Positive Health Online

Homeopathy, light therapy and colour therapy, all seek to restore balance to the systems of the human body. People can begin to understand that sound is an energy form and that it does not just affect the ears. Sound affects our nervous system, our brain, our chakras and etheric body as well.

A morning meditation

Summary/Introduction

Jonathan Goldman is widely recognized as one of the foremost authorities on the uses of music and sound within the sphere of complementary medicine/healing. Each year Goldman facilitates a nine-day intensive introduction into the many facets of the healing potential of sound. Jonathan Cope caught up with him during Healing Sounds Intensive 2003.

Interview

Jonathan Cope: Please explain briefly what you do.

Jonathan Goldman: My major purpose right now is to assist and empower people in the uses of sound and music as a transformative and healing modality.

JC: You are known as a prolific author, musician and teacher. Do you feel that you reach your target audience through each of these equally?

JG: I'd like to feel that my primary gift is that of teacher, my secondary gift is that of a musician and my tertiary gift is that of a writer. My book Healing Sounds has reached a lot of people who speak highly of it, and for that I'm very grateful, whilst my CDs such as Chakra Chants have won many awards, are sellers and also have reached many, many people. But I feel that my greatest gift has been being able to allow people to experience what sound can do to them. Many people have told me that taking my workshop has changed their lives forever. I am always so grateful just to have been part of The Healing Hands Intensive as an experience. I don't necessarily believe that sacred and solemn are synonymous – so lets have a good time as well when we resonate with sound!

JC: I certainly had a great time and learnt a lot also. I consider myself very lucky to be able to travel here from the UK. Are we likely to see a Sound Intensive in Europe any time soon?

JG: One can never tell. I was in Findhorn, Scotland, a couple of years ago and I love the UK. It is worth remembering that one of the pioneers in this field was Dr Peter Guy Manners in the UK. Back in the early sixties, he developed the Cymatic Instrument that utilizes direct application of healing sounds into the human body.

JC: That's great. For those not familiar with, what I'm going to call 'alternative teachings' do you have an idea, suggestion or practice that would help them discover the possibilities of this type of work? Where to start?

JG: I think it starts with the awareness that everything is in a state of vibration and that sound is vibration. I like the model of the human body as an orchestra that is producing wonderful harmony when the body is healthy. It only takes one musician in this orchestra to lose their sheet music and start playing out of tune, to make the whole orchestra sound 'off' and this is akin to a part of the body that starts to vibrate at a different, non-harmonious, frequency. This disharmonious frequency can manifest in the body as illness. What is important to understand is that one can create sound which can restore harmony to the body.

This is like giving the sheet music back to the musician in the orchestra. Such an understanding may lead to a huge 'aha' – a great awareness among people of the power of sound to heal and transform. Once this model is understood it can be applied to many other forms of vibrational medicine or energy medicine, not just the use of sound. Homeopathy, light therapy and colour therapy, all seek to restore balance to the systems of the human body.

People can begin to understand that sound is an energy form and that it does not just affect the ears. Sound affects our nervous system, our brain, our chakras and etheric body as well. I would also like to make a differentiation between music and sound here, with sound being mainly composed of single tones that don't modulate with harmony or rhythm. I feel that, for this reason, sound is much easier to track in terms of its effect than music. There are so many different elements in music; harmony, rhythm, tone, etc. each of which may be further subdivided and investigated. When it comes to teaching the uses of music for healing it becomes a great deal more complex than simply dealing with sound due to the consideration of all the effects of these different elements.

When I created Chakra Chants or The Lost Chord for example, I combined many different sacred and healing sounds, and found that amazingly, they combined together and created quite wonderful music. The Lost Chord has Hindu, Tibetan and Hebrew chants all sounding simultaneously. It is an awesome listening experience. It seems that many of the sacred and healing sounds from different traditions like to resonate together, regardless of the culture or spiritual path they come from. This truly makes you realize that sound is a major uniting factor that allows us all to experience the source of the sound – the divine.

JC: Once this realization, the healing potential of sound, is made, do you feel able to make any recommendations in terms of writings or teachings for those wishing to discover more on this subject?

JG: I would certainly mention the writings and teachings of John Beaulieu who has been a great influence on me. As you know by being here at the Healing Sounds Intensive, Sarah Benson who teaches with us, is just incredible! Don Campbell, Fabien Maman, Steve Halpern, Jill Purce, Kay Gardner, who was a dear friend of mine before she passed away, Tom Kenyon, Chris James – there are so many people doing so much marvelous work. The people who are mentioned in the acknowledgements of Healing Sounds are quite outstanding. One could do well to start there.

Attendees of the Jonathan Goldman. Sound Intensive. 2003.

JC: I also understand that you publish a good amount of information on your website www.healingsounds.com

JG: www.healingsounds.com has many articles and much information about sound healing, including downloadable healing sounds, as well as a message board, a chat room, an online store with great recordings and sonic tools for transformation and many other excellent innovations. We also have an international resource directory of the Sound Healers Association at www.soundhealersassociation.org.

I think that it is worth noting that the Internet is rapidly becoming the 'Global Mind' and that it is really important to manifest the 'Global Heart'. Sound is the key to this. We must use Global Sound to active the Global Mind and develop the Global Heart. As part of this year's Healing Sounds Intensive we used sound and intention to create a group Merkaba – a powerful geometric energy form – which was broadcast around the world as a Webcast via the Internet. Our purpose was to assist planetary healing and activation, accelerating harmony and peace on a global level. It was a truly profound and powerfully transformative experience.

JC: Fantastic! Like it or not I guess the Internet has brought a great many thoughts and teachings to a much wider audience. If I could perhaps bring this briefly into a more personal sphere, I note that you come from a family of allopathic doctors and here you are as one of the leading practitioners of complementary medicine. How does this resolve itself within your family?

JG: My father, who passed away some twenty-five years ago, was one of the foremost ear, nose and throat specialists. It took me about ten years of my work to finally realize that his work was based around the throat chakra and that I am doing similar work to that of my father but on a very different level. My brother is also a doctor. He would probably have a hard time with something that happened to me a couple of years ago.

I gave a workshop at the home of a scientist – an inventor of sound equipment. In fact, he had invented an amazing type of speaker that really allowed pure sound to come through. Not only the frequencies of the sound, but also the intent of the sound (the energy behind the sound). In my book Healing Sounds is the formula: 'Frequency + Intent = Healing', so I was very interested in using these speakers.

My recordings are loaded with not only sound, but also intent – the energy of healing and of different celestial beings. Divine entities are invoked and their energy is quite present while I'm making a recording. I think that may be one of the reasons for the success of my recording – not only the frequencies, but also the intent that is encoded upon them. This inventor allowed us to use his very expensive amplifier as well as these speakers for the workshop. I was particularly interested in seeing what would happen when, as part of my workshop, we listened to my recording of The Angel of Sound, which was created to transmit the energy of this extraordinary archangel of sound to those who listen – particularly in a workshop setting.

For a while the recording sounded wonderful. I heard things I'd never heard before and you could really feel this extraordinary energy in the group. Then, all of a sudden the sound just stopped – it turned out that the amplifier had fused some circuits. Afterwards, as a group we had taken up a collection to help with repair costs of the amplifier, but it really wasn't going to cover the cost of this thing. As a last resort, the group toned the amplifier and, believe it or not, once plugged back in, the amplifier worked fine! The inventor was speechless, and also, I might add, quite pleased!

JC: That's a great story. Can I turn now to something you mentioned some days ago? You suggested that you were working on a sound that has the potential to unify the world's religions and, given the current political and religious climate in the world today, that could be of extreme importance. Are you happy to comment on this further?

