We're taking you on a profound journey, a deep exploration into the power of sound healing with our special guest, Lana Ryder. From her beginnings in herbal medicine to her successful integration of sound healing into her massage therapy practice, Lana's story is captivating. Her encounter with Dr. Mitchell Gaynor's work, which utilizes crystal and Tibetan bowls in his oncology practice, ignited her passion for sound healing and its potential for alleviating grief. Join us as we engage in an enlightening discussion about the effectiveness of sound healing, delving into the depth of belief, and the fascinating nuances of the placebo effect.
Embarking on the second half of our conversation, Lana guides us along her path into the realm of sound healing. Offering insights into the necessary precautions when using sound for healing, she emphasizes the importance of seeking a well-trained and experienced sound healer. Listen in as we uncover the profound impact sound healing can have on those dealing with grief, and how it has revolutionized Lana's massage practice. We invite you, our listeners, to engage with us, share your questions, and suggest topics you'd like us to explore in future episodes. It's an enlightening journey you won't want to miss as we navigate the world of sound healing.
We're taking you on a profound journey, a deep exploration into the power of sound healing with our special guest, Lana Ryder. From her beginnings in herbal medicine to her successful integration of sound healing into her massage therapy practice, Lana's story is captivating. Her encounter with Dr. Mitchell Gaynor's work, which utilizes crystal and Tibetan bowls in his oncology practice, ignited her passion for sound healing and its potential for alleviating grief. Join us as we engage in an enlightening discussion about the effectiveness of sound healing, delving into the depth of belief, and the fascinating nuances of the placebo effect.
Embarking on the second half of our conversation, Lana guides us along her path into the realm of sound healing. Offering insights into the necessary precautions when using sound for healing, she emphasizes the importance of seeking a well-trained and experienced sound healer. Listen in as we uncover the profound impact sound healing can have on those dealing with grief, and how it has revolutionized Lana's massage practice. We invite you, our listeners, to engage with us, share your questions, and suggest topics you'd like us to explore in future episodes. It's an enlightening journey you won't want to miss as we navigate the world of sound healing.
The views expressed by guests are their own and their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent.
Stephanie:
Welcome to, as I Live in Grief, a podcast that tells the truth about how hard this is. We're glad you joined us today. We know how hard it is to lose someone you love and how well-intentioned friends and family try so hard to comfort us. We created this podcast to provide you with comfort, knowledge and support. We are grief advocates, not professionals, not licensed therapists. We are you.
Kathy Gleason:
Hi everyone, welcome back again to another episode of as I Live in Grief. We're all grieving, or if we're not, we may know someone who is, and we're trying desperately to be that support person for them. We're going to talk a little more today about sound healing and we're going to hear a personal story and then maybe talk about how, indeed, it maybe could help alleviate some of those devastating symptoms we all suffer when we're grieving, if nothing else, provide just an atmosphere for some meditation, for some reflection or introspection, and this is certainly not something specific to grieving, but it's a modality that I recently have become more aware of and I'm digging in my normal research and I'm finding this absolutely fascinating. So with me today is Lana Ryder. Hi Lana, Thanks for joining me.
Lana Ryder:
Thank you for having me.
Kathy Gleason:
Oh, my pleasure. Definitely Before we get started, and I've been known to ask some pretty simple I call them toddler questions, so don't be surprised. A little bit of your background.
Lana Ryder:
Yes, I was born to a physician, nurse, mother, and so that really started a career for me in her womb.
Lana Ryder:
I don't know that I ever looked at it that way until I was well into my 50s, but come from a very musical family and also health-oriented professionals. So all through my life I've been exposed to a lot of different types of music and different types of healing. I was born and raised in South Central Pennsylvania and had lots of wonderful opportunities to be exposed to all kinds of live music through my mother and through my family as I was growing up. But my interest always seemed to go in the direction of health care. Even as a very young woman I got interested in herbal medicine and started looking at that and studying that when I was 18, 19 years old. So through the course of all these decades later it's just grown and expanded and after a time of 25 years in our traditional medicine or allopathic medicine, I found myself wanting to dive deeper into holistic medicine, and so for the past almost 30 years that's where I've been and learning and educating myself, taking a lot of different courses and classes, how we can heal ourselves holistically mind, body and spirit.
