EP 188 WTH?!?: The Healing Harmony of Crystal Sounds with Jeralyn Glass

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Hey, welcome back, everybody. Dr. Greg Eckel here today on what the health and our topic is crystalline music as medicine. I've got my dear friend Geralyn Glass. She's an internationally acclaimed singer, musician, and leader in the field of sound healing who has been sharing the gift of music medicine with the world for decades. She began her career on Broadway, has sung an opera and concert stages around the globe. Geralyn offers a unique alchemical blend of music, meditation, and high vibrational sound, which I hope she will share with us today. Emerging quantum science, bioenergetics, and crystalline singing bowls. Geralyn helps facilitate healing and transformation with the power of music and sacred frequencies that nourish our bodies, connect us with our hearts, and awaken our consciousness. She's got a book, sacred Vibrations, releasing this month, July 23, 2024. Her music can be found on all streaming platforms. Humanity streams and Insight Timer. Welcome aboard, geralyn. Thank you.

Dr. Greg, it's so good to see you. Thank you.

You are so welcome and I am so excited about you, your book, your message. You know, we've been saying on this platform for a decade, the future of medicine is frequency. And here you've come up with your. Is this your first book?

Yeah, it is.

Here it is. Ah, it is so lovely. Sacred Vibrations, the transformative power of crystalline sound and music. You also have a tarot deck, I believe, that has QR codes that play the tunes. You have an app coming out. You have new music being released. Like, what aren't you doing these days?

Resting.

Yes, there it is. Well, I am so excited, you know, you, I got to be an early reader for your book. And you, you are talking my language here with frequency and you know, crystalline music as medicine. What do you mean by that?

Well, I think, Greg, you know, I've been a musician all my life, and so I always understood that music is something that can uplift our spirits, and music is something that can bring us to calm or bring us to a deep state of reverence, bring clarity. But in the last 17 years, I've been playing the crystal singing bowls, and those are a very special instrument that do that in a very different way, I think, than normal music, so to speak. Right. There's something about the crystalline structure, which I know you understand, that entrains with our own system because our own system is crystalline in structure, our blood and our bones. And so when I first heard those bowls 17 years ago, I was like, whoa, what is that? And it felt like the sound, the pure exquisite sound of the crystalline Instruments sort of awakened a kind of remembering. It was like a sound that I knew, right? And I had been playing the Tibetan Himalayan singing bowls for a long time. I had used them, like before performances. I would put one on my belly and I would just play it and feel the vibrations come into my solar plexus. And then I would warm up my voice for performances. But these, when I heard them, they were completely different. The crystal has a very different feel than the metal bowls.

Well, talk to me a little more about the crystalline structure and crystal in general, because there is. There is an information in a deep remembering with that. How do you talk about it with people?

I mean, I'm not a medical doctor, nor a scientist, but I know so deep inside me that the second I begin to play, what I can say to you is that my mind and those of those who I play for, they usually experience like, the mind suddenly gets this pristine focus and a clarity because part of you goes, oh, music, right? And yet it's a very different kind of music than we're used to hearing. And so in that moment, the mind becomes very still and focused, and you're able to drop down deep inside yourself, perhaps in the deep subconscious. And memories can emerge, colors and shapes. People can see connections with loved ones. There's all kinds of things that can happen. But I think that idea. And for example, like this, the COVID of the book, that is an image of a small F bowl, and the note of the F is in the fifth octave. And this image is by John Stuart Reed, who invented the cymoscope, which is an instrument that we can see sound made visible. So this image is just a perfect geometry with 22 of these little antinodes. And, you know, again, I'm not a scientist or like that, but when you see that picture and you imagine that those perfect shapes that are being created by the crystal singing bowls and are activated in our very cells, they're activated in the fluids of our body. I know what I feel when I play is a deep and profound sense of peace. And I guess, you know, again, I've been playing them for many years, and I've experienced all kinds of people along the way. One of my singing students, you know, when I first brought them home, I was living in Germany and enjoying a full career as a classical singer there. She had a little bit of a blockage in her voice. So I asked her to choose one of the seven bowls that I had, and just to tone with it, whatever, you know, to make tones with the bowl. And suddenly the blockage dissipated and she started singing with her full range. Right. And then she said to me afterwards that she remembered in that moment that she heard the sound and made the sound of her own voice entrain with the sound of the bowl, so that she remembered a childhood trauma and she felt that childhood trauma release.

