Energy Work for Tinnitus
Tinnitus is a chronic condition that affect millions of people. As someone who has had tinnitus for many years, I want to share my experience living with it and working to heal it.
What is Tinnitus?
Tinnitus is often thought of as ringing in the ears, but it can also be buzzing, clicking, or roaring. There are a number of official tests to diagnose tinnitus, but most people know when they have it. It can be related to hearing loss but doesn’t have to be. It can also be related to high blood pressure, TMJ, issues in your ear canal, and other conditions. It isn’t life-threatening, but it can range from annoying to debilitating.
Millions of people suffer from various levels of tinnitus, including me. I’ve noticed it on and off for a decade, but about four years ago it started getting noticeably worse, especially in my right ear. It generally doesn’t disrupt my life too much since ambient noise, music, or talking easily keeps me from noticing it. In this, I am very lucky. Some people have it so bad that it makes it hard for them to concentrate or hear correctly. I notice it most when I’m trying to sleep or relax in a quiet environment. It can be extremely distracting when I’m trying to enjoy the silence, which is why I do most of my meditating with background nature sounds and fall asleep with quiet music playing. I’m fortunate in that some simple behavioral changes easily manages my problem. I know there are people who have severe tinnitus, and it can be a constant challenge to deal with.
Is there a cure for Tinnitus?
It is generally accepted that there is no cure, however there are some therapies that can make living with tinnitus easier. The American Tinnitus Association recommends that if you suffer from tinnitus, you never accept a practitioner’s advice to “live with it.” Therapies and management strategies can minimize the effects and stress of the constant noise. There are also a number of clinical trials underway to find better solutions. One that is in the process of recruiting participants is testing to see if remote Reiki can improve tinnitus symptoms. The trial is set to begin June 2023, so it will be a few years before we hear the results. You can check out the details of this registered clinical trial on clinicaltrials.gov.
Of course, if you’ve read my blog, you will know that I generally don’t accept “there’s no cure” as the end story. In my view, the real answer is actually, “there is no cure YET.” We’ve discussed how, despite their best efforts to make us believe it, modern medical science definitely does not know everything about our bodies. This means they also don’t know how to cure all our ailments (you can read more about my views here). Fortunately, this doesn’t mean a cure will never be found. Also, modern medicine generally doesn’t acknowledge the fact that your body is meant to heal. When it has the support it needs, the body is able to heal all kinds of “incurable” problems.
Can energy work help with Tinnitus?
Yes, I think energy work can help your body heal from tinnitus. In fact, I know it can because I’ve seen significant improvement in my own tinnitus over the past six months. It’s not 100% gone, but I’m having longer periods of time when my ears don’t ring at all. When I do hear ringing, it’s much quieter than it used to be. I’m anticipating that eventually it will totally go away.
I’ve been working on healing for over a decade now, so you might wonder why, in the midst of this, my tinnitus actually got worse before it got better. Part of the reason is that I was dealing with bigger issues. I had several serious food sensitivities that severely affected my life (you can read more about that story here). That was the first thing I wanted to deal with. As those issues slowly faded, others came to my attention that needed work. It wasn’t until the past 18 months or so that I decided that my tinnitus was bad enough to start working with it directly.
When I began trying to understand this issue, I used my preferred modalities to try and clear the issues energetically. Reiki, Integrated Energy Therapy® (IET®), and Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) are the three I use most often. I worked with them for months with some improvement, but not it never lasted long so I started adding in essential oils and crystals to work with the tinnitus. Again, I saw some improvement but never for long. What finally helped me make significant and lasting progress is a class I took the summer of 2022.
Autonomic Response Testing
The class I took was Level 1 of Autonomic Response Testing (ART) with Dr. Kinghardt. When I first started working with a naturopath years ago, they practiced ART and it was very helpful for me to start tackling my food sensitivities and other issues. I’ve always been interested in learning more, but classes are pretty pricey. I finally decided it was time to take the plunge and jumped in to see what I thought of Level 1. I’m so glad I did because it has been a valuable addition to my energy practice.
