Good Vibrations and the Healing Power of Sound: A Conversation with T Love

Music, a language that everyone understands, has been used in rituals across cultures throughout time. This podcast reviews how music and sound affect the brain to bring feelings of reward, analgesic (painkilling) effects and more. This bonus episode includes an introduction to and a sample of the sounds of Quartz Crystal Singing Bowls which are used for healing in complementary medicine. My guest for this episode is T Love who is only one of a handful of Vibrational Sound Therapists in the world certified to both teach and play Quartz Crystal Singing Bowls specifically for healing purposes. T, the host of the award winning Energy Awareness Radio, is the founder and CEO of the Sojihuggles Children’s Foundation, a nonprofit whose mission is to provide basic necessities for underprivileged children and is only run only by volunteers. T Love can be reached at quantumwellness.org. This episode is sponsored by CF Creative Designs, a full service creative design agency. I have used them for my logos, websites and more. The agency was founded and is run by Christy Ferrigno, who is responsive, a true expert, a pleasure to work with and who came with an incredible reputation for award winning designs. CF Creative Designs offers a full suite of marketing solutions which also includes brand identity, print design, package design, vehicle wraps, trade show booths, promotional items, signage and other marketing collateral. Their rates are affordable to fit in your budget. Check out their five star reviews at CFcreativedesigns.com or reach them at 201-306-6422 for a free quote on your next design project. For those local to northwestern NJ, on Thursday, April 26th, 2018 I will be having a book signing in Sparta, NJ at Interplay Couture fashion store in Theater Plaza from 6-8PM. At 7PM I will give a brief talk entitled: “There is Hope: Strategies for Self Care and Life Balance.” My book is entitled “There’s Always Hope: A Story About Overcoming.” I wrote it with love for children nine and under or to serve as a symbolic gift for an adult in your life who is need of hope - find it on Amazon.com or at Sparta Books. If you enjoyed this episode of Psychology America with Dr. Alexandra, press subscribe, share the episode with a friend, or leave us a rating on Itunes. 

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SPEAKER_00 0:04

To love learn. To laugh. To love. To be love. To see beauty. To understand. To bring grace to the things that matter most. This is Psychology America with Dr. Alexandra. Welcome to my show. For every life stage, we have questions. Let's enhance our lives together as we explore the things that matter most. This episode is sponsored by CF Creative Designs, a full service creative design agency. I've used them for my logos, websites, and more. The agency was founded and is run by Christy Ferrigno, who is super responsive, a true expert, a pleasure to work with, and who came with an incredible reputation for award-winning designs. CF Creative Designs offers a full suite of marketing solutions, also including brand identity, print design, package design, vehicle wraps, trade show booths, promotional items, signage, and other marketing collateral. I can verify that their rates are affordable to fit in your budget. Check out their five-star reviews at cfcreative designs.com or reach them at 201-306-6422 for a free quote on your next design project. For listeners who are local to Northwestern New Jersey, this Thursday, April 26th, I'll be having a book signing in Sparta, New Jersey at Interplay Couture Fashion Store in the Theater Plaza. My book is called There's Always Hope: a story about overcoming. I wrote it with love for children nine and under, or as a symbolic gift for an adult in your life who's in need of hope. It can be found on Amazon or at Sparta Books. A delicious meal, an awesome run, and the touch of a loved one. All these things bring us the feeling of reward. The way we experience pleasure in the brain comes in two phases, in two different parts of our brains. One is called anticipatory pleasure, and it's linked to one part of the brain. Because I'm aware of this, I love to tell my four children about a vacation plan way in advance so that together we can dream and enjoy as much of the anticipatory pleasure as possible. Then there's what's called the consummate pleasure, which is housed in a different part of the brain when you're enjoying it right then and there. Music activates the anticipatory pleasure part of the brain. There are natural opioids. Natural opioids, those that our own bodies produce, give us those pleasurable feelings. They're also natural painkillers. In addition to chocolate, we activate these natural opioids from nursing a baby, sexual and non-sexual touching, and what we're going to talk about today, the healing power of music. Music is a universal language that everyone understands. Every known culture across the planet has used music as part of their rituals. I'm here to learn with you today about the healing effects of music from T Love, who is one of a handful of vibrational sound therapists in the world certified to both teach and play quartz crystal singing bowls specifically for healing purposes. Her name is really T, and it's spelled like the letter T. And her last name is really Love. T is the host of the award-winning Energy Awareness Radio, and she's also the founder and CEO of the award-winning Soji Huggles Children Foundation, a nonprofit whose mission is to provide basic necessities for underprivileged children. It's run only by volunteers, so that 100% of the donations directly support the recipients. T, you smiled when I said that about your name.

SPEAKER_01 4:50

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 4:52

So thank you for being here today. Thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Sound, it isn't just heard with our ears. It's heard in every cell of our bodies.

