Living from Spirit
Good, Good, Good Vibrations

Recently I drove to Navarre from Tallahassee to attend the Unlimited Horizons ( www.Unlimited-Horizons.org ) metaphysical festival. What a great time it was - spiritual and loving people eager to follow their spirits and learn more - what a joy! I enjoyed visiting with the vendors and with the audience that attended my talk on vibrational healing. I could tell by the excitement of the people who crowded around me after the talk that there is a lot of interest in the subject, especially relating to healing with crystal bowls. Many people had never heard a crystal bowl being played before. I realized how blessed I am to have my very own!

After my first experience with a crystal bowl about five years ago, I knew I had to have one! I was visiting the spiritualist community Cassadaga when I laid my eyes on a crystal bowl for the first time. I was in one of the metaphysical shops when I saw it, a beautiful slightly glowing crystal set upon a pedestal. I wondered what it was, and I wondered what it did. The shop owner came over to me and asked me if I would like to "experience" the bowl. I stood directly in front of the bowl while she stood off to my right and "played" the bowl. She took the suede-covered mallet and pressed it gently against the outside surface of the bowl and went around and around the bowl. It made a sound like no other I've heard before! It was pretty and eerie at the same time. The sound got louder and seemed to envelop me, I could actually feel the vibration. Gentle waves of sound surrounded me, bathed me in a sonic massage! Time stood still, for when she stopped playing there was a few moments that I lost. This has happened since then, in meditations, but that was the first time. I actually got lost in the sounds of the bowl!

Healing centers all over the country are using sound to help people get well, including chanting, toning, playing Tibetan singing bowls and crystal bowls in conjunction with using traditional medicine and relaxation like meditation and massage. While at the symposium on sound healing earlier this year, I learned a lot about the physiological effects on the body when crystal bowls are played. Front-runners in the field of sonic vibration (sound and music healing) gave lectures at the conference. Speakers and workshop leaders included Don Campbell, who wrote the Mozart Affect; Joshua Leeds, who produced Andrew Weil's meditative CD called Sound Body, Sound Mind; and Dr. Jeffrey Thompson who is performing studies on the scientific use of sound healing and changing consciousness. Wow, what a group of folks on the cutting edge! At an Omega conference a few years back, I also had the opportunity to study with Mitch Gaynor who wrote the Sounds of Healing.

After attending the symposium on sound healing this year, I got my bowl! My friend Amy Juchem is a distributor and she gave me a deal I couldn't resist! It's just as lovely as the first one I saw at the metaphysical shop. It is tuned to the note of G and represents the throat chakra. It helps me to bring my desires into manifestation. It also helps with expressing our talents and treasures into the physical world.

A new science called psychoacoustics is on the rise, parallel to the already established discipline of music therapy. I learned so much at the lectures that I attended! Did you know that hearing is the first sense that a fetus develops? Because sound waves travel through water five times more efficiently than through air, it makes sense that the sound waves created while a crystal bowl is being played would have an impact on the body, which is made up predominantly of water. Specific sounds have been found to have a direct effect on pulse rate, respiration, pupil dilation, EEG, EKG, and body temperature. Studies are also being done on an audiologist whose blood pressure went so low that he fainted when a patient of his sang a note that she continually had ringing in her ears. If a single note can produce such a result, imagine what else we can do with sound once we have explored more about healing with sound!