The power of sound: An interview with a vocal and sound healing expert
Kimberly “used her inner voice to heal her outer voice”, and now she is helping others do the same! Here’s our interview with her.
I say I used my ‘inner voice’ to heal my ‘outer voice’ - Kimberly Joy Rieli
Kimberly Joy Rieli is a professional musician and vocalist as well as a renowned vocal healing coach and sound healer. She transformed her own trauma and grief over an abusive upbringing into a unique healing art that has helped hundreds if not thousands of others.
In this interview she takes us through her own intuitive healing journey using voice and movement, graciously gives us some practices that we can try on our own to get started on our own journey of healing with voice and sound, and explains some of the science behind this amazing work.
You can check out the two-part video of this interview below.
FULL interview with Kimberly of www.singingforyoursoul.com:
J: So as you know, we are looking into vocal healing and diving into Irish keening [a vocalized form of ritual grief in ancient Ireland and Scotland]. I am really wondering what that might look like in a modern context, so I would love to hear what drew you to this, how you trained, how you changed over time…
K: So I came into voice healing work because I needed it myself, I had as many of us do, a dysfunctional upbringing and narcissistic abuse was part of it and when you’re in that environment one of the things that happens is that our voices get taken. We aren’t allowed to speak our truths and to have our own experience - gaslighting takes away your belief in yourself, and your ability to know what you think or feel is even true. It sort of blurs the lines.
So, I didn’t know that at the time - but that was the environment that I was in and it was really starting to manifest as extreme anxiety as well as a number of health problems that I had, the worst of which was cystic acne. That was the worst because it was so visible, on my face. So I had all of these health problems as well as these emotional problems, severe anxiety, depression, PTSD; and by the time I was in grad school I was performing professionally but I was just getting worse and worse. And when I would sing, I would have what I now know were anxiety attacks I would feel like I was going to pass out, I couldn’t see straight, I couldn’t breathe, I had very little access to my actual voice at the time. It would sound like this little mouse.
I had nobody who knew how to help me. My voice teachers, their approach, was just practice harder, work on your vocal technique; but that wasn’t the issue - although I didn’t know. So then it was compounded - like I was beating myself up on top of it.
Very long story short, I actually had this realization moment where I realized that I got into music because it felt good and nothing I was doing was feeling good. I needed to start following what felt good to me. What felt good to me was making weird sounds, and rolling around, and feeling sounds vibrating in my body and playing with sound and breath and really going outside of academia and getting really primal with it and really meditative and that started me on the path to healing. That combined with yoga and holistic health practices all just wove together and brought me into this work.
J: Wow, that’s so beautiful how you were able to follow your intuition like that, you know?
K: Yeah! And I say, it was my inner voice that helped heal my outer voice. So there’s a really important relationship there.
J: That’s amazing! So, do you perform now - or are you mainly just focused on this healing work?
K: So, it’s funny that you say that. I have done quite a bit of performing, but what I love the most is doing sound healings for people. So it is sort of a performance, but it’s not ‘oh, I’m on stage trying to impress everybody’. It’s ‘I am holding sacred space for people to have a soul journey and a healing experience’ - whatever that’s going to be for them. My voice is part of that woven with these instruments. It’s just my favorite thing, it’s what my soul wants to do. My husband, he plays out a lot - he’s a gigging musician - and if I go to gigs with him often people will ask me to get up and sing, but then it’s popular music. You know, I’m singing like Carol King or whatever and I finally just realized, ‘this is not my thing. And yeah I can do it, but just because I can do it doesn’t mean it makes me happy and I am going to set a boundary and I’m not doing it anymore,’ I am mostly doing the sound healing at this point.
J: So what kind of instruments do you weave into your sound healing, I see a harp behind you and some singing bowls…do you use these?
K: Yes I use the crystal singing bowls, and harp, I have some Tibetan metal bowls that I use sometimes. I have these amazing kochi chimes - they’re super magical. So I use all of that, and my voice. I would say that the main instrument that I use is my voice.
J: Is that something you just do intuitively, in the moment?
K: Yes, but that was hard won. The ability to do it intuitively took a long time. There was a lot of vocal training and really learning how to embody my voice. And there was a lot of unwinding of my vocal training and just trusting. But yes, it is very intuitive. Sometimes I will play songs, especially when I play harp, that have English words or that are sort of preplanned - like I know what chord patterns I am going to use - but for the most part it's improvisation.
J: Yeah, and I guess once you have a certain level of skill and all of that it’s easier to do that, right?
K: Yeah, I try to help people understand that this is a process. You’re not just suddenly going to feel super comfy doing this necessarily.
