AN INTERVIEW WITH DR. MIRIAM BURGER

SOUND MEDITATION & MUSIC THERAPY

1. What are your suggestions for how we raise our vitality? How can we support health before sickness?

The WHO defines health as ‘a state of complete physical, mental, and social wellbeing, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’.

Sound meditation offers the benefits of meditation, only that you do not need meditation expertise, as it takes you quickly into meditative states. You can simply let a ‘sound bath’ gently take you into a meditative state. Without any experience, you still fully benefit from sound meditation. It is a great tool to activate the parasympathetic response, which balances the stress response. The parasympathetic response is also essential in preventing sickness.

While we live in constant information overload and uncertainty during the pandemic, we translate stress into so-called stress hormones (adrenaline and cortisol). As part of our natural hormonal cycles, stress hormones are physiologically meaningful. However, chronically secreted they can accumulate up to excessive levels, affecting health on many levels, even at the cellular level.

Sound meditation can support the nervous system to become more ‘resilient’ to stressors. It can be a simple tool to release beneficial neurotransmitters (norepinephrine, dopamine, and endorphins) balancing chronic stress and pain, and improving mental clarity and physiological balance. Also, the quality of sleep can greatly benefit from the effects of Sound Meditation as it influences the release of melatonin and its derivatives. It may be possible that vibrations also enter tissue directly and travel to cell level. Interestingly, latest research at MIT shows that cellular structures emit vibrational signals in intracellular processes.

2. What does an in-person sound meditation session look like?

A sound meditation is an immersive sound experience with gongs, singing bowls, and other instruments also used in Music Therapy. You can combine it with recorded music. It’s called a ‘bath’ because sound waves ‘wash’ over you and fill the room as you lie down and receive the experience. It is assumed that the harmonics of low frequencies and overtone patterns, binaural dynamics, will effortlessly carry your mind into a meditative state, and vibrations enter your body to release tension.

The sound session starts out with a brief introduction, a short guided meditation and breathwork to help you settle into the experience. The instruments will then be played for 45-75 minutes as you sit or lie comfortably and listen to the various sounds and feel sensations that may come up. The session will conclude with a short silence to let the experience settle, followed by an outro to guide you back and let you adjust to the present reality.

During a gong bath, you sit or lie in front of a gong with eyes closed or with an eye mask, and listen to the low frequency tones. The soothing sounds carry us into a meditative state.

I work a lot with the gong and singing bowls, and see that everyone has a different experience with them. It is assumed that a gong’s tangible sounds (vibrations) work on the central and peripheral nervous system by entraining brain waves and entering nerve endings, which can cause shifts in consciousness states, tingling sensations, sensations of electricity. Some people feel completely blissed out, while others feel more emotional. This will be different each time for everyone. The first time can be particularly intense, since it will be a new experience.

3. How do you envisage the future of sound meditation?

I think wellness music such as sound meditation is a first wave of an emerging discipline we could call sound medicine and musical medicine. As a medical doctor, to me this is a truly inspiring vision. In the future, I would like to contribute to the conceptualisation of a medical specialty that officially entitles doctors to be specialised in sound and musical medicine.

As a musician and artist, I have always been very sensitive to our audible and vibrational surroundings. It is well known that high sensitivity is linked to creativity. There could be future opportunities at these crossroads. I believe that we will benefit greatly from utilising wellness music in educational, cultural, preventative and therapeutic ways. And just as meditation has become a big part of everyday life, I think sound meditation will become that, too.