I’ve always been super interested in ideas and theories that other people might pooh-pooh.
Sure there’s a lot of stuff out there that’s a bit on the fringe, but there’s a lot of stuff, while science can’t (yet) confirm as being valid, time and experience will generally validate or invalidate things.
With a scientific mind, I find it hard to take things on faith, just because organised religion tells me I should. But for years, I’ve had a leaning towards holistic wellness and spiritual healing. Not because these are all proven, but because they haven’t been disproven.
We laud medical science as a means to keep us healthier, fitter and living longer, but in fact, medical science (and practice) especially in Western society, appears to be killing and causing illnesses across a broad swathe of the population.
Drugs prescribed to lower A1C in diabetics are causing Hypoglycaemia, leading to instances of death from complications of the “cure”. The U.S. Federal Drug Administration has issued a public health advisory to doctors advising them of the possible cancer risk and potential for blood clots, potentially caused by drugs prescribed for Eczema. Other drugs, including diuretics and beta-blockers, frequently cause adverse reactions in the skin, including eczema.
Holistic healing however has never contributed to the death or injury of any individual that I am aware of. Now I’m not saying don’t take pharmaceuticals and use holistic healing instead, but consider holistic healing as an augmentation to what science can bring to the table. It can’t hurt.
It is with this mindset, I got into spiritual and sound healing some years ago.
The spiritual healing came about due to a serious accident I had which fractured my neck. My orthopaedic surgeon ran all the usual tests and declared that I would likely be in a wheelchair by the time I was fifty.
I was prescribed opioids for the pain, given physiotherapy exercises to perform and sent off with this daunting news.
Well in the words of Sigourney Weaver in Galaxy quest FUCK THIS I said.
I looked into other types of healing. Acupuncture, acupressure and tapping helped with the pain. Spiritual healing helped with the healing and got me off the drugs. Sound healing calmed me down and made me look inward towards what I wanted my body to do, not what pharma wanted to do to my body.
Here I am, well past the wheelchair deadline, still up and about and able to walk many miles a day, without too much pain (except when I overdo it, which by very nature is far too frequent for my own good)
So I started looking into scientific papers about these holistic healing practices. One of my loves has always been in music. All around the world, people listen to music. But they also listen, consciously or not, to nature.
Think about standing in a busy street, with cars rushing by, horns blaring, electronic beeping of crossings, whistles, the rumble of the subway, and hissing of air brakes, and my guess is, if you concentrated on those sounds long enough, your pulse and blood pressure and therefore stress would elevate.
Now imagine being in a serene nature setting, with birds chirping in the distance, the sounds of cricket, the babbling of a river meandering by, the gentle rustle of the trees in a breeze and I would guess most people would have their blood pressure, pulse and stress lower.
Stress is a disease. Indeed disease comes from old French and English meaning exactly that, lack of ease. So if sounds can reduce stress, and therefore reduce the lack of ease, why can’t sounds promote healing?
So in my part-time, I study the science of sound, and how it is scientifically proven to affect people, and then build instruments that can be used in holistic healing practices.
Here’s one of my plate gongs.