ART started as a way to diagnose health problems by testing how the Autonomic Nervous System responds to various triggers (both negative and positive). It has been (and continues to be) developed by Dr. Kinghardt as a diagnostic tool that came out of both medical science and alternative practices such as acupuncture. I find it fascinating because it straddles the physical and the energetic world, diagnosing problems in both and using supports in both to help the body heal. As my practice had become nearly all energetic work (because I believe every health problem has an energetic root), learning ART helped me reconnect with the physical aspects of health as well. I still believe that energy is the root of most problems, but I now better understand how identifying physical problems can help support the body’s full healing.
One of the key things I learned from this class is that our bodies are riddled with viruses and retroviruses. We often think of viruses as something that we get and then get over rather quickly. However, most of us have chronic low-grade viral infections all the time. Some even theorize that retroviruses can be hereditary, passed to babies before they are born. Many of these hidden infections settle long-term into areas of our body where they may not be noticed but where they can create debilitating problems.
This brings us back to tinnitus. Although it wasn’t taught directly in my class, I started playing around with the idea of viruses and retroviruses being the root cause of the ringing in my ears. Through testing, I quickly started finding both viruses and retroviruses (a shocking number, actually) affecting my inner ears. Using healing protocols and energy work, I was able to slowly clear the problems. It has taken a few months, but I’ve finally started seeing significant improvements.
How can ART find infections that standard medical science cannot? It’s because modern medicine is actually pretty bad at testing for many things that can be making us sick. They just don’t have to capability to develop tests for all the possible viruses and pathogens in the world. Even if they could develop a test, the likely wouldn’t be able to create ones with the sensitivity needed to detect many of these smaller infections we carry around. What medicine cannot test, it cannot diagnose, and what it cannot diagnose, it cannot treat. Therefore, viral and retroviral infections too subtle to be picked up by tests become issues with “no known cure.” Ditto with radiation, environmental toxins, parasites, bacteria, and many other things that can get stuck in our bodies causing long-term health problems. Fortunately, systems such as ART are sensitive enough to detect these infections and toxins. It can also find the appropriate physical and energetic supports needed to help your body heal.
Healing Tinnitus can be challenging
Hearing is the result of a very delicate system of bones, muscles, drainage tubes, canals, membranes, nerves, brain processing, and more. Every single piece of this system can be affected by viruses, retroviruses, environmental toxins, and everything else mentioned above. I had been working to heal my tinnitus primarily on the energetic level but being able to identify and neutralize all these other disruptions at the physical level allowed me to heal on all levels. Despite that, it has still been a slow process to heal my tinnitus over the course of the past six months. I've need to use all my modalities at different times to heal the layers of issues.
I’ve said it before on this blog and I think it bears repeating now that healing is complicated. There is rarely one magic bullet that will solve any problem right away. That’s because once an area of your body has an energy problem or physical injury, it creates an energy block that limits the body’s ability to heal that area. Over time, more and more issues build up around the original issues that creates a mess of intertwined mini-problems that can for one big problem (such as tinnitus). For me, it was viruses, retroviruses, energy problems, environmental toxins, and more that had congregated in my ears (particularly the right one) and kept me from healing. Over time as more issues congregated there, the tinnitus got worse. Once I started working on clearing all those problems, I needed to be able to work with every piece, physical and energetic, in order to unpeel and release the overlapping mini-problems keeping my body from healing. It has been a slow process and I still notice the issue occasionally, but I am grateful that my tinnitus is MUCH better than it used to be. If you are working to heal your own issues with Tinnitus, you need to know that you will probably not find one single modality or therapy will fix it all. Be willing to try new things and experience different ways of healing. Most importantly, allow your body time to rest and heal.
Are you interested in learning more?
Contact me on my website and we can talk! I’ll answer any questions you have and see if there is anything we can do to help your body heal.
