass drum mallet, unlike the wooden mallets used with the metal bowls, where the wood was smooth and shaped somewhat differently.
Sometimes the bowls are simply used to create an initial tone and simply vibrate, sending waves of sound rippling through the air. Other times when struck, a tone is set into motion, and the sound “pulled” around the bowl and amplified by manipulating the mallet. The sound vibrates and becomes more sonorous and more soothing.
Water can be placed in them, and their vibrations will produce patterns – sound vibrations transform water, sand, and other matter to produce geometric patterns and shapes. This is known as cymatics.
Sound and vibration
We often hear about various universal laws and the laws of nature. One such universal law is the law of vibration which simply means everything is in motion – everything is energy. Everything you see around you is vibrating at one frequency or another, including you.
credit: Njorg
Sound waves are generated by a sound source or object, such as your throat (speaker, string on an instrument, etc.), to create a vibration. This vibration of particles continues to increase, creating sound energy that travels in the form of a sound wave. A sound wave consists of particles that move away from the source of the sound – sound waves travel.
All the particles in the universe have the properties of waves, including all the particles that we ourselves are made from. Waves transmit energy and can encode information.
Vibration and our bodies
Since water is an excellent carrier of sound (vibration) and because our bodies are in total 60-70% water – sound is able to travel through our physical bodies. We can feel vibrations.
The brain and heart are composed of 73% water, and the lungs are about 83% water. The skin contains 64% water, muscles and kidneys are 79%, and even the bones are at 31%.
H.H. Mitchell, Journal of Biological Chemistry 158
Healthy bodies are said to resonate in a particular range of frequencies. When we are in a state of imbalance or disease, our frequencies are misaligned. This is at the heart of why sound healing can work to bring the body back into alignment and be used as a healing modality.
If you want to learn more about sound, vibration and how it works read Amy’s articles in Mindful Soul Center magazine here: