Becoming a Certified Sound Healer in Kathmandu
The semi-disappointing real history of singing bowls, the true vibrations at the core of all being, and thoughts about the way we are all just songs playing out on a cosmic speaker
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After a few days in Kathmandu, I returned to the Himalayan Yoga Academy, where I’d done my first yoga course and where now I was set to become a sound healer. I gratefully slipped back into the center’s routine, letting the rhythm of early mornings and regular vegetarian meals ease me out of my funk.
I’d wanted to become a sound healer for many years, ever since I’d first discovered singing bowls on my first ever solo trip. At the age of eighteen, I’d taken a covert summer road trip to Woodstock, New York. The whole trip had a mystic quality to it, and I still think it changed my entire life and set me upon this entire solo traveling path.
Anyways, on the final day, I happened to drive by a Tibetan-style house in the middle of the dense and ancient forests of the state where I grew up.
The house turned out to be a singing bowl store, and inside was a collection of hundreds of gigantic gold singing bowls. The storeowner showed me how to play them, and for a little while, time stopped.
I’ve always believed in music’s healing powers, and have been using it to heal myself since I was a very young child, so sound healing has always felt like a natural step for me. After many years of adding singing bowl sets to various carts online and removing them, now I was at last going to learn to play them for real.
The True History of Singing Bowls
On the first day, our teacher Raj immediately launched into a history of singing bowls and sound healing. Singing bowls as we know them are not actually all that ancient, he told us. In fact, the golden bowls we were using generally used to be used for eating in Nepal until about the 1960s, when Western tourists came over and began developing the idea of using the bowls for sound healing.
So all of this was really the product of Western hippies, I thought, a bit disappointed.
Upon further research, I can say that there is definitely not a clear consensus on where the bowls actually come from, and plenty of historians and spiritual websites will tell you the bowls actually do date back thousands of years to ancient Tibetan lamas. However, these kinds of beliefs can actually do damage.
“Western bourgeois fantasies about Tibet and the harmful racial stereotypes they peddle simply have no need for the real Tibet and the suffering my country endures,” writes Tenzin Dheden in The Toronto Star. The idea that singing bowls originated from ancient mystical lamas links Tibet to some far-off, mystical, “dying, one-dimensional civilization” which “prevents Tibet’s political concerns from being taken seriously,” she adds. (See my past post on Tibet for more on that).
So singing bowls aren’t exactly ancient. But sound healing is, even if singing bowls aren’t.
Sound Healing’s Ancient Roots
Sound is absolutely fundamental to Vedic philosophies, and, as Raj told us, Nada yoga (or sound yoga) is 15000 years old. According to this yogic tradition, the sound “om/aum” is what emanated when two opposite forces collided to create the world, and it still rings through all of existence today.
Sound healing also appears in many other ancient civilizations and Indigenous cultures. Religious rites have always incorporated singing and music and always will. Because music and sound can penetrate beyond the conscious mind, deep to the true vibrations at the heart of what we are.
Reading my notes from the course today, I see that I wrote “we are all just songs playing out on a cosmic speaker” during one lecture, and I think that about sums it up.
Modern science has also lent a fair amount of support sound healing as a concept, and I also became interested in sound healing because of some modern research that has found that sound can do everything from shrinking tumors to healing depression.
It makes sense to me: if we’re all made of vibrations and frequencies — which science (and the Buddha) says we are — then certainly we can also get out of tune, and tuning ourselves back to the proper vibrations should be able to heal us. Science is also increasingly saying it can.
The Art and Artifice of Sound Healing
Then we began actually practicing sound healing. I wasn’t expecting it to be so taxing on my knees and back — leaning over someone carrying a heavy bowl is a bit more physically demanding than I’d thought, which is yet another reason that one of these days I absolutely have to shock everyone by getting incredibly ripped.
We alternated giving and receiving sound healings, and during my time lying on the mat, I felt myself floating away inside the walls of sound during the sessions. During the times when I was doing the healings, though, I spent most of the time struggling to remember the extremely complex patterns and sequences and flows that our teacher was showing us.
Himalayan Yoga Academy has its own unique sound healing procedures, which were extremely specific and geometrically complex. A few days in, I decided I’d take a six-day course there instead of a ten-day; it was much cheaper, and everyone else was doing six days, and anyways, I wanted to take another course at some point to compare the techniques I was being taught with other ones.
