Portsmouth man blows up alternative medicine

Fourteen years ago Joseph Carringer sat straight up in bed in the middle of the night with his eyes wide open. His then-girlfriend curiously looked up at him from underneath the covers.

"I'm going to play the didgeridoo," said Carringer, to no one in particular.

He had no idea what he had been dreaming about or what a didgeridoo was, yet something had compelled him to make the statement. The rest is history.

Growing up in a military family, Carringer moved from place to place before spending most of his childhood in Nashua, N.H.  In his adult life, he has kept this nomadic pattern and explored much of the eastern side of the United States. His experiences vary from working with hemp textiles in D.C. and in the garment district of New York City, to helping run bars, doing landscaping, and playing music with DJs in Jersey City and Portland, Maine, to name a few.  But nothing could prepare him for the change in direction that would take place after that profound dream and ultimately lead him to a career in Didgeridoo Sound Therapy.

During an outing in Portsmouth about six months after his dream, Carringer found himself in Macroscopic, a boutique in the downtown area. In front of him lay a basket of didgeridoos and he intuitively picked one up, and blew into the hollowed out piece of wood.

"The woman who was working looked from around the corner and said, ‘Do you play the didge?' and I said, ‘no' and she looked straight at me and said, ‘yes, you do,'" said Carringer.

The didgeridoo is an ancient Aboriginal Australian instrument and is one of the oldest wind instruments in the world. By vibrating the lips, the instrument creates a drone-like sound and can be played continuously by a technique called circular breathing. This is done by breathing in the nose at the same time as breathing out the mouth. The technique usually takes people many months of practice, but for Carringer it only took a week and a half. At the time, he was bar manager of a blues club in Merrimack called Stormy Mondays, and one night he was pulled up on stage with his didge to play with the band.

"It was great, I learned to play rhythmically just from hanging with the players," said Carringer.

When Carringer first started playing it was all about the music, but he soon realized there was an inner peace that the didgeridoo brought to him.

"I lived near a river, and I would go sit with my dog and meditate, not realizing I was meditating, but just listening to the wind and birds and play and play and play," said Carringer.

After doing some research Carriner came across an article that a doctor had written about the side effects of someone playing a didgeridoo over someone else. The list seemed endless; relief of muscle spasms, relief of muscle tension, stress reduction, and relief of insomnia. From there he asked friends, parents, and community members to let him test out his stress reduction system on them.

"I found out it was helping [them] with muscle tension and stress reduction and I got to thinking, there must be something to this," said Carringer.  

After doing extensive research and speaking with numerous alternative medicine practitioners in the area, Carringer started doing combinational work with traditional

Chinese medicine, shamanism, acupuncture, Reiki, and massage therapy.

When Carringer opened Didgetherapy.com in Portsmouth in 2004, he learned just how important his work could be for people. His therapy can be broken into three integrative parts which, combined, benefit people in many different ways.

First, "It's a sound massage," said Carringer. "That's the easiest way to explain it to people."

The vibrations of the didgeridoo work in a similar way to an ultrasound. The sound waves can go down to zero hertz and "at that low of a frequency range you can snuff out a candle," said Carringer.

These vibrations warm the muscles from the inside creating relaxation throughout whatever is tender or strained.

Second, is energetic. It's very similar to Reiki or Chi-gong, but "like a power washer". Reiki and Chi-gong are similar in practice. Both philosophies involve the transferring of a universal life force or spiritual energy through the master into the person who is receiving the energy, which induces a healing effect. Unlike Reiki, which needs both the master and the receiver to work together to remove energy blockages, the sound waves of the didgeridoo literally forces blockages of energy out of the body.

Carringer integrates the Chakra theory into his therapy. Chakras initially were discovered in several eastern traditions and describe whorls of energy permeating out of the physical body. There are seven major Chakras in the body and each is attached to different organs and emotional states.

The seven different keys a didgeridoo can be played in match up to the energy waves of the seven Chakras. Carringer plays the entire energetic system of a person and tries to align or balance each persons specific Chakras with the different keys. Energetic stagnation and emotional stagnation that resides in the body are typically in specific organs. The didgeridoo helps remove these stagnations by realigning the Chakras.

"Avedic medicine for 3500 years has known the underlying tones of energetic system line up just like a scale," said Carringer. "When you hear something in tune why does it sound in tune? It's because there is a universal hum."

The third and final way the didgeridoo works is meditatively.

"The first two things are really nice but meaningless if a person cannot connect with their own delta brain waves and actually heal themselves," said Carringer. "[One] needs a mind-body connection".

He explained that as a culture we are constantly on the go. When we wake up in the morning the first thing we think about is all the things we have to do that day and when were done the first thing we do is turn on the T.V. This constant "plugged" feeling makes our brain constantly run on overtime and does not give our mind or consciousness a time to relax and connect itself with our physical bodies. This makes for a build up of tension, anxiety, and stress, with no time to just release it.