A group of beanie-clad women carrying pillows and doonas trickle into a country hall on a Wednesday night to set up their swags in a circle.
They've come to Bundalaguah-Myrtlebank Hall in central Gippsland for a slumber party of sorts — a crystal-bowl sound meditation with Ulrike Herzog.
Ms Herzog says sound can help relieve mental or emotional stress, and in turn help you feel a bit better.
"The singing bowls [that produce a sound when hit or circled] work really well with our bodies through vibration, because our bodies are a musical instrument," Ms Herzog says.
"In a guided meditation, you have to concentrate really hard.
"In sound-healing meditation, you can actually fall asleep and it still works, as the sound still opens up the body and gives that beautiful energy and release."
How sound meditation works
Sound and vibration have been used by Indigenous cultures in meditative rituals and healing prayers for thousands of years.
A healthy human ear can hear sounds at frequencies between 20Hz and 20,000Hz, whereas other animal species such as birds, bees, butterflies, dogs and dolphins can hear wider frequencies and use that power to navigate to source food, sense danger, and mate.
Miranda Munro, founder of the Australian College of Sound Therapy in Western Australia, believes much of the stress of modern life comes from a "soup" of artificial stimulation that surrounds us.
"Everything is a resonance, you walk into a room and you can feel the energy. We're energetic beings, we feel everything, we're just so switched off from that," she says.
Ms Munro trains people in the art of playing crystal singing bowls, Himalayan bowls and tuning forks, with additional drums, chimes, rain sticks and vocal tones.
In much the same way that an upbeat, feel-good song can instantly lift one's mood, she believes listening to the singing bowls can improve your wellbeing.
While the research on sound meditation is thin, there is a body of scientific evidence to suggest that our brains do process sounds and speech differently, with the left side of our brains handling speech, and the right side handling music and sounds.
Ms Munro believes that when people listen to the sounds being played during a meditation session it helps them switch off their left brain and relax.
"The right side of the brain then switches on as we get into a state of relaxation," she says.
"It puts the brain into a nice deep theta or alpha brain wave state," she says. "This is a state that we go into when we are in deep relaxation, or just before we fall asleep in deep meditation and also in hypnosis."
A ministry of sound
Helen Lavretsky, president of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry and director of integrative psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), has been researching preventive and treatment approaches for late-life mood and stress-related disorders.
Dr Lavretsky cites a 2022 pilot randomised controlled trial study of 54 international university students attending a summer school in Olomouc in the Czech Republic, which concluded that listening to low-frequency sounds helped alleviate acute stress.
"Sound and music therapy have a growing evidence base on beneficial health effects, especially for stress reduction," Dr Lavretsky says.
As with music, some sounds can be grating or irritating to the ear, therefore sound therapy works best when customised to the needs of the individual.
Dr Lavretsky says music therapists will typically customise a playlist from music that a patient grew up with, or was popular during their youth to trigger a memory response.
"Music sound healing can be helpful in reducing signs and symptoms of stress, anxiety, depression as it leads to deeper relaxation and reduces blood pressure and heart rate," Dr Lavretsky says.
"Just by experiencing positive emotions and joy you can feel better."
"If this is a part of the placebo response, it only speaks to the power of the human mind to heal the body and the mind-body connection."
Relaxation on a budget
Ms Munro says sound meditation is actually becoming a popular means of reducing stress and realigning depleted energy levels.
White noise, often touted as an aid to help babies sleep, has also become a popular category of YouTube and podcast content, consumed by millions of people each year.
There are also many videos that feature long recordings of natural sounds, like the sound of rainfall or the bush, long enough that you can play it in the background while you sleep.
With so many types of sound-meditation content on offer, Ms Munro says it is important to test "what feels right for you".
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