Harmonize, balance, and integrate with sound. Sound meditation is a practice of active, attentive listening, not just hearing, which develops awareness and insight.
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 or a sacred ceremony. Those names describe a mood. They do not describe what is happening, which takes you as much as it takes the guide. 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 sit or lie down, you shut your eyes, and you stay awake.
The name people most often give this work is unclear, and the reasons are written out in full.
“Nothing here is done to you. You sit or lie down, you stay awake, and you do the listening. The instruments are only very good at holding your attention while you do it.”
Hamid Jabbar
This is most of what turns up, though not all of it turns up at once. A sound meditation leans on gongs and bowls. A training covers the range of it, hands on, so you learn to work with each one yourself rather than watch someone else do it.
Didgeridoo is the exception. It takes longer to get a sound out of than a weekend allows, so it gets introduced in the advanced training rather than taught from scratch.
Crystal bowls draw the most questions, and there is a lot about them that a photograph will not tell you.
Symphonic gongs or tam tams, tuned gongs and Thai gongs. Himalayan bowls and crystal bowls.
Native American style flute, bansuri and overtone flute. Harmonium and shruti box for the drone.
Singing and overtone singing. Chimes and bells in a good many varieties. And monochord, didgeridoo and drums.
The trainings are led by Hamid Jabbar and cover the same material in different amounts, with more direct teaching at each step. Begin online, deepen in person, then go on to Level II or one to one mentorship.
Begin
Online, at your own speed
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.
It includes fourteen modules, twenty six videos and the training manual to keep, for $298, paid once.
Deepen
In person
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.
Continue
In a small group, or one to one
Forty hours for practitioners already working with sound who want to find their own voice in it. This is where didgeridoo and the rarer instruments get introduced.
Ongoing and one to one, for practitioners already working with sound and for people who want to be. Each mentorship is built around where you actually are. No fixed curriculum, no cohort, no set length.
Terms are arranged individually, and confirmed in writing before payment.
Yoga Alliance continuing education hours come with the online course and the in person programs, for anyone who needs the documentation for a studio or venue.
Most sound meditations are 60 to 90 minutes. Through the fall there is a monthly evening around the gong at Abundant Space in Scottsdale, 6:00 to 7:30pm, $44 suggested. Nobody is turned away for lack of funds.
Bring live sound to your conference, retreat or company event, at resorts, hotels and venues across Scottsdale and Phoenix, from a small team to a whole conference.
Graduates of the trainings and mentees who asked to be listed, each with what they offer and how to reach them. A listing is a personal recommendation from Hamid: these are people he would send his own friends to.
A sound practitioner holds space with sound, for a room of people or for one person at a time.
Quartz bowls are sold with a lot of story attached to them. Underneath it: where they come from, what the marketing words mean, and how to tell one bowl from another with your ears.
Why the name people most often give this work is unclear, and four other things to notice in a practitioner or a training before you book.
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 you hear in the room 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 center 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 center of the work.
There are many kinds of gong.
A Thai gong has a raised boss in the middle. It rings almost like a bell, with one clear pitch.
A symphonic gong, also called a tam tam, spreads much wider, and it is the kind most people in the West have heard.
A tuned gong is its own thing again.
Ten years ago the work would have been explained just this way, and the acoustics have not changed since. What a session does with them has. More of it 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 sessions. There is more music in between than there used to be.
The quickest way to find out whether this is for you is to be in a room while it happens. Events run around the Phoenix area most months.
To start by listening instead, the recordings are on the streaming services.