SPEAKER_01 5:05

That is correct. I even have people who come to me who are deaf. And one would wonder why would a deaf person come to a sound therapist? But it's the vibration. It has really nothing to do with the sound that is accelerating and initiating the healing within your body. It's the vibration. So they feel it rather than hear it.

SPEAKER_00 5:25

And that makes sense. I'm especially thinking about drums and the effect that drums have. I have a lot of family in Rio de Janeiro. And when I've been there for carnival and I hear those beats, it has such an effect on me.

SPEAKER_01 5:43

Absolutely. The drums are it's not really that they're playing music, it's the the vibration again. So the vibration that they make is what's affecting every single part of your being and bringing it into harmony. Yes. Balance.

SPEAKER_00 5:58

And tell us about what it is that you do with healing and music or sound rather. Well, I play quartz crystal singing bowls.

SPEAKER_01 6:07

Now I chose quartz crystal singing bowls because they're made of silicon crystal, 99.92%, versus the Tibetan bowls that are brass. You don't have brass in your body, it's a trace minimal of copper and zinc, but you do have silica in your body at every level, mitochondria cells, everything. So I play the bowls, and it really is based on the science of cymatics, which is physical sound on matter. So when I strike a bowl, it makes a sound wave, and that wave goes out to you. And when it is hitting your body, you're the matter that it is hitting, and it comes back to me, and I can hear what that sound is and how to correct it so that I know which bowl to play next. So I'm playing these bowls, calibrating your body in the same way that you calibrate your car in order to have it, you know, when you get a front-end alignment, you want it to be driving properly. So you need to calibrate your body. And again, that actually it initiates and then it accelerates the healing process because you're in complete alignment and harmony within your being. It's a very spirit, mind, and body. So it accesses all parts of you.

SPEAKER_00 7:14

Yes. Um, in preparation for this, I read a book called The Healing Power of Sound by Dr. Mitchell Gaynor, an oncologist.

SPEAKER_01 7:24

Yes, I love Dr. Mitchell Gaynor. Unfortunately, we lost him a couple of years ago. He is an oncologist in New York, was an oncologist in New York City. And when you walked into his practice, he had a great big quartz crystal singing bowl there. And if you were to have radiology or chemotherapy with him, it was required that you also have sound therapy because it works very well along with conventional treatment. It's never in lieu of, it is always in in conjunction with other therapies.

SPEAKER_00 7:53

I appreciate that. Yeah, I that's why I like it when people refer to complementary medicine versus alternative, because you can do both.

SPEAKER_01 8:02

That's right. And you should do both. We're not there yet that we can just say this is what's fully going to work on a person. We need the other things, but it accelerates the healing. And when you're in a place of harmony and your body is in alignment, then whatever treatment you're getting is going to work a lot better and more quickly because of the fact that your body is in alignment. It reduces the stress. Stress blocks that that other treatment from working. But when you reduce all that stress and you initiate the healing, it's going to be quicker.

SPEAKER_00 8:32

Yes. Can you give an example for us?

SPEAKER_01 8:35

Wow, I can give you a few examples. I'll give you one though, that was very interesting because it was totally unexpected. When I do concerts, it's a group thing and group energy is very strong. And a woman brought her daughter, who was 16 years old, to a concert. It was the summertime. The daughter had warts all over her feet, but she couldn't wear sandals. She didn't want to. She was embarrassed. And she had had these warts for two years, which I did not know when they came to the concert. The next day I got an email from the woman asking, you know, my daughter's warts are gone. So I asked her, Well, would you just stop and get compound W? What did you do to get rid of the warts after two years? And she said, No. We came and saw tea love. And I said, Well, wait a minute, what are you talking about? And she said, Well, they're gone this morning. And so I asked her, you know, they're kind of creeping me out here, are they in the bedlinens or did they recede? What happened? And then I told her, Please don't tell me I didn't want to know. But now it's about four or five years later, and those warts never came back. And it's unusual because usually in the case of warts, there's a mother wart which dies off before the other ones go. To have all of them go on both feet at the same time is very unusual. So I found that very interesting. That was, you know, kind of cool.

SPEAKER_00 9:44

Yeah, that's that's that's neat. Yeah. And you have a clip of what these bowls sound like. I do. Would you like to hear it? I would very much. Okay, well, let's hear the clip. It is relaxing to listen to those.

SPEAKER_01 10:39

And that was just a really short clip. So when you hear the music, and that was a CD, when you hear the music in person, it's totally different. And even when you're in a group setting, it's totally different than a private session.

SPEAKER_00 10:51

It makes sense. Live music versus listening to it on a CD. It's very different how it affects your body.

SPEAKER_01 10:58

And yet it does affect your body. That people will listen to the CD when they're not feeling well. My husband wasn't well. I played the CD from 24-7 and he bounced back a lot more quickly than anyone thought he would. It just works because again, it's the vibration. It seems to come through, even though it is on a C D.

