SOUND MEDITATION
Sound you take part in
Gongs, bowls, flutes, harmonium and voice, played in a room you are lying down in. What follows is what those instruments do, why the tuning matters, and where to learn to play them.
Gongs, bowls, flutes, harmonium and voice, played in a room you are lying down in. What follows is what those instruments do, why the tuning matters, and where to learn to play them.
It is a branch of nada yoga, which is sound yoga. Sound is directed toward the body to move energy and settle the mind. Every guide uses different instruments and different techniques, and most of them lean on audible harmonic overtones, which are the part doing the work.
The same practice gets sold as a sound bath, a sound healing, a sacred ceremony. Those names describe a mood. They do not describe what is happening, which takes you as much as it takes me. Nobody is bathing you in anything. You are meditating, and sound is the thing you meditate on.
That is also why the room is set up the way it is. You lie down, you shut your eyes, and you stay awake.
Most tonal instruments in the West are tuned to the equal tempered scale. A C major scale on a piano is equal tempered. It is a compromise. Each note is nudged off its natural harmonic ratio so that every key and mode works on the same instrument.
Before that compromise a tuning had to choose. Some intervals came out beautifully and others came out badly, and the bad ones were called wolf notes, because they howled. Eastern traditions largely kept those older tunings, and so did the West until about a hundred years ago.
Sound meditation wants natural harmonic intervals rather than equal tempered ones. Plenty of what I play is equal tempered anyway, including Native American style flute, harmonium and crystal bowls. There are ways of playing them that bring the natural overtones out, and a good facilitator ends up doing it whether or not they know the theory, because it sounds more meditative.
The voice is the interesting case. People do not naturally sing in equal temperament. Hold a sustained note over a shruti box or a harmonium or a bowl and the harmonics build on their own.
Single note instruments get their power from the fundamental. Gongs and Himalayan bowls work the other way around. Struck dead centre with a small mallet a gong has a fundamental too, but as the vibration travels across that much metal, overtone after overtone comes up out of it.
What you get is usually described as a wall of sound. There is a root tone in it and you can find it if you listen for it, and above that there is more going on than you can count. It settles most people faster than they expect it to, which is why the gong sits at the centre of what I do.
There are many kinds. A Thai gong has a raised boss in the middle and rings almost like a bell, with one clear pitch. Symphonic gongs, also called tam tams, spread much wider and are the ones most people in the West have heard. Tuned gongs are their own thing again.
Everything above is how I would have explained this work ten years ago, and the acoustics have not changed since. What I do with them has. More of a session now is played rather than sounded. Harmonium underneath, voice on top of it, flute lines, guitar.
Some of that is the recording work feeding back into the room, and some of it is just what happens after enough years. A gong still opens and closes most of what I lead. There is more music in between than there used to be.
This is most of what turns up, though not all of it turns up at once. A gathering leans on gongs and bowls. A training covers the range of it, hands on, because the point is that you play them rather than watch me play them.
Bansuri and didgeridoo are the exceptions. Both take longer to get a sound out of than a weekend allows, so they get introduced in the advanced training rather than taught from scratch.
Crystal bowls are the ones I get asked about most, and there is a lot about them that a photograph will not tell you. Read what a crystal bowl is
The same material, in different amounts, with different amounts of me in it. Start wherever fits.
Over 20 hours of self paced video. Start today, work at your own speed, and arrive at an in person training already fluent in the theory.
Thirty two hours in person, across two weekends. History, theory and practice, with real time on gongs, crystal bowls, Himalayan bowls, shruti box, flutes, chimes and overtone singing. Small group, at my place in New River.
Forty hours for practitioners already working with sound who want to find their own voice in it. Capped at eight people, so nobody watches from the back of the room. This is where bansuri, didgeridoo and the rarer instruments get introduced.
Not a program. I take practitioners already working with sound, and people who want to be, and we build it around where you actually are. No fixed curriculum, no cohort, no set length.
Graduates and mentees who have chosen to list themselves are in the practitioner directory. Yoga Alliance continuing education hours come with the in person programs, for anyone who needs the documentation for a studio or venue.
The quickest way to find out whether this is for you is to lie down in a room while it happens. Gatherings run around the Phoenix area most months.
If you would rather start by listening, the recordings are on the streaming services.