My therapist asks me to lay down on the bed.
She elevates my legs and my head comfortably on pillows and places a warm blanket over my body, a singing bowl between my ankles and a chime bar lengthways down the centre of my torso.
Talking me through everything, she lowers the lights, puts on quiet soothing music and lays a lavender eye pillow across my closed eyes, while inviting me to take deep breaths of the essential oil blend she’s just lathered over her hands.
I often doubt the effect alternate therapies claim to deliver. Still, I’m prepared to open my mind to the sound therapy session I’m about to have because I know my therapist is a woman of science with a background in pathology.
She explains that everything is energy, our bodies are mostly water, and the treatment she’s about to give me is based on sonar communications like our intelligent friends the dolphins use.
Sonar used sound waves to ‘see’ in the water.
The idea is that the sounds used in the therapy will place my body at the optimal frequency for my cells to heal.
It makes perfect sense when explained that way, right?
The sceptic in me momentarily lets down her guard before spiking again at my therapist’s prompts to inhale and exhale my chakra colours in order.
Perhaps I’m not spiritually enough in tune with myself to know what flavour of air each colour is, but I cannot distinguish one colour from another, much less master isolating each, no matter how hard I try to visualise.
So, I just take my deep breaths in and out as guided until I fall into a deep meditative state, almost like I had sunk into a deep hypnosis.
With each strike of the singing bowl or the chime bar, I can feel my limbs tingling with the succession of vibrations the instruments create. I imagine my cells are buzzing with activity as they work to repair themselves.
As I sink deeper — still awake, yet hearing myself let out the odd snore anyway — it feels like my spine is realigning itself.
I visualise a staircase, and these jagged movements as my back moves up the steps.
My left leg twitches every time my therapist strikes the singing bowl.
I experience no discomfort or pain during my treatment.
After 45 minutes of sound and my therapist’s hands placed on pressure points on my head and feet at various intervals, she gently brings me back to full consciousness, where I try to wriggle my toes and fingers, the latter feeling a heaviness as though they had sunk further below the surface of the mattress with every minute of the session.
I immediately feel quite tired and spaced out, but five minutes later, I’m feeling exceptionally energised for someone who’d had just four hours’ sleep the night before.
Post-session, my therapist gives me a report of her findings.
She did not see my body twitching despite it seeming to me the movements would be obvious.
The chakras that fall across my throat and my stomach were the noisy ones on her first pass of the chime bar, indicating that maybe I have words unsaid, or I haven’t been entirely honest about things and that energy was uncleared in my throat and that maybe I’d had some stomach issues.
My cynical mind often tells me that findings like this from a deck of tarot cards or psychics at conventions could be applied to any number of things in your life if you want to believe it badly enough or if you’re a good enough spiritual spin doctor.
But my practical mind is shocked to realise I can immediately relate these results to two things that are going on in my life right now without even having to get creative with my imagination, twisting angles and moulding them to fit some narrative I’m desperate to believe.
As for the spine stuff and my left leg twitching, I come to my own conclusion this has something to do with the terrible debilitating bout of sciatica I had following a crushed nerve in my spine just over a year ago, of which ill effects still linger.
“Could some specific sounds in a specific order from some specific instruments really help heal such an ailment?” I ask myself.
I’m not yet entirely convinced — old thought processes die hard — but I sure do hope so.
Even if nothing is physically healed within me after this gentle sound therapy session, something spiritually heals straight away.
Whether it’s permanent or temporary remains to be determined.
But I’m walking away relaxed and smiling, like someone who’s just had a phenomenal massage and deep meditation.