Sound Healing: A Path to Wholeness
For thousands of years, humans have understood something profound: we are not just flesh and bone, but vibration and frequency. Every cell in our body responds to and resonates with sound—both the sounds we create internally and those we receive from our environment. When we fall out of harmony—whether through stress, trauma, illness, or simply the demands of modern life—we can return to balance through the ancient art of sound healing.
Yoga and Sound Healing in Athens
Since October 2022, I have had the profound honor of partnering with Kojun of Sacred Waves Sound Healing here in Athens, Ohio, to offer monthly combined Yoga and Sound Bath experiences. (see Sacred Waves Sound Healing on Facebook and Instagram) These events have become a sanctuary for our community—a place where the ancient practices of asana, pranayama, and sound healing weave together to offer a respite from daily life.
For the full 90 minutes, Kojun intuitively plays his instruments—crystal singing bowls, Tibetan metal bowls, planetary gongs, rattles, and crystal pyramids—matching the sounds to whatever is unfolding in our movement practice. As we move through gentle yoga and conscious breathing, the instruments respond and support. As we settle into savasana, the layers of sound deepen and expand. Each vibration becomes an invitation to let go a little more, to soften a little deeper, to relax into our wholeness.
What moves me most is witnessing the changes in the students. I see bodies release tension they've carried for years. I watch faces soften, breath deepen, and a palpable peace settle over the room. People arrive carrying the weight of their daily lives— to-do lists, demands of work and family, stress of our busy modern world—and they leave with a lightness, a clarity, a reconnection to something essential within themselves.
Join us for our next Yoga and Sound Bath on Friday, November 14th at Village Productions in Amesville. Experience this powerful combination of movement, breath, and healing sound for yourself.
The History of Sacred Sound
The instruments we use in sound healing have a rich history. Metal singing bowls have been crafted across Asia for over a thousand years, with Nepali artisans traditionally hammering these bowls by hand from bronze alloys. While these bowls have often been called "Tibetan singing bowls," they were made primarily in Nepal and used across the Himalayan region. They became more widely known in the West during the 1970s.
Gongs trace their origins back even further—to the Bronze Age, around 3500-2000 BCE, first appearing in China during the Western Han Dynasty (206 BCE – 9 CE). These powerful instruments have been used for ritual, ceremony, prayer, and meditation for approximately 4,000 years! Their reverberations are said to carry us into altered states of consciousness and cosmic connection.
Crystal singing bowls, on the other hand, are beautiful newcomers to this ancient practice. Developed in the 1980s, these pure quartz instruments were originally crucibles used by the solar and computer chip industries. Musicians discovered that these rejected bowls—those not quite pure enough for industrial use—produced beautiful sounds. While they lack the thousand years of tradition carried by their metal counterparts, crystal bowls offer their own unique medicine, their vibrations interacting with our body's electromagnetic field in profound ways.
Sound Healing at the Cellular Level: What Science Reveals
As I have been guiding the movement in our yoga and sound healing events for the past three years, I have felt in my own body that the sound penetrates or resonates for me at the cellular level. My experience has been recently affirmed by scientific research. There is scientific validation of what mystics and healers have known intuitively for millennia.
Groundbreaking research from Kyoto University in 2025 demonstrated that when cultured cells were exposed to audible sound waves, nearly 190 genes were activated. Sound literally changes how our genes express themselves.
The research shows that sound waves create mechanical stimulation of cell structures, influencing how cells bind together and arrange themselves. Scientists have introduced the term "sonocytology" to describe this emerging field—each living cell produces a pattern of vibrations that changes depending on the task performed by the cell.
Research at Columbia University shows that cells pick up sound through primary cilia—tiny cellular hairs receptive to vibrational energy fields—which then alter proteins and cause cells to change shape. This research is now being applied to investigate sound-based treatments for arthritis, polycystic kidney disease, heart failure, and even cancer. When we bathe in the tones of singing bowls and gongs, we're engaging in a conversation with our cells, inviting them back into their natural rhythms of health and vitality.
Benefits of Sound Healing for Your Physical Body
As a teacher and fellow human interested in full health, I want to highlight what sound healing can offer your body:
1. Stress Reduction and Nervous System Regulation
Sound healing reduces cortisol levels, activating the parasympathetic nervous system—our "rest and digest" mode. The vibrations help shift us from high-stress beta waves to the more relaxed alpha and theta states, where true healing can occur.