Kathy Gleason:
That is absolutely fascinating. Now I think I may have to have you back for another episode on herbal medicine at any rate. Did you find in your experimentation that the sounds in general were helping you, and how did you make that determination?
Lana Ryder:
Well, I was working as a massage therapist. That was the first education that I took when I decided to leave allopathic medicine, and it was through working as a massage therapist that I joined our local hospital's wellness center. They were getting ready to open this holistic wellness center and the medical director of the center brought in Dr Mitchell Gaynor to speak to us for the kickoff of the opening of this center, and what I loved about that was I had been looking for a way to incorporate music in a more healing way, a more specifically healing way than just having nice music playing in the background while I was giving someone a massage or, you know, craniosacral therapy or polarity or whatever modality I was using. So when Dr Gaynor came and spoke to us, the really cool thing was that the night before the medical director had announced who he was bringing in to speak to the staff and to the public as we would open our holistic health care center, I found a book by Dr Gaynor called the Healing Power of Sound. So when I went into the meeting the next day and Dr Rogers announced that he was bringing in Mitch Gaynor, I was like, oh, it's a sign, because the book by Dr Gaynor, first of all, he was chief oncologist at Strang Cancer Center and taught at Cornell University, and there he was an MD, using crystal bowls and metal bowls or Himalayan bowls in treating his terminal oncology patients.
Lana Ryder:
So with my background training in allopathic medicine, I just thought that was perfect. So that propelled me into the studies of how could I use sound voice and music as a healing modality or a complementary medicine for my clients and patients. That was how I got interested in it. The only thing I could find at the time was an online course. There wasn't a whole lot available in studying sound therapy or sound healing, so I took that I had bought a small Himalayan or some people call them Tibetan bowls that's not really quite the correct name, but they are becoming known as Tibetan bowls. So I bought a small, a Tibetan bowl and a maybe medium sized 14 inch crystal bowl and basically was mimicking what I had seen Dr Gaynor do with my clients and even though I really didn't know very much at the time, I saw with my massage clients that it could affect them. It was complimenting and enhancing what I was doing with the massage and that, of course, just made me want to know more and study more. I didn't want it to be just woo, I wanted to know the science of it. That was important to me and not to discount the things that we they were.
Lana Ryder:
So from there I just kept finding different teachers to study, such as Dr K Thompson-Lew. I took a voice bioanalysis course with her, which was using your voice and a voice print to see perhaps what frequencies or notes that we are either deficient in or have access of. And then all of her case studies. And even as I started using it I saw, oh, there's something to this, this works. I don't know if I can explain it, but I see it's working. So I had that anecdotal evidence. And of course, then some people will say, well, the power of suggestion, the placebo effect, is very real. But at that point in time I really didn't tell people anything to expect and with the voice print you couldn't really do that. So I started seeing how this was working and again I just continued to study and look for teachers and I finally found some really good ones.
Lana Ryder:
They both of them were ethnomusicologists, both PhDs, and they had worked with Sound for many years, and that was Alexandre Tannou and Mitch Neur. And so they set me on the right path and I had to unlearn some things. I had learned from some other teachers who meant well but were just kind of passing on some misinformation that they weren't aware that it wasn't quite the truth. So it brought me to where I am now and I still take classes from them, if it's not in person, it's on many others as well. I mean, there's a big long list so I won't name all of them, but Alexandre and Mitch they were the two really set me straight. I had some unlearning to do and as I teach Sound to my students, I pass all of that information on to them.
