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- Diane: Tom would you tell us how you became interested in sound and the tools of sound healing.
 Tom: Actually, I became interested in sound as a child. My mother said that I used to sit on the swing for hours, singing. Apparently I would go off into my own little world, and she would have to drag me inside to do chores and things.
When I was twelve or thirteen, I had a very strange experience. We were living in an apartment building at the time, and I would go downstairs to the rec room to sing, because of the natural echo in the room. Nobody went down there, and I would sing there for hours. Then one day some guy showed up at the door whom I had never seen before in the building. Because I stopped singing, he said, ''I didn't mean to disturb you or scare you. But I just wanted you to know that you will heal many, many people with your voice.'' Then he disappeared. He just turned and left.
Later on, I became a professional musician, which helped put me through college. During that time I observed that different musical sound patterns affected people in different ways.
In the early 80s, it all came together for me. I was a practicing psychotherapist at the time, and I developed an interest in what is called ''Whole Brain Learning,'' which utilizes sound to create more receptive learning states. I went to California for a six-week residential program to study that system, and when I went back to my private practice, I started using music with my clients to accelerate their therapeutic process.
This sound therapy had such a positive affect that my clients would give the tapes I made to their friends. I started getting requests for the tapes from people all over the country.
At the same time, I decided to scientifically document the effects of sound on the brain, which at that time was a very new field of research. I started enrolling universities and researchers in the idea of exploring with me what was happening in the brain in relationship to different sound patterns and rhythms and tones.
The research took on a life of its own, and acoustic brain research became my main focus for the next ten years. That's how I got into the work. First through my own interests, then through observing what it did for others. I applied it to psychotherapy, and I worked with it scientifically.
Diane: How did you become interested in utilizing tools for sound healing such as the crystal bowl and drums?
Tom: Well, the tools of sound are very interesting scientifically. At that time, most of the work I was doing was EEG-oriented. Then one day I came across a research paper that talked about how shamanic drumming at a certain rhythm increased Theta activity in the brain.
Up until then I had been using electronic tone generators. I could set digitally-controlled frequencies and create brain changes that way. But as I started working with shamanic drumming and other sound implements, I very quickly shifted from using the tone generator to the use of these sound objects. Why? Because they were much more effective!
For instance, when I tested change in the person's state, I could make subtle changes in how I was delivering the sound with the drum, whereas with the tone generator, once you set the frequency it did not vary. I could change the frequencies with a tone generator just by pushing a button, because it is digital. But it was much more subtle — and much more masterful — to actually tune in and follow the changes with the drum, crystal bowl, or a rattle or other implement.
Diane: How do crystal bowls, chimes, and tuning forks work within the body?
Tom: There's something in the brain called the RAS, or Reticular Activating System. The Reticular Activating System is a bundle of nerve fibers in the medulla oblongata, which is down near the brain stem — the most primitive part of the brain. The RAS has pathways that go up through the midbrain and into the neocortex.
The total purpose of the RAS as far as we know is to alert the brain to the presence of new stimuli. So if something happens in your environment that's novel, new, or different, the RAS alerts the brain, in case there might be danger lurking. A woolly mammoth might stumble into the cave — or on the freeway a car might pull in front of you — and the RAS would immediately stimulate the brain into a state of high alertness, or what's called High Beta activity.
When a stimulatus is repetitive, the RAS stops paying attention to it, and starts to actually calm the brain down. It has a sedative quality. So when there is a repetitive sound pattern in your environment, the RAS creates a sedating effect in the brain. This is one of the keys, technologically, to all of the shamanic tools. With drumming, for instance, you have a pattern that repeats itself over and over again.
Toning with Crystal Bowls
 If you have a crystal bowl, you also have a pattern that's repeating itself over and over again, but with subtle changes. The primary signal or sound is the same, and this causes the RAS to actually begin to cause the brain to go into Alpha-Theta states.
Alpha-Theta states are wonderful for transformation of consciousness because they're dreamlike. Things become more fluid. In normal waking state, we tend to hold the world a certain way. As we go into the dream state, these ways of holding the world get more fluid, and possibilities for new ways of seeing occur.