J: And I am sure that’s very validating for people to hear.
K: Yeah, and you gotta just play with it. Just get in the mud and play with sounds and have a good time with it and that helps it come out more.
J: Well awesome! So you sort of have two parts to your work then it sounds like, the working one-on-one with people and your sound healing space container that you’re holding.
K: Yeah, I do one-on-ones, I do groups, and I do the sound healings.
J: So I would love to learn more about the vocal healing, and about how you learned this, is there any scientific evidence that you bring into it, was it mostly intuitive - how did you learn to do this?
K: Good, good questions! In the beginning, it was mostly intuitive. And that was because I didn’t have money to pay, and I didn’t even know where to go to pay to get this knowledge. I didn’t know sound healing was a thing, I was just poking around with myself as the experiment.
So as time went on, I had some really interesting experiences that happened. One was that I started seeing mandalas with I would say is my third eye. It was like this inner vision where when I would hear music, I would see these mandalas. Somehow, I was like, “I know that sound is doing that.” I have never seen any scientific validation, nothing. So come to find out that there is a whole science around sound called cymatics. So, some people might have seen those studies where they have like a metal plate, and they put sand on the metal plate, and they vibrate the plate with a tone and that tone creates divots in the plate, and you can see the patterns of the sound. And they are geometric, they are beautiful, it’s like sacred geometry.
So, when I started discovering things like that I was like, ‘Game on! There is science to this, I am not crazy. There is a reason I am having these intuitions.’ So yeah, there is a lot of science around it. The main sciences that I have just loved working with is Quantum physics, cymatics, and the studies around the vagus nerve and healing the vagus nerve. Also, Nada yoga is really amazing to weave in with all of that. And Nada yoga is the yoga of sound, and it’s like a philosophy and it’s also a medicine and a process of awakening by using sound. So there are a lot of different pieces I weave in but usually where I start with people is helping them to have an experience of their own voice shifting them in a way that all of these sciences show it shifts.
These sciences show that when we make conscious sound, it creates more coherence in our bodies and in our energy field. It literally reorganizes the structure of the matter and the energy that makes us up. So it creates more beautiful patterns, which then leads to more harmony in our bodies and in our energy, and that leads to healing.
It’s not necessarily a linear process, but that’s part of it. Also the vagus nerve is toned by singing or sounding practices. It’s soothed. And when it’s soothed or toned, science shows that people are more peaceful, more balanced, and more equanimious when they do practices that tone the vagus nerve. One of the best forms is toning, which is using the voice to hold out notes repeatedly; repeatedly.
J: So that was going to be one of my next questions which is, what are some of these practices that you would suggest to people?
K: So that is my very favorite one, and you can do it just humming, just “hmmmmmm” and you hold it out and you take a breath and you do it again. And you do it on a comfortable note for your range. And you do that for like three to five or ten minutes.
And one of the amazing things about sound is that it just entrains us into a calm state so fast. People are just shocked how fast it happens. One of the things that I recently did was my first sound healing booth at a festival, and I have held back from doing it because festivals are noisy, right? And I’m like, ‘well it needs to be quiet so that people can receive the sounds.’ But I got tapped into it and I did it and people dropped in even with all the noise around them. So now I’m like, “well I guess I am going to start doing booths - I guess I don’t have an excuse anymore.” So I learned something. But it’s amazing, and I invite people to try it. Hold a note out and just see how you feel. It feels amazing.
J: First of all - doing the booths sounds so fun to draw in all different people in all different environments. I just have so many questions now! I am wondering - as you said people are amazed at how quickly they feel calm and I have heard people say that too. I have some friends with whom we all like to just play around with the guitar and singing, and a lot of these friends are moms; and I have heard people say you know, ‘I was having this hard day, and I just keep forgetting that if I just take a minute and just sing - just that vocalizing helps me to get to a better place, it helps my kids too to align. It just shifts everything, and it’s like this thing that’s always there that we can forget we have access to right?
K: I love that you are hearing that from other moms, that they are noticing that.
J: Yeah, totally! Although, I don’t know that everybody would, right? If music isn’t part of your life. Do you find that of the people that are seeking out your services and doing vocal healing - are a lot of them musicians or singers - or not?
K: Most of the people that get in touch with me aren’t, but they are on a healing journey and they’re aware that their voice is an important part of their journey. Often, it will be that somebody has seen a therapist or a psychic or an astrologer or someone in the healing arts and someone has said, ‘voice lessons would really help you.’ Or they have had that intuition and I think there is a real awareness that our voices are shut down and that it’s costing us a lot. It’s getting in the way of being free, and expressed, and healing, and happy.