Kathy Gleason:
You know, the more I speak with people like yourself and others I have met through the same path, the more excited I get about Sound and I want to make a quick comment before I go back to the questions that everything you said just provoked. But my quick comment you mentioned placebo effect. That well, there's placebo effect. So what if there is? If it helps, it helps. I don't care if it's placebo or otherwise, but if somebody gets some relief, that's what we're looking for. So that was my quick comment on the placebo effect. One question I wanted to ask you've used the term allopathic, which I'm not familiar with. I'm familiar with homeopathic, some of the others, but could you just kind of help me understand what allopathic means?
Lana Ryder:
Sure, that is just our traditional, like Western, medical system you know, our healthcare system here in this country well, and others that look at a more science-based Tony-type of perspective on how we? Okay, I just want to say, though, about the placebo effect, what I've found with that. Now we hear the quote from Jesus who said physician, heal thyself. So if we believe, not hope or beg, but if we believe and envision that this, it happens for us, I have found, not only personally in my own life, but in the lives of other people that I work with, as well as family and friends, that this works. So, yes, as you said, the placebo effect whether it is this kind of a made-up type of thing and the power of suggestion or there really is something to it it works. So that's the bottom line I agree.
Kathy Gleason:
So don't discount it, don't rule out the placebo effect and don't let someone talk you into believing something that isn't going to make any difference. If it helps, it helps. However, you got there. That's the important part. You got there, okay. Where do I want to start? Let me first relate to you how I first got intrigued with sound.
Kathy Gleason:
I was in Dallas, texas, visiting my younger daughter, and we went to a crystal shop for the very first time in my life and I picked out a few crystals that I felt drawn to. I was doing some research in the line of healing crystals and the power of crystals and when I went to check out they put my crystals in a small bag and then they turned around and behind the counter there was a large bowl. It was metal and they kind of rubbed this mallet type thing along the rim and I heard this sound that resonated deep within me. It was a whoa moment. I couldn't believe I wasn't just hearing the sound, I was feeling the sound. So I asked about it and they mentioned that they cleanse the crystals before they leave the shop because so many other people may have handled them, et cetera, and that's just their philosophy and I understood and accepted that.
Kathy Gleason:
But as soon as I got home I had to delve a little more into the sound, and it's taken me over a year to find people like Ulana and some others that I've spoken with Rich Ryan I'm going to be speaking with, I'm going to be speaking with Allison, I believe, and Duff and it's taken me over a year to find this group of people that I feel can lay it on the line for me and can give me information that I can trust and take to do my personal research. Beyond that, I have scheduled and a sound bath for myself and I can't wait, and I've gotten my daughter, stephanie, interested as well. So, on that note, there are so many ads out there now and we all know on Facebook, if you start to think about something, the ads start to appear. I know it's all this AI, but it just boggles my mind. So there are all kinds of classes and opportunities out there. Is there anything someone might experience just attending a random sound band event coming up? Is there anything that could harm them or be negative?
Lana Ryder:
Well, first of all give a shout out to all those people you mentioned and I've learned a lot from Rich good hon. Far as any precautions or side effects from sound healing, there are some precautions. Like someone has a pacemaker, I don't wanna put a ball right on that area, you know, or anywhere they have implant or kind of replacement, joint replacement. If someone is wearing hearing aids, of course you don't wanna put any sound too close to their ear. If anybody is recently a TBI, a traumatic brain injury, there are precautions to take with that. In some sound baths they like to have lights going. Of course flashing lights can trigger seizure disorders. So there's that. Those are the basic things that come to mind. Right off the top of them. Many people can go out and buy these instruments. They're not difficult to sound or make sounds with them and they have little or no training. So I like to let people know well, there are some things you should know. You really should know not only the precautions but also to give the people who are coming to you the maximum experience. So once in a while I've had twice.
Lana Ryder:
I've been into the sound healing for like 20 years In giving these sound meditations or sound immersions, or the popular term now is sound baths. I usually don't play like the crystal balls too loud because I was starting to say a couple people have come up to me at the beginning of these group sound events and they see the crystal balls and they say, oh, I see, you have crystal balls. I hope you don't play them too loud because I had to leave the room at the last one I was in. It gave me a headache or those kind of things, not that they were harmful to any great degree, but they were uncomfortable or annoying. So there are things that need to be learned about the best way to play these instruments.