Wow. Yeah. You know, the, that I don't think is a one time thing. You know, this is a component as to why we've brought the, the crystalline sound into our practice as well. And why, why do you think? Why is this an important medium in today's world?

Wow.

Yeah.

Dr. Greg. I mean, you know, from your own experience, because you're also using the bulls that there are so many things in our lives today, especially that medicine doesn't know how to solve or alleviate the pains. Right. And for my own particular experience, I lost my son nine years ago, and he was 19 years old. And as I landed in grief and I was offered by three different medical doctors to take antidepressants and I just, you know, I just shook my head because I knew deep inside myself that that would not solve the problem. I wanted my son back. It's like, don't give me a pill because it'll just numb me out. And I don't know if I'll ever be able to come back to the land of the living. And what I've since seen is that there's just so many things for most people, just like the student I described, who might never have come to that memory of the trauma and might never have been able to release it, even with years of talk therapy. And I discovered my, in my own practice that I was going to talk therapy to try to alleviate the grief. And it was, you know, it helped. But nothing did what the sound and the vibration and the frequency, nothing did what that did. It was like it pierced through and held me in this sacred kind of place that I could keen and I could groan and I can express the deep feelings of grief without any words. You know, as we all know, music has that ability a, to unite people. No matter what language you speak. You know, if, you know, if you're hearing something and you're clapping a rhythm or you're dancing or you're just listening to a beautiful symphony, you know, music has the ability to unite us. We don't need to speak the same language at all. Right. And there was something about working with the sound and frequency like that that really went beyond any words. And it took me to this place that I now call this place of the ineffable you know, and I began to understand, as I know, you know, the other night I was sitting next to a medical doctor, been practicing for 10 years. And I asked her, I said, how do you experience that your patients heal? And she looked at me and she said, you know, I've had a very strict training and upbringing in medicine, and, you know, I have a protocol. But she said, what I've learned in 10 years of practice is that patients want me to listen to them. They want to be seen and heard and felt. And I think there became an ally for me with the bowls that I could play and I could begin to express feelings and just through sound that I couldn't express in the talk therapy. And suddenly what I would notice is I was getting lighter and lighter, and the grief wasn't weighing me down. And sound was really. Had become my medicine, where a pill could never have done that. It would have numbed me. It would have held me kind of. I mean, I don't know, because I've never taken it like that. The sound was really, for me, the medicine that just let me have all my feelings and help the feelings be felt and then let them be released and healed.

Yeah. You know, the term that comes, that keeps coming to me is this resonant body, right? We have these vessels we call our bodies and our voices and sounds that we can admit. And then here you have tones and bowls that you can send with frequencies and information into all of the cells with vibr. That component. It's like we have this ancient technology baked into our bodies, right? We have the tones of the different energy centers and nerve plexuses, and you've associated. And through time, there's, you know, different people put different notes to the different energy centers. But that aspect of grief and what you've experienced, what thousands of people are experiencing around the globe, it seems like there's this kind of blooming and blossoming. And I know that you are at kind of the epicenter of that, of teaching a lot of the sound healers out of your. Your studio in California there, even, where, you know, Kitty studied. And, you know, we brought that technology into our center. What. What are you seeing? Because you are with your sacred science of sound platform and, you know, you're bringing together some amazing thinkers and having these deep conversations around the science of sound and sound, he. And trauma and, you know, all of these different facets of, you know, what's going on with this vibration.

