The 'Sound' Of Beginning Again

Lynsey Skinner
Mar 9
5 min read

Updated: Mar 14

I turned forty this year standing in the Atlas Mountains.

It was my birthday. The Moroccan sun was high, the air thin, and I was trekking up a dusty path somewhere outside Marrakech wondering how life had managed to get both bigger and simpler at the same time.

There’s something about reaching forty that feels less like a milestone and more like a quiet realisation. Not that you have everything figured out. Far from it. More that you understand something essential about the kind of life you want to live.

For me, that realisation has always circled back to the same thing. My vocation as a therapist means the work is never really finished. The learning never quite ends.

If I’m doing this job well, I should always be slightly curious, slightly humbled, slightly stretching towards something new.

Which is how I found myself choosing to start two concurrent training courses. Not as a quirky hobby or a midlife whim, but as the beginning of a year-long training in sound therapy.

And yes, a year feels important here.

Let me say that again, because it matters. This training takes a year.

If you’re ever exploring sound work for yourself, please ask your practitioner about their training. This isn’t just about making beautiful sounds in a peaceful room. Sound therapy interacts with the nervous system. It can move emotion. It can stir things that have been sitting quietly under the surface. Done well, it can be powerful. Done casually, it can be irresponsible.

So we take our time.

Because therapy that works with the body, the nervous system, and emotional resonance deserves respect, curiosity, and proper training.

And because sometimes the most meaningful new beginnings start in the most ordinary places...

From a Village Hall to the Mountains

The first weekend of training in bowls work took place in a village hall in Milton Keynes.

Which feels like the least mystical sentence ever written.

Plastic chairs. Tea urn. That slightly echoey hall acoustic that reminds you of school assemblies. And yet...

The moment the first bowl sounded, something in my body recognised it.

Not intellectually. Not professionally. Not in the tidy, cognitive way some therapists like to explain things.

My body recognised it.

A wave moved through my chest that I can only describe as an opening. My skin prickled and seemed to ripple as the vibration travelled through the room. It was subtle and strange and deeply familiar all at once.

And my first thought was not, "wow, this is magical."

It was, "oh no, I’m going to have to take this seriously."

Because that’s the thing about resonance. It bypasses your scepticism.

Feeling Like a Fraud

If you’ve ever started learning something new as an adult, you’ll know the feeling.

The quiet voice that says:

Everyone else seems to know what they’re doing.

You’re not intuitive enough for this.

You’re too analytical.

What if you’re the least spiritual person in the room?

The imposter syndrome arrived right on time.

The bowls were placed carefully around us, each one humming with potential. And there I was thinking, I’m a clinical psychotherapist. What am I doing here?

But learning something new is a strange kind of humility. It asks you to be a beginner again. To listen more than you speak. To let your body learn something your brain hasn’t quite caught up with yet.

Over the weeks that followed, so the training moved too. From that very ordinary village hall…to a farm tucked high in the mountains of North Wales.

Somewhere Between Earth and Sky

The farm sits in the kind of landscape that makes you instinctively breathe deeper.

Rolling hills. Wind moving through grass. A horizon that reminds you the world is larger than your inbox.

Inside the barn studio, the gongs are laid out like quiet giants waiting to speak.

And the gongs are something else entirely.

And it turns out I am particularly drawn to the planetary gongs (which probably won’t surprise anyone who knows me.)

There is something about the idea of planetary resonance, cosmic rhythm, and the vast choreography of space that has always fascinated me. The idea that each gong is tuned to the orbital frequencies of planets feels like standing at the intersection of science and poetry.

But before anyone starts picturing incense and cosmic affirmations…

Let me say this clearly.

This is not woo.

The Science of Sound

Sound therapy has been quietly studied for years now, particularly for its effects on the nervous system, mood, and stress regulation.

Research has shown that sound-based meditation and gong-based practices can significantly reduce tension, anger, fatigue, and depressive mood while increasing relaxation and feelings of wellbeing.

A 2016 study published in the Journal of Evidence-Based Integrative Medicine found that participants in gong meditation experienced measurable reductions in stress markers and significant improvements in mood states.

More recent research exploring sound-based interventions suggests that vibrational sound can influence the autonomic nervous system, encouraging shifts from sympathetic “fight or flight” activation toward parasympathetic states associated with rest, repair, and emotional processing.

In simple terms, certain sound frequencies can help the body move from vigilance into regulation.

Sheila Whittaker’s work on gong and therapeutic sound goes even further, describing the gong as an instrument that can create a “soundscape” capable of entraining brainwave states. The layered harmonic frequencies produced by a gong interact with the brain’s natural rhythms, encouraging slower brainwave patterns associated with deep relaxation and meditation.

This isn’t mystical thinking.

It’s resonance.

Your body is a resonant instrument. Your cells constantly vibrate. Your nervous system responds to rhythm. Sound travels through water and we are, after all, mostly water.

The body listens even when the mind is unsure.

When the Body Knows First

One of the strangest parts of this journey so far has been noticing how my body responds during the sessions.

There are moments where the sound seems to ripple through the skin. A sensation almost like gentle waves moving across the body. The chest softens. The breathing deepens. Sometimes there’s a subtle emotional release that arrives without a story attached to it.

Sometimes dramatic. Sometimes just a quiet sense of something unwinding.

I had a similar experience whilst giving birth(!) - my bbody was doing something it just knew how to do and knew what it needed, whilst my brain was fearful, doubtful, and all too questioning.

It reminds me of something the musician and sound practitioner Alef Field writes about in his work with resonance and music. He describes sound as a form of relational listening between the body and vibration, where healing can occur not through analysis but through experience.

Which, when you think about it, makes perfect sense.

Therapy is sometimes about the words - though not always as you know I'm a Dramatherapist first! And sound therapy is also what can happen when words step aside.

Coming Home to Something Old

There’s a quiet feeling I keep returning to during this training.

The feeling that I have come home to something.

Not something new, but something remembered.

Music has always been one of humanity’s oldest technologies for connection, regulation, and ritual. Long before modern psychotherapy existed, people gathered around rhythm, vibration, and sound to process grief, celebrate, heal, and reconnect.

So, perhaps this work isn’t modern at all - it’s ancient.