The other thing that's interesting about these brainwave states is that in Theta, awareness is so internalized that we are no longer aware of the external environment. What we are aware of is the internal process — whatever might be brought up in terms of imagery and experience. And because of the way the nervous system is set up, the body-mind actually interprets these internal experiences as real events.
For instance, a person might have a dream where there's a monster, and all of a sudden they wake up startled and their heart is racing and they are breathing fast. This is an example of how in these deeper states of consciousness what is experienced is actually taken as real. There are neurological and chemical reactions to what, in the Western world, we call dreams and fantasies.
So if you create a healing experience for a person like this, it will have a very healing, powerful, positive benefit in terms of neurotransmitters, hormones, blood pressure, heart rate, and all those parameters that occur in the body and the mind. This is the primary way that drums, crystal bowls, rattles, chimes, and other instruments create changes in the body.
Subtle Energy Research and the Field Effect
There's another effect called the Field Effect, which comes from an area of science called ''subtle energy research,'' which looks at the use of these instruments in a very different way. While the RAS is creating those sedative changes in the brain, imagery starts to arise, and the person very often has dreamlike experiences. And while that may be going on, what is also happening is that the vibrations of the actual instrument, like the crystal bowl or the chimes or the tuning fork, are interacting with the energy field of the person himself. This area of research is very new — within the last fifteen years.
There's a group called the International Society for the Study of Subtle Energy Medicine, which is probably one of the premiere professional organizations. Their view is that when you look at a person, you are seeing only a part of what exists. There is an energy field around each human being, and this has been scientifically documented. This energy field is very responsive to sound and other energies. And it turns out that it is also very responsive to energy.
Dr. Valerie Hunt of UCLA showed that a person's energy field connects to another's when that other person has a thought about the other person. If someone enters the room and you have a thought about that person, there's a connection energetically that occurs between your two energy fields. So when you get to this level, you can say that it is the intention of the person working with the bowl and the intention of the person receiving the healing that also has an effect.
This gets very complicated, because you have a physiological thing going on in the brain creating neurological changes, but you also have the Field Effect of the actual vibration itself interacting with the field of the individual. And then, finally, you have the intentionality of both the healer and the person being healed. All of these factors have an effect.
Diane: I understand that there are some people who have sound healings and nothing happens, and others who have sound healings and tumors disappear. What is necessary in order for the brain to allow the body to heal.
Tom: There are several factors. One is physiology, one is psychology, and one is subtle energy.
Physiologically, the person has to be receptive enough to open to new energies or new insights or ways of being that might come up for them.
I'll give you an example. In music therapy, there is classical piece that is often used called Pachelbel's Canon. It's a standard largo movement, slow and stately, which tends to increase Alpha activity — in other words, it's relaxing. I used this piece early on in my practice, and everybody had these very relaxing experiences. Until one day this man came in, and instead of a relaxing experience, for him it created distress. It turned out that he had associations with Pachelbel's Canon based on the death of his mother. So a stimulus that relaxes one person might have a different or even opposite effect on someone else.
There are certain observable physiological events that mark receptivity. You'll see the face muscles relax, and you'll see an increase of blood flow to the face. And the client, in order to create healing through sound, has to enter into a receptive state easily. My belief, based on doing psychotherapy for over 18 years, is that we all have the resources to heal the problems we face, we just have to find a way to access them.
Some people are very easy and flexible in accessing internal resources and some people are rigid and need more assistance. So part of the, let's say, the mastery, or the effectiveness of the sound healer is to be able to sense when a person has truly gone into receptivity, and when a person needs more assistance into receptivity. That's one part of the picture.
Another part of the picture has to do with the person who is actually receiving the work. I believe it is both the person's intention and the intention of the person making the sound that have immediate impact. The healing process becomes a co-creation between these two individuals.
We don't understand all of the elements as to why one person heals and another does not. But I believe that part of it is this subtle interplay of intention, how willing the person is to receive the sounds, opening up to a deeper level of their own consciousness.
Obviously, we all want change. But there are places in ourselves, blocks, where we don't want change. Sometimes these blocks can play a big role in why something doesn't work, in terms of sound healing or any other type of healing.