Lana Ryder:
Certainly, when you go from using one instrument to the next, you want to segue gently into it because anything that's sudden, it doesn't even have to be loud. It can be a sudden change. Our reptilian brain is programmed to the startle effect because it's like what's that? Something's different. It's a protective device built into us. So that's something else people need to know if they're going to be using sound. Does that answer the question?
Kathy Gleason:
It does and prompts many more. So is it fair to say that if you want to have a one-on-one healing session with sound and you find a practitioner, is it normal for a word, reputable, but I'm going to use it anyway For someone who is extremely trained I'm not going to say certified, because there is no certification in sound healing. You can have a certificate for completing a training session, but there is no certification or license for sound healing. But is it fair to say that someone who is very well experienced, does this professionally and has done it for years, might ask you some of those initial questions do you have a pacemaker, you have any artificial joints?
Lana Ryder:
like questions like that now, of course I'm coming from that you know, medical background in training and then also as a licensed massage therapist. Our intake forms included some of those questions. All right, and so when I teach my students sound healing, they, they know that there are things you need to say upfront and and make the client or the person you'll be working with, or even a group of people, to keep in mind. These are things to be aware of and their important considerations. Some of the, as well as being trauma-informed, I, my students, have to have a trauma-informed workshop before they can graduate and and I imagine you've already talked with rich goodheart, because those sound like his words there's no, there's no certification you can give it. I mean, anybody can give you a certificate for anything, and so just because someone says I'm a certified sound healer, that may or may not mean something. What I tell people is look at where they got their training, see who they studied with, see how many people they've worked on individually. A lot of people, like I said, they want to buy these instruments and then they start her holding group sound, and you know they. They might sound nice and for the majority of people they're fine and they're relaxing and they're a good thing, but you still need to be trained and understand what to do if someone in that group has these issues or it triggers a trauma response. These are important and it's important for those of us who are truly serious about bringing sound into mainstream that people understand this is these are not toys, that we're playing with these instruments. You know whether it's the metal bowls or gongs, or tuning forks or the voice, the chimes. I mean there, there's so many different instruments right now and we're not music therapists. That's a whole other thing.
Lana Ryder:
I had one woman, I know I'm digressing, but I had one woman on Facebook one time and she commented on one of my posts oh, I do what you do. Only I call myself a music therapist because I use music too. And so I asked her kindly, gently you know, are you a music therapist? Do you? Do you have your degree in music therapy? And she said no, I just use music when I see my clients, and so hopefully that was a good thing for her to realize.
Lana Ryder:
You, you can't call yourself a music therapist just because you use music in your sessions. Of course, music is organized, sound, but that doesn't give us license to, you know, call ourselves a music therapist. There's a huge difference. So anyways, yeah, so in. And music was a strong connection for me with my mother. She was a professional musician from the time she was 11, 12 years old, playing during the Great Depression with her father's band, and so music for me. I started hearing in the womb and it was through that and through that music that helped me through the grief with my mother. I don't know if you were ready to go there or not, but that's just what came up that's a great place to go.
Kathy Gleason:
Let's talk about the grief with your mother. Did sound healing, did sound help and how?
Lana Ryder:
absolutely. When I first got into sound, my mom was still in her right mind the dementia hadn't gotten to her at that point and her comment about it was because she went with me to several of the venues where I spoke and taught people about and she said well, that's very nice, those are nice sounds and I see where it could work. But I think music does the same thing. And of course I knew she had a point because music was equally important to me. I was in music ministry and saw the power of music, sometimes greater than the spoken word. You know, music sometimes reaches in where just talking does not. Yes, there are a number of different factors there. But so when she started getting a little bit of anxiety with when her dementia started and at first she wasn't diagnosed with Alzheimer's, which we know is one kind of dementia, there are many different kinds but she heard me using one of my metal bowls and she said oh, what, what was that? That's one of your balls or something like that? And I said yes, and so then she seemed interested in it. So I gave her the bowl and I said here, you know, you can tap it or rim it to make it sing. And she did. And I was so touched by that because before she just kind of you know, well, that's nice, but you know I prefer my music, so which was fine. So I was so touched by that and I thought, wow, so something's changing in her brain.
