Sound, Frequency, and the Gong: Reflections on How Sound Creates Change

I work as a sound healer, and alongside this I am currently studying a Master’s in Music Therapy. Holding these two worlds together has deepened how I think about sound, not only as an experiential or spiritual practice, but as something that actively shapes emotional regulation, nervous system states, and psychological change. Studying psychotherapy and clinical frameworks has drawn my attention to an important question that underpins all therapeutic work: how does change actually happen? Exploring sound through this lens has helped me articulate what I sense intuitively in practice, while also challenging me to reflect critically on how sound healing fits within wider models of care. So how does sound, frequency and the gong create change?

Sound as regulation rather than explanation

In psychotherapy, change is often associated with insight or verbal processing. Sound-based practices suggest a different path. They offer regulation before explanation, meeting the nervous system and body before the mind needs to interpret or label.

Rhythm, repetition, sustained tone, and vibration support the nervous system to shift from states of hyperarousal or shutdown into a window of safety and engagement. Once regulation is established, emotional processing, relational openness, and meaning-making often emerge naturally. Breath deepens, muscular tension softens, and emotions can move and settle without verbalization.

Clinically, this aligns with bottom-up processing, where physiological shifts enable emotional and cognitive integration. Spiritually, it resonates as a form of remembering; the body already knows how to return to balance when it is met with safety and resonance.

Using Sound in Ceremony: Creating Active Engagement

Sound in ceremonial or group contexts offers a unique way to engage participants actively rather than passively. Ceremonial frameworks allow people to enter a shared sound environment where they can participate at their own pace, choosing how and when to interact. This supports several key domains of change:

• Agency and empowerment: Participants make choices about how they move, respond, or contribute within the sound space, reinforcing that they are active collaborators in their experience.

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• Relational attunement and connection: Shared sound creates a container where people sense each other’s presence, attunement, and energy, fostering safety and belonging without words.

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• Embodiment and sensory integration: Ceremonial use of instruments such as the gong, chimes, or singing bowls encourages participants to feel vibration and resonance, grounding attention in the body and senses.

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• Emotional regulation and processing: The immersive qualities of sustained sound allow people to explore emotional material safely, supporting release, reflection, or integration.

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In ceremonial settings, sound becomes a facilitative medium rather than a passive backdrop. The role of the facilitator is to hold space, guide pacing, and encourage engagement while remaining responsive to the group. Participants’ active involvement whether through movement, vocalisation, or focused listening transforms the experience from something done to them into something co-created, supporting meaningful therapeutic change.

Why understanding methods of change matters

Recognising methods of change is essential in psychotherapy. It allows practitioners to:

• match interventions to individual needs rather than diagnoses

• identify when an approach is likely to be supportive or overwhelming

• work ethically and safely across vulnerability and sensory differences

• articulate the value of non-verbal and embodied therapies

  
  

Effective therapeutic work rarely relies on a single mechanism. Instead, it engages multiple domains of change simultaneously, supporting transformation on emotional, physiological, relational, and cognitive levels.

Key domains of change

In clinical and creative therapies, change is often facilitated through six interrelated domains:

1. Emotional regulation and processing: Feeling safely, staying present with emotion, and allowing emotions to move rather than overwhelm.

2. Embodiment and sensory integration: Reconnecting with bodily sensations, internal cues, and movement; particularly important when words are insufficient.

3. Meaning-making and integration: Reflecting, symbolising, and understanding experience, often emerging after regulation rather than before.

4. Relational attunement and connection: Being mirrored, supported, and regulated in relationship, including through non-verbal forms of engagement.

5. Agency and empowerment: Having choice and an active role in the process, rather than being a passive recipient.

6. Physiological and nervous system regulation: Shifts in arousal, breath, muscle tone, and autonomic state that create the foundation for other forms of change.

These domains interact constantly. Physiological regulation, for example, is not merely supportive, it can be the gateway through which emotional, relational, and cognitive change occurs.

Where sound healing fits

Sound healing works across all these domains simultaneously. It meets the body first, supporting physiological regulation that allows emotional and relational processes to unfold naturally. Rhythm, tone, and vibration provide structure, containment, and engagement without requiring words. In doing so, sound can help people:

• settle high arousal or overwhelm

• access emotions without verbal expression

• feel safe enough to engage relationally

• integrate experiences that may be difficult to articulate

  
  

Sound-based work does not replace psychotherapy, but it complements it by activating mechanisms that talk-based approaches alone may not reach.

The gong as a therapeutic instrument

The gong is my primary instrument, and it exemplifies how sound engages multiple domains at once. Unlike melodic instruments with fixed pitches, the gong produces a dense, evolving field of overtones and vibration that unfolds over time. This creates an immersive experience that is felt physically and emotionally as much as it is heard.

In practice, the gong can support:

• nervous system regulation through deep vibration and sustained resonance

• emotional release and containment without pressure to verbalise

• altered states of awareness that encourage rest and integration

• a sense of being held within sound rather than directed by it

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Because the gong is powerful, careful attunement, pacing, and relational awareness are essential. When used mindfully, it facilitates regulation, emotional processing, and embodied presence. When used without sensitivity, it can overwhelm, reinforcing why understanding mechanisms of change matters in practice.

Gaps in how change is often described

Even with detailed frameworks, some aspects of sound-based change are underrepresented. Intuition, presence, and felt sense are central in guiding how and when sound is offered. Decisions such as when to play, when to soften, when to allow silence, or when to stop emerge from embodied listening and relational awareness. These qualities are rarely named as formal mechanisms, yet they shape outcomes profoundly.

Similarly, flow and altered states, moments of deep absorption, timelessness, or expanded awareness, are powerful therapeutic experiences that support regulation, integration, and insight. They remain difficult to capture in clinical models but are consistently observed in sound-based sessions.

Finally, discussions of frequency and vibration are often avoided in clinical literature, despite their experiential relevance. While fixed claims are inappropriate, acknowledging these factors as meaningful components of change helps bridge spiritual, embodied, and clinical understandings.

Integrating clinical knowledge and lived experience

For me, sound healing sits at the intersection of clinical understanding and lived experience. It works because it engages multiple pathways of change at once, physiological, emotional, relational, and experiential.

By situating sound within a framework of mechanisms of change, practitioners can communicate the value of sound-based approaches, practice safely, and work ethically while honouring the unique experiential qualities of vibration and resonance.

Sound works because it meets us before words, it reminds the body how to listen, regulate, and return to balance. The gong, with its immersive complexity, embodies this principle in every vibration.

If you feel called to experience sound therepeutically please get in touch.