J: Absolutely.
K: That’s a pretty basic understanding that a lot of people have, so they will seek out the voice work for that reason. Also, because people have experienced that when they sing they do feel better and they want more of that. The challenge with our society is that people have been so shut down around their voices so people are afraid to sing. So even when people know that it feels good, they don’t want to do it because they don’t want to be heard or they don’t even want to hear themselves. That’s where I come in and I’m like, ‘OK, let’s heal that narrative because there is so much more to your voice than, ‘do you belong on American Idol’
J: Yeah, right? It’s just such a powerful thing on so many levels. And in relation to grief, and especially an interest of mine is recovering these ancestral practices around grief that have been lost, and I think a lot of them would have been done in community. So, being seen and being able to vocalize in a way that’s not even pretty but we are expressing something and we are seen for that. So I am just wondering, is there a difference between someone doing toning or another vocal healing practice alone, versus with you, versus in a group?
K: Yeah! There we so many layers in there of what you just said. What was the first thing that you said, now I’m on to the group thing, but you had said…
J: About being seen in grief being in an ancestral thing?
K: So I had this experience, I had a lot of things in my past life to heal, and I had a therapist say to me, ‘Kimberly, your sounding and movement practices are probably why you haven’t ended up with either a mental breakdown or with a physical breakdown. And that is why you have been able to heal so much of what you were going through physically and emotionally.’ And there is a lot of science around animals shaking and making sound after trauma, and our voices with that vagus nerve - it entrains, it’s so important for our ability to shift from fight, flight, or freeze into rest and digest. And that is so much of what we are doing when we make sound and we do it on an elongated exhale. Those elongated exhales plus the vibration really entrains that vagus nerve into a calmer state.
So when we are in grief, being able to express it is so important by making weird sounds. By listening to yourself cry. That was a big, “aha” (another one) for me was just listening to the sound of myself cry and letting it do whatever it needed to do. That was a big breakthrough moment for me and I invite people to do that. Listen to yourself cry the next time you’re really letting it out, it’s amazing. Because most of us judge it, we don’t want to hear it, it’s uncomfortable. But going in there and actually listening to it is a sound healing - in and of itself - and it’s like holding space for yourself to have that experience.
J: Interesting!
K: So sounding and crying and wailing and singing grief is profoundly important, and it’s something our society has lost - and it’s something that everybody thinks is weird! I am not exactly sure why or where that whole belief came in, probably with the whole puritanical like, ‘you must be seen and not heard and you know…”
J: Well I have some ideas around that! Because you know, it was women that did it. It was women that were doing these practices right, and they held very powerful places in society. They say these keeners were behind revolutions, right? People knew that the ability to wail like that in such strength was connecting them to something deeper, I think - if I had to guess.
K: Right, it was a bridge. A bridge between dimensions back in the day. Right? That there was a connection that women had, particularly women, who could use their voices like that.
J: Absolutely, yeah so just going back to what you were talking about with holding space for yourself. That feels really powerful, being able to just be witness to yourself doing it, that feels big, maybe to do that before doing it with others; would you say?
K: Yes, I often recommend even before people do it in front of me, even if we are doing one-on-one sessions - I will invite them to explore sound on their own. I will give them specific movement, breath, and sound exercises but I also invite them to just go play with it. I tell them, ‘don’t worry about hurting yourself - if you do something that you feel like is hurting your voice then just don’t do that sound again. You’re not going to blow your voice out just because you do it once. So I invite people into exploration and really the first place it starts is holding that space for yourself.
And it can stop there! Like even if you did nothing else but get comfortable making sound and holding space for yourself to make sound, that is huge in and of itself. Then, doing it in front of somebody else that can be further healing because for most people it’s going to bring your stuff up and it’s going to be moving through the fear. Doing it in a group, I have had some really powerful experiences doing it in a group but I do have two things I want to say about that.
It needs to be set up appropriately, if you go in too soon it can be not comfortable. And I know that from experience. So I’m a sound practitioner, and I have been in a group where somebody just started us out making all of these crazy sounds and trying to get us to just go for it. It was extremely uncomfortable for me, because I didn’t know of any of these people in the group. We had no connection, we just walked in from off the street and now suddenly we are going into this supposedly sacred space and we weren’t ready for it.
But, I found that if we do a half-day workshop, or a day-long workshop and if we get to know each other and we study some of what sound does and we connect with each other through voice and sound and breath in a safe way, then people tend to be more open to going in and getting a little more guttural and improvisational with it.
J: Yeah, it totally makes sense.
