THE MAGIC POWER
OF SOUND
TIM WHEATER
INTERVIEW
by Atasha Fyfe
First Published in Avalon Magazine Winter 2004
TW
– Tim Wheater
AF
– Atasha Fyfe
We
met in the Glastonbury Experience courtyard, and Tim led me to a door I’d never noticed
before. It was like being taken to a secret room.
And
true to the ways of secret rooms, there was a different world inside. It was
light and airy, with crystals and exotic
musical instruments everwhere – drums, Tibetan bowls, tuning forks, bells,
gongs and rattles.
Dominating the room was the biggest and most elaborate
healing table I’ve ever seen. The strings underneath made it look like a cross
between a massage table and a grand piano. At its foot were suspended two huge
gongs, with an even bigger one at the head.
“It’s
fanatastic to have this room” said Tim, slapping the back stone wall. “The
Abbey is just on the other side of this wall, so it’s in a vortex of
energy. I’m also looking forward to
creating a sound healing temple in the house. We live in Bovetown. I love to
see the Tor from there, and there’s beautiful countryside around.”
We
began to talk about Glastonbury.
“I
got to know Glastonbury well over the years
because I lived for some time in Bath,”
he said. “Most of my recordings were done when I was there. Glastonbury is a friendly town. Very civil -
which a lot of places aren’t. My view is Glastonbury
is like a microcosm of the world. All the polarities are here, the light, the
dark. There are like-minded people here if one chooses to meet them.
And a lot
of interesting work comes through the town - things like the Tibetan monks
coming here next week.
So there’s plenty of opportunity to experience and
witness things. And it’s a slightly freer society. It’s very cosmopolitan -
it’s certainly not an insular town. There’s a lot of energy here. The water
flows with the masculine and the feminine, the white and red. I think there’s
probably a linkage to other sacred sites but I’m not the person to ask. Others
are much more knowledgable about that.”
We
began to prepare for the sound healing that he was going to give me to start
the interview. He made the point that sound healing has a lot to do with
opening up to listen for the sounds and signals that have become drowned in the
cacophany of modern noise. He talked about the gongs and other instruments he
was about to use.
“This
big one is the earth gong”, he said, touching the larger of the two gongs at
the foot of the table. “It corresponds to the heart chakra and the colour
green. This smaller one underneath it is the moon gong, which is tuned to the
second chakra, and the colour orange. The biggest gong – that one at the head
of the table - is tuned to the crown chakra and the colour violet.
A
drum bath is a very good cleanser. Rattles have the effect of clearing stuff
from the periphery of the aura. These components on their own individually are
all very effective things. The overtones that go into the body are immensely
powerful. The tuning fork is a fantastic thing on its own. But to combine them
all is very powerful.”
With
that, he helped me onto the table. I was settled down with a satisfyingly heavy
eye-cover, cushions under my head, knees and feet, a smooth quartz crystal in
either hand, and a purple and gold cover over me.
He
began by stressing the importance of
breath.
“The
breath will keep you safe” he said. “Sound begins with breath.”
Following
his instructions, I began to breathe
slowly with him. Then slowly and sensitively, he began to make various sounds
with the different instruments. I could sense him moving softly around the
table. Some of the sounds created feelings of great intensity and power, while
others felt soft and healing. On looking back, I realised that the experience
was re-connecting me with the “highest” moments of various past lives, and
perhaps even other-worldly experiences. The actual memories were just brief
impressions – the main experience was of being returned to that state of mind
and feeling. There were fleeting images of
some dramatic initiatory experiences that I somehow knew had been in the
Andes, and at another time in Tibet.
I re-lived some wonderfully clear moments in meditative lives spent in the Far East. There were also glimpses of how it felt to be
beyond the earth altogether, when the doings of this world seemed as little and
far away as ants on another continent.
When
the session was over, he brought me gently back. As I recovered, we talked
about the effects. I remarked that sounds like this have the potential to take
us back to our true soul self. With that, the interview began.
TW:
It’s a royal journey back to the soul. On a medical level it’s called holistic
resonance – that’s what you were experiencing. It works because sound goes
right through the body. It permeates every cell, as well as affecting the
chakras, the organs, and the etheric body. As a result it brings harmony into
the whole system.
AF: Can you tell me a bit about about your background, and how you came to do this
work?
