Everyone seems to be contributing their thoughts in this time of what is considered a global pandemic of Covid-19 and it seemed correct to do the same. So in this blog and for several after, I will be putting forth some ideas about how we can use sound and consciousness to enhance our immunological system and deal with many of the situations presently occurring.
As many of you may know, I’ve already created a couple of YouTube videos (and their downloadable audio mp3s counterparts). I’ll be focusing on something about them in a later blog. But for the moment, I’d like to bring your attention to something which has been on the focal point of my sonic consciousness for the past several years. This is humming.
As you may be aware, I’ve been in this field for over 40 years, researching, experiencing and teaching how to use sound for healing and transformation from nearly every aspect of the sound field. Many of these approaches seem to work very well for healing and transformation and I will do my best to bring information about them in future blogs. There are many different activities regarding sound that I don’t teach about—this doesn’t mean that I don’t utilize them. I hope to discuss many of them in later blogs.
For the moment, I’m going to focus on one aspect of the healing benefits of humming that I think can be immediately applicable to what is happening right now. Several years ago, my wife Andi and I wrote a book called THE HUMMING EFFECT. To our knowledge, this is the first professionally published book that deals exclusively with the subject of humming. We wrote about this subject because after many, many years of teaching sound healing, one troublesome phenomenon seemed to continue—this was the idea for a lot of people that in order to practice sound healing for themselves, they needed to be professional singers, trained musicians or have some ability that they were taught and practiced.
Andi and I wanted to find some sound that everyone could do—some sonic activity that people would not judge themselves about—something that would allow everyone to experience the power of sound to heal and transform. We were talking about this, trying to see if we could figure out a sound that would be inclusive, not exclusive—and allow everyone the power to use their own self-created sounds as tools for healing.
We thought for a moment and then almost simultaneously looked at each other and went: “Hmmmmm”. Thus began the first step toward writing THE HUMMING EFFECT. The second step was to outline the book and somehow discover some way that anyone would want to read a book about humming. We decided that in order for this to occur, the first chapter had to be about the therapeutic, positive physiological benefits of humming. And that this information had to be peer reviewed—from research found in journals that were accepted in traditional medicine and science.
While the process was pretty arduous—you had to know what to search for in order to find this material—it turned out that there was indeed much information that was available. And we presented a lot of this, including how humming caused the reduction of stress, release of melatonin, lowering of heart rate and blood pressure and much more. One of the most striking benefits that continually showed up was the release of Nitric Oxide (abbreviated as NO), a molecule that is, among other things, a vasodilator. Rather than tell you more about it right now, I’m going to ask you to check out the video above.
This 3 minute video is actually an excerpt of a more than hour long video by Dr. Deitrich Klinghardt, a German MD and Ph.D, who talks about using many different modalities to assist with the pandemic. The section I excerpted focuses on Nitric Oxide’s use with Covid 19 and in particular, the humming of use to stimulate NO. We were sent this video by a Healing Sounds Correspondence Course student and we’re grateful for it. While we don’t necessarily agree with everything that Dr. Klinghardt says in his video, we are totally behind this brief 3 minute excerpt in which he talks about the benefits of Nitric Oxide and humming. While we have this data in THE HUMMING EFFECT, for many this video may be the added impetus to get them humming.
For those who wish to view Dr. Klinghardt’s entire 76 minute presentation, you may view the full video here
Our next blog will deal with further aspects of the how’s and whys of using humming in this time of Covid-19. Stay tuned!
P.S. As I wrote this blog, I just saw a video that just went up today (4/27/20) on using inhaled NO for Covid-19. The fact that we can literally create our own NO when we hum may prove important! Click Here to View Video
