By Jodi Buller
Sound Therapy: "treatment based on the finding that human blood cells respond to sound frequencies by changing color and shape, and the hypothesis that therefore sick or rogue cells can be healed or harmonized by sound. The therapy was developed and researched by French musician and acupuncturist Fabien Maman.”
The alternative health community has registered a number of integrative break throughs in the last 40 years, as eastern practices like meditation, acupuncture, and yoga merge with western medical and psychological advances. Western science is reluctant to accept truth phrased in other languages, and the onus has been on the alternative community to communicate truths of the body, psyche, and energetic experience in a framework that western medicine can validate and begin to prescribe to the population at large. As teachings that used to be considered esoteric find voice and resonance in western spiritual communities, and dynamic teachers find ways to make ancient healing wisdom relevant to modern medical practice, our cultural perspectives about healing are shifting.
The idea of frequency is not new to western culture; America is full of cell phones, radios, light bulbs, and televisions. We are inundated with color and sound. Current scientific and medical research is beginning to demonstrate the extent to which we are affected by all these frequencies-the havoc that this kind of stimulation may be wreaking on our psychological, emotional, and physical equilibrium. The vibrational frequencies of the modern world impact us because human beings are resonant creatures- mostly water-and humming along on our own particular frequencies, which sometimes resonate and sometimes dissonate with the world and people surrounding us.
The universe communicates in a spectrum of frequency. The movement of chi, life-force energy, vibrates on the lower end of the spectrum from sound. At a certain point along this spectrum, movement speeds up frequency into sound. If you increase the frequency of sound there is color, and then light. The cells in our bodies are vibrating at a frequency too. And when sound, color, and directed energetic movement are introduced into the body system, resonance happens. Vibrational healing techniques of movement, color, and sound to affect the body’s system on many levels, from the cellular to the subtle energetic. One of the surprising effects of resonance work for western medical minds is the impact of sound on cancer cells, which show a tendency to explode during vibrational sound healing sessions.
A musician first, Fabien Maman began integrating sound and vibrational into his acupuncture practice, and his research with French biologist Helene Grimal in the early ‘80s, sparked a fascination with the effects of resonance, into a life’s work. What they found in photographing blood cells before and after an interval of acoustic music was that particular musical progressions had different effects of the size, shape, and integrity of the nucleus and electromagnetic fields of human cells. The cancer cells they photographed were most profoundly impacted by dissonant sound progressions, and began to lose their integrity, while healthy cells responded to resonant sounds by changing colors and expanding their edges.
“What force is coming through musical sound that revitalizes healthy cells and destabilizes cancer cells?” This question from his research findings led Maman to deepen his explorations into the vibrational nature of the universe, and in 1988 he started Tama-Do, the Académie of Sound, Color, and Movement, which offers the essence of his 30 years of research and integrational work with acupuncture, color, sound, and chi movement in practical form.
Maman is in town this weekend at the invitation of Susan Bradbury, whose Fairhaven acupuncture practice has been deeply informed by Maman’s work. Bradbury had been working with Bellingham sound healer Sibyl Sanford, through a grant from the Spirit Fund of the Whatcom Community Foundation, and in conjunction with Michael Karp at A World Institute of Sustainable Humanity, to bring a monochorde table and sound tubes to Bellingham as part of The Sound Essence Project. The commitment of this project is to provide vibrational healing treatments for cancer patients and others, and to increase the synergy and cooperative treatments for cancer patients and others, and to increase the synergy and cooperative treatment opportunities between local health care providers.
The monochorde table is and instrument, with 72 strings all tuned to the same note, and as Bradbury plays the strings beneath you during the treatment session, you begin to understand resonance in a very tangible way; your whole body hums along. Vibration is a very powerful tool for loosening the stuck places on the subtle levels as well as the physical; the soundwaves from the session vibrate in the body for a few weeks, tuning you deeper into yourself. This work is about slow integration, and making space for shifts to happen.
Bradbury told me a story about reading a book on vibrational healing on a trip to Europe 22 years ago. She put it down when the trip was over, but something resonated, and all this time later she’s sharing its fruit with her community. As she says, “it was a big seed, it took a long time to grow.”