So I know, and it's so important because it affects everyone, you know, whether you're I've had little children in here. I've had veterans, I've had cancer patients. I've had hospice patients and their families. I've had someone with Parkinson's. And I know you're working a lot with that, you know, and the miracle of what watching me play one bowl around her and having her tone and make sounds with it and watching completely her shaking stop, you know, and her two daughters were there and they were ecstatic. I just think this kind of sound medicine is really becoming where people can turn. I mean, not for everything, of course, sometimes you need the intervention with medicine. But I was privileged to present in Washington D.C. last December for a workshop, for a two day workshop that was called Music as Medicine, sponsored by the Kennedy center and the National Institutes for Health and the National Endowment for the Arts and the Renee Fleming Foundation. I was presenting as a musician among some of the leading scientists and researchers in this field. And we were talking about pregnancy, about dementia, about college students learning to be super inspired and be more focused and present. I mean, everything. Veterans, children, people going to the hospital to have operations, how sound can really help to calm them and make that operation more successful. I mean, Greg, it's. It's like if you think about music being in every culture since the beginning of time, we're just awakening now to how we can use frequency and sound and harmonics in a way that is very, very beneficial to the struggles that we have in today's world. Yeah.

You know, you think about it, you know, you hear a song from your childhood and it takes you right back to those memories of when, when you had some event with that song playing and how it gets stored in our memory banks. And now there's, you know, the new information coming out around the exclusionary zone or our bodies of water and how these frequencies influence structures of water, etc. It's, it really is an exciting time to be ha. To be here. Right. I mean, to, to experience life, but then to have this blossoming and blooming or renaissance almost of music as medicine, even from humming. Right. Of putting tone on our vagus nerve and how important that is for healing. What were some of the surprising things for you as you wrote this book? What, what came up for you?

I think really being able to drop into just the blessings I've had in my life, like just knowing as a young, a young child that I wanted to go into the field of music and that's what I would do. And then just looking back at my life because the thread of music is woven throughout the whole book and how music has affected me and how I've seen it affect others throughout my life. And then I guess, just working with some of my students and having them share some of their most exciting things that have happened. Like, one mom was working with autistic children, and one of the students even helped a cancer patient to actually heal and to get the news that the doctor said, you know, you're cancer free. Go live your life. There were so many, one working with veterans that were blind. So that information is added in there. I think there wasn't anything really surprising. There's sharing from John Stuart Reed, who I mentioned created the cymascope. Dr. Daniel Levitin, who wrote this is your brain on music. And we are working together closely with Minerva Institute, which has been voted for the third consecutive year the most innovative university in the world. So we've started a music and the brain lab last year. So, you know, Dr. Dan will say to me, keep doing what you're doing, and science and spirituality and music and sound are going to connect more and more and more. And that's what we saw really, in Washington. And I think I decided to write somewhat about what it was like to lose my child and to understand, I think, Greg, that each of us, no matter what's going on in our lives, no matter what, if we're dealing with an illness or if we're dealing with losses, or if we're dealing with a child that's handicapped or whatever it might be in our lives, that there is indeed a bigger picture, right? And I think that came more and more clear that my son's passing and everything that happened in my life was part of a whole bigger life purpose. And I think writing the book allowed that to land, you know, and realizing, like, in one of the chapters, there's a story when I went to India to the ashram of Amma, who's known as the hugging saint, and like, an incredible miracle happened there. And to be able to write about all the different miracles that have happened over the last nine years and really share those, I think nothing was surprising, but things, you know, developed. And there were moments where I thought, oh, you really need to add that in there. You know, there was a very moving experience in Cambodia when I was at the Killing fields. Oh, you need to add that in there because we need to keep. Keep bringing together this power of sound and music as this universal language to hold humanity, especially. Especially now.

Especially now. You know, I really love that about your book on. I mean, you have lived an extraordinary Life of. I. I want you to share some components, and you're not done yet, by the way. There's the best is yet to come, Geralyn.

The.

