Winsted Native Demystifies the Ancient Art of Sound Therapy By MELISSA JORDAN-REILLY Staff Reporter WINSTED --

Christine Skutt had tried everything from bone scans to acupuncture, but nothing was helping the hip pain she'd endured since a fall she'd taken a year and a half ago.  Then a chance meeting with Alice Richard, a local "sound therapist," led to two sessions that completely turned Skutt's condition around. "I'd gone the conventional route," said Skutt, owner of Christine's Flower Shoppe on Main Street. "I'd had an X-ray, an MRI, a bone scan, chiropractic medicine, ultrasound, a shot in the hip -- and nobody had any answers. I couldn't walk, I couldn't run, I couldn't go upstairs or even sit for an extended amount of time." But a chance meeting with Richard, a sound therapist who operates AUM (A Unified Matter), convinced Skutt to try a more unconventional approach. "That chance meeting turned into something that really benefited me," Skutt said. What had been missing in everything she'd tried before, Skutt believes, is the emotional component behind her pain. "I had experienced some extreme grief that had manifested itself as physical pain, and Alice moved out a lot of that blocked energy." Richard said this week that she is well aware that many people are still unaware, perhaps even skeptical, of the scientific component behind the ancient practice of healing with sound. "My goal is to demystify energy work," she said. And once her clients grasp that "everything is energy, and we all have our electrical systems," Richard said, the theory behind using resonance and entrainment to heal a variety of ailments begins to make perfect sense. She pointed to work done by Fabien Maman, a French bio-energeticist and composer who studied the effects of sound wave's on cells in the human body. Working with two breast cancer patients who "toned" for several hours a day, he found that one patient's tumor disappeared entirely, while the other's surgeon found her tumor to have "literally dried up." Cancer cells, he concluded, could be destroyed by sound therapy. In more recent tests, doctors at London's Royal Marsden Hospital have found that high-density ultrasound provides effective "knifeless surgery" on liver cancer and other organ tumors. In China, thousands of patients with liver and pancreatic cancer have literally had their tumors cooked to dealt by using sound therapy, which raises the temperature of the tumors to 140 Fahrenheit, usually killing them instantly. One of the many benefits of sound therapy, Richard noted, is that it can be combined with more traditional protocols, such as chemotherapy, so that even the most leery patients (and their doctors) don't have to worry that they will be putting their recovery at risk by adding sound therapy to their treatment schedule.

Sound therapy works for countless other maladies, both physical and emotional, Richard said. She said she'd been able to help clients coping with problems ranging from grief and depression as well as addictions to drugs, alcohol, smoking and food. "Every trauma, every disappointment we have, are toxic emotions that are literally on a lower frequency, and they get stuck in our energy systems," Richard explained. "And sound is an extremely powerful way to heal many different areas." The process Richard uses involves resonance, the vibratory rate of an object. Using music and a variety of instruments -- including Tibetan and crystals bowls, tuning forks, bells, remo drums and tinshaws (Tibetan bells) -- Richard encourages sympathetic resonance in her clients, as their systems vibrate in harmony with the instruments. Each instrument operates at a specific frequency, which Richard pinpoints to various parts of the body, as well as to her client's specific complaints. As a result, sound therapy patients experience entrainment, an aspect of resonance, in which the client's vibrations lock into the vibrations of whatever instrument she is using. "Nature always seeks the most efficient state; it takes less energy to pulse in cooperation than in opposition," her brochure explains. In this way, a person's own frequencies can be reset, in a sense, clearing the way for improved blood circulation, blood pressure, breathing, skin response and muscle tension, among other things. Tibetan bells, for example, have been found to create ELF's (extremely low frequencies) between 4 and 8 cycles per second, which helps calibrate a client's brain waves to those frequencies commonly achieved through meditation. While the concept behind sound therapy may be easy to grasp, the therapy involves far more than just ringing a bell here and there. Each part of the body has its own rate of vibration, Richard notes, and it takes training to understand how to most effectively heal a client by using the resonance and entrainment processes.

She said that she often spends about ninety minutes on a first-time client. Among her offerings for individuals or couples are "tune-up" sessions, in which the build-up of unwanted emotions and past trauma are cleared away. She also conducts sessions, either in person or by telephone in which she teaches techniques to help clients continue to "tune-up." Richard's "bliss sessions," are private sound therapies tailored to the individual. She even offers tune-ups for home or business environments, in which she redirects the flow of negative energy within the building. Richard noted that she is hoping to begin working more closely with teens, both privately and in group sessions, because cases of depression, autism and Attention Deficit Disorder have been shown to improve through sound therapy. She'd also like to do more work with cancer patients, and is producing a documentary in which patients and doctors discuss the healing possibilities of sound therapy. Richard, who was born in Winsted and went to school in Canton, returned to town about eight years ago. "I missed Winsted a great deal," she said. In August, she opened AUM, which cleverly evokes the ancient OM, or AUM, sound, the Hindu tradition of the sound of creation. She shies away from talking about her own conversion to sound therapy, other than to say her interest in music and signing eventually led her to the theories she now practices. "Doing this is very innate for me," she said simply. "It's the thing I was meant to do. "It's not a mystical, magical thing. I just want to help people who want to be helped."
For the holiday season, Alice Richard is offering gift certificates for private sessions. She is also offering healing demonstrations, in which she will travel to a home, hospital or other location to demonstrate the use of Tibetan and crystal bowls as healing implements. For more information, call 860-738-8796.