Sonic bond with Mother Goddess

Surya Nada
Jun 30
6 min read

Exploring the connections between sound, healing and the awakening.

As a fetus you were exposed to a rich soundscape in the safe womb of your mother. Your prenatal experience was predominantly of a sonic nature. The particular connection you have with this soundscape of your mother’s womb is deeply stored within your subconscious mind.

Recalling and possibly restoring this (sonic) connection with the mother awakens a profound (and often healing) experience. In this article I’ll explore the sonic connection between you and your mother, both on a personal and cosmic level.

I AM.

Vibrating consciousness.

Radiant Being.

I AM.

The womb as a soundscape

From a state of pure being – I AM – the human life starts very small, in the safe container of the mother’s belly. In the womb, the sense of hearing develops earlier than all of the other senses. Therefore, the sounds the foetus is experiencing in the womb create a deep imprint within that human being, setting the tone for the rest of his or her life.

There’s assumably no one else that investigated this topic as deeply as Dr. Alfred Tomatis. This Frech doctor lived in the 20th century and dedicated his life to healing people on a profound level through transporting them back to the sounds they experienced within the womb. He specialised in the field of auditory processing, neurolinguistics, and sound therapy, and worked predominantly with children with severe psychological disorders.

As Dr. Alfred Tomatis discovered, the foetus perceives its world primarily through sound.

The foetal soundscape includes:

The mother’s heartbeat
Her breath
Digestive flows
The tones of her voice (not as meaning, but as music)
Environmental sounds

All of these sounds are perceived through water, instead of air (as usually is the case for us). Sound travels over 4 times faster through water than it does through air. Therefore, the soundscape in the womb is of an entirely different nature than what we hear through our adult ears.

According to Tomatis, what we hear—and how we listen—shapes our brain and our being from the very beginning. What we perceive through our ears is literally shaping our brain and the complex of mental structures. This, of course, is particularly true for the foetus and the early stages of the human life, yet sound continuous to carve out consciousness, moment by moment, in whatever stage of life we find ourselves. Therefore, if the ability to listen is compromised, especially during the foetal development, this may cause severe issues in the psychological and linguistic development.

My children have a teddy bear that plays sound as it was perceived in the womb, with the heartbeat as the central sound. When my son can’t sleep, he grabs the bear, switches on the sound and every time again he seems like …coming home.

The Lost Paradise

What Tomatis found was that the foetus is perceiving a soundscape very similar to “the sonic sphere of the African jungle at sunset”. He also referred to the womb-experience as ‘the lost paradise’. (*1) He likened the womb’s sonic environment to the jungle at dusk — layered, alive and whispering.

Remember – from a deeper place, beyond the mind – the lost paradise.

Once again, unite with it.

The paradise that once fully embraced you is right here, right now.

Glowing in the radiant reflection of sunrays in the water,

Whispering as the leaves in the trees.

He called it the lost paradise, because in the womb our experience generally was one of security and complete fusion with the mother – call it unity. When a baby gets born, we all know it doesn’t take long for him to cry. Tomatis states that “The cry with which the child greets its arrival in the world is a cry of despair. The child is already mourning the lost paradise he experienced moments before in the mother's womb.” (*2)

Losing the lost paradise, forgetting the state of absolute unity - forgetting the paradise - is embedded in the human experience. Forgetting the union that we are, is what I call spiritual forgetfulness. It’s not a forgetting of the mind. Rather it’s a forgetting of the true nature of the being and its interconnectedness with the world (or the cosmic Mother).

Each one of us goes through this process of forgetting, and as human beings we are free to wander around, unfulfilled, with the notion of lack, for the rest of our lives OR we might choose to reconnect to this paradise and recognise it in the greater world around us.

The Mother is the World

“My womb is in the waters, within the ocean. From there I spread-out over all creatures and touch the very sky with the crown of my head.”

-Goddess Vak (the Goddess of sound and speech) from the Rig Veda (circa 1500 BC) (*3)

What was once this loving person we call our mother, became the world: mother earth and the entire mother cosmos, carrying us like a Mother. Truly, all life is the Mother. The notion that the great all-encompassing force of Life is nurturing everyone and carries a loving essence, might be called spiritual maturity. Unfortunately, the majority of modern human beings doesn’t spiritually mature before they die. Most people run through their life in search for something they never find, overlooking the possibility that it might already be here. According to Doctor Tomatis, what we are looking for is reliving or returning to the lost paradise, the womb-experience, yet he believes that the mother’s womb is expanding after birth. He stated that “In some way we never leave the mother’s belly. We just give it another dimension. The uterine wall stretches further and further. First to the walls of the cradle. Then to those of the room. Then to the world of the family. Then to the fatherland. To the earth, to the cosmos, and so on.” (*4)

Her heart is still throbbing you to life.

Her ebb and flow has been breathing through you unceasingly.

She has been there all along, from the very beginning.

She never stopped carrying you. She breathes through you now.

MA. Mama. Amma. Devi. Goddess.

All life is the Mother. All life is the Goddess.

Applying sound as a means to heal and reunite

The process of healing the connection with your possibly traumatic prenatal past and with your mother may go hand in hand with a process of ‘reuniting’ with the greater divine Mother. The application of sound therapy, nada yoga and/or mantra yoga comes in very useful in here.

Sound therapy:

Although there are many ways, when it comes down to healing wounds from our prenatal experience, the Tomatis therapy is still very alive today and is being applied in 75 different countries. The biggest and most experienced Tomatis center globally, is located in Sint-Truiden, Belgium: Atlantis VZW.

Nada & Mantra Yoga:

There are plenty of sonic ways to connect with the divine Mother. One such essential practice is mantra japa -the internal or external mantra recitation – for Goddess Durga. Durga is both a devoted mother and a fierce warrior Goddess. Calling Her is calling the divine Mother.

Her main mantra: OM DOOM DURGAYE NAMAHA

Note: If you’ve never been initiated in person into mantra yoga, this practice is usually not recommended.

Conclusion

Healing prenatal trauma, as well as ‘spiritually remembering or maturing’ is a gradual process. This process involves getting completely free from the attachment to one’s mother, which once was needed as a child. When this liberation fully takes place, it paves the way for the recognition that all life is a Mother. All life is sacred and as divine as a Goddess. This process can be supported through the application of sound, whether it’s passive (listening) or active (singing or chanting).

Sources

1) The conscious ear - Alfred A. Tomatis

2) The conscious ear - Alfred A. Tomatis

3) Sonic theology – Guy Beck

4) The conscious ear - Alfred A. Tomatis

Photos by Isaac Quesada, Shima Abedinzade through Pixabay

This article is based on the Sounds of Awakening podcast episode ‘Song of the Mother’, that includes evoking sounds and music.

Listen it here: