Healing through sound: my journey
In 2022, I left a senior position in corporate communications to pursue my passion and become a sound healer.
You might wonder how I went from managing the reputation of an organisation to working with sound to support people on their healing journeys.
My dear friend Rhiannon has had front row seats during this transformation and was keen to understand more about my journey one recent Friday afternoon.
And so here is the conversation we had about how I found wisdom through trauma, and starting sound healing.
As your friend I have always felt grounded and supported by you - but now you’ve taken that gift to the next level! What has led you to put your energy into healing as a profession?
I’ve always been drawn to helping people. As a child, I wanted to make everyone around me feel better. I grew up in Northern Ireland in the seventies and eighties during the so-called ‘Troubles’. It was a war zone.
My father was a police detective. He was ambushed, shot and seriously wounded by the IRA when I was four, which caused him a lot of suffering, both mentally and physically. His undiagnosed and untreated PTSD impacted greatly on me and the rest of my family. We lived in a place where we couldn’t tell anybody anything, in case of more harm. We were totally isolated.
My Dad and I enjoying our shared love of nature, not long before his shooting
That must have been such a horrendous time for you.
It was. My sister was also seriously ill, and my mother was stoically trying to keep it all together. I was the good, well-behaved older sister. Usually quiet and helpful apart from the odd temper tantrum! Looking back, my ‘accidental’ purpose was to make sure that everyone else was ok. I disappeared.
The kindness and care we give to others can be detrimental when it’s out of balance, can’t it?
Yes, you’re right. The pattern from my childhood continued, as patterns tend to do. When I became older, friends and colleagues often came to me for guidance, and I would give a lot of support to others but wouldn’t always leave enough time and energy for myself.
We end up being good at the roles we are cast in, in life!
We do! I even considered studying psychology at university, but the degree involved so much maths and science that it felt too clinical and analytical. I didn’t understand why I needed to be good at those things to understand and help people.
So I went down a different route. I worked for charities and discovered lots of different causes close to my heart – helping people, animals, and the environment. That’s been really rewarding.
My team and I from Soil Association on a team away day volunteering at a local organic farm
I left Northern Ireland behind, but Northern Ireland didn’t leave me behind. The patriarchy and misogyny; the hellfire and brimstone; the secrets; the violence; the aftermath - all of it stayed with me, and lodged itself throughout my body, manifesting in chronic pain which I lived with for 13 years.
The pain reached breaking point in 2021, when I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. I wasn’t at all surprised. I had already been living with endometriosis, painful bladder syndrome, sciatica, and chronic temporomandibular joint dysfunction (TMJ). If the fibro diagnosis had come earlier in my life, it would have felt like a death sentence. But when the news came, I’d been undergoing somatic bodywork therapy with an amazing healer in Bristol – Sarah Harlow – and I already understood that the pain was trapped trauma. I remember sounding some old trapped emotions in my body out with Sarah on my second session. Sarah surmised that sound was going to be a very powerful part of my healing journey. When I recall this memory, I always get goosebumps!
It was also around this time that drumming found me. I discovered, by accident, that if I drummed, I could minimise the pain I was experiencing throughout my entire body. It took my pain down from a 9/10 to a 3/10 and I could start my day.
What was it like living with chronic pain?
Before the drumming, the pain would have increased throughout the day, leaving me incapacitated and exhausted. For many months, I couldn’t do the most basic things like wash myself, dress myself, or even sit down.
I spent 12 years trying everything to find some relief, with painkillers, antidepressants, injections, anti-epileptics. These didn’t help at all. Removing inflammatory foods from my diet, and herbal medicine did support with managing it but last year the pain became so extreme that sometimes I wanted to knock myself out. I couldn’t get away from it.
The drum was the only thing that worked so quickly and effectively. For me, it was ground-breaking. At the time, I didn’t know why it worked, but it did!
What has drawn you to sound healing?
When I think about the happy times in my childhood, I always remember music. Mum and I would often make our excuses to get out of the house and we used to drive aimlessly around the town with the radio on. If a good song came on she’d say ‘come on, let’s drive around the block one more time’.
I taught myself to play the organ, clarinet, and the recorder in my bedroom. Looking back, it was a way for me to express myself, as well as a form of meditation. That was my time. It was protected and it was for me. I joined the orchestra, the wind band, and the recorder band. Playing music with other people was so healing.
