Healing through Sound

Book excerpt: • Shows how sound, even humming, can change the body’s tissues, rearrange posture, and release long-held emotional trauma and stress • Explains how to listen deeply to the body and discover the rhythms of the areas to be treated as well as how to intuit the sounds required for healing • Offers practices to help you immediately release tension and explains how to use your voice to release emotional conflicts so your body can naturally heal You are made of sound. By listening deeply, you can hear the rhythms and stories of the audible body. With the power of the voice, you can heal the body layer by layer, awakening your cells while releasing long-held tensions, stress, and emotional trauma. In this guide to sound as bodywork, sound healer Vickie Dodd shares her system for addressing trauma locked in the physical body with the healing power of sound. Touching on the function of the nervous system and the parasympathetic breath, she reveals how sound travels the inner pathways of the body, eliciting responses from the body memory of tissues and muscles while bypassing the mind. Sharing examples from sessions with her clients across five decades, she explains how sound can change the body’s tissues, rearrange posture, and release undigested emotional experiences. She teaches how to prepare the body for the work of sounding and releasing and explains the vocabulary of healing sounds, in particular the power of vowels to start the healing process. Presenting experiential exercises, the author explores how to listen deeply and precisely to the body’s stories and discover the rhythms of the areas to be treated as well as how to intuit the sounds required for healing—your unique soundprint. She offers practices to help you immediately experience a release of tension and stress and explains how to use your voice to release emotional conflicts so your body can naturally heal. She explores how to sing love songs to your shadow, transform negative patterns into harmonious ones, and discover the grace and peace that arise as your body’s stories and tissues come to rest. Revealing the vast potential of sound to heal and transform, Vickie Dodd shows how each of us can dialogue with our own body for release, restoration, and vitality.