I was having a conversation with a healer by the name of Candace Blakely, and she said, ''You know, Tom, I've worked with cancer for years and years, and I believe that if the intention was clear enough, we could sit down with somebody who has terminal cancer, smoke a cigarette and drink a cup of coffee, and have a spontaneous healing.''
What she was saying is that the methodology of what creates the healing is not as important as the intention and the power behind what is done.
There's a sound healer by the name of Jonathan Goldman, and he coined a phrase, ''Sound is a carrier wave for intention.'' I think that that statement is very accurate. When we start looking at sound healing and using various implements, the implements do have an effect physiologically and neurologically. There's no question about it, this has been demonstrated time after time. But the implements themselves are not what does the healing. I believe it's consciousness that does the healing, and it's an interplay of co-creation between the implement — whatever it is, whether it's a shamanic drum, crystal bowl, tuning forks, chimes — plus the intention of the person using it and the intention of the person receiving it. It's those three elements, all coming together.
Is Healing Always Possible?
Diane: What about the situation where you know there is intention to heal, and yet healing does not happen. You can see the healer's intention, and you have all the right bowls or chimes or bells and whistles. And the person who has the illness has stated, ''I choose to live,'' and they've done hours of psychotherapy, they've tried all the cures, they've been to all the healers — and they die anyway? Would you then say that there wasn't enough intention? I know there are people who carry guilt about this. Guilt that they didn't do enough, they didn't intend enough, they have given their all...
Tom: Well, there's two things. First, I'd like to talk about this from the perspective of the field of psychoimmunology, sometimes called psychoneuroimmunology. It's a big word meaning how the mind affects the immune system. And second, there is a personal experience I had with my wife, Pam, who died of terminal breast cancer, and what my experience was in working with her.
The first thing is, I think there is damage that occurs in the New Age movement where people say, ''It's my full and total responsibility for whatever happens to me and my health.'' The research does not support that. What the research supports is that there is the effect of mental and emotional experience. What you and I think and what we feel on a daily basis does affect our immunity. But to say that if our thoughts and emotions were clear and strong enough we would not get sick is a flawed statement. I think it is a very damaging way to think.
For some people, the thought is, well, if you get cancer, it's your fault. However, there are so many toxins in the environment, the biosphere is getting so polluted, there are so many elements that come into play where illness is concerned, I don't think it serves people to go into guilt. I understand a lot of people do, but all I can say is, from medical research on psychoimmunology, it doesn't hold up to say that it's your fault that you can't heal yourself. There are too many elements we don't know about.
One of those elements, I believe, has to do with the soul of the individual. It is my personal belief that the soul of the individual has an effect on the outcome, because some of the decisions are not made at the personality level, they are made at the soul level.
Which leads me to my experience with Pam. After she died, which was very confrontive to me as a healer, as you can imagine, the first thing I did was go immediately into a Tibetan tantric ritual that empowers people who have died as they start going into what Tibetans call the bardo state — the state a person goes through after death.
I started doing that ritual, and Pam came to me immediately, and said, ''Don't waste your breath. I'm fine. Here's something that's much more important. Here's a list of my jewelry, and who you are to give it to, and what you are to tell them when you give it to them.'' [He laughs.]
So I gave away these pieces of jewelry according to her instructions, along with what she said, and it was a very wonderful experience for many people and very significant for them. I could talk to her very clearly, and I asked her through my grief why she had to die. And she said, well, she didn't realize it, but she could not become the Love that she was by remaining the limited person that she had become. That the world was much broader to her now.
I realized then that her decision to die may have been made at a soul level. Certainly at a personality level she really was committed to staying alive and did everything that she could, including very intense medical procedures in the alternative arena.
And although, as I said, it was very confrontive for me as a healer when she died, I discovered many things in the process. Pam had bone cancer that had metastasized out of breast cancer. Bone cancer is extremely painful, and usually people have to be on heavy pain medications up until the last minute, and they are in anguish the entire time. In Pam's case, she did not take any pain medications until the last week or two, and it turned out that her pain was greatly reduced by the work that I did.
Now, looking back, it is both humbling and also uplifting for me. Humbling that I wasn't able to assist her to stop the cancer, but uplifting that the sound healing really did help to stop the pain until the last few weeks.
