BEETHOVEN
Githa Ben David has taught me so much about Sound, and Sound Healing. I first discovered her many years ago, and since then her work has begun to be validated by science. I wrote this reflection on sound for my Kitchen Table Therapy You Tube channel, at the start of Covid.
I had begun to train in sound healing, but this was interrupted by the epidemic. However my interest and belief in its contribution to the healing field remains. In my work with clients, we may use sound to help ground, soothe and calm the body, be it the delicate Koshi chimes, or a soothing voice tone in guided body scan.
If you prefer to listen to the audio version of this blog, click this link.
BEETHOVEN
‘According to the Indian tradition the indisputable purpose of music is union with God’
Githa Ben-David
It is common knowledge that Beethoven became increasingly deaf over his lifetime. What level of sound he may or mayn’t have heard is sometimes discussed, but what seems to be undisputed is that he had a serious compromise of his hearing, by the time he finished his ninth symphony in 1824.
How did he do this? Some say he heard the vibrations through his feet, from the ground. Undoubtedly, as Mozart is reported to have said, Beethoven also heard the music in his head without needing to hear the notes in actuality, so tuned was his mind and heart to the beautiful, passionate music he created.
The current growing awareness of the sound world, and its potential for healing, amongst other things, is burgeoning, two hundred years after his death.
But Beethoven shows we are so much more than simple anatomy. When our intention is seated in love, we can defy the laws as we have created them and step beyond the realm of man’s limits to attain a union with something that is governed by laws still unknown to us. Some may call this imagination, or fantasy. But the more the scientists discover, the larger the limits of man’s understanding, and imagination grows.
What else is possible? What wondrous joy might it be, to imagine we have only touched a small amount of our infinite hearts and minds? What could we yet heal in our failing world if we began to understand our full potential? Not with our minds alone, for we see where this leads us, in our current climate, but with the intellect held safely in the arms of our compassionate hearts, our earth and its infinite variety of life might learn to trust us again.
Hope is arriving along with despair. We are making leaps in the field of sound healing and energy healing. No longer the domain of the fringes of society, their potential is being brought into the light.
It seems we are only just beginning to discover the scope of this universe in which we are so gently held. Beethoven found his own inner source of power to continue his passion, his music.
As we begin to understand the possibilities of all we are, and the responsibilities of all we share, may we all learn to hold the earth in which we live and its wildlife with equal gentleness, whilst we grow up.
Blessings