Embodying Harmony with Marybeth Hallinan
““I am embodying what I was meant to do. I am in my body and yet not in my body. I am timeless, limitless, egoless and boundary-less. I have a sense that this moment, this sound, this space, is where I belong.” ”
Marybeth Hallinan’s first memory of music is a distinct and an early one. She was only four or five years old, riding along sandwiched in the middle of the back seat in her family’s station wagon. The radio was on, and Marybeth was singing along as she always did.
“Did you hear that?” Her mother exclaimed to her father, “She is singing harmony!”
Surprised by her mother’s reaction, and afraid that “singing harmony” was a bad thing, Marybeth stopped. Soon after, she began to realize that not everyone could hear what she heard.
Piano lessons began at age seven and elementary school brought Marybeth’s introduction to the stage, where she held a solo part in all of her elementary staged musicals. Her middle school chorus, music and piano teacher acquainted her with Chopin and her high school chorus director and piano teacher introduced her to the music of the sixties and seventies. As a teenager, Marybeth learned to play the flute and began to write her own songs and perform them in school concerts.
“The choir, and the stage, was a place where I belonged, intrinsically, without even naming it or questioning it. I was all of myself there,” Marybeth reflects. “When I give over to singing and the song, fully, I am literally transported out of my body, and to a place where all is as it should be.”
Marybeth went on to study music theory and performance at various colleges in Massachusetts and Colorado, then finished her self-designed Bachelor of Arts degree in Education, with a focus on multicultural choral music, from Goddard College in Plainfield, VT.
Her music career has since spanned three decades, as a singer/songwriter, recording artist, performer and teacher for countless adults and children who have enlisted her guidance to sing, read music and play the piano. A sought after accompanist for choirs, churches, community events, high school and professional theater musical direction, Marybeth has also been an organist and church choir director in New Hampshire for 20 years, currently for the Peterborough Unitarian Universalist Church.
A Massachusetts native, she moved to Peterborough from Mason, New Hampshire with her three young children in tow, drawn to the schools, clientele and community. Now, Marybeth is the heartbeat of the musical community in Our Town.
However, that seat was earned by the experiences of her lifelong passion for music and community-building.
In 2003, Marybeth attended an intensive weekend class about tuning forks in New York state with John Beaulieu, based on his book “Human Tuning.” The concept of combining her intuition with sound to help heal others piqued her curiosity and she continued to explore and study, though she did not talk about it at all at home.
“It felt too radical for me to embody at the time,” Marybeth said. “I was afraid to step into that place.”
Little did she know, she was just ahead of her time.
In 2008, Marybeth founded Two Rivers Community Choir (TRCC) to provide a non-classical and non-secular singing experience that would allow anyone to reclaim their voice and own it with courage, strength and confidence.
But she also wanted TRCC “to live into the ‘community’ aspect of the phrase ‘community choir,’ by deliberately demonstrating that the whole is so much more than the sum of its parts. TRCC accomplishes this in the music that the group embodies and their fundraising concerts for local organizations.
Three years later, TraverSing was born, a Hospice and Healing Choir that provides music and programming to families, schools, churches, families and communities experiencing grief, loss, trauma or end of life journeys.
In 2015, Marybeth founded Voicings Adventure Singing Camp, which combines 3-5 days of hiking (or “sauntering,” as she says, more specifically) in the woods, stopping to chant, notice, write, journal, sing and play. The motivation to start this camp resulted from a very personal experience that revealed to Marybeth just how powerful the combination of nature, music and a gentle sense of accomplishment can be for one’s psyche.
“There is a remarkable transformation that occurs when you combine hiking or sauntering, with singing and chanting,” Marybeth noted. “The harmony in nature, the harmony of our combined voices, and the safe, deliberate container that I shepherd quite literally transforms our nervous system. It’s like sound healing in the forest. When you add the component of being in community, the effects are incredible and exponential!”
A year after she founded Voicings, Marybeth found herself working with a healing practitioner in California who used tuning forks. The experience resonated with her in a way that other body work had not. Marybeth confessed to the healing practitioner that she had her own set of forks that she was not yet utilizing. The woman encouraged Marybeth to return to them and cultivate a relationship with them.
So, Marybeth began to use the tuning forks in her voice lessons. She was shocked to see that students’ issues could shift in as little as one lesson. Prior to introducing her tuning forks to the lesson studio, students could work on the same issue for months, or longer, due to long-held energetic patterns which present themselves as emotional blocks. With positive feedback from her students, Marybeth began to study more actively online and in person from mentors in California and western Massachusetts. She also earned a certificate from the Sound Healing Academy in the United Kingdom.
What began with just tuning forks evolved into a harmonious incorporation of the gong, Tibetan and crystal singing bowls, chanting, and her own voice in uniquely individualized sessions. This was the beginning of Fundamentally Harmonic, using the healing qualities of sound and vibration to return the body to its natural state.
“We are, each of us, Fundamentally Harmonic and resonant beings at our fundamental core,” Marybeth said. “We resonate just standing still! Sound, in the right quality and measure, and especially sound healing, has a way of effortlessly returning us to that core, fundamentally harmonic state.”
To Marybeth, sound healing is the most non-invasive form of natural healing, with a profound ability to deeply relax and restore the parasympathetic nervous system. In addition to resetting the parasympathetic nervous system, this modality specifically releases blocks in energy throughout the body. Marybeth works with both the meridians and the chakras to encourage these pathways to find balance with one another.
“The most profound experience when working with clients is sensing each client's unique energy field. It used to scare me at first, quite honestly,” Marybeth remembers. “Now I am humbled and honored to work within that energy field.”
As the vibrations of the tuning forks or gong, singing bowls or voice move around and into the body, the body naturally entrains to those same vibrations. Energy that was once blocked, releases. This is especially helpful for anxiety, insomnia, depression, nervousness, ADD and ADHD, and trauma.
“We each have a particularly unique vibration, which includes the energy and presence of those energies that surround us, like loved ones who have passed, children, spouses, trauma, etcetera,” she explained. “I often sense those energies, as well. It’s a beautiful thing to witness and hold space for, and then ‘tune’ the entire energy field, inside and out, so that all is harmonized and integrated as one limitless being.”
With regular treatment, sound healing can help reduce chronic pain and inflammation without medication, and generally, the modality helps return the body to a state where it can heal itself as it is born to do. Marybeth has seen clients come in with a headache or neck pain, and leave without it; all without manual manipulation, just the beauty and harmonic healing of sound and vibration on and around the body.
If only little Marybeth singing harmony in the backseat of her family’s station wagon could see herself now.
“I am embodying what I was meant to do,” she says. “I am in my body and yet not in my body. I am timeless, limitless, egoless and boundary-less. I have a sense that this moment, this sound, this space, is where I belong.”
And so it is.