The components of your singing career in the opera and really how that kind of primed you for the. For where. What you're up to now. Will you speak into that?

Sure. So I think the book begins with something that was called. That's called a jump in. So I was known in. In Europe as the Jump In Queen, meaning that if I. If there was a role or a piece of music that I knew, I would get a call and they'd say, someone, the leading supreme has canceled. Can you jump in? So the book begins with. It was New Year's Eve in Munich, and I'm at the big Philharmonic hall, and I get the call at 10:30 in the morning to jump in for that night. And I think those kinds of experience, I mean, that was. That was huge for me. Those kind of experiences grounded in me like a vocal athlete. Like, you know, so anyone that can relate to you, train and you work to make yourself the strongest you can and the best that you can be, and then, boom, you're called to jump in, you know, and you. You don't have time. As my one singing teacher used to say, take the question mark off your shoulder, you know, take it off like it's. It's time to just land and trust that who you are and what you're made of and everything that you've trained will show up, will be there for you. So that was really one. One big thing. And then I was very young and I got a Broadway contract, and there's a story about doing My Fair lady on Broadway with Rex Harrison. There's a story in the book about that. But I think music, like sports, teaches you how to refine skills and how to, you know, develop yourself to the highest potential that you are in that moment. And then I talk about in the book the two kind of techniques that I've learned. And one is the technique of doing everything as correctly as you can and being studious and practicing. And then the other technique is, in that moment, how do you open your heart and how do you just land and trust? This is who I am. This is the gift that I have to give. I will just trust that. And again, you know, not question or doubt. So I think there's two techniques. The technique of our hearts and how we live from there, and then the technique of our skin skills, and how do we bring those together?

I love that. And it's like they do kind of infinity sign back and forth there for you're kind of needing both of those. And the word jazz comes up of the improvisation on top of the, the training. So you, you know, you had to trust your training and then open your heart and really just be present. What are you seeing? Where do you see the future of basically music as medicine? Where, what, what, who's really pushing the bounds out there besides you?

I think there's a big, there's a big group of us and I really got to see that in Washington D.C. and it was very, very inspirational because we all talked about, excuse me, the importance of collaborating and the importance of an artist sharing well, just like the techniques I just told you, like how do we use the excellence that we've trained to be and to do? How do we use that and also bring our hearts to it? Or was like the medical doctor when I asked her, you know, how do your patients, how do you see your patients healing? And she explained she had that structure but it was important for her now to really listen. So I think there's always gonna be that fine line of how do we care, how do we love, how do we heal? What are those kinds of things that we can do? I mean, you know that so well from your own clinic. What are those things and how can we hold space for that? Because I think so much of what's happening in music is medicine actually. Chapter 17. I write about the future, you know, and I have some of my colleagues like Victor Wooten, who's a five time Grammy Award winning bass player, shares about his vision of the future. Dr. Levitin shares about his vision of the future. Joshua Leeds. So people in the profession are sharing and I share how I envision it. And actually the word that came up was what you said was renaissance. This is a renaissance. Because I think people are understanding more and more that once again, the more we can come together in communities, the more we can feel like we belong to and orchestra and that we can tune with our fellow musicians. The more that, I don't know, society becomes more and more enriched. We feel more and more safe and in community. So I feel like music is coming more and more in the forefront. Certainly with we've had it already, as you know, with ultrasound and different sound and frequency techniques. But now I think there's a way to sit and receive sound in a way that really nourishes and nurtures our spirits and our physical being in a way that we haven't used before. I mean, you know from ancient Egypt that they really had sound healing chambers and that in many of the ancient cultures, sound and tone were a big part of the community and how people healed. So I think this is just coming more and more to the forefront. And the interesting thing about the bulls is that they're really only 20, 20, 24 years old. They really came out in the year 2000. And so there's not been a lot of research. There's been research done on the metal hemming, the Himalayan singing bowls, but nothing yet on the crystal singing bowls, which is why I'm so passionate about really looking, you know, what is it? Is it we're in the key of C and that's working with someone who's had a heartbreak or we're in the key of F and that's working with a cancer patient. What we know for sure right now is it's never going to be one to one. Yeah, I think that's important that, you know, like, if you go in to have an operation and you're going to be playing, there's going to be music playing during your surgery. It needs to be what you love, you know, and if you love jazz, the best jazz needs to be playing. It doesn't need to be Bach or it doesn't need to be Vivaldi. You know, music is such a personal thing and music medicine really comes to be with what do you love?

