When the Gong Opens the Sky

Sound Baths, Trance States, and the Sonic Mechanics of Surrender

Hello!

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This is part two of my series on sound and healing. Last week was the wide-angle lens: how sound reaches the nervous system, the fascia, the brain’s rhythms. This week zooms in—on sound baths, gongs, and trance.

My obsession with sound baths started a couple of years ago, in the middle of burnout. I was doing all the right things—meditating, practicing yoga, exercising—but still wound tight. My bodyworker, Phillip Malone (if you’re anywhere near Hudson, see him), told me bluntly: you need to learn how to relax. I didn’t know what else to try.

Then came a yoga retreat in Mexico—my fourth—with Mark Morford. At Xinalani, people signed up for a sound bath. I skipped it, not understanding the point. It was such a hit, they added another. This time I went. I lay down, listened. And something happened: my body let go. Fully. Deeply. I was hooked.

Around the same time, I was studying modular synthesis with Sarah Belle Reid, learning to build sound from the ground up. Frequencies, textures, shapes. It gave me tools to create my own sound baths. After months of exploration, I recorded one. And now, a new track—drifting more into trance. Links below.

I’ve been reading The Mysticism of Sound and Music by Hazrat Inayat Khan. One line stays with me:
The joy of life depends upon the perfect tuning of the mind and soul.

For those who struggle to meditate—whose minds skitter or snag—recorded sound baths can be a revelation. Drone, gong, or steady rhythm can give the body something to follow. Something ancient. Something steady.

This Friday the 13th, I’m hosting my first Substack Live with fellow writer NJ Simat. We’ve connected over poetry, science, mysticism, and yes—sound. Join us at 6pm EST. We’ll be talking about sound, poetry, and metaphysics.

And now, part two…

The Architecture of Vibration

Every cell answers to vibration. Every organ, every circuit in your brain pulses to invisible tides. You are a cathedral of oscillation. Wind-swept, wave-carved, thunder-kissed. Speech came later. Story came later. Frequency came first. It remains—an ancient blueprint encoded in the pulse of your tissues.

Gamma waves (30–50 Hz) illuminate presence and focus, weaving short-term memory into long-term understanding. They are volatile, sensitive to stress and disease. Theta waves (4–8 Hz), more elusive, guide dreaming, intuition, and integration. Their dance—how one rhythm carries the other—is what holds cognition together. When sound restores their harmony, something essential comes back online.

Healing Thalamocortical Loops

The brain is a symphony. Neural groups oscillate at different frequencies, forming harmonies that shape perception, memory, and mood. When one section plays too fast or too slow, the whole arrangement falters.

This breakdown has a name: thalamocortical dysrhythmia. It occurs when the alpha rhythm (~10 Hz) slows toward theta (4–8 Hz), and gamma (~40 Hz) dims. The thalamus—the conductor of sensory information—loses its timing. And with it, cognition, mood, and selfhood unravel, seen in conditions like Parkinson’s, depression, chronic pain, and tinnitus.

Low-frequency sound acts like a tuning fork and initiates healing. Delivered through the body in vibroacoustic therapy, low-frequency sound travels through skin, muscle, and bone. Soundbeds become instruments, tuned to the human body. The brain listens—and echoes. Circuits that had dimmed begin to light. Theta returns. Alpha strengthens. Gamma sharpens. The nervous system begins to sing again (Bartel et al., 2021).

This is precision resonance. Carefully chosen frequencies. Beds and chairs that transmit sound through connective tissue. Sessions calibrated not for entertainment but for entrainment—drawing the brain’s rhythms into alignment with therapeutic tones. This is music as medicine, grounded in evidence and delivered with craft.

Trance states, rhythm, and brain waves

Recent EEG studies confirm what healers have practiced for centuries: repetitive drumming and rhythmic sound reliably induce altered states of consciousness. In trained practitioners, these rhythms increase gamma activity—the same high-frequency synchrony linked to vivid imagery and insight (Flor-Henry et al., 2017). Trance states also show decreased alpha coherence, increased beta synchrony, and more complex patterns of neural criticality—hallmarks of deep neuroplastic processing. fMRI data suggest that under sound-induced trance, external perception quiets while inward networks—the default mode, salience, and executive systems—move into synchrony, allowing for the immersive, reality-warping experience of trance without any drug (Flor-Henry et al., 2017).

The Gong’s Landscape

Among the oldest and most evocative instruments of resonance is the gong. Its voice exceeds melody. It envelops. It shudders through the body. A gong bath is not an aesthetic experience—it’s a somatic one. The body listens. The parasympathetic nervous system responds. And what begins as vibration becomes a kind of floating: breath slows, cortisol falls, and the brain slips into a healing trance.

A skilled player shapes a sonic landscape. Attack and decay. Tension and resolution. Overtones swirl, collide, and settle. The experience isn’t musical in a traditional sense. It is physiological—a rewiring via tone.