Another interesting thing occurred with Pam that I'll share with you. She started working with a shaman, and he conducted a ceremony in which he retrieved her Earth soul. He said, ''Well, we can't say whether you are going to live or die, but we can say that ... you will be in bliss.'' And that's what happened. Except for the pain, mentally and emotionally she was clear and in bliss right until the last few minutes. Pam told our mutual friend Judi, who was in the room with her, ''You know, it really doesn't matter whether I live twenty minutes or twenty years. It's the process of life that matters.'' And twenty minutes later, she died.
Why we live and why we die is a great mystery on many levels.
So let me summarize those two points. First, I think that a healer or a person facing a health crisis needs to let go of the belief that if people can get ''clear enough'' they will live, and if they don't, they will die. There are so many things in the immune system that we don't understand from a scientific standpoint, it doesn't hold up to reason that a person should be blamed for succumbing to a disease process.
There's a phrase they use in hospice: ''The person was healed and the patient died.'' Meaning that a person may come to clarity, release, and integration in their life and be healed, but ... their body might die anyway.
Second, I believe that some of the decisions affecting us are not made with the personality. They come at another level of ourselves called the Soul, the Spirit, whatever you wish.
Diane: Thank you for sharing that with us Tom. What an amazing teaching!
Tom: You're welcome.
How to Use Crystal Bowls
Diane: Okay let's explore the use of the crystal bowl.
Tom: Right. Well, the crystal bowls are an interesting phenomenon. Quartz crystal is crushed and some kind of bonding agent is added. It is then melted and cast into bowl shapes close to the diatonic scale: C, D, E, F, G, A, B. Most crystal bowls are not pure to the pitch. Although three bowls might be in the key of C, if you played them at the same time, one would sound flat and the other, sharp. They will rarely be right on the money.
For practicality's sake, because I go all over the world to teach, I use a D bowl, because it is suitable for my vocal range and provides more flexibility. Some people have all seven. There is some belief among practitioners that C corresponds to the root chakra, D to the sex chakra, E to the solar plexus, F to the heart, G to the throat, A to the third eye, and B to the crown. However there is no scientific evidence that I am aware of that validates this belief.
What I'm attempting to clear up here is the dogma around the crystal bowl. You don't have to get all seven. You can just get one and experiment with it. Find one that resonates for you. People are always asking me how to decide. I say that part of it is, you need to hear it. If it feels good to you, it's going to be a good sound implement for you to work with. If it doesn't feel good to you, then don't use it, even if the person selling it tells you it is the best, most powerful sound implement on the planet. Your own feeling response is the best criterion.
What I have personally found with the crystal bowls is that it is my intention, rather than the pitch, that works best. I can direct the frequency of the D bowl and my intention into any area of the body I choose, and the person receiving the work will feel it there. The crystal bowls set up a vibrational effect. There's no doubt about it. Anyone who has been in a room with a quartz crystal bowl can actually feel the body vibrating. If you are going to use your voice in addition, then you might choose a bowl that gives you the greatest vocal range. I chose D.
There's a field of science called Cymatics. It was actually created by a researcher by the name of Hans Jenny [pronounced Yenny], who studied the effects of sound on different substances — metal filings, water, pollen, and so forth. Water, for instance, is a tremendous responder to sound. If you take a wine glass with wine in it and rub in a circle around the rim until it makes a tone, the sound produced will reflect complex geometries.
Since much of the body is water, estimates range from 40-60 percent, and the crystal bowl sets up such a very large sound field, you will feel the vibration. The whole body will vibrate. In fact, the vibration goes into the body of anyone who is nearby. Literally, what's happening at a physical level is that the water in your body is in resonance with the crystal bowl, and the bowl is setting off very complex geometric shapes and forms called standing-wave patterns into the body's intercellular fluid. Those fluids are going into resonance with the crystal bowl, and that's creating effects in the brain, in the nervous system, and in the hormones. All types of biological parameters are affected by one simple instrument. You add intention to it, and you have a very powerful combination.
Diane: Will someone who is hearing-impaired still get the same benefits?
