Eileen McKusick | Biofield Tuning & Sonic Alchemy: Concordiam a Dissonantia Per Vocem
Eileen McKusick returns for her third InnerVerse conversation fresh from the Music & Sky festival, where she debuted a new body of work: Sonic Anatomy, developed with the Brothers Koren as part of their "Sing The Body Electric" project. The premise is that your body is a pipe organ, trauma, silence, and suppression collapse the pipes, leaving most people expressing only a fraction of their full tonal range. The work is about reopening them.
Topics: why Eileen believes people who were silenced as children carry that silence as physical tension decades later; the 12 tones of the Sonic Anatomy system and which body zones they correspond to; why laughter at the throat chakra works as a release; Eileen's view that trapped sound drives inflammation, lymph stagnation, and chronic pain; Eileen's own decades-long terror of singing and how she finally moved through it; the "mind as cattle dog", give it a pattern to look for or it eats the furniture; ancestral rivers and mind viruses as inherited tension loops; why even stubbing your toe means something; and Eileen and Chance's real-time examples of reading physical injury through biofield anatomy.
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In this episode
Core themes
Sing the Body Electric and the sonic anatomy
Eileen McKusick describes the newest branch of her work, Sing the Body Electric, co created with the brothers Koren, Isaac and Thorald. Together they mapped what they call the sonic anatomy, twelve core tones plus roughly twenty demitones that resonate in specific parts of the body. The sound ma lands in the spleen, which relates to mother, and paw in the liver, which relates to father. There are also five zones people tone from. At Music and Sky she combined a group biofield tuning with mass toning for the first time, watching hundreds of people bounce and sound at once.
Your body as a pipe organ
The governing image of the conversation is the body as a pipe organ. Macro and micro traumas collapse, clog and rust the pipes until a person expresses only a few notes of their full range. McKusick argues most people have been silenced, in emotional expression and in speaking up for their needs, and that a funny sounding singing voice simply means a pipe is blocked. In her two day workshops everyone sings happy birthday to themselves at the start and again at the end, and she says the difference after seven hours is phenomenal because people stop judging and start playing.
Making harmony out of dissonance
Chance Garton titled the episode Concordiam a Dissonantia Per Vocem, meaning creating harmony from dissonance with the voice. His breakthrough was treating dissonance as a portal rather than a fault. Before a late night radio appearance, sick and congested, he held his G note tuning fork, which correlates to the throat, and let his voice find the harmony instead of forcing it, moving up and down the register for twenty minutes until his energy was in full flow. He also had a client tone the sound raw for stuck heart chakra energy, and she could not stop yawning.
Tension as the root of nearly everything
McKusick offers a claim she invites pushback on, that pretty much everything we suffer from mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually is tension based. Where you are tense, blood and lymph stop moving, electricity and information stop flowing, oxygen drops and disease finds an environment to grow in. Healing then is not removal but relaxation into acceptance. She tells clients the wound of being an unmothered child will never be filled, and that holding a grievance is resistance to the whole stream of life. Even if someone did not deserve forgiveness, your body deserves release from the tension.
Reading the field and the mirror of injury
Biofield anatomy works as a map. Garton found a client's left solar plexus blip at baby age and named it, and the woman linked it to her earliest months. A man McKusick worked with had cleared everything back to age three but never touched the precognitive self worth layer beneath it. Beliefs formed that early even shape your tone of voice, so people hear it and dismiss you. Garton read his own strained shoulder as unexpressed anger with a friend, McKusick read her sprained ankle as dithering over two decisions, and her sore arm as resentment over an apple pie she wrongly assumed her sons ate.
Quotes
“The dissonance or the symptom or the difficulty is actually like a portal that if you go through it and let it happen, like the key is letting it happen.”
“Your body as a pipe organ, and all different kinds of macro and micro traumas throughout your life have caused pipes to collapse, to shut down, to get clogged, to get rusty, and we end up only expressing just a few notes of our full potential because we've just been so shut down.”
“Because it's not about how you sound or how you look. It's about the joy of expression. And and so people get liberated into that in just seven hours. They're like, I'm liberated.”
“You can self-regulate your own body with sound, that you don't need, you know, the patch or the pill or the ear thing or, you know, you don't need anything outside of yourself. Just your own voice for self-regulation is huge.”
“It's really a reflection of the human birthright at our core as these electric tonal frequency beings that are created in the image of the entire fractal of the universe. Like, we are like the entire universe as a human being. It's incredible to be able to recover that joyful expression of sound and not judge it.”
“Pretty much everything that we suffer from mentally, physically, emotionally, relationally, whatever, what have you, spiritually, is tension based. It's just some part of you that's tense, and when you're really sick you're very complexly tense.”
“When you have a belief that nobody cares what you have to say, that's going to come out in your voice, so that people are going to subconsciously hear that tone and respond to it and be dismissive of you.”
“I think it's because I knew that the situations correlated. It's like it becomes miraculous when you realize, like, even stubbing your toe means something.”
Eileen McKusick is the founder of Biofield Tuning, a sound-healing modality that uses tuning forks to map and clear the human energy field, and bestselling author of Tuning the Human Biofield and Electric Body, Electric Health; she has been a recurring InnerVerse guest.
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