TW:
Music for me was a very important escape from a slightly challenging background,
and that was certainly achieved. I went through a very intensive musical
training for seven years - a bit like training to be a vet - at classical
Musical Conservatoires in London, Paris and New
York. I studied the concert flute with James Galway
predominantly, and his teacher Marcel Moyse.
He’s second generation of a French
school of playing from about the 1840s, so I’m third generation in that school.
It’s a dynasty that involved my teacher playing in the premiere performances of
The Rites of Spring, some Debussy concerts, and Diaghalev ballets in Paris. So there is a
certain poetry, a certain heritage to the way I play, which I was very lucky to
have been taught and encouraged in.
My
own background in coming to use my music constructively for healing came about
when I discovered the voice. That happened in 1988 when I was living in Cornwall. I was part of
the Camelford water pollution incident, when they dumped 20 tons of aliminium sulphate into the water supply. A
lot of people were poisoned in the community, forty thousand fish died, and I
woke up with paralysis around my mouth. So for a year I struggled to play the
flute but without much success. It was very frustrating.
I then decided to do
the classic thing of letting go, and went to India to travel. While there I
heard some very beautiful chanting. And I thought maybe instead of struggling
with the flute I should actually use the voice instead. So I wrote a little
mantra chant and did that for 40 days. And with that I began to feel tingling
nerve regeneration coming into the lips which I hadn’t felt for a year. This is
where I came into a belief in the miraculous nature of sound and indeed of life
too.
AF: So doing toning and using your voice helped that to heal?
TW:
Definitely. It was a very profound and very noticable experience, which
encouraged me to start using the voice more. So I developed that - and there’s
a whole story about what happened next. It was heard by different people, I signed up to a big Hollywood company – it was a big shebang – opera and so
on, all coming out of this seed of a chant and a prayer.
So
that was really my introduction. I’ve since then become more and more aware of
people around the world using this with powerful effects. For me it’s very
gratifying when I get feed-back about ways in which my music is used - at times
like wedding ceremonies, conceptions and births. I’ve even heard of people
choosing to take their final rite of passage to the other side with my music
playing.
AF: I understand you use sound healing to help schizophrenics and recovering
addicts. Can you describe how that works?
TW:
I adapt what I do for each person, working with them intuitively. There is a
model that I use, a system, but I adjust the volume and the sequence to the
individual person. In the situations you’re talking about, I do more of the
monochord harp and more of the voice. My feeling when I’m doing that in some
situations is the role of the sort of distant absent father. The soft paternal
figure. I recognise it is very much their journey, which I’m just here to
support and accept, with no judgement. We have so many similar stories, so many
similar wounds that we need to heal and transcend.
I
would make the sound very cradling to an individual in that sort of condition
and very supportive to them and gentle. But there will be points when I might
push it through. On occasions, I’ll try to push them through.
AF: And when you do that how are you hoping to affect them?
TW:
What I’m trusting will happen, and in most instances it will, is to pause the
process of thinking. This unhooks them from their story, and in spiritual terms
can put them in touch with the divine grace within them.
AF:
I guess that works because sound healing isn’t a matter so much of fixing
what’s wrong as a matter of putting in a vibration that’s right, which
automatically changes everything else. To put it very simply, in our culture we
tend to try and fix what’s wrong instead of bringing in what’s right.
TW:
Absolutely, that is what’s happening It
is also, I hope, enabling people to really touch a higher realm of their own
divine self. I have a lot of trust in the realms of sacred higher powers
assisting in this.
AF:
Do you have any thoughts about how sound could be used in the future?
TW: I can certainly see sound being used
within the realm of cancer treatment. In
my own mind there’s a debate whether it’s going to be via electronic means of
amplifying sound into the body. I’m not wholly convinced about that. My belief
is that the tunings within the instuments, say the tuning forks, are precise
enough that they do vibrate within the body.
Specific tunings as designed by
Pythagoras or perceived by him when he was working with monochord correlate to
the vibrational frequency of the earth and the other planets. A lot of the
music that we have in western society is slightly tuned up, out of that
frequency. So I’m interested in very precise scientific tunings - it’s the one
area where I get technical. When I teach my groups, I try to explain that there’s
a science and maths to it. Then of course there is the wave of sound that comes
according to the intention of the musician. And the silence afterwards can also
be most healing and profound, when that experience is integrating itself into
us.
AF:
When you talk about precise tuning, do you mean tuning that affects specific
organs of the body? Or even the mind?
TW:
It’s a broader thing. There are certain frequencies which will affect our
chakra system and through that, some of our inner organs.
