World Sound Healing Conference = Post-Conference Workshop with Sound Healing Expert Tom Kenyon

This workshop was soooo awesome. It’s difficult to accurately describe everything that Tom covered in one day, so I’m going to actually cut, paste, and edit the original description from the World Sound Healing Conference website. The reason I am doing this is because Tom actually did all of the things that are described below. It was great.

The Journey - Exploring Sound Healing with Tom Kenyon, M.A.

Tuesday May 15th, 2007

In this one-day training, we explored the fascinating world of Sound Healing as a way to enter into the rich territory of our inner worlds—the realm of living myth, dreams and potential creativity.

Sound, in some form or other, has been used for millennia as a means to alter awareness and to make deep contact with other worlds (worlds of perception that open before us during altered brain activity). The methods of using sound to alter awareness vary from culture to culture, but certain commonalities are shared. Among these are the psychoacoustic affects of sound on brain activity.

One form of inner exploration that uses sound as an integral element to alter perception is the shamanic journey.

From a shamanic perspective, the Journey is a movement of attention from the outer world to the inner, and then “down” into the Underworld of primal forces. In classic shamanic journeys there is then a movement “up” into the Celestial World of spiritual experience, returning back to the world of illusion (or the outer world of attention). The purpose of the Journey from a shamanic standpoint is to collect spiritual power, which can then be used in the world of everyday life or the spiritual worlds, as needed.

From a Transpersonal Psychological perspective the Journey is a movement from the Conscious Mind into the Unconscious and Superconscious Minds. Unlike the shamanic perspective, which views the other worlds of attention as real, Transpersonal Psychology views them as symbolic expressions of the psyche. The purpose of the Journey from this perspective is to gain psychological power by bringing into conscious awareness that which has been hidden.

Finally, from the perspective of neuropsychology and psychoacoustics, the shamanic journey involves the use of sound to alter brain activity, characterized by strong increases in theta waves, which are associated with dreams, visions and inner directed attention. These types of experiences also show an increase in non-dominant brain activity (the right hemisphere for most people). Thus, the Journey can also be viewed as a complex experience arising from distinct changes in brain state.

In this workshop, Tom discussed all three perspectives (Shamanic, Transpersonal and Neurophysiology). He also addressed how to best utilize altered states of consciousness (like the Journey) as a source of personal healing and insight. He explored the connection between psychoacoustics (the use of sound to alter perception) and the neurophysiology of altered states. A fascinating part of this exploration is the relationship between sound, internal imagery, emotion and psycho-spiritual experiences. Far from being a dry intellectual presentation, this was a highly experiential and transformative workshop. Tom is well known for making complex scientific concepts easy to understand and highly entertaining. As part of the experience, Tom guided us (the participants) into a discovery of how vocalization can be used to bridge the worlds of spirit and matter (the shamanic view) or bridge the Conscious, Unconscious and Superconscious (the psychological view).

Finally, Tom facilitated the work through the use of natural acoustic instruments and his nearly four-octave range voice.

We (the participants) left the workshop with an understanding of how sound can be used to alter awareness, and how our own voices can be utilized to integrate psycho-spiritual energies. The Journey offered us an extraordinary opportunities to explore our inner lives, and it increased our ownpsychological and spiritual insights.

I was actually amazed at how Tom held the energy for the entire room during this workshop.  One of the ways that he did it was through fabulous preparation and explanation and answering of questions before we actually did our Journeying.

I personally had some amazing insights during the Journey.

Melanie and I have now signed up for his 5-day Sound Healing Training in Seattle over Labor Day weekend.

Look for an upcoming free Teleseminar interview and Podcast with Sound Healing Expert Tom Kenyon.

Thank you for being a part of our SoundHealingExpertsLive family.

Dr. Andrew Colyer

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