How sound evokes emotion…
Evoke the Soul Sound Journey at True Love Yoga navigated the polarity of light and dark through sound.
One person shared that the famous ocean drum induced fear within her. Another person shared the singing bowl tones also brought out a sense of fear. He asked about my thoughts on when sound evokes emotions that are often thought to be “bad” or “negative.”
I had a few different answers to that question. When a person has a sense of fear in a Sound Journey, the sound is serving as a stimuli for a stuck emotion to be felt all the way through. It may also serve as an opportunity for deeper integration of a part of them that feels fear in daily life. Sound is simply the vehicle for evoking what might be in our unconscious, inviting it into the conscious. As I share the expectations of the experience, I often say sound has the ability to bubble up different emotions, feelings or memories. Invite you to breath into it, and inquire deeper.
What I’ve come to understand is that there are no “good” or “bad” emotions nor are their “good” or “bad” sounds. It’s energy that is on a spectrum of human experience. That just as in the movie Inside Out shows us emotions have specific purposes. Fear’s job is to keep us safe.
The body is sensing a lack of safety, from a trigger also called stimuli. It can be a normal occurrence for someone to feel a sense of fear or anxiety during different portions of the Sound Bath. Oftentimes, emotions may start moving, and it hasn’t felt safe to feel those emotions, or they’ve been too much in the past, which can cause a sense of fear. Fear is often attached to another emotion underneath that (refer to emotional intelligence book)
When fear arises, it’s important to come back to the breath. It is an invitation for the observer to check the surroundings and assess the level of safety and what to do next. Sound Bath’s offer a safe opportunity for individuals to process stuck emotions and move through fear.
Viktor E. Frankl said, “Between stimulus (trigger) and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.”
In this case, the stimuli is the singing bowls, which triggers a certain feeling or emotion. Between the emotion and the response to that emotion is a space. What we do in Sound Journey’s is expand that space. When we expand the space, this creates more opportunities to see the choice a person has in responding. Sometimes, all we need to do is to let the emotion flow through.
The fear could also be associated with an unconscious shadow part. Sound taps in to different states of consciousness like the Alpha, Theta and Delta brain waves states. These states are associated with creativity, deep relaxation, meditation, the subconscious and unconscious. A sound journey is a space to uncover programming, limiting beliefs and fears that are stored in the subconscious mind. When accessing these states, fear may bubble to the surface.
The participant and I also spoke about how we could not have the light without the dark.
While fear, anger and even sadness may be undesirable (and even very dark) at times, they deepen the level of experience we can have as human beings.
To label them as “good” or “bad” is a judgement and creates resistance. Resistance doesn’t allow them to really flow through, which is what emotions are designed to do. To experience them in a safe place like a sound journey, is a way to allow them to flow through and create more space for yourself to experience the vastness of being fully ALIVE outside of the sound room.
