How sound healing can promote emotional healing and physical well-being

When Joshua Inacio first realized the power of how sound can affect your feelings, it wasn’t with singing bowls or gongs or flutes—it was with Michael Jackson’s album Bad.

It was this ability to use music to feel a certain way that led him to start composing music as a teenager. By the time he was in his 20s, he was tuning in to energy fields and creating music to match them.

This is the foundation of sound healing: using sound and tuning in to our energy fields.

Inacio, who today is a spiritual teacher and vibrational sound healer, says people have a tendency to look at tools such as sound healing as being something that is only outside of ourselves—we may picture a wide selection of instruments and bowls and chimes—but these are just ways to augment what is already inside each of us.

What Is Sound Healing?

Sound healing is a process used in energy work to help break up heavy energy, raise energy vibrations, and support mental and emotional health. We can use sound itself as a substance to help access the inner power we all have.

“Every organ, cell, bone, tissue, and liquid of the body, and the electromagnetic fields which surround the body, has a healthy vibratory frequency,” explains The Association of Sound Therapy. It is when these cells and tissues and fields become dissonant that sound healing can balance the energy fields and restore harmony.

Merrill Scott Jr., a sound healer and Reiki master, describes sound healing as restructuring the water in your body. It can be a very powerful experience, but it is not a new one. It is believed that in ancient Greece, there were attempts to use music to cure mental disorders.

“Throughout history, music has been used to boost morale in military troops, help people work faster and more productively, and even ward off evil spirits by chanting,” suggests a recent Healthline article.

What Sound Healing Sounds Like

Sound healing can make use of sounds both with and without tools. Singing, chanting, breath, prayer, silence, and meditation can all be part of sound healing. But there are also plenty of instruments that are commonly used to help clear stagnant energy and raise vibrations.

What is Sound Healing, Singing Bowls, Vibrational Healing

Singing bowls, including metal and crystal bowls, are some of the most popular tools for creating specific healing frequencies. These are often used by individuals but can also be effective in groups both large and small. Tuning forks, chimes, and gongs are other small instruments that can be incorporated. Flutes, digeridoos, drums, and other instruments—or even simply listening to music—may also be introduced.

These tools offer a wide range of frequencies that can help target different energy fields, vibrations, or issues. Scott recommends choosing your tools in person and letting your intuition (and your spirit guides) help pick the ones that resonate.

Every session is different and each one is, in the end, guided by the energy that is present. Inacio says a sound healing session with him might start with a large gong to break up the coagulated energy. He may then use a digeridoo to perform a body scan, seeking the points where vibrations change from dissident to constant; this is where the work begins to create balance, and he could use weighted tuning forks to recalibrate the energy.

From there, Inacio might choose a crystal singing bowl and use his voice to continue raising the vibrations. “It’s like tuning a violin or a guitar,” he says. Inacio likes to end with a reading or a prayer to help create an even deeper and more soothing experience.

What Sound Healing Feels Like

Scott had been familiar with singing bowls before, but when he started going to weekly sound healing appointments, he was so relaxed after each session that the receptionist teased him for walking funny on his way out. He had been practicing Reiki and healing touch for years, but sound healing had a stronger feeling for him, explaining that it’s become “another tool in the energy healing toolbox.”

Scott says that sound healing has helped practitioners connect with angels, guides, and loved ones who have passed: “It opens doorways.” And those doorways can lead to healing or improving a variety of issues, including sleep disorders, anxiety, depression, stress, PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), risk for chronic illness, immune function, and chronic pain.

“By using rhythm and frequency, we can entrain our brainwaves and it then becomes possible to down-shift our normal beta state (normal waking consciousness) to alpha (relaxed consciousness), and even reach theta (meditative state) and delta (sleep; where internal healing can occur),” says Nate Martinez, a sound healing practitioner, on mindbodygreen.com.

As we move from a beta state to an alpha state, the body begins to bring itself into alignment, Inacio says. The deep relaxation provoked by sound healing techniques allows participants to release their grief, pain, and fear, healing old wounds and emotional scarring. It can help relieve physical aches and pains, promote faster recovery after injury or operation, and increase mobility.

Interested in sound healing but not sure where to begin?

Inacio recommends spending as little as seven minutes listening to slow sound, such as music at 40–50 beats per minute. That can help you find a meditative state that allows for the healing to begin.


To learn more about Joshua Inacio, you can find him online at joshuainacio.com. You can also listen to his Vibrational Healing Support series on YouTube.

About the Author

Mallory Herrmann is a copy editor and proofreader at Unity World Headquarters. She has an English degree from the University of Missouri and a graduate certificate from the Denver Publishing Institute. She lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she is a reader, writer, and flaneuse.

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