What sound healing is
Sound healing is a loose name for sessions built around sustained, resonant sound. In a one-to-one session you lie on a mat or table, fully clothed, and the practitioner plays instruments near you: most often metal singing bowls, sometimes gongs, chimes or their own voice. There is nothing for you to do except listen.
The name promises more than any evidence supports, as you will see below. What it reliably offers is an hour of lying still in a quiet room with nowhere to be.
Sound healing or a sound bath?
Same instruments, different setting. A sound bath is a group lying on mats in a hall; a sound healing session is just you. One to one, the practitioner can play closer, adjust the volume and pace to you, and talk with you before and after. If you have not tried either, the weekly group sound bath is an easy way to find out whether you like it.
Where singing bowls come from
Most people know them as Tibetan singing bowls, but the history is debated. A 2020 article in Tricycle, the Buddhist magazine, reports little hard evidence that the bowls are ancient and even less that they are Tibetan, and traces the popular name to a 1972 album called Tibetan Bells. Some link them instead to the rin bowls of Japanese temples. Whatever their past, the sound is the same.
What the research says
A little, and of low quality. In a 2017 study of 62 adults, people reported less tension, anger, fatigue and low mood after a singing bowl meditation, but there was no comparison group. A 2025 review of 14 studies concluded that singing bowls appear to reduce stress, anxiety and depressive symptoms, with low to moderate certainty.
What no study has shown is that particular frequencies heal cells, organs or illness. Treat a session as a way to rest deeply, not as treatment.
Sound healing at Portal de Paz
Individual sessions take place in the private session room at Portal de Paz, near the park in Mindo. Write to us from this page and we will tell you who is offering them and when. Monica's group sound bath runs every week on the calendar.