March 17, 2025 My Discovery of Vocal Sound Healing by Trinity Thomas
Sound Healing landed in my life as a revelation, in the midst of months of repeating strep throat infections that stole my voice entirely. It was 1991.
As always, I had to be pushed to my limit to seek wisdom outside my usual range. I had just arrived in Boulder, Colorado, famous home of many alternative healing methods. Including the relatively new modality of Sound Healing. This was the third month of strep throat infections that stole my voice.
My wise primary care physician eventually mentioned I might need to investigate ‘energetic’ causes for my illness. “What does that mean?” squeaked my previously southern, Texan, Catholic self.
He began writing. “You need Vickie Dodd,” he declared. He seemed quite certain.
“Is that a person?” I croaked.
He laughed, bless him. “Yes, she is quite a person, one of our local celebrities, actually. She teaches and has a practice in what is known as Sound Healing. I just saw a notice in today’s paper that she is starting a beginning class. That’s what we call a synchronicity! You should look that up. This is an official prescription. I expect you will find answers there. Likely more than you currently imagine.”
He handed me the paper with her contact information. I contacted her and signed up for her class.
Over the following decades, her work was adopted and expanded by Jonathon Goldman, now a very famous Sound Healing teacher and practitioner, although he operates with a very different style. https://www.healingsounds.com
But this was early days. Before either of her books. Before her institute was formed in Port Townsend, WA. https://sacredsoundworks.com
I did find answers through my study with Vickie. More than I could ever have imagined. We became friends and colleagues. She invited me to be the official Crystal Healer on her Sound Healing Tour in 1995.
Vickie began her class by having us, one at a time, sing our names, just our first names. Then together, over and over and over again. She taught us. We noticed how the sound changed and how we felt with the different versions. I had never been aware of feeling my voice, or feeling how it affected my body. We were encouraged to explore making unbeautiful, disharmonious sounds and feeling energies move.
She started at the beginning, teaching us about energy, chakras, how blocked energy becomes illness. How to hum, sound, sing to open our throats. How to sing into the body, our own or someone else’s, to scan it for blocks, then sing into the blocks to remove them.
Vickie sees sound as a river, the body as a landscape through which it naturally flows. She is a wonder of a woman. A revelation of a person perfectly suited to deliver the revelation of Sound Healing.
My work with her revealed my early damage, my severely blocked throat chakra, from having so much to say that was not welcomed by my environment. As a child, I saw and heard the other realms. I was excited to report my findings! My Catholic household insisted on my silence on all of these topics. Further years, as a neurodiverse woman born in the 1950’s in Texas, encouraged me to mask myself to survive, deepening the damage to my throat.
Vickie taught us through her own stories of discovering her gifts, timeless wisdom, and practice, that the vibrant energy center of our throats, being midway between our heads and hearts, often becomes blocked by the war between them. By the assault of ‘passing for normal’ in life. By all the things we intrinsically know but dare not say, much less live.
When we hum, sing, sound to open our throats, illness abates. Often wisdom and resolution of the war between the head and heart arrives.
This is a high alchemy, readily available, through restoring our voices.
I’ve never had strep throat again.
As I moved through the years, developing my own healing practices of Reiki, Hypnotherapy, Crystal Healing, Inner Oracle Activation, and my own versions of Sound Healing practices, I found myself always returning to the alchemy of our individual vocal sound.
I believe this is the high alchemy we need, as humans living in times of planetary transition. We must free our voices, heal ourselves and each other. We must allow ourselves to live from our hearts’ version of reality, translating the truth we know into inspired action.
Ava Adams and I founded The Somatic Sound to create a container for this work. We invite you to join us!
Free Your Voice, Free Your Planet™