We sound to wake up.
We continue sounding to stay awake. Sound is a means to remember. A tool to dissolve the amnesia. . . Of what we may have forgotten. What is our most important vision and mission this life? Yes . . . it is to wake up! We sound to quiet the noise in our heads. The noise that keeps us from being able to listen to our most important teachings. The noise that clouds our memory, our thinking. The noise that creates confusion and miscommunication. It is not about how good our “chops” are. . . But how well and willing we are to listen to our Soul’s teachings. Why else are we here if not to listen to what our Soul needs from us, To complete its mission or cycle? A call to Awaken. A call to demystify common sense, to be restored to what has always been. Remembering we are made from the minerals of this very Earth. We sound to clear the noise, even temporarily. . . To receive our teachings. We sound to listen. We sound to remember, what has been forgotten. <A>Sound as an Evolutionary Possibility <A>
When I speak of sound, I do not separate sound, light, color, and movement. Although they can be broken down individually, in my experience they are the same, translating as different octaves, vibrations, and resonance of each other. Sound breaks up crystallization. Sound creates a resonance so that movement starts to manifest, and the reverberation continues. Sound is a definitive tool, a medium for the inner terrain of the physical body, a conduit that is 70–80 percent fluid with an electrical current running through it as the generator. Sound work is dynamic in nature. It always creates change. When we are exploring our inner bodily terrains, our bodily laboratories, we want to notice where there is pulsation and rhythms and where there isn’t. Where there is rhythm, we match its resonance and then follow the pathway it takes us on, and where there isn’t resonance, we can use our voices to begin awakening the numbness to discover its unique pattern or rhythm. The Hum, a method and exercise referred to often in the book, provides the strong foundational work. Practiced daily, the Hum softens and keeps the passageways throughout the body liquid. The Hum employs consonant sounds, allowing it to resonate in the body, creating a reverberation and massaging of the inner landscape. For this method to work, consistency is a major component. It is in the process of doing, tracking, and noticing what occurs that we start learning how sound works within us. Using ourselves as a laboratory allows us to learn this firsthand. I spent many years daily using sound, Humming and Emptying my noise, my chatter. “Emptying” is an aerobic sounding that creates and activates an inner bodily movement. Examples of Emptying and Humming will be taught throughout this book. I spent weeks, months at times, sounding places of numbness, of amnesia, before I could feel a small movement, a reverberation, an awakening begin to happen. By using my voice, I started waking up the sleep, waking up the deadness, waking up the rhythms of denied expression. My first years of sounding and doing research in my own body laboratory, I did emptying sounds. I had many layers of congested, embedded, emotional buildup inside my body. I later started naming this as “undigested emotional material”. Sounding is a wonderful medium to dissolve stuck unexpressed emotions, especially the held expressions of fear, grief, and anger. I was using my voice to dissolve this formation, which was clouding my ability to listen into my inherent wisdom.
Also, I was doing this to stay awake, as my view of reality was that it was easy to fall into sleep, numbness, as the pain of awareness can be very great at times. Especially in those early days, I was feeling quite alone in this awareness of the need to awaken. These were the early days of the mind-body movement and therapies. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I knew no one working with sound, and I didn’t have any support for sounding. My soul was my authority and teacher during these years. I started training in massage, acupuncture, shiatsu, and Rolfing. I became an Aston Patterning Movement teacher, studied nutrition, herbalism, and more. I needed assistance for my body and emotions. I also needed to be received as a trusted practitioner to begin listening to bodies and to commence this deep study of listening and sounding. One of the first teachings that Sound offered was “that which is unexpressed runs the show.” We sound that which is denied expression. For the past 50 years, I have maintained a teaching practice and a bodywork practice with sound. I have listened to thousands of stories contained in our bodies. Through this work, I have observed that we all experience some degree of body-mind amnesia. For example, with clients in the late 1980s, I started noticing an increase in the mucilaginous substance around the cervical spine, a sticky liquid surrounding the nervous system. I do not know what this means, just an observation. I also observed that sounding the cranial area would increase fluidity in the mucilaginous quality. We want to remember and keep emphasizing that our work with sound is a teaching of evolutionary possibilities. We are wanting and desiring to take the risk that evolution is possible. In fearful times—which seem to be most any time—we go toward maintenance, the status quo (“Just take the pain away, please.”), and our healing sessions can easily become about managing pain. Listening to thousands of bodies taught me that pain is not necessarily the place to look for the source of the problem or the solution. We must always look at the entire being, from head to toe. Physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual—which “body” is in pain? Which body needs support? What calls us to listen? What memory or feeling wants to be sounded now? I need to go deeper to the root of the discomfort, a reminder that the motive here is evolution, not maintenance. We may need to notice how much of the allopathic paradigm we have taken on in our traditional studies, possibly without our awareness. In our sound healing paradigm, we ease the discomfort through sound. Our voice creates movement within our liquid terrain, our body. Inner movement in the tissues and cells relieves discomfort and creates a feeling of more ease and connection. We are resourced naturally! We sound to create more liquidity in the tissues, to dissolve that which may impede our spiritual and emotional progress. About the Author: Vickie Dodd, M.A., has been a sound healing therapist, bodyworker, workshop leader, and internationally recognized pioneer of healing through sound for more than 50 years. She collaborated with Don Campbell at the Institute of Music and Health Education in Boulder, Colorado, and has created sound school training worldwide. Vickie offers residential retreats on sound at the Nature Bridge Campus in Olympic National Park and is an adjunct faculty member at the Globe Institute in San Francisco. She lives in Port Angeles, Washington. https://sacredsoundworks.com |
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