Certain instruments do more than calm. They shift the body's entire operating system. Large Jambati bowls, crystal bowls, and gongs have been shown to lower cortisol, ease pain, quiet mental noise, and restore balance to the nervous system. Their tones are not just heard but absorbed. Vibration travels through skin and muscle, reshaping the inner weather. Tension unwinds. Breathing deepens. The mind slows its grip. This is not just relaxation. It is a return to coherence (Goldsby et al., 2016).

The Practice of Deep Listening

Pauline Oliveros called it deep listening: a full-bodied awareness that attends to the total field of sound. Presence becomes tuned like an instrument to the air, attuned to every ripple of vibration in the room and beyond. The body becomes a chamber. Attention becomes an antenna.

Binaural beats deepen this effect. Playing slightly different tones into each ear generates perceptual rhythms in the brain. Delta waves support sleep. Theta invites hypnagogia (a liminal state between wakefulness and sleep, where the mind drifts, images unfurl, and logic loosens its grip). Gamma sharpens awareness and coherence. These beats shift mood and cognition by synchronizing internal rhythms (Chaieb et al., 2015; Bartel et al., 2021)

Clinical Sound

Modern neuroscience is catching up to what healers and drummers have long known. When brain waves falter, so does cognition. Memory thins. Attention wavers. In neurodegenerative disease, depression, and trauma, the music inside us loses tempo—and in that dissonance, we feel our edges blur (Bartel et al., 2021).

The nervous system is responsive to rhythm, light, and pattern. As global rates of cognitive decline and emotional dysregulation rise, new forms of therapy are tuning into ancient tools: sound, frequency, and sensory immersion. Music therapy has been shown to stir the limbic system, light up reward circuits, and soften the edges of anxiety, apathy, and cognitive fatigue. Gamma wave entrainment—particularly around 40 Hz—has demonstrated effects on memory, focus, and calm, especially when delivered through both auditory and visual channels. Multisensory stimulation shows particular promise in Alzheimer’s care, helping preserve neural coherence where other methods falter (Jiao et al., 2025).

What’s emerging is not a single tool, but a symphony of techniques: song, pulse, flicker, and feedback. When these are combined—tailored to the individual in real time, guided by AI that senses shifts in physiology and adjusts accordingly—therapy becomes more precise. Music complexity can be dialed up or down. Frequency can follow the nervous system’s lead. The result is a new kind of medicine: adaptive, elegant, and rooted in rhythm. While still early, the promise is clear—healing through coherence, not chemicals.

Singing bowls don’t just soothe—they signal. Their low, steady tones may slow respiration and shift the body into parasympathetic rhythm. The nervous system begins to downshift. Participants in sound meditations report not only less anxiety and anger, but a feeling of deep spiritual well-being. One reason may be brainwave entrainment: these sounds may increase theta and alpha activity, gently guiding the brain toward meditative states. The tones are predictable and spacious, creating a field with no demands, no vigilance. Nothing to solve. Just resonance. Some researchers suggest that vibration moves through tissue, not just ear but bone, fascia, muscle. The body hears. The body answers. And for those who’ve never experienced it before, the effect can be strongest—like a door opening for the first time (Goldsby et al., 2017).

The common thread: rhythm. When rhythm returns to the body, function improves. Perception sharpens. Selfhood steadies.

Try a Sound Bath

1. YouTube – Sleeping Vibrations Channel
   https://www.youtube.com/c/HealingVibrations
   This channel was created purely for crystal singing bowl sleep music.

2. Insight Timer App – Sound Baths and Vibroacoustic Tracks

   https://insighttimer.com
   Look for ambient, transcendental sessions rooted in deep listening and spiritual practice

3. Ambient meditation music

   Created using VCVrack and or Eurorack modular synthesis by Kim Barke

   1. Soundbath

   2. Trance

4. Youtube Shamanic drums: Meditation Music for Stress Relief

5. Spotify Shamanic Trance Music

If you aren’t ready to become a paid subscriber, you can still support S&P by buying a coffee

References

Bartel LR, Chen R, Alain C, Ross B. Vibroacoustic Stimulation and Brain Oscillation: From Basic Research to Clinical Application. Music Med. 2017;9(3):153–166. https://doi.org/10.47513/mmd.v9i3.542

Jiao D. Advancing personalized digital therapeutics: integrating music therapy, brainwave entrainment methods, and AI-driven biofeedback. Front Digit Health. 2025;7:1552396. Published 2025 Feb 25. doi:10.3389/fdgth.2025.1552396

Goldsby TL, Goldsby ME, McWalters M, Mills PJ. Effects of Singing Bowl Sound Meditation on Mood, Tension, and Well-being: An Observational Study. J Evid Based Complementary Altern Med. 2017;22(3):401-406. doi:10.1177/2156587216668109

Chaieb L, Wilpert EC, Reber TP, Fell J. Auditory beat stimulation and its effects on cognition and mood States. Front Psychiatry. 2015;6:70. Published 2015 May 12. doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2015.00070

Flor-Henry, Pierre & Shapiro, Yakov & Sombrun, Corine. (2017). Brain changes during a shamanic trance: Altered modes of consciousness, hemispheric laterality, and systemic psychobiology. Cogent Psychology. 4. 10.1080/23311908.2017.1313522.