JG: Sound is the unifying factor in all the different religions of the world For example, "In the Beginning was the Word", "And the Lord said ' Let there be Light!'" – sound creating light. You find this awareness of sound as the original creative force in all the different spiritual paths. Sound can really allow people to travel and experience different states of consciousness, to really connect directly with the divine.

A particular sound may have the potential to be a universal sound of the divine. Perhaps it may even be the undiscovered universal sound, which therefore has the ability to transcend the various religions in the world today and unify people. This universal sound is a very ancient harmonically related sacred name of the divine, which bypasses the separateness created from language. No consonants in this. It is composed only of vowel sounds and their corresponding harmonics and it's extraordinarily powerful to intone. It is my profound desire that we will be able to be in our sacred sound temples, wherever they may be; church or at home or on the internet, and we can link together and sound together, creating an extraordinary resonance that can change reality. Perhaps bringing us globally to a new level of consciousness. Perhaps this new universal sound, as well as other sounds, will assist in achieving this.

Through creating such sounds, we can experience levels of the divine. We will not need a priest, rabbi, shaman or whatever if we work with sacred sound together with our hearts filled with love. Such sounds, which we make, can truly be transformative and let one travel to different realms of consciousness and experience different aspects of the Divine. There is a synergy that occurs when people sound together in a group that's truly amazing – it's 1 + 1 = 3. We don't have to be in the same physical local for this to occur. We can be spread throughout the planet, yet toning the same sound together and this synergism occurs. Please remember that it's really necessary for the feeling of love and compassion to accompany the sound. The frequency alone is insufficient. Intent is the energy behind the sound and we've found that the best energy to accompany any sacred sound is that of love. This is what the world's spiritual teachers have been always telling us.

JC: This all sounds great for expanding personal consciousness but what about a more 'physical' practice for those more connected to their physical body, rather than more 'spiritually' connected?

JG: The easiest thing that I know of is to ask someone to make a low sound, a mid-range sound, and a higher sound and to realize that these sounds all resonate in different parts of the body. Sound doesn't just go into our ears (and into our brain) – it also goes into our body. So beginning to experience the physical effects of sound – particularly our own sounds – is very useful for those beginning to understand this. Low sounds tend to vibrate our lower trunk, mid-range sounds tend to vibrate our upper trunk and high sounds tend to vibrate our head. Making sound in this manner really expands our level of awareness with regard to the effects of sound. After that, becoming aware, when we're listening to music, of where that music is vibrating in our physical body, is another useful learning tool.

Another important thing, with regard to the idea of physical practice, is the realization that sound and music can also affect each of us in different ways. Sound may vibrate one person one way and another person another way or different parts of our body may resonate differently from each other. So, of course, our response to different sounds and music can vary immensely. Thus, there is a uniqueness with regard to our personal response to sound and music. We are all individual beings with our own special resonance to vibration. Yet simultaneously, there is also sameness with regard to certain aspects of sound and its effect upon us. This is the science of psychoacoustics, which deals with the effects of sound on our nervous system. There is, for example, a direct relationship between music – particularly the rhythms of music – and our heart rates, respiration (our breathing) and brainwave activity – slow music tends to slow us down and fast music tends to stimulate us. If you are, say, eating and listening to fast beat music then it follows that you will be chewing faster and may get indigestion, so you may want to eat to slow music and use faster music for jogging or other exercise. Knowledge of the effects of music will assist in your understanding how to use music to enhance your daily activities. Additionally, knowledge of how specific sounds can uniquely affect us is also valuable for living for balanced and harmonious lives.

JC: Jonathan, I want to thank you for taking the time in your busy schedule to speak to me.

References

Goldman J. Healing Sounds. Element. Dorset. 1992.
Goldman J. Shifting Frequencies. Light Technology Publishing. Arizona. 1998.
Information regarding Jonathan Goldman can be found on www.healingsounds.com