How I ended up here

The long way round

Music

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

Law came next. I took a Juris Doctor at UCLA and practiced law in California and Arizona for nine years before deciding it was not my life’s work. Those years overlapped with my yoga studies and teaching.

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.

Yoga

Yoga ran alongside the law, and it is where I learned to teach. I co-directed the 200 hour teacher training 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. The gong did not come up in either degree.

On paper

Music	Bachelor of Music, New York University
Law	Juris Doctor, UCLA School of Law
Law practice	Nine years, in California and Arizona
Yoga Alliance	E-RYT 500
Teacher training	Co-directed the 200 hour yoga teacher training at Urban Yoga, Phoenix

What I learned in Chiang Mai

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. I have written that whole history down instead, along with what learning this in Thailand actually involves and why it is still the answer I give.

Read the Thai history

Why it is the gong

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.

You are the one meditating. The sound is what you do it with, which makes it participation rather than reception.

“I am not trying to fix anyone. What I am after is a room quiet enough that you can hear something you usually talk over. Everything else is instruments.”

Hamid

I trained under Don Conreaux, and have kept studying since. Himalayan and crystal bowls, flutes, shruti box, harmonium, voice.

Most of what I know came from teachers who were generous with me. I teach the same way. Trainings are small, and you spend the hours playing rather than watching me play.

I record too. Some of it comes out of sessions and some of it was built in the room on purpose.

Hear the music

The years in Peru

The other thread runs through the Amazon and the Andes, and both began in 2018. I apprenticed with a Shipibo lineage, which is one of the most hands off ways of working with ayahuasca. At the same time I started working and learning from a teacher in the Andes, in the Red Road tradition with huachuma, and I have continued with that teacher since.

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.

Read about plant medicine