TEMPLE, Texas — September is National Self-Care Awareness Month and right now is the perfect time to take a little better care of yourself. In this week's Your Best Life, 6 News Anchor Leslie Draffin traveled to Salado to explore sound baths, a holistic approach to relaxation and healing.
"If you're suffering from anxiety, depression. If you work a lot, if you haven't worked in a while, it's basically good for everyone," said McKenzie Reeves, a massage therapist, reiki master and owner of Salado Creek Healing.
Reeves said sound baths are basically a meditation tool she as used during her other therapies for the last year.
"If you can help the body find its balance again it'll start to heal," she said.
A sound bath has nothing to do with water. Instead, you're bathed in sounds of different frequencies meant to put you in a deep, meditative state. Reeves uses various tools from crystal bowls to gongs and chimes. Each one tuned to different parts of the body.
According to Reeves, "These are in 432 hertz, which is the miracle tone or frequency. So, it just helps to allow total body wellness and allow your body the availability to heal itself by just giving it a break from real life."
The life-long singer also uses her voice to create healing frequencies of sound.
"I found out that I can sing with them. I can sing another note and it creates a harmonic either binaural beat or some sort of harmonic frequency there that is really powerful for the body, things just release. It's really amazing," she said.
Reeves said to understand why it works, think of your body as a flowing, vibrational system.
"Everything's vibrational, you know they teach you in science in school, that everything's just vibrating at a certain frequency. So, when you get out of frequency it creates a lot of pain and other disturbances like emotional disturbances in the body," she said.
Reeves said sound can help move those stuck feelings.
"So by playing through them and allowing the sound waves to flow through your biofield, which is the energy field around you, it washes away and helps tune the body back into wellness and frequency, happiness. If you think of how you hear somebody sing something that's super, super powerful and you get goosebumps like that affects you on a vibrational level! And so, listening to beautiful music is just healing. It has been since the dawn of all the time," she said.
Each sound bath lasts about an hour. Reeves plays and sings, taking participants on a journey into relaxation and sleep.
"You can release a lot of stuff, stuff that you didn't know you had, stuff that your family's been holding on to for a long time, or things that have been chronically bothering you for as long as you can remember. It allows you to feel weightless for just a moment, sometimes longer, helps get out of the heavy," she said.
Reeves sound baths are donation based so it's accessible for anyone to try.
If you'd like to try one for yourself, you can find Reeves on Facebook.