Tom: They are not getting the input to the auditory pathways in the brain, so I wouldn't say it's the same effect, but the vibration is affecting their field. And if the intention is to heal, they are definitely going to get a positive healing effect from it.
Other Toning Devices
 Diane: Would the same principals hold true with tuning forks, chimes, and other sound implements?
Tom: Tuning forks are different. The principle is the same, but the Field Effect is not as large from a tuning fork as from a crystal bowl. The tuning forks create a microenvironment, where a crystal bowl creates a macroenvironment. All you have to do is be in the room with the crystal bowl, and if you're close enough, your body will vibrate with it. But with a tuning fork, you have to have it really close to your ear. Often, what practitioners will do is set the tuning fork on the different energy points of the body, near the chakras, or the meridian acupressure points, and let the sound go in that way. It's a similar effect to the bowls. It's not as large, but the intentionality of a practitioner can quite easily come through a tuning fork as well as another sound implement.
Healing and the Power of Anticipation
Diane: You mention having your implements be sacred to you. It makes me think of the Shamans who used implements of power in their ceremonies. They have a feather, they have a bowl sometimes, or they have a drum... How much of that is the object itself and how much is the ceremony surrounding it?
Tom: That's a very good question, and we don't know the answer from a scientific standpoint. But I do suggest that a person who works with sound implements and chooses to explore their use treat them as sacred objects, imbuing them with power and energy.
I can tell you an interesting story about this which comes from Larry Dosse, M.D. He tells of when he was an intern and a man came to him who was very seriously ill. Nothing the doctors could do could help him, and they couldn't figure out what the problem was.
Larry didn't know what to do. He reports going to the man and saying, in a last-ditch effort, ''Well, there's nothing we can do for you. The only thing I know to do is a secret healing ritual that I was given. And I will do this with you tomorrow.'' What he was doing was creating a hypnotic suggestion because, in fact, he did not know any rituals. The next day he created something on the spot in a desperate attempt to fight the illness. And the man actually recovered! This is the power of suggestion. In research, they call it the placebo effect.
The placebo effect is really fascinating. What it means is that if you give a group of people a pharmaceutical that's in a red capsule, and you give another, control group plain sugar that's in the same kind of red capsule, a certain number of the people who get the sugar pills will have a reduction or a complete cessation of their symptoms. So when scientists do pharmaceutical research, they actually have to look at the placebo effect and statistically calculate it in such a way as to remove its effects from the research results. Because if the placebo effect is too high, it throws off the research.
I had a personal experience with the placebo effect that I'll share with you. I was going to conduct a workshop intensive, and I created a tape specifically for the attendees to listen to ahead of time. They were to play it at night before they went to sleep.
I mailed the tape out to everyone, and this woman called me up and said, ''This tape is the most incredible thing I've ever experienced in my life. I'm having healings with my family. I'm having insights I've never had before. Thank you. Thank you. I can't wait to get to the intensive.''
Then I got a call a few days later. She said, ''Now this is a subliminal tape, yes?'' I said, ''Yes. I put some subliminal messages on it.'' And she said, ''Then there's no music, right?'' I said, ''Well, there is music.'' And she said, ''Well, that's what I thought, because I talked to some friends of mine and they described their tapes. But I don't have any music on mine.'' I had accidentally sent her a blank tape! This woman had this amazing transformational experience, based only on her anticipation.
When you get into a shamanic ritual or a tantric ritual or any ritual that has a lot of mystery around it, if the person has enough anticipation and if they are highly suggestible, they can actually create a response to something, even though that something is not what we would call ''real.''
On the other hand, I know a shaman who had some feathers that were gifted to him by his mentor and went back hundreds of years. Those feathers carried the power of all the shamans who had ever used them. And I have knowledge of Tibetan Buddhist tantric rituals using objects that are believed to carry the energy of those who have used them before. From a scientific standpoint, we can't make any comment about whether an object has power or not, because there is no way to measure it. Personally, I believe it's a combination of both. Some of these objects do have power, and they can affect things.
Then there is the belief and intention of the person which plays into that.
A Love Song to Yeshua
Diane: Recently, you released two CDs, City of Hymns and Forbidden Songs, both of which are off the beaten path from what you usually do. From the perspective of sound healing, could you please tell us what your intention was for these two albums.