In Chinese medicine
there are certain sounds which are used for certain internal organs. The
Chinese have played a very important part in the history of music therapy. For
example, they were aware of the importance of sounds as a mirror to how the
people were feeling. The ancient Empress
would send spies round to listen to people’s music, and in this way gauge
the mood and attitudes of the public.
The
Ancient Greeks made very important contributions to this field. Hippocrates,
father of modern day medicine, was a sound healer. He would take his patients
to the Temple
and use a lyre which is similar to this (touching the strings under the
healing table) except it was shorter strings, and only seven. That would be used to alleviate some of the
dis-ease. So yes, it’s been very noted historically in different societies.
AF:
What about other uses for sound? Some people think that the pyramids might have
been built by sonics, for example.
TW:
I’m not sure about that, I don’t have an opinion. But I certainly do believe
that within the pyramid, the chambers are accoustically very precisely tuned.
The same applies to many of the very important sacred sites even over here. I’m
thinking particularly of that very famous place in Ireland - Long Barrow or whatever
it’s called. Because I know the chambers there are very precisely tuned. If you
make a sound there that’s tuned to a particular frequency, it resonates with
other chambers elsewhere that have the same frequency. So there is a certain
magic and science to it. They talk about
the stone circles here – Avebury, Stonehenge –
as having been manned by monks chanting
24 hours a day. Sound would have been a very important part of their life.
AF:
Why do you think they did that?
TW:
My feeling is they were generating an energy, above all. And keeping that
energy consistent. Perhaps it was part of their belief in keeping the earth on
its axis or the population of the earth tuned in to stellar intelligence. But
whatever it was, it was very important to them. Sound is a key thing in all our
civilisations. Even the church in the Middle Ages recognised the importance of
different frequencies, when they banned one chord, calling it The Devil’s
Chord.
AF:
What chord was it and why did they do that?
TW: It’s the tri-tone of augmented 4
- so on a piano it would be the note F natural B natural. (He hums it – it has a thoughtful,
slightly questioning sound). You can hear, there’s a slightly discordant
sort of interval. And as the notes clash, they create a sort of ghost note.
This is where harmonics come from. That will have been the fear - of this invisible note coming from the
ethers. Also, there would have been an intensity about the tone that probably
would have had some aspect of healing to it. I mean, we’re talking patriarchal
control here.
AF:
What effect does that tone have on people?
TW:
I think it’s probably the unlocking of the door to consciousness. It’s a bit
like the taboo around the number 13 - which I understand is not actually
unlucky, but a powerful and magical number.
AF:
Have you had any extraordinary personal experiences in the course of doing this
work?
TW:
Well, my life is a series of miracles, I’d say, more than anything. I’m very
conscious of possibly a pre-written script. If we have the willingness to
serve, and a recognition of our purpose, then I think support is given to us.
I’m very conscious of this being important work. I’d like it to reach a much
broader audience, not just one to one. I’m intending to found a charitable
foundation to train people to do sound healing. A lot of people want to train
in this. And also maybe take sound healing into hospitals and hospices. So that’s my idea, to make this mobile and as
a charitable basis we’ll offer it as a service. My speciality at the moment is
post addiction and schizophrenia but I’m very conscious that it might change,
that I might work more with children for example.
AF:
Do you have any advice on how people could use their own voices for healing?
TW:
Yes. The voice - very easy, very potent. Firstly be aware of the breath.
Inhalations through the nose and exhalations through the mouth introduces them
to just opening the mouth and letting go, which is what making sound and using
the voice is all about. Then to do some toning, just take the vowel oo. (He
makes a soft ooooo tone). And with that focus of intent there’s going to be
potency in the sound. I’m a very firm believer that 99% of us were born with
the healing voice as a tool for our own self-healing and indeed the healing of
others. Many people have been shamed when children into not using their voices,
so there’s often resistance about using it. A lot of my work is taking them
back to the concept that they do have the freedom and they are allowed to do
it. They can give themselves permission to do it. I usually teach people to do
a mantra – a very simple one like Om Namaha Shivaya or Om Mane Padme Hum. The
feedback I’ve had is that when people do this is, they find their life
completely changed in a very beautiful way.
So
I do experience many miracles in my own life. I have a lot of trust in my life.
And I witness other people going through the same and it’s very beautiful. I’m
conscious that this work does open all the portals, making possible miraculous
healing and miraculous change.
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