How sound healing gave me my life back

Before any of it

Five years ago, I would have laughed at all of this

I'm probably not what you picture when you think of this work, and that's part of why I think it matters.

Five years ago I would have laughed at all of this. I was out every weekend, drinking, partying, chasing the next high. I had the corporate career and the social life, and I believed in none of what I do now. My entire understanding of healing was this: you go to the doctor, you get antibiotics, you get better. I genuinely thought antibiotics fixed everything.

I was also deeply reactive. Everything landed on me, everything got a response, and I had no idea what that was costing me or the people around me. I was arrested and placed on a good behaviour bond in my twenties.

Deep down I was always someone who cared, and someone who was kind. I just didn't know how to show up as that person, and I didn't know any other way to react.

Growing up

I didn't feel accepted, including by myself

I'd come through a lot before any of that. I was bullied relentlessly growing up, for being queer and for being the overweight kid, and those two things fed each other.

I didn't handle it by going quiet. I got reactive. Defensive, sharp, first to fire back, because that felt safer than letting any of it get to me. I didn't feel accepted at school, I didn't feel accepted by some of the closest people in my life, and I didn't feel accepted by myself.

I hated how I looked. I'd catch myself in a mirror or see a photo and hate what I saw. That didn't stop when the bullying did. In my early twenties I had multiple plastic surgeries to try to make myself more attractive, and to try to feel okay about what I saw in the mirror. I carried a distorted picture of my own body well into my thirties, long after nobody was saying anything to me at all.

What I buried

I told everyone, including myself, that I was fine

At 18 I overdosed and very nearly didn't make it. At 24 I was kidnapped while overseas, and I didn't tell anyone about it because I blamed myself. A few years later I was sexually assaulted.

I did what I thought most people do with things like that. I buried them, kept moving, and told everyone, including myself, that I was fine.

My body had been keeping score the whole time. For years I was anxious, burnt out and constantly sick. Chest infections that kept coming back. A fatigue no amount of sleep fixed. Every time I went to the doctor I was told there was nothing wrong with me, so I kept going.

December 2022

At 30, my body stopped letting me get away with it

Towards the end of a trip to Bali I started to feel more unwell than I had ever felt in my life. It was as if my body was shutting down. I came home to Melbourne expecting it to pass. It got worse, until I was bed-bound and couldn't manage the basics of a day.

This is what it actually looked like, in case any of it is you right now:

• Sleeping sixteen hours a night and waking up exhausted. That sentence makes no sense until it happens to you. Sixteen hours, and it bought me nothing.
• Brain fog so heavy I couldn't hold a thought. I couldn't read or write properly. A message on my phone would go in and nothing would stay. I stopped trusting myself to drive.
• Heart palpitations out of nowhere, and panic attacks that turned anxiety into the background of every single day.
• Pain everywhere. Intense joint pain, every muscle aching, symptoms that looked like fibromyalgia, and a gut that had stopped working properly.
• No capacity for normal life. I couldn't stand for long, couldn't focus on the simplest task, couldn't do the basic things a day asks of you.

It felt like overnight I went from a healthy, social 30-year-old to a shadow of myself, lying in a body that felt foreign to me.

Four months of tests

More than fifteen doctors, and everything came back normal

I was convinced I had Lyme disease. So I saw a specialist at the hospital. Then I went back, and back. Bloods every single week. Every week another test for another illness, waiting for something to finally show up on a piece of paper and explain why I felt the way I did. By the end I had seen more than fifteen doctors and specialists and had just about every blood test and stool test you can think of.

Doctor after doctor, test after test, and the same answer every time. Your bloods are fine. There's nothing wrong with you. It must be in your head.

After enough of them, you start to wonder whether the problem is you. By that stage I would have settled for being believed.

Lying in that bed I worked out two things. The system was treating my symptoms and not the cause. And if I wanted my life back, everything had to change.

Getting better, and arguing with it

Someone suggested a Chinese medicine doctor. I came away with herbs I didn't understand, and they started working. I still couldn't accept it. I'd see a doctor who told me not to believe in that stuff, and I'd let that land harder than my own experience of getting better. That's how deep the model goes.

Around the same time, two books found me: You Are the Placebo by Dr Joe Dispenza, and When the Body Says No by Dr Gabor Maté. They said something nobody in a consulting room had said to me. A body under this much strain for this long is trying to communicate, and a nervous system stuck in fight or flight can't heal. For the first time the question changed from what is wrong with me to what is my body trying to tell me.

Four months in

Sound was the first thing that actually reached it

By the time I went to my first sound bath I'd been sick for four months and had run the entire Western medicine playbook into the ground. I didn't care what it was that helped me anymore. I only cared that something did.

In that very first session a weight lifted that I hadn't realised I'd been carrying for years. The anxiety eased, the pain subsided, and for the first time in months I felt calm. It was the first genuine relief I'd felt since getting sick, and I knew I had to explore it deeper.