K: It’s like in plant medicine they say that set and setting is everything, same with sound. Sound can be used psychedelically as well. There are cultures that don’t use plant medicine, they just go in and use sound to reach those altered states.
J: Now that’s fascinating to me and I would love to have another conversation around that. Because with people who have terminal illness, which is another topic that we write about, [that is something they] are seeking out because of how powerful it can be going into altered states with accepting mortality and all of that. So that’s awesome, I didn’t realize that people were doing that with sound.
K: One of the reasons that sound is so great for people who are in a lot of pain, chronically or with end-of-life care, one of the reasons it is so powerful is that sound travels the same neural pathways as pain. So it can actually numb the pain and it is really common for someone to finish a sound healing and be like, “I came in with X, Y, Z issues and I don’t even feel them anymore right now.”
J: Wow, that’s huge!
K: That happened at that sound healing booth that I did a couple weekends ago, where a woman came in, I did like a three minute sound healing on her - I mean we did a 30 minute session and part of it was talking, part of it was sounding, and then she laid down and I did this really quick little sound healing with bowls and my voice. She sat up and she said, “I came in with pain in my shoulder and it’s gone!”
J: Wow, amazing. So the sound is traveling the same neural pathways, and what do you think is happening when they are transforming that pain?
K: It’s vibrating. It’s vibrating it and it’s creating more coherence, more beauty, more chrystaline structure and patterns. But also just think about how soothing vibration is. It’s soothing and it’s reharmonizing.
J: Awesome, so do you have any other stories that you might want to share - especially in the grief space - any transformations or nuggets that you’ve walked away with from this work with yourself or with others that you don’t mind sharing?
K: So a couple stories, first - I first heard about Keening when I was in Irish lit class when I was either in freshman or sophomore year in college. This was when I was a singer at the time, but I had not gone into the healing realm with voice yet. My teacher was talking about keening, and I just remember my whole body was like, ‘what is that? I need to know what that is.’ It spoke to me on many levels. So when I hear about things like the Threshold Choir, which is a group of people that get together and sing to people in end-of-life care, I just know that sound is so powerful for those transitions.
So, one of the most powerful experiences is when we get together as a group, particularly as women, and get start to reclaim our voices and make sound. I had a group that I lead and I was playing drum, and it was the end of the day, I was playing the drum and I was just creating sound for them. And intuitively, helping them to feel safe in the space to let their voices start to lead in for maybe twenty minutes and they got to the point where they were open enough that there was a lot of sobbing, there was screams, and just like primal stuff coming through - rage - and one of the women e-mailed me after. She said, “That was probably the most powerful healing experience of my entire life to be able to express the dysfunction of my childhood and the abuse that I endured. I have never been able to do that and it feels like a lot of it moved through my body and left because I had that experience.” So, it can be really powerful.
Once you do something like that though, you want to soothe it. Once we open up to that level of vulnerability and expression and rawness, at the end I always do a little bit of a sound healing. So, I always use crystal bowls, I always do some deep breathing, we always bring it back so we’re not sending people out in this broken open state, right? That’s an important piece of the work, to make sure that we reset after we open things up.
J: That makes sense that we would have to come back to a sense of safety again just so that you can know that was OK in your body. I remember too, from when I used to work in both energy healing and hypnosis, I would always tell people that the next couple of days you might just need to not do much. So maybe do this on a Friday or on a day when you don’t need to work afterwards. Just lay around, in a blanket, like with water. That might be exactly what you need because sometimes it can feel amazing in the moment but then, you know, your body needs to process it right?
K: Exactly.QWA
J: Well I just want to honor you, it’s just so amazing that you took these huge leaps - and now you are holding space for others. You helped yourself heal, and now you are holding space for so many other people so that’s amazing.
K: Thank you, it feels amazing. It feels like, what I’m here to do.
J: Well I love that. It’s like you are really in your power, and that’s beautiful.
K: There’s places I’m still not in my power, but I’m working on them - you know?
J: Well, I always think that we wouldn’t be here as humans if we were completely healed, right?
K: Yes.
J: Is there anything else you would want to share? One thing that I was wondering about was evaluating someone based on their voice. That’s something that I have heard of, that people have said to me that they could hear certain things in my voice. Is that something that you work with at all, or notice at all? Or is that not in the realm of what you do?
K: So, that is really fascinating work. I have had my voice evaluated and they can tell so many things about us based on the sound of our voice. They are actually able to use it more accurately than fingerprints. So, there is really cool science around that and there is also a lot of healing around that - like finding out what your signature frequency is…You can go really deep with that.
