Pros and Cons of Sound Bath

Negative Experiences of Sound Baths

From this article, you will learn about the potentially negative experiences that may happen to your audience when you are leading a sound bath, sound meditation, sound ceremony, sound healing, or sound therapy session.

My name is Guy Yair Beider and I found my purpose in serving people with the therapeutic properties of sound. December 2021 marks twelve years since I facilitated my first sound journey. Back then, I used to call it a "Sound Healing" session. I was considering many other names to describe what I was doing and always tried to avoid eye-catching titles that may turn the audience away. Titles like "Shamanic Sound Healing" or "Sound Alchemy Healing" were popping up in front of my eyes on Facebook and Instagram, raising the question of authenticity. One day, someone came to my event and said that he is very excited about his first "Sound Bath". I never resonated with calling what I do a "Sound Bath". It is much more than bathing the listener in the waves of sound or soaping the audience with specific frequencies. 

How to Provide the Best Sound Bath

Sound Journey or sound meditation is deep work and it must be coordinated with the knowledge of music theory, psychoacoustics, psychology, and ethics. However, for some reason, the title "Soundbath" became very popular and today everyone knows what to expect from a sound bath. 

Yes, of course, we want to call things the names that describe their concepts most accurately, but in this article, I'd like to talk about something else. Let's take a look at what the experienced facilitators of sound healing arts are saying about the "shoulds and should not" to be observed while leading any sound healing event. What are the pros and cons of defining whether the practitioner is a professional artist? 

Avoid These Mistakes When Leading a Sound Bath

An activist of the sound workers community and a friend of mine Thomas Orr Anderson asked sound practitioners at his forum to list negative reviews about their sound healing experience. These reviews, in my opinion, are worth printing out and reading until memorized. 