So I went all in. I wanted to understand what this work was actually doing to me, because it had shifted something in a few weeks that years of therapy never touched. Therapy had me understanding my patterns better than anyone, and still living inside them. This was the first thing that shifted them.

What I understand now

Mind, body and energy, worked on together

That led me to sound therapy training in India, Solfeggio frequencies, Reiki, and my Diploma in Sound Therapy so I could read and work with the energy field. It became Integrative Frequency Healing, my own approach, which works with the mind, the body and the energy field together instead of treating them like three separate problems. Treating one layer on its own is why things keep coming back.

Somewhere in there I also realised I have ADHD, which explained most of my life. Years of running at a pace that felt normal to me, a head that never stopped, rest treated as something you earn once everything else is done. Sound and energy work became how I manage mine. After my diagnosis I started having the conversation with friends too, and so many of them turned out to be undiagnosed as well.

It changed how I work. A busy mind often can't drop into a sound bath with one or two instruments, so I live-loop up to seven layers of sound, enough to drown out the noise of the mind and work across the layers of the nervous system and the energy field. And the body matters as much as the sound. Somatic shaking was one of the things that helped me most, which is why we now run Fascia + Sound and the 75‑minute Nervous System Reset.

Who I am now

I don't carry any of it as damage anymore

I'm not the person I was. I'm not reactive anymore. I don't live with the chronic illness symptoms, the anxiety or the depression I used to. I sleep. I'm actually present with the people I love. The 18-year-old me wouldn't recognise the life I've got now.

Somewhere along the way I learned to love myself, properly, for the first time. The more I did, the more I started seeing beauty everywhere: in nature, in people, in the small things.

The biggest change isn't the symptoms though. Working with sound and energy, and all the shadow work that came with it, has completely changed how I look at my own life. I have forgiveness for every single thing that happened to me. I'm grateful for all of it, because it made me who I am and it's the reason I can do this work at all.

That's the shift I want for everyone I work with. To look back at the worst things that happened to you and feel peace with them.

That's what I bring into the room. I was on the floor and found a way up, so when someone comes in carrying something they've held for a decade, I'm not intimidated by it.

Doing it properly

Eight qualifications across three countries

Feeling something work isn't the same as understanding it, and I wasn't willing to hand this to other people on a feeling. I trained across Australia, India and Thailand.

• Diploma of Sound Therapy, Kyela Sound Therapy Method Australian College of Sound Therapy · Perth, WA
• Tibetan Singing Bowl Sound Healing Aithein Healing · Goa, India
• Crystal Singing Bowls Sound Therapy and Sound Healing Ali Young, Chiang Mai Holistic · Thailand
• Crystal Singing Bowls, Level 1 Rainbow Sounds · Melbourne
• Solfeggio Frequencies and Energy Centres Think and Grow · Melbourne
• Meditation and Mindset Think and Grow · Melbourne
• Reiki Level 1 Art of Repair, Robyn Hillman-Harrigan · Melbourne
• Sound Therapy and Healing Accredited Practitioner Soul Remember

One to one, I work with energy field readings, frequency and vibration healing, and fascia release. In the studio I lead group sound healing classes every week.

Windsor, Melbourne

Why I built Sound of Soma

I don't really think of myself as a healer. I think of myself as someone who creates the conditions for people to heal themselves, because that's exactly what happened to me. Nobody healed me. I was given a doorway and my own body did the rest.

I built Sound of Soma because this work was almost impossible to access properly. One-off events where you had to bring your own mat and ended up uncomfortable on the floor. Price points that made it impossible to come regularly. Someone hitting a few bowls at the end of a yoga class and calling it sound healing. So I built a studio where people can come every week, properly held, with everything provided.

We started in borrowed rooms. Tuesday nights in a cosmetic tattooing studio, weekends at a wellness studio, fifteen hours a week lugging instruments across Melbourne. Now around 400 people a month come through 5/1A Windsor Place, and over 5,000 have walked in, most of them people who'd never heard of sound healing before.

I've had clients who'd been seeing specialists for five or ten years, where the only answer anyone gave them was medication, and within a few sessions things started moving that hadn't moved in a decade. People who've done years of talk therapy, who understand their patterns inside out, and still feel stuck in their body. People who've lived in fight or flight their whole life walking out with a way to bring themselves down, and actually using it. I don't take credit for any of it. Their body does the work. I just create the conditions and hold the space while it happens.

Jack and Charlie hold the room alongside me now. Have a look at the studio and what runs each week if you'd like to see the place before you come.

If you got this far

If any of this sounds like you

If you're exhausted in a way sleep doesn't fix. If your tests keep coming back normal and you're starting to wonder whether it's all in your head. If you've been carrying something for years and telling everyone you're fine.

I can't promise that what happened for me will happen for you. I don't know your body and I'm not your doctor, so please keep seeing yours.

What I can tell you is that you don't have to believe any of this. I was the last person on earth who would have. You only have to notice whether you feel different afterwards.

Get yourself into the room, and let your body remember how to rest.