The Magical Power of Sound Bath Meditation

I must admit something: I have a contradictory component to my personality. I have been a devoted yoga practitioner for 15 years, a meditator for about 10, and enjoy a rich spiritual life with a higher power of my understanding. Yet, YET, I am a skeptic at heart.

When I read write-ups about things like Sound Bath Meditation, which state, “You will be guided in a meditation to reprocess tensions and difficult emotions being held in your body and mind,” my knee-jerk reaction is to doubtfully dismiss that something as simple as sound can do those things. I inwardly cringe, thinking, “That doesn’t sound scientific.”

This belief system of mine was recently challenged.

2024 has been a hard year. Our baby Cairo was hospitalized twice this summer with Acute Respiratory Failure, once landing in the ICU. Early in the Fall, I was diagnosed with the same medical condition that my beautiful, seemingly healthy aunt passed away from a few months after her 60th birthday. These events superimposed on an already full schedule of raising 3 boys under the age of 4 and keeping a business going.

This year made me question the stability of my mental health for the first time in a long time. Was I slipping into a clinical depression? My metabolism had changed; I didn’t feel particularly hungry. I lost weight.

When filling out the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale at the pediatrician, one that I’ve filled out dozens of times, I had to stop and think about my ratings to “Things have been getting on top of me” and “I have looked forward with enjoyment to things.” 

I ran into my friend A around this time, another mom of twins who is an Internal Medicine Physician. She’s always been an open book about her struggle to balance her busy work life with mothering 3 young kiddos, and she’s open about taking SSRI drugs to cope. When I confided in her how I was feeling, she said succinctly, “Our brains aren’t meant for this modern world, Caroline. I am able to cope with day-to-day stress much easier with an SSRI in my system.”

So here I am, debating the state of my mental health, contemplating pharmaceutical intervention for it, and simultaneously moving into an emotional state that felt like the closest to despair I’ve ever come.

As luck/the universe/my higher power would have it, my best friend had scheduled a Sound Bath Mediation on October 1st, a belated birthday gift to me because she knows how much I love yoga and all things yoga-like.

A lovely young woman came to my house, unpacked her colorful singing bowls, tucked us into my L-shaped couch, and began her magic. Some quiet guidance followed by an hour of singing bowls at various frequencies, color-coded in accordance with the chakra system, unfolded. I lay there, awake yet relaxed, saying a silent prayer to be open to receive whatever gifts this experience offered to my skeptical heart.

And wouldn’t you know that this 1 hour Sound Bath Meditation experience brought me back from the edge? In the 7 weeks since that day, I have slowly gotten back to feeling like my old self.

My healthy coping mechanisms have been re-activated. I’m laughing and goofing around with my kiddos more. I spontaneously break into dance, with or without them. Even my husband noticed the improvement in my mental health and the lightness of my spirit.

How could something this simple and this short have been so healing?

Bessel Van Der Kolk, the well-known trauma researcher and psychiatrist, gives us insight in his best-selling book The Body Keeps the Score. He states that psychiatric and psychological healing traditions from around the world rely on mindfulness, movement, rhythms, and action: Yoga in India, Tai Chi and Qigong in China, and rhythmical drumming throughout Africa. (This contrasts Western reliance on drugs and verbal therapies.)

Sound Bath Meditation is both a mindfulness practice and has a rhythmical component to it via the vibrational sound of the singing bowls. The idea is that sound vibrations correspond to specific energy centers in the body, thus why the bowls were color-coded according to the Chakra System (Chakra = energy center).

My feelings of improved mental health, a surprise to a skeptic like me, would have left a non-westerner totally unphased. This is one of the ways that non-westerners have healed for thousands of years.

I would have taken the marked improvement in my mental health with a grateful heart and without expectation of any other “gifts” of this meditation — but curiously, I realize I received another gift from this experience: my creativity resurged after months of dormancy after the Sound Bath.

Tears sprang to my eyes when Nazinga (the wonderous sound bather) brought our attention to our 2nd Chakra, the sacral chakra, our center of creativity. When Nazinga de-briefed with us afterward, I told her of my surprising emotional reaction to the sacral chakra, and she told me she felt compelled to keep coming back to make the sacral chakra bowl sing during our session.

She asked me if I was creative, and I said, “I don’t think of myself as creative, but perhaps I am.” It wasn’t until my inspiration and creativity were resurrected that I realized I am creative: I am inspired to write, tell stories like these, and tell the stories of my courageous patients. I hadn’t felt like writing a blog for months before the sound bath. Afterward, I wrote 4 in one month.

This experience inspired me to write this blog and to share this practice with others.

Life is full of stress: getting a scoliosis diagnosis is stressful. Living with scoliosis is stressful. I hear every day from patients about other stressful situations they’re going through: separations from partners, taking care of an ailing loved one, recovering from a traumatic event, grieving the loss of a loved one — none of us will be excused from these stresses and pain — at some point in our lives we will come face to face with them.

The quality of our lives often depends not on the stress itself but on how well we can cope with various stressors. This is why SchrothDC has decided to offer a Sound Bath Meditation to our beloved patients and clients this year as a Holiday gift. Our way of saying thank you, and take care of yourselves.

And if you’re a skeptic at heart like me, take a chance, do the unexpected, and try to keep an open and curious mind. Sometimes, we can surprise ourselves.

Note: This blog by no means is intended to undermine the importance of pharmaceuticals for mental health. Many people find profound relief from suffering with SSRIs and other prescription medicines; Bessel Van Der Kolk discusses this in his book that I mentioned above.

Every stressful situation and everyone’s body and brain chemistry is different and therefore requires a different approach. For many, a combination of Eastern & Western therapies works well. I am grateful for modern Western medicine and believe there are situations where it’s absolutely necessary.