Sound healing for trauma

[sonia]

I looked up Frank Kane, the teacher of the Georgian singing workshop I attended, and found this article from 2006 on What Trauma Has Destroyed, Conscious Vibration Can Rebuild (PDF) by Frank Kane and Madge Bray.

"It is interesting that this song, which evokes abandonment and loss, became one of the emblematic songs sung by children at the Dzegvi children’s home. This innovative center, founded by Gia Razmadze and others in the early 1990’s near Mtskheta, took on the task of working with abandoned or orphaned children, many of whom were victims of sexual, physical or psychological abuse, while all had faced some mixture of rejection, abandonment, denial and betrayal in their lives. Speaking of the early days of Dzegvi, Gia Razmadze said that no one had any experience in working with abused children. At the outset, the method was simple: they would go walking in the woods with the children and spend the whole day singing.

"A simple approach very much in keeping with Georgian values: love and appreciation of nature and human connection expressed through words and song. But underlying that simplicity, according to Gia Razmadze, lies all of the implicit and non-verbalized intelligence about how to build, maintain and repair human connection, which is indeed the real essence of what was at work at Dzegvi and in Georgia as a whole throughout its history."

Oh. The sense of connection and healing I felt was not an incidental side-effect of the workshop. At one point during the workshop I thought, "This feels like it creates a safe space for the trembling reaction after trauma." Frank didn't talk about trauma at all, though.

Wouldn't it be nice to live in a culture with "implicit and non-verbalized intelligence about how to build, maintain and repair human connection"? I'm happy just to know that one exists. Here in the US, I feel out of step just for caring about connection.

There's more about Madge Bray, Dzegwi, and Georgian singing here.