Those early experiences with music seem like they were an escape from what was going on around you…
Definitely - and I continued to seek escapism! I grew up and discovered techno and house music. One of the reasons I love techno so much is the repetition and the rhythm of the beat. It puts me into a trance. That’s the point of it – to get out of your head and into your body. A space where you feel, rather than think.
The more I learn about the power of sound, the more I connect where I am now in my journey to these early experiences of being moved and transformed by music.
My crystal bowls and other instruments have happily replaced techno nights out
The beat in techno is similar to the beat of the drum that reduces my pain. There are theories that these beats soothe us because we hold memories of being in the womb, feeling ultimate safety, and hearing our mothers’ heartbeat. We hear the beat and we don’t have to think - just feel.
The society we live in is so much about rational and analytical thought. Obviously we need that but I believe we lose a lot as a society when we don’t make space for feeling and listening to our bodies.
In the UK, we are so used to having to present ourselves as normal, neat and sociably acceptable. When we’re triggered into flight, fight or freeze, we often override these states and our bodies absorb the reaction. If we are stressed and feel the urge to scream, or agitated and feel the urge to run, we might have to stop ourselves because we’re in the middle of the supermarket or at work; we swallow down the reactions and the resulting stress hormones are stored in our body.
Yes, most people don’t do those things even when they’re alone because it feels weird.
Indeed! We’re so out of practice as a culture.
Our ancestors intuitively knew about sound and movement medicine. In every indigenous culture that has been studied, if somebody in the tribe had a traumatic incident, the tribe gathers around to help heal that person. They’d do this by dancing, shaking, chanting, singing, and drumming.
We’re not used to this in modern Britain – but it’s in our nature; it’s who we used to be, and we’ve lost that. Luckily, there’s a movement towards bringing these things back into our knowledge. And I am proud to be part of that movement.
Connecting with nature and my ancestors
Can you talk about your own experiences with sound healing?
I have TMJ which creates terrible jaw pain – but I had a massive release of this pain through sound. I was playing the drum and the rattle. With the rattle, I could really hear it close by, as though it was playing inside of my head. Later, when I was in bed, the tension in my jaw started loosening and unwinding. I realised I was holding myself so tightly in bed. I didn’t know until that moment how tightly I held myself when I thought I was relaxing!
The unwinding feeling travelled down my neck, down my shoulder, through my arm and my hand just totally relaxed. At the same time, I was experiencing vivid forgotten memories from childhood, of not being able to speak my truth, of being stifled and silenced. The memories were pouring out of the side of my face. This went on for about 30 minutes. Then I felt what can only be described as euphoria.
And since then, the pain in my jaw has improved incredibly so. It can still present itself at times, but when it does, it’s not nearly as bad.
I want to be able to hand that freedom to other people. Healing others in this way feels like a calling; and I don’t use that language lightly at all. I’ve never felt so compelled to do anything, ever, in my life, and I have many different interests and activities that capture me!
It's incredible how rooted in your emotions your physical health problems have turned out to be.
It is, though not every physical health problem can be healed by sound alone – but I truly believe that sound is a powerful tool to understand our bodies and our experiences better.
I know this first hand from my own experiences – this one and many others – and I’ll happily talk about them to anyone who is interested!
What have you learnt from practising sound healing on your clients?
I learn a great deal from my clients. I am often struck by how strong people are. People carry so much pain and stress around with them, in their minds and in their bodies, and yet they still try hard to help themselves, and to be good for the people around them. I admire my clients because they have identified that there is something out of balance in their lives and they’re taking steps towards rebalancing.
I’ve learnt a lot about myself through meeting new people and the intimate, parallel process that sound healing creates. There is a connection that is made in the intuitive and hypnotic space, and when I am in that space with somebody, I am constantly developing as a practitioner.
Through my own healing journey and fibromyalgia diagnosis, I’ve learned that women tend to suffer with this condition more than men and I think that’s linked to the fact that women often put others’ needs before their own – and carry the burden of others’ pain. I recognised this pattern both in my early family life and in my work life. I worked in jobs where I helped a lot of people but I burnt out, multiple times.
Working as a healer has taught me that I can help people in a healthy way without depleting my own resources. This type of work is community work – it’s non-hierarchical and I get as much out of it as I put into it. And that’s beautiful.