2. Pain Relief and Reduced Inflammation
The vibrations produced during sound therapy stimulate the body's natural healing mechanisms, reducing inflammation and promoting tissue regeneration.
3. Enhanced Immune Function
Sound healing improves immune system function by increasing the production of immune cells in the body. When we're relaxed and in balance, our bodies can devote energy to healing and protection.
4. Improved Sleep Quality and Restoration
The soothing vibrations help slow brainwave activity, allowing the body to enter deeper, more restful states of sleep. Many students report sleeping more soundly in the days following a sound bath, waking refreshed and renewed.
5. Cardiovascular Health and Circulation
Sound healing lowers blood pressure and heart rate by calming the nervous system. When the body is in a relaxed state, stress hormones like cortisol decrease, contributing to cardiovascular health and improved circulation.
And Blessings for Your Energetic Body
Beyond the physical, sound healing works profoundly with our subtle energy system—those invisible channels of life force that the yogis have mapped for thousands of years:
1. Chakra Balancing and Alignment
When sound and vibration are introduced to a chakra, they resonate with the energy of that center, breaking up stagnation and encouraging energy to flow freely. Each bowl, each gong strike, each rattle shake speaks to specific energy centers, inviting them to remember their natural state of harmony.
2. Clearing Energetic Blockages and Stagnation
Just like our water taps can accumulate minerals that prevent free flow, densities can accumulate around the chakra centers. Sound healing releases stored tension and shakes loose these densities of what no longer serves us, creating space for new energy to flow.
3. Enhanced Prana Flow
Sound helps move and dispel stagnation, promoting a healthy and unobstructed flow of Prana (life force) through the 72,000 nadis—the energy channels throughout your body. This vital life force becomes more available to every cell, every organ, every system.
4. Emotional Release and Healing
Sound can touch the deepest parts of our emotional being, releasing stored tensions and promoting emotional balance. I have witnessed many students shed tears during or after sound baths—not from sadness, but from the profound relief of finally letting go.
5. Spiritual Connection and Consciousness Expansion
As we align and balance our chakras, we connect more deeply with our spiritual selves, opening to a greater sense of purpose and spiritual growth. In the space created by sacred sound, we can touch the infinite within ourselves, and connect with the infinite around us.
An Invitation
Sound healing is not magic, though it can feel magical. It's not a cure-all, though it can support profound healing. It is more like a return — a return to the fundamental truth that we are vibrational beings in a vibrational universe, and that when we align ourselves with harmonious frequencies, our natural state of health and wholeness can emerge.
I invite you to experience this ancient and modern practice for yourself. Come to our November 14th gathering, or seek out sound healing in other spaces. Come with an open heart and a willingness to receive. Come as you are—tired, stressed, grieving, curious, skeptical, or seeking. The bowls, gongs, and rattles don't judge. They simply offer their frequencies, their vibrations, their medicine.
And in that sacred space between the sounds—in the silences that follow each wave of tone—you may discover what has always been there: your own innate capacity for healing, your own path to liberation, your own wholeness.
May all beings find peace. May all beings find healing. May all beings be free.
With love and in service,
Michelle Greenfield
Resources & Further Reading
If you want to explore the science and practice of sound healing more deeply, here are some key sources:
Research on Cellular Effects of Sound:
Kumeta, M., Otani, M., Toyoda, M., Yoshimura, S.H. (2025). Acoustic modulation of mechanosensitive genes and adipocyte differentiation. Communications Biology, 8(1):1-11. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-025-07969-1
Valenti, D., & Atlante, A. (2024). Sound Matrix Shaping of Living Matter: From Macrosystems to Cell Microenvironment, Where Mitochondria Act as Energy Portals in Detecting and Processing Sound Vibrations. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 25(13):6841. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms25136841
"Your cells can 'hear': Uncovering the relationship between life and sound" (April 2025). Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2025-04-cells-uncovering-relationship-life.html
Research on Sound Healing Benefits:
Fachner, J. (2021). Music, Moments and Healing Processes: Music Therapy.
Goldsby, T.L., Goldsby, M.E., McWalters, M., & Mills, P.J. Effects of Singing Bowl Sound Meditation on Mood, Tension, and Well-being.
Study on music therapy and pain management (2017). Research on 30-minute music therapy sessions combined with traditional care after spinal surgery.
Study on singing bowl meditation (2006). Research showing effects on blood pressure, circulation, immune system, and pain relief.
Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. Various studies on sound healing and immune system function.