- It's amazing, the people you can meet on Craigslist.
That sounds like sarcasm-- like something I would never take seriously a year ago. One situation is all it takes-- to find the opposite of that bad rap-- and that is exactly what I found in Erik Cohen.
I was searching for a sound healing bowl-- a high-vibration singing bowl to enhance the yogic experience for my private clients. Through yoga, I have been familiarized with crystal bowls, each holding a different frequency and vibration that directly correlates to the frequencies of our energy channels in the physical body. So I started simple- I started on Craigslist.
Through that search I ran full-force in to a single man in Clairemont with a kitchen full of hand-hammered Tibetan sound bowls of every different size and frequency. We kept in touch after he informed me of his business, Resonant Verve, his own creation of private sound healing concerts where he plays either on-body or off in the privacy of his home for a group of 2-10 people with his own private collection of Tibetan bowls and gongs.
I followed his band page on Facebook and was notified of an upcoming event-- a private concert on a Sunday evening up in Ramona in a "sound chamber," similar to a cave where we could fit 12 people snuggly in this space on the side of a mountain and he would play his bowls for an hour.
Five of us from the current Yoga Teacher-Training signed up, assuming this would be a naturally formed cave on the side of a mountain up in the northeast county of San Diego.
What we found was that in tenfold.
Shawna, Monica and I rode together, all three of us in the front seat of a little ranger. We pulled up, late like I am to every important event, there a dark dirt road where the GPS insisted was the final location. At the end of the road, a small woman running towards us/
Terrified of her fast-paced yog, we all began to giggle, like "Who is this little man?! Or woman?! What is she running from?"
"Is this real life Blair Witch Project?"
Naturally, we roll the window down and ask this little creature "You know about the sound chamber?" Without saying a goddamned word, she approached us inches away from Monica's face on the passenger side of the truck and whispered "It's up here.. I was coming to look for you because we heard sirens and thought maybe you were part of that accident."
She pointed a tiny finger to a small dirt driveway with a frail white mailbox on the end when, in the midst of this instruction, she takes off running, a little fairy, directly in front of us in the glow of my headlights, leading us to the little grass lot we had read about. We parked, still half laughs/half tears of fear, crawling out of the truck with our long johns and sleeping bags and pillows. We followed her up the rest of the driveway and in to her home-- a beautiful wide log cabin with fur carpets and deities and altars strewn about. She spanked the bottom of a man bending over putting on his shoes in her kitchen, catching us all of guard as she continued to lead us through the house, like "Well what was he thinking, poking it out like that for?"
"I repeat, this is a SINGLE FILE PATH," she was so tiny, crawling now all jumpy, leading us up jagged rock steps to a grassy path directly on the side of a huge mountain covered in grass and oversized grey rocks, like Bedrock, "and all four acres are ours," she said, and it was like we weren't even in San Diego, California anymore. Was it Narnia?
She lead us up to the top of the small hill before a small circular silver dome with dim light glowing around the 2 X 2 door, demanding we leave our shoes by the small rug outside of it. We crawled in to find Beth and Eli and five others already laying in a circle, setting up their blankets and pillows to grow closer in to one big pile of warmth, all of our heads centered directly underneath the highest center-part of the chamber. It was silver and circular up to the top until the roof folded in to itself in one tall triangle. Erik walked around, providing lawn chair padding to lay on as we set up on the clay floor and prepared.
This is where it all began-- he, requesting we set an intention-- but really just insisting that we let go. "If anything arises, (which always does in chanting and sound from the vibrations), to just come back to the breath."
"If you ever feel lost, let your breath be the GPS, your body--- the way home."
It started with small trinkling-- light little bells tapping, moving in to deeper sounds and spinning of the bowls. He began to carry the bowls closer to us around the circle, playing them directly above us. I began to feel an intense pressure in my head, similar to a headache-- and what does this signify?
The sound removes blockages, shakes out tensions and pain-- it was beginning to break up the obsessive thinking that I keep stored in my brain, my 6th chakra. If there is anyone out there who has never known meditation but always craved reaching it, sound healing through singing bowls will directly carry you there without much of an option for escape.
The bowls got heavier, the gong began to wave-- there were so many sounds traveling in each second that I could feel my whole being becoming multiple beings-- the vibration creating many outlines around my own figure as I imagined it from an aerial perspective.
Looking down at myself, each sound wave carried more of my bodies to the outer sides. Each vibration within the waves, I was becoming more and more of it-- more bodies, more beings-- all of the past and future me's with my core still in the present, in focus. I was becoming infinite.
I set the intention of love.
The lack of judgment.
The desire to begin truly living from a point where I can understand and send compassion rather than neglect and hold resentment. Here is one way of letting go.
Always fascinated by the idea of astral travel, becoming one on the astral plane and feeling that energy, I grew tired of always feeling so below that attainment and just decided to go for it-- to put my focus there-- and I imagined myself on the ceiling. I held my entire body still through breath while imagining rising up out of my skin. I felt my limbs remain heavy, steady, only my energy traveling upwards.
Once there, the space between floating and grounded, sleeping and awake-- this is where you feel everyone else around you, not as singular elements but as one heart beating, one movement taking place-- one force field of understanding. CONTENTMENT: this is where you find it.
Two bowls began to sing together in such a dark and dreary tone, it felt like a dark orchestra in a Disney movie right as an innocent creature traveled on it's own only to wind up finding itself near death. And then death.
It was then that we heard the coyotes howling.
Howling with some kind of cat? Or maybe a younger coyote. They howled and howled as the bowls spun deeper and deeper, that kind of corkscrew sound that invokes so much emotion and builds such a climax that I immediately released the tension I held in my chest and loudly, Erik spun a small plate of beads to sound like rain washing over us. But not a cleansing rain--rather, a rain that made attempts to silence and honor the death or dispute between the wild animals outside of this dome.
We're all still here
deep within this moment.
Your intuition carries you to places you have never been but recognize.
Places you thought you would never go but somehow know your way around.
Each time the vibration would get too intense, I would focus on breathing and it would lessen-- when I grew calm, it would rise-- we were one.
All of us,
one movement, one force field, one higher vibration.
One sound echoing "Om" in the middle of Ramona up in the mountains in between all of those big grey rocks at this little fairy named Charlene's house on these four acres where she built this silver sound chamber for happenings just like this one.
"The experience is not found in the healing session,
it is found in the creation."
Dreams are enhanced. Vibrations are heightened-- pain is lessened-- awareness is attuned.
Erik Cohen: Resonant Verve, Sound Healing Concerts, sponsored by Charlene Penner in her "sound resonating sanctuary" that she calls the Cistern Chapel.
And you have to believe in magic because that is exactly what things like this are made of.