We were being taught intricate methods and sequences of movement, but we weren’t being taught exactly why these movements were being made — and I started to get the feeling it was all just a bit arbitrary and random. Apparently, the movements had been intuitively generated by the academy’s late sound healing guru, who died a few months prior, and I would have loved to ask him about how he came up with them.
But I didn’t have to raise these concerns, as the other people in our course pretty much constantly asked questions. We moved at an extremely slow pace through the healings and ended up having to eliminate yoga and meditation sessions for more coursework. Still, I was there to learn, and by the final lessons I felt I’d learned a lot, even if I had more questions than answers in some cases.
7 Chakras, 7 Notes
During our final days, we ended up diving into chakras. Here’s another reason I’ve been drawn to sound healing: the musical notes in an octave (CDEFGAB) correspond directly to the seven chakras in a way that seems almost too perfect to be coincidental. I remember discovering this by myself during my brief stint in a sound healing band in California and being totally mind-blown.
We went through each chakra in detail, exploring how the root — located deep at the base of our spine — has to do with grounding and stability, and work and livelihood, and energy activation; a masculine chakra, it is the place where the coiled serpent of potential energy that lives within all of us lies dormant until we activate it.
Then there’s the sacral chakra, the center of sexual energy and emotion and family; self-care and sense attachments and creativity all correspond to this chakra. Above that, deep in the chest, there’s the solar plexus, where power comes from — and power, our teacher told us, must ideally become willpower, leading to self-esteem and vitality and balance.
Above that is the heart, the locus of devotion and surrender and compassion, and to activate the heart we must surrender our ego. Above that is the throat chakra, where knowledge and information and ideas live; through study and analysis we can activate this chakra. But staying in our comfort zones, or living in fear and negativity or the past, can close this chakra down.
Above that is the third eye, which goes hand in hand with the throat and corresponds to consciousness and awakening and true self-knowledge.
Finally there’s the crown, but there are actually two crowns, Raj explained: the seventh crown, which is the physical crown and involves connection to divinity, and the eighth crown, the real crown, or the 10th gate, which is the portal to enlightenment and divinity and departure from the wheel of death and rebirth.
He also explained that in order to activate all our chakras, really we need to start from the crown and third eye. We need to begin with knowledge, followed by compassion and emotion. At last, when we have ideally achieved some form of grounding and stability in our lower chakras, we can begin to activate the kundalini energy at the base of the spine, which will then rise up through the chakras in a way that is often intense or terrifying if one is not prepared. This awakening can blast through all our defenses, ultimately connecting us to the divine through our crown.
One of the final healings we learned was a chakra healing sequence, which involved playing sounds that correspond to each chakra and moving the bowls in sweeping motions up and down the body. Then we practiced a group healing, and finally received our certifications.
Outside of lessons, I was enjoying getting to know some of the other women in the course. One of whom had been a contestant on a popular reality TV show, and she regaled me with stories of the insanity of that experience. I felt so grateful to be done writing about reality TV forevermore, and after exchanging stories about our time in the bizarre media and entertainment landscape, we both eventually spoke a lot about how we both want to do so many different things and can’t quite decide on one.
All we knew was that we someday both dreamed of running healing retreats, so we promised to check in in a few years to see if the time might be right to start something like that. I do dream of leading creativity and eco-art retreats; I already love running circles and art accountability groups, and I know it’s only a matter of time before I do more extended, in-person events that incorporate landscapes and travel.
And so many people I know dream of communal-style living in rural places; now we just have to make it happen, which is, as always, the hard part.
Anyways, we enjoyed dreaming about all the different paths we could take and exchanging stories from our time on the road as we ate whole coconuts on the street and sipped chai tea and struggled through yoga flows that, I found, had become significantly easier for me than they were when I first arrived in Nepal.
Afterwards, we met for often during the four days I had left in Kathmandu, and spent a day at the nearby Bhaktapur Durbar Square, shopping and talking about God as we wandered through the temples and museums, feeling like we’d passed through different universes as we moved through the labyrinthine streets. (My favorite kinds of people are the ones who like to talk about parallel dimensions just as much as I do).
I also did some yoga, got a massage, and spent some time purposefully relaxing before my upcoming 10-day vipassana meditation retreat, which I hoped would be a great chance to reset, and reflect on my future, and get a little better at meditation. I hoped all the sound healing, yoga, meditation, and time in nature I’d just had would prepare me for ten days of silence and contemplation.
But I was not prepared. Not in any way, shape, or form. Nothing could have ever prepared me for what I was about to experience.