However, for me I really like working with the intuition. It’s the whole inner voice piece. And also because so many people have a lot of wounding around their voices, I don’t really like to bring into the space, ‘Oh, this is what I’m hearing in your voice’, because it can cause people to retract rather than soften and open up. So, what I work with people on is experiencing their voice and experiencing what it feels like as it opens up and becomes more resonant and trusting that their voice is going to invite them into the sounds that are going to be most supportive for their healing journey on any given day. So, I tend to just focus more on how it feels rather than how it sounds because as we get more comfortable with entraining ourselves with the sound of our voice, it starts to automatically sound better. It’s like a byproduct, a side effect rather than the goal.
When I was in academia, and the goal was to sound better, it was not working for me. It just triggered me into more fight, flight, or freeze and caused so much more anxiety.
J: Well that makes so much sense. Yeah, that makes sense that being in that evaluative place would keep you from being in that I guess more somatic or primal place that you need for healing.
K: Yeah, we make sound to express rather than impress - and that shift is so key.
J: Yeah, and some of the most amazing singers - like Janis Joplin is one of my favorites - it’s raw. It is just expression.
K: And really skilled vocalists, that has value. All of our voices have value. The really skilled ones that can go to that primal place can create that catharsis for all of us. We experience it in our bodies. It’s that mirror neuron thing in our bodies and it’s just so good. But, it’s also amazing to do it for yourself!
J: That’s so interesting. That’s one thing that I want to explore when I am able to actually speak to some people who are rekindling this keening tradition because it seems to me, and I could be wrong, that keening was more raw - more expression. But, a lot of people who are doing it are skilled vocalists so I am just so curious how they go together and all of that.
K: A lot of the keening that I have heard, is sung, and it’s pretty; and I’m like, “I don’t think…I think there was rawness, I think there was emotion. I think that’s what keening really was and it was like guttural and maybe it went to a place where there were beautiful melodies and things but I think there was all that expression. And when I do sound healings, it was really scary for me for a while because I eventually started doing more Native American, more guttural sounds because they just really wanted to come through me and that is something that people often remark on and they will have profound experiences when I am doing that and I am drumming and I am … doing these sounds so they have a very important place.
J: Yeah, exactly. And I think there are, and I don’t know that much about this, but I think there are names for a lot of these sounds too and I think it’s amazing that a lot of these Indigenous American cultures have kept some of that and I think there’s some in Europe and around the world that have also. So my question is always like, ‘what was mine…is it lost in terms of what that was in my ancestral cultures?’ Because exactly what you are talking about, there must have been that and that surely would have connected us with with something really important in ourselves, and I think would have been one of the first things to have not been OK [with colonization] at a certain point.
K:Right, because it puts you in your power…and we can’t have that, now can we? But I would say, it’s in your DNA. A lot of the sounds I have brought through, nobody taught me how to make, but they feel so aligned with my soul and my body so trust that your body can lead you back to those traditions.
J: That’s beautiful and that’s really awesome for you, I want to have another conversation around that about what we might work together on - but it makes total sense that just by taking the journey that it’s a reclamation in itself of sound, right? Awesome! Well is there anything else that you might want to share?
K: Well, I could go on for days but I think that’s probably good. There was a lot in there.
J: So how can people find you?
K: I am at SingingForYourSoul.com and they can come to my website, I am on YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook - Singing For Your Soul - I am just back on instagram for the first time in a few years and it’s a wild situation on Instagram and I am just like, ‘I have no idea what is happening here’
J: There’s a lot going on there, yeah!
K: But I am doing my best. Yeah so, they can find me that way and I have a free voice class - if you go to my website you can sign up for that and it’s an hour long and I teach a lot of different stuff in there around using your voice and I send a newsletter; most of the time weekly with tips around our voices.
J: I’m definitely going to check all of that out and can’t wait to talk to you again Kimberly and I really honor you for the work that you are doing.
K: Thank you so much Jacqueline, it’s so great to connect. I honor the work you’re doing as well, we are just tag teaming a lot of us.
J: I hope we can all lift each other up, like we are weaving a web here.
Kimberly Joy Rieli, founder of Singing For Your Soul, is a singer, sound healer, and holistic voice coach. She’s 5x Winner of Best Voice Lessons in Santa Monica, CA, was featured in collaboration with Yoga Journal, and in 2020-22 reached #1 internationally on Google for holistic and spiritual voice lessons. Kimberly has worked with clients in over 15 countries. She especially works with female entrepreneurs to gain confidence, reclaim their voices, and have the impact they desire. Kimberly offers 1:1, group work, and a sound healing certification through her Singing For Your Wild Soul sacred sisterhood of voice healing. Find her at www.singingforyoursoul.com
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