So true. And I think that's a great lead in to the assembly you have right behind you on experiencing some of the crystal tones via Geraldyn Glass. Sure.

You know, Greg, and what I just said, like, so, so I mean, obviously if I played you a tune and I love to sing with the bowls also, so it's nice to sing a song that people know. But the real magic, I think happens when you just hear the frequency and the vibration. So it's a different kind of music, you know, so to say, okay, I want to have my operation with the sound of crystal singing bowls. Then we have a whole bunch of questions, you know, what do you like, what key do you like? What, what tuning do you like, etc, so it can get very rich. But just again, this sound just really helps us to steal the mind and drop. I invite you to allow yourself to hum with the bulls. Perhaps you just tone, ah, whatever feels comfortable to. Because when we allow our sound, our voice to entrain with the bowls bring a deep sense of peace. Sam and it's really not about singing or being right, it's really about what sound frequency, what is your vibrational signature. What sounds do you want to make, allowing them to have free freedom of expression. And let the sounds of the singing bowls hold you wherever you feel that in your body. Sound and music medicine has to do with, again, what feels harmonic for you, what feels good for you. Sometimes I'll just play the bowls and do something like this. Just allow my voice to siren up and down sam sa and just gently rubbing the palms of your hands together to generate heat. And you can gently stroke them through your scalp, caressing your cheeks, perhaps placing them on your heart, heart gently tapping that you feel that you are indeed energy. We're made of that energy and sound, vibration and light. And the sound will linger and linger and linger. And the truth of it is, we are that. And sound, even in the silence, is always vibrating. There's always an essence of vibration and tone within each of us. And I encourage everybody to. You know, we have a YouTube channel, and there's lots and lots of meditations for you to listen to on there, but there are two loops. I encourage you, if you don't have bowls, to listen to those two loops and just make sounds with them. You know, it's a wonderful way. When I meditate in the morning, sometimes I'll just play a single bowl. Sometimes I'll play a number of bowls. Or if I'm not at home with the single singing bowls, I'll just listen to sounds. And perhaps just so you really begin to activate that we ourselves are a crystalline vessel and that we ourselves really are sound.

Love it. Thank you so much. And your YouTube channel is Crystal Cadence on YouTube. And I do encourage folks to subscribe. It's a great way to bring these vibrations right into your home and definitely get plugged in to this movement. I am so excited and pleased with your work, Geralyn. Your book is a massive accomplishment and big kudos to you. I know it is a labor of love to get that out there. Do you have any last. I mean, the bulls really do sing for themselves. But do you have any last words to our listeners and viewers out there?

I think we. We didn't mention much about the app Source, but that was created, again, as a platform where people could learn about science, about sound vibration, about what some of the connection between the science, the spirituality, and the sound. And I'm very excited for that conversation to become more and more present for all of us, you know, just to explore, well, what. What does cymatics mean? What does constructive and destructive sound mean? What is that? Why is music a medicine? How does the brain work with sound. So and then there's lots of meditations to listen to and there there will be new material every month.

Awesome.

I'm very excited. Yeah.

Yeah, we'll definitely put those links in our show notes and on our social channels to to get this word out because it is really how I feel the shift in change happens is through frequency and vibration and when it sounds so lovely as that, it's really easy. So thank you for your gift and your heart and your message.

Thank you so much, Dr. Grave and same thank you to everything you are doing Greg in the world.

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