Lana Ryder:
Her added to her feelings about how the just plain sound and the harmonics within the book affecting her and as she got worse. This went on for eight years before she passed and she, when she would stay with me at my house, she would use the bowls If she saw one sitting there and I have them all over my house but I have them in different rooms in my house and she would pick it up and she would just hold it and it was very calming for her. Now she played. She was an organist and jazz organist.
Lana Ryder:
She played her music right up until four and a half days before she died, when she went into the hospital she was still trying to play on the organ. So when I saw what it did for her and how calming it was, I thought I'm going to try using this more with some of my patients or clients who have these dementia issues or memory loss. And I knew it was calming. I knew just to hold the bowl and strike it and listen to those sounds was calming, as was all the other instruments for me, and so that was one of the last gifts that my mother gave me was showing me how it doesn't have to be organized sound. It doesn't have to be music per se, but these simple sounds are very grounding and balanced.
Kathy Gleason:
Sadly, and I hate when this happens every time, but our time is running out, so before I sign off, I want to turn the microphone over to you and let you speak directly to our listeners that are actually around the world and tell them more about what services or training you might offer. If you've got books out there, whatever you would like to let them know, go ahead.
Lana Ryder:
Well, thank you, kathy, and thanks again for having me. I guess the first thing I would say is, as far as what I offer is how everything has been honed down to me actually opening a sound school and it's local, it is all in person. You can learn some things online. There are many good classes and courses online but the advantage of learning in person is, of course, you have the use of all the instruments, you have the instructors there overseeing you, you have that interaction, you have that bonding and you learn many things in person that you can't learn virtually. So the sound school is a six and a half month program and that is here in Lancaster, pennsylvania.
Lana Ryder:
I also have written two courses Reggae Sound and Reggae Voice and they are curated specifically for Reggae practitioners to learn how to begin using sound or voice in their Reggae practices. I have written a couple books, but they are just self-published. I have a couple of those. I did go to the Institute for Integrative Nutrition back in 2010 because I thought nutrition was something I needed to learn more about. So I have a book called Sound Nourishment and it's using sound and nourishment as a healing, and also songs of the morning light, which is more my sharing the experiences I had in using sound with both my mother and my father's passing so.
Kathy Gleason:
I think Sounds interesting. How could people reach you?
Lana Ryder:
My website is probably the best way, and that would be soundwisehealthcom. I'm on Instagram as a soundwise woman and Facebook is soundwisehealth, or my personal page, lana Ryder R-Y-D-E-R. I'll be the best ways.
Kathy Gleason:
Okay, I appreciate that Listeners. As always, contact information will be posted in the podcast notes and on our website and, as always, if you want to reach out to her, you're also welcome to reach out to me and I will connect you. I have a lot today about sound healing, and one of the things I want to impart since I label myself as an eternal skeptic is if, in fact, we have to be careful, if we have certain physical issues if you will like, artificial limbs, pacemaker, etc. If we have to be careful when considering sound healing, that to me means there's something there on a scientific basis. That just helps me feel more confident that there's really something to this.
Kathy Gleason:
For me personally, I'm going to delve a bit deeper. I want to know, I want to feel the sound to the depths of my body, and I'm looking forward to that experience For everyone out there listening. I hope we've answered some questions. I hope we've prompted some questions enough so that perhaps you'll consider maybe sound can help me feel a little bit better. So until next time, take care of yourselves, as we all continue to live in grief.
Stephanie:
Thank you so much for listening with us today. Do you have a topic that you'd like us to cover or do you have a question from one of our episodes? Please email us at info at asylevangreavecom and let us know. We hope you will find a moment to leave a review, send an email and share with others. Join us next time as we continue to live in grief together.