SPEAKER_00 11:14

Yeah. In my reading, I noticed that sound, music, brings out the same neurotransmitters that we try to access through psychotropic medications. So it's not just the opioids that I mentioned in the intro, but it also affects dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine. These are all what we put in drugs like Lexapro and Prozac and Cymbalta.

SPEAKER_01 11:40

Solofia to raise your endorphins and to get rid of anxiety and stress levels. But what happens with sound, there are three neurophysical processes that happen in the brain to start with. And the first one is that it goes right into the auditory cortex, which is the limbic system. So it's creating positive neuropathways in your brain. The second is that it crosses the it obtains information allowing the corpus callosum to bridge that right and left hemisphere so that now they're working in harmony. And then it really excites the peptides in your brain so that it does increase those endorphins and it it raises the level of what is happening in you so that your emotions and your moods are higher. You don't have the anxiety, and it reduces cortisol levels, which is your stress, and you don't want that. So yeah, it does an awful lot.

SPEAKER_00 12:30

I um was wondering how it might affect the flow state, which I was reading about this Hungarian man who has a massive last name with 16 letters in it. And uh I actually Googled how to pronounce his last name. His first name is Mihai, and his last name is Cheeksent Mihai. And uh he's an expert on flow, the flow state, which is when you're so involved in an activity that nothing else matters.

SPEAKER_01 13:02

That's very similar to meditation because when you're involved in something, you don't even notice that time goes by. You're just so into the zone, as it were, that you lose track of time and you're in complete alignment and flow and things are going smoothly. And you know, Einstein used to do this in his office at Princeton. He would hold a rock in his hand and he would go into a meditative state, and the rock was there so that when he went too far, he the rock fell out and he would hear it and he would wake up because he knew he fell asleep and it'd start going back into meditation again. It allowed him to create because that's where you get all of the creativity from. So he would create in that place and invent in that place, and that's what helped him, and it was being in that state of flow.

SPEAKER_00 13:46

Yes, I think my impression is that the state of flow does bring so much more creativity. And part of that is a certain relaxation, or maybe it's a certain using of your whole brain, but music will bring that, and also a certain um athletic performance will bring that as well. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 14:05

And that's where they tell kids when they're meditating, visualize and see yourself getting that goal. Or, and I don't know sports, so I'm probably gonna get this wrong. You know, throwing a ball over the net or whatever it is you do, winning. See yourself winning. And they end up doing that because the brain doesn't know the difference, whether you did it or whether you're thinking it. So when it's time to do it, it will happen. And you can get there through so many different methods, and the sound therapy is one way to get there.

SPEAKER_00 14:32

How long does one session of sound therapy take with your quartz crystal bowls?

SPEAKER_01 14:38

With me, you come in for a one-hour session, or you can come in for a half hour session. I like to see people first for an hour so that I can get a feel for their energy first. And then the second time you come in, you know, maybe you only need a half hour session. You really don't want more than 20 minutes max of the bowls to 30, depending on what's going on. Some people, however, will play the CD all the way through over and over again all night long because they want to sleep and they like the sound of it and it helps them to stay in that state of sleeping. Wait, they sleep while you're doing it? No. Then when they come in for the hour, it's it's only an hour or a half hour. But then if they have the CD, they'll listen to it over and over and over again. Yeah. So, you know, they'll just let it play constantly. I do that in my house sometimes. I just let it play all day. 24-7. Keeps me relaxed.

SPEAKER_00 15:25

So that's what you like to listen to for music? What else do you listen to?

SPEAKER_01 15:29

Well, I also like Bob Dylan, and you know, you know, when I'm vacuuming, it's a different story. But if I if I've had a day, you know, I can't drink wine or get a migraine, so I play my music or someone else's.

SPEAKER_00 15:44

So how can listeners find you?

SPEAKER_01 15:48

They can go online and they can find me at quantumwellness.org. Or if they're in the tri-state area, I do have people come in from New York because I'm located in New Jersey. I have a private practice in Sussex County, and they can find me by calling 973-3838022 and leaving a message because when I'm with patients, I don't pick up the phone. And you also don't allow them to use cell phones. I don't because it's an electromagnetic field that you're introducing into the therapy room. So you need to leave it outside. It won't, your energy level won't read the same if that thing is on.

SPEAKER_00 16:22

Well, it's been a pleasure to have you. Thank you for coming on the show.

SPEAKER_01 16:26

Thank you so much, Dr. Alexandra. I really appreciate you giving me this opportunity. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 16:32

On April 26th at 7 p.m., I'll have my book signing at Interplacateur in Sparta, New Jersey. I'll be giving a brief talk entitled There Is Hope Self Care and Life Balance. For those of you who can't make it, you can find my book, There's Always Hope, at Amazon or at SpartaBooks. Thank you.