Shamanic Song Healing

Shamanic Song

One of my and my clients favourite forms of healing is the ‘shamanic song-healing’. If you can sing and don’t feel shy about it, this is a lovely use of clairaudient ability to channel healing energy and make adjustments in the energy field. With intent, you can direct the stream of sound into specific areas of the energy field and move energy around with your voice.

To some extent, song-healing is about creating an atmosphere or mood and setting the stage for an altered state of mind within the client. Shamanic song-healing uses sound and rhythm to evoke the release of emotion and facilitate shifts of state. Music is a univeral language which seems to speak to the soul and stir deep feelings.

Toning is the most simple way to use song-healing, because it doesn’t require modulations in tone, melody, rhythm or mood. If you prefer a more free-flowing approach to toning, focus on the chakra you feel drawn to and listen. What sound do you hear? As you listen and feel into the sound, breathe in, open your mouth and allow the sound to come forth as it will. Direct the sound towards the chakra as you sing. Repeat this until you feel guided to change the tone or move on. If you get crackles, breaks and weakness in your voice as you do this, it might be because you have encountered a blockage in the chakra and the sound is struggling to shift it. If this happens, persevere with producing the same tone until you can do it with a strong, clear voice.

You can change the mood and feeling of the tone by adjusting the vowel sound you are using, the shape of your mouth, the resonance of the sound and the volume. You can ‘sing through tones’ using harmonics and what I call the ‘wind-breath’. Singing through a tone simply means adding more light and shade to the monotony of a long single note, providing it with more character and variation. Harmonics are fine, ringing notes that sit above the main sound being produced. They can be difficult to hear and produce but its well worth the effort to do so because they are excellent quality sounds for singing healing. With practice, you can make turn the harmonic into a beautiful melody which dances on top of the lower tone and you can even learn how to make the harmonic sound dominant in volume.

‘Wind-breath’ is easier to produce and master than harmonics but equally effective during song-healing because of the mystical mood it introduces. This form of song is ideal for shamanic journeys and shifting people into altered states. To create a ‘wind-breath’, sing a tone and then let more air out, blowing it out with a little force and shaping your lips so that you get a slight whistling effect. It can help to practice creating the wind sound first without the tone, and experiment with moving your sounds back and forth between a soft whistle and blowing, in order to develop control. Once you have control, you can adjust the tone of sound being blown through your lips as you sing and you can keep the wind sound happening in the in breath as well. What the client hears is an almost eerie, magical sound of song being carried on the wind and sometimes getting lost in the wind. These sounds work well to transport people into past life memories.

Tone work can be highly effective for clearing energies in the healing space, the clients energy field and your own energy field. When other methods of clearing aren’t working for you, try toning! Simply hook into the blockage with your minds attention and get behind it with your breath and let the breathe come out as sound.

Song-healing is about allowing yourself to move around between tones to create a melody and adding some rhythm. I never use actual words when I sing for healing because it’s the sound that is important and the lack of words lends a ‘world-music’ feeling to the song as though I were singing in some other language. I just make up the vowel and consonant sounds as I go along, letting my body create the sounds it feels like expressing. The songs can sometimes sound as though they are distinctly African, Aboriginal, American Indian, Indian, Hawaain, Irish, Scottish, Middle Eastern and so on. At times, this cultural reference can have some kind of personal meaning for the client.

I learned a lot about song-healing from the spirit guide of a Brazilian client. The client later told me that my style of singing reminded her of the healing she wound receive back in her home-town. This spirit guide taught me shamanic healing techniques such as sucking toxic energies in with short, sharp in-breaths and spit-blowing them out and away on the out breath. I don’t recommend trying this at home unless you really know what you are doing. To do it safely, you need to have good personal boundaries and be completely comfortable working with negative or toxic energies. Either that or very good guidance!

I have particular voices I use or that ‘come through’ (channeling) for specific purposes. When I’m helping deceased spirits ‘cross over’, I use a soprano female voice with a angelic church-choir tones. When I need to step into my power and be assertive in response to an intimidating energy, I drop down into my deep male, American Indian voice, because it has a forceful ‘sit-up-and-pay-attention, don’t-mess-with-me’ kind of feel to it! I also have an alluring female French voice that is excellent for coaxing stubborn energies to come out of hibernation and unlock themselves from set positions in the energy field in order to rebalance the field. These are just a few samples of the many voices I use. In my mind, they belong to guides who are working through me, but they are also ‘my’ voices and very much a part of who I am.

In general, song-healing is a wonderful accompaniment to shamanic journeys and particularly effective with clients who have experience in this area. You can instigate the journey by setting the scene, asking them to look for a guide (animal guides work best) and directing them to follow the guide before launching into song. The song ‘carries’ the journey and helps the client stay focused on their unfolding vision. You can stop every now and then to check on their progress and to see if they need suggestions from you by asking ‘what’s happening now?’ or ‘where are you now?’.