Tom: The City of Hymns was actually proposed to me by Virginia Essene, who is my publisher. Yeshua came to her in meditation and asked her to ask me to do a sound-healing treatment with hymns. I was very busy, and I actually said, ''Well, I'll think about it, but it's going to be a while. I have too much on my plate.'' Then one day, in my own meditation, Yeshua actually showed up and said, ''Would please you do this? Because your sound treatment of hymns would help many, many people. I can reach them through your voice.'' Needless to say, I created space on my plate.
Basically, these are hymns that are familiar to a lot of people, but the treatment is very different. A lot of hymns are very rigid in their structure and rhythm. My task was to find a way to allow a different type of experience to come through. Many times during the process of creating this recording, Yeshua would actually show up, or send beings to help me.
One of the most interesting experiences was when I was really struggling with a hymn called ''In the Garden.'' This hymn is normally played very stridently, almost like a march, which is quite the opposite of a healing sound. Remember, in sound healing you want to open up an Alpha-Theta window, which creates relaxation, and that element was what I was trying to find in the piece. But for some reason, I could not find any way to make this hymn healing. I struggled with it. I was up almost all night. I finally went to bed about 3:30, and woke up at 5:00 and spontaneously went in and started playing the hymn, and it hit me: The rhythm and tonality embedded in this hymn were a love song to Yeshua. It was so obvious.
The hymn actually begins, ''And he walks with me, and he talks with me...'' and another line says, ''I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses.'' So I'm singing this song, and I look up and it is dawn, just as it ''dawned'' on me how to make this hymn work. [He smiles.] For me, it was a journey of getting past my own prejudices around these hymns and finding the love and the serenity and the true spirituality that was embedded within them.
I have some interesting stories about City of Hymns. I heard from a lady who is a very fundamentalist Christian. And she said, ''You know, I started getting teary when I started listening to this, and then I got more and more relaxed, and you know, you can't do other things while you listen to this.'' I think that one of the greatest endorsements for a sound-healing CD is when somebody who is not oriented towards these healing methods and Alpha states actually says, ''You know, I can't pay attention to the external world. I have to close my eyes and go inside when I listen to this.''
Forbidden Songs has a totally different plan. It's my own music. Something happened when I turned fifty. Before that, I wrote songs and put them on the back burner. In 1985, when Acoustic Brain Research took off, I only had time to compose music for scientific purposes. Then when I hit fifty, all these songs that were children of mine started banging on the door and saying, ''We demand time.'' So I started composing again, and the songs on this album came from songs that were written up to twenty-five years ago. It's not like City of Hymns, that gets you totally relaxed; Forbidden Songs alters you because of the tonality that I'm using in my voice. The words are a statement of raw, hard emotion. The timbre of my voice and the music are creating, hopefully, an opening for a person to experience their own deep feelings more directly.
Diane: And how can people get these new releases?
Tom: Through any music store, Amazon.com, or Barnes & Nobel. You may have to special-order them. You can also get them by calling our office at 360-376-5781, or by accessing our website, tomkenyon.com.
Diane: Great. Well Tom, thank you for such a great conversation and a wonderful interview. Good luck with the new CDs.
Tom Kenyon: Biography Musician, researcher, author and therapist, Tom Kenyon, M.A., holds a masters degree in psychological counseling and has over seventeen years of experience in private practice. In the course of his psychotherapeutic work he began to use sound and music to accelerate the therapeutic process.
Recognizing the power of sound as a healing modality, Tom founded Acoustic Brain Research in 1983 to scientifically document the effects of sound and music on consciousness. Through his scientific explorations, Tom became fascinated with the use of sound as a means to access altered states of consciousness and the more creative aspects of the brain/mind.
In addition, Tom has developed a system of "catalytic sound" using his nearly four-octave range voice to assist others in entering deeply altered states of awareness. A large portion of Tom's current work is in the synthesis of internal alchemy as a means to heighten awareness and to develop spiritual illumination.
He is the author of Brain States (US Publishing), and co-author of The Hathor Material with Virginia Essene (SEE Publishing).
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