I went to NYU on a music scholarship, then to law school at UCLA, and practiced in Los Angeles for a while before admitting that was not it. Now I lead sound meditation gatherings around Phoenix and train sound practitioners at my place in New River. The gong did not come up in either degree.
You are the one meditating. The sound is what you do it with.
Nothing is done to you here, and nothing is a cure. You lie down and you practice.
Trainings are small, and you spend the hours playing rather than watching me play.
Most of what I know came from teachers who were generous with me. I teach the same way.
Music came first. I went to NYU on a scholarship and it is still how I think, in phrases and intervals rather than in bullet points.
Law came next. I took a Juris Doctor at UCLA and practiced in Los Angeles. The degree earns its keep more often than people expect. It shapes how I read a study, and how I think about what a practitioner can honestly claim.
Then yoga, which is where I learned to teach. I co-created and co-directed the 200 and 300 hour teacher trainings at Urban Yoga in downtown Phoenix, and I am an E-RYT 500 with Yoga Alliance. Thai bodywork after that, studied in Thailand. Since 2012, sound.
A gong is not a subtle instrument, which is what I like about it. Played well it throws off a wall of overtones. The mind gives up trying to track them and goes quiet. That is most of what happens in the room.
I trained under Don Conreaux, and have kept studying since. Himalayan and crystal bowls, flutes, shruti box, harmonium, voice. I record too. Some of it comes out of sessions and some of it was built in the room on purpose.
Sound is half of what I do. The other half is minerals and health: hair tissue analysis, the Root Cause Protocol, and the retreats I lead to the Sacred Valley of Peru. It started with my own health not adding up and nobody being able to tell me why.
That half has its own home. Everything about it lives at mineralshaman.com, including the retreat dates.
Before sound there was bodywork. I trained in Northern style Thai massage in Thailand across several years, mostly at the home of one teacher, and kept going back for Tok Sen, which is worked with a wooden mallet rather than with hands.
That teacher was Ajahn Pichest Boonthumme of Hang Dong, who rebuilt the practice so that it benefits the person giving it as much as the person receiving it. He died in 2023.
I do not offer sessions now. That whole history is written down here instead, along with what learning this in Thailand actually involves and why it is still the answer I give.
The other thread runs through the Amazon and the Andes. I apprenticed in the Shipibo tradition, which is one of the most hands off ways of working with ayahuasca, and I have sat with huachuma in the mountains above Cusco. I still go back.
It meets the sound work more often than people expect. Sound is used inside ceremony, and one of the pieces I wrote is about yoga and ayahuasca, where two traditions turn out to be describing the same thing in different words.
None of it is offered here, and nothing on this site is instruction. What I have written is an account of what these traditions do and what I have seen, which is where it stays.
Reading about sound meditation is a poor substitute for lying down in a room with a gong in it. Gatherings run around the Phoenix area most months, and most people arrive knowing nothing about it.
If you would rather play than listen, the trainings start with an online course and go from there. If you came here for the mineral and health work, that lives at mineralshaman.com.
