Have you ever heard the term “healing voice”? If you haven’t, you are about to discover a profound healing tool that you have had within you since birth – your voice!
Before reading further, we want to start this article with a little exercise to help you recognise your healing voice. Sit in a comfortable position of your choice, and take a deep breath. Relax your shoulders, jaws, and face, and try to make a sound with your voice. It could be something as simple as “aaaaaaaaaa”, “ommmmmmmm”, or “mmmmmmmmm” like someone that just enjoyed their favourite meal.
Did you happen to notice how your voice vibrated through your body to create the sound?
We hope this article will help you understand what your healing voice is, what its “healing superpowers” are, and how you can nurture and use it as a powerful healing tool in your day-to-day life.
What Is Our Healing Voice?
Your healing voice not only enables you to speak, tell great stories, and share your emotions, thoughts, problems, and successes with the world, but it also helps to boost your immune system!
Many of the effects we can achieve with various sound healing instruments can also be experienced through the voice. It can often be more powerful and transformative to work on ourselves with our healing voice than with any other external instruments!
The Power Of Your Healing Voice
Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of using our healing voice in a focused and intentional way.
When we’re engaged in singing, chanting mantras, or vocal toning, our exhalation becomes inevitably longer than the inhalation as we control the amount of breath we release to control our voice. This breathing pattern activates a parasympathetic response in our Autonomic Nervous System (ANS).
Consequently, we feel much more relaxed and can facilitate the functioning of the parasympathetic branch of our nervous system normally associated with nourishment and restoration.
Another great benefit of working with your voice is that it can also serve as a “sound massage” tool. A great way to experience this is to direct the physical vibration of your voice into different areas of your body. This can be done by using different sounds, especially when doing chakra toning with vowel sounds and combining them with variations in volume.
Ultimately, the most important thing to remember is that our healing voice has the potential to express our intimate self at an emotional and physiological level.
A 1-2-1 Talk About Our Healing Voice With Aria Thomé
To learn more about the power of your healing voice, we invited one of our associate teachers, Aria Thomé, to talk to us about her experience of using her voice in her career and life, both for herself and her clients.
Dr Aria Thomé holds a Level 2 Practitioner Diploma In Integral Sound Healing from the Academy Of Sound Healing, as well as a Doctorate In Sacred Music, emphasising in choral music, vocal pedagogy, and choral conducting. Her Masters, also in Sacred Music allowed her to study the voice classically, but also explore shamanic, African, Northern European, and other world chanting practices, with particular focus on their practical, therapeutic properties. During her undergraduate studies, she studied both jazz piano and voice, delving deeply into the improvisatory potential of sound.
What inspired you to start training in vocal sound healing and using your voice in a new way?
As someone who grew up singing in Church and high school choirs, it did not surprise me to find myself seeking every vocal opportunity I could during my undergraduate years. From opera studio to the jazz singers, I relished in the very experience because I knew there existed something undefinable but ever-present in the voice.
During my Masters’s and Doctoral studies, I had plenteous opportunities to sing in chamber choirs and conduct a wide variety of repertoire. Using the voice after my formal education as a choral director just naturally happened.
By this time, putting my other interests of easter mysticism, quantum physics and Gregorian chanting with vocal work made me realise something scientific explained why intentional voicing became such an elixir for me. As fate would have it, I purchased a book about the Sanskrit mantra. After that, it was all over. There was no turning back. Before I knew it, I was already studying vocal sound healing.
What do you draw on from your musical background in your current practice?
In my current practice, I draw on much of my musical background. I’ll try to narrow it down to a few points.
- Harmonisation – I harmonise via toning with the instruments I play. For instance, I might use a C tuning fork and tone a G with it to produce a perfect fifth for a client, which, as we know, is incredibly therapeutic
- During grounding with a Shamanic drum, I will tone just using various phonemes on various syllables I feel drawn to use – I think this comes from my jazz training
- Vocal improvisation I also use with various chimes
- Lastly, I have a Gregorian Chant about water, for instance, that I’ve committed to memory for use when I am using any instrument designed to mimic rain, such as a rain stick – I feel they complement each other well
What healing outcomes can a practitioner expect when working with the voice in this way?
The healing outcomes from using the healing voice depend on what I am using the voice for within the whole process of a client’s session. The feedback about the harmonising, drumming, and chanting I mentioned has always been positively received.
As another example, if the client feels comfortable producing tones, I will tone with them to co-create heart coherence. I’ve also toned while holding a client’s upper feet while grounding.
The outcome always depends on my intent and willingness to get out of the way and let the voice be free to go where it needs to go.
Your original training was in Sacred Music. Do you still connect with that training, and how is that a part of your life as a person and not a practitioner?
I still connect with my training. I maintained relations with a local Church where ritual, ceremony, and liturgy all lend themselves to use chamber music, choir music, chant, and conducting. So, never did I feel a need to step away from my training just because I was now a sound healing practitioner.
Much of the training I also use in my daily meditation practice, such as chanting and toning. Being able to use those skills in both my personal practice and in client sessions makes practical sense to me. The freedom to use the voice in a myriad of expressive ways always stayed with me, even after training as a sound healing practitioner.
Join Our Free Course & Learn How To Work With Your Healing Voice
Do you want to learn how to use your voice as a healing instrument? We would love to show you how! Join our FREE Online Healing Voice Course guided by Dr Aria Thomé, one of our experienced Teachers from The Sound Healing Academy who also holds a Doctorate in Sacred Music.
In this course, Aria will take you on a transformational journey to unlock the power of your healing voice! You’ll learn how to work effectively with Vocal Toning, Vowel Sounds, Mantras, and Chanting to help yourself, your family, friends, and community.
What you’ll learn:
- the concept of tuning our bodies through toning by exploring connections between how the voice naturally behaves and how we can harness that to heal
- how to use mantras to heal (Bija mantras, seed syllables, Sanskrit mantras and more)
- how to create accessible mantras for your clients by diving into ancient vocal practices
Final Thoughts
Our important message for the world is that the human voice is by no means meant to be used primarily as a speech tool to convey verbal information.
We often associate singing with performance and this can feel overwhelming to some. What if we look closely at some of the primal sounds that we make on various occasions, like aaahh, mmmm, ooooooo, etc. to express sensations or certain feelings in our body? So instead of singing in a traditional sense, we “sing” or tone some of these sounds, and by doing so, we can find that we all have subconscious wisdom around the therapeutic use of our healing voice. If we bring this wisdom to our awareness and focus, we can use the treasures of our voices consciously and intentionally!
Now imagine this – what if every day you would allow yourself to use the healing potential of your voice, even for just 2 minutes?
What new possibilities of healing and expansion could you create for yourself in your life and therefore ripple across into the wider world? Sign up for our FREE Online Healing Voice Course and find out how to use your voice as a sound healing instrument for your health and well-being!
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