• T.A. Poor Musicianship (including poor rhythm, rough or harsh technique, disturbing dynamics, excessive volume, etc.)
• A.K. is commenting on T.A.'s post: "I understand what you mean. However, in my experience sound baths and music meditation may be slightly different in the sense that sound baths don’t require music, just vibrations so in sound baths you are not expecting a musical performance of any kind, meaning there’s no set tempo, melody or harmony as used in music because those are the basic elements of a musical piece. That being said, the fact that you say “poor musicianship” is interesting to me because in a sound bath there’s no performance or anything related to what we understand as a musical performance, it’s a matter of emphasizing vibrations when of course dynamics play a part and sensitivity from the healer is key. Not sure if this is just a semantic confusion because I do know what you mean but I don’t think that’s the name for it because many sound healers are not musicians and they are as good or even better than some musicians/sound healers.
• T.A. answers to A.K's comment: "I tend to consider all sound to be musical... which is, in some sense, certainly just a semantic choice. It is for that reason that I included, in parentheses, more clearly specified examples of what I mean by "poor musicianship"... being "poor rhythm, rough or harsh technique, disturbing dynamics, excessive volume." Whether or not you choose to call the ambient sound sessions musical... those features are nevertheless important.  
• All sound sessions include rhythm. A very poor sense of rhythm can be disturbing to the heart and breath rhythms of the listener, and thereby to their overall state. And vice-versa. All sound sessions (wherein the sounds are produced by a person rather than an electronic system) include technique… which can indeed be rough or harsh… which roughness and harshness can be disturbing indeed. And vice-versa. All sound sessions include dynamics (changes of volume) which can be too sudden and certainly disturbing. And vice-versa. All sound sessions include some overall volume… which can certainly be too much for the ears (such as striking a gong or bowl too intensely and too close to the ears). And vice-versa. Hopefully, this clarifies what I mean. It is for these reasons that many experienced sound workers suggest that even those sound workers who do not consider themselves to be “musicians”... that it is nevertheless a good idea to devote some attention to the basic features of musical performance… because whether or not you call it music, the sounds necessarily include the basic features of music… which can surely be Beautiful, Harmonious and therapeutic… or, alternatively, harsh and disturbing. Learning some basics of music theory and performance techniques is incredibly helpful for all sound workers.
• B.R. Excessive Attention to "Protocol" at the Loss of Attention and Sensitivity to Listeners and Environment.
• K.L. Insensitivity to Listeners / Recipients and Environment.
• G.G. I would say lack of space and pace...(space meaning... allowing silence – not the need to fill every moment with sound).  The tone is often not taught... the subtleties. I agree completely with T.A. with harsh technique, disturbing dynamics, and excessive volume!!
• R.K. Ego 🙏🏿❤️🙏🏿
• G.B. I find it disturbing when the facilitator talks nonsense or talks too much.
• G.B. Singing bowls pulsating in dissonant rates are placed on the body and playing at the same time.
• R.K. This is a really good point to explore.  I think dissonance has its place...but when I see people placing bowls ON the body, they often have NO IDEA what they are doing.  First of all, we are starting to learn that chakras probably don't have a specific "note" or "frequency", but even if they did, what knowledge do we really have that suggest it be to put a bowl that vibrates at the note on that part of the body and strike, that it is supposed to elicit a healing response? Are we sure that a metal or crystal bowl is the best set of vibrations for this? I shake my head when I'm at conferences or group sound sessions and I see people loaded up with bowls on the body and the "practitioners" are banging away at them. Yo, this might feel good to some (I liken this to someone who is incredibly tense and stressed out who gets a really poor message and still feels better after), but most of us have absolutely NO IDEA what this is actually doing to the body and the biofield. This is all assuming these bowls are in harmony. If they are creating dissonance, that's a whole other can of worms.  In my experience, I am akin to dissonance and intense dynamics to my experience with plant medicine.  Dissonance and intense dynamics, when done so with proper awareness, can help bring to the surface aspects of ourselves that require healing. That being said, if there is no proper support to resolve and heal these aspects (harmony, space, integration), then it is just uncomfortable and can leave someone feeling unstable.
• L.L. I am definitely aware of all this and appreciate you reminding us of the potential benefit.  If you know that the methodology being used is best for the client, then, by all means, I encourage and support it! That being said, I find that you either need a deep connection with intuition or deep knowledge of sound (ideally both) to make sure certain methods are best for a given client. Yes, vibration releases blockages of energy, sometimes in a BIG way, and I see practitioners using "high octane" methods of doing this without the total understanding of healing - usually the aspects of harmonization and integration. Sorry to be graphic, but I liken it to a festering wound full of puss. You can't just puncture and drain the wound without cleaning it and expect it to heal. Some of the instruments we work with are indeed great tools that can do a lot of this work without us having to do much to influence them. I suppose my synopsis was that many practitioners don't quite understand the level of powerful energy they are working with. In my experience, It's not to be underestimated. I completely honor those who have cultivated awareness and are guided from the depths of their being and not just by what they have been "taught" or "think" they should do (because as we are seeing, "knowledge" in this field can often be a bit misguided). Thank you for allowing me to elaborate and I appreciate the opportunity for dialogue.  💖🙏
• K.M. Too loud! Whacking on the Fen Gong!
• D.K. Too loud near your head.
• S.V. Too abruptly loud or loud in general.  And not enough space/silence.
• D.M. As well as playing the crystal bowls really hard, she started playing the melody of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" on the crystal bowls but since she didn't have the lowest note she wanted us to sing that note. We had to do that several times. I was the only person in the class who was old enough to remember the tune. It was the weirdest sound healing class ever. 
• F.P. It is difficult as sometimes the challenge can be beneficial. A little wander out of our comfort zone can be necessary. Pleasant isn't always the way.
• J.S. Too many woo woo beliefs hoisted onto the unsuspecting recipient. And too much interpretation of the recipient’s experience based on woo woo belief systems.
• T.A. It is interesting to note that what would otherwise be a fantastic sound session, requiring no verbal commentary... the benefits of speaking for themselves... can be totally undermined by the projection of dogma and fantasy onto it... “explaining” it too thoroughly with vague systems of poorly defined terms, which systems’ only strength is their appeal to “authorities,” which would be better called “celebrities”... as their only authority lies in their history of lucrative practices and effective marketing tactics.
• T.O. Some basics about overplaying and starting with blasting crystal bowls and giving everyone headaches, having Tibetan bowls on a hardwood floor and banging them with the hard stick..really relaxing 😅 All down to the facilitator's lack of sensitivity, awareness, skill and listening ability themselves I'd say.
• J.K. It all comes down to awareness for me. I can just tell when people aren't aware of how the sound is interacting with the people and space with which they are working. This manifests as poor dynamics, banging or clanking on metal instruments, no spaciousness, lack of flow, harmony and/or coherence, a misunderstanding of how to properly utilize dissonance, etc.
• A.L. Attentiveness... Sensitivity... born primarily from deep listening.
• M.L. My husband got trodden on 3 times by a famous, very famous sound teacher during a very famous gong bath!
• V.C. I heard tell of a famous gong teacher who spent the first morning of a course lasting several days teaching how to erect a gong stand. In the evening performance, a gong stand fell over onto a woman who was injured!
• C.S. Crashing and bashing, too much attention on performance and not enough on holding a safe space for participants.
• R.K. I have yet to experience a bad sound session. Lucky me! One time one of the practitioners decided to spray me with some weird scented water which she didn’t announce or ask beforehand and totally took me out of the zone because it felt weird, I didn’t vibe with the smell and I wasn’t expecting it. Other than that I’ve been to better sessions than others but I wouldn’t say there was a “bad” one yet. That being said, I am very picky about where I go.
• F.P. Playing too loud, striking crystal bowls constantly and abruptly, switching constantly between different instruments, no silence at the end, banging on the gongs too loudly. Also – multiple people playing together but not paying attention to what the others are playing (and not rehearsing at all).
• L.B. One of my students was at a sound bath and the person playing tripped over her twice. When she moved against the wall to sit the person then scolded her for not being “in it.”
• A.S. Stillness within the Sound Therapist thyself is the way towards creating a harmony of sounds. Only when the Sound Therapist can calm himself, relax is when he’ll be able to relax his participants. What I am trying to say here is – the experience within the Sound Therapist will be the mirror image of the experience of the participants too.
• D.Z.S. That feeling you get when you hear someone too afraid to cough.
• D.V. Intuitive people that refuse to get any kind of sound training because they say their guides show them how to play.  However, it is not their guides that are playing it's them and they need music or instrument lessons. I asked one lady if her guide was actually a musician because she was speaking in the typical mixture of the language of the internet.