There is something I have been wanting to speak about for a while, because it sits very close to the heart of why Matty and I teach sound in the way that we do.
Sound can feel incredibly gentle and subtle. It can invite us into deep states of rest, open something within us emotionally, reconnect us with our bodies and create experiences that can be difficult to put into words. It is one of the things I have loved about this work for so many years.
But something being subtle does not necessarily mean that it is without power, and I think this is an important conversation to keep having as sound healing continues to grow.
My own understanding of this began to deepen around 2012, when part of my role at the Crystal Castle involved training sound facilitators and managing a team who were offering sound experiences to the many people moving through the space. On some days there could be close to a thousand people visiting, so over time I had the opportunity to witness an enormous range of people experiencing sound in very different ways.
So much of what I witnessed was beautiful. People would soften, become deeply still, have emotional releases or simply experience a moment of peace that they perhaps had not felt for a long time.
But I also began noticing the other side.
There were times when sound was overwhelming for someone, when an instrument was played too loudly or too close, when an experience brought something to the surface that a person was not expecting, or when someone had a physical, emotional or mental health consideration that meant the sound needed to be approached differently.
There were also situations where people had beautiful intentions and genuinely wanted to help, but perhaps did not yet have the knowledge or experience to recognise what was happening or know how to respond.
Those experiences taught me so much, and they began shaping questions that have stayed with me ever since.
When we work with another person, something changes
I absolutely believe there is a place for intuitive exploration with sound. Buying a singing bowl, sitting with it, listening, experimenting and noticing how different sounds affect us can be a beautiful personal practice.
We do not need to intellectualise every experience we have with sound, and I certainly do not believe intuition needs to be trained out of us.
But when we move from exploring sound for ourselves into facilitating an experience for another person, I feel the responsibility changes.
Someone is trusting us with their body, their nervous system, their emotions and often parts of themselves that we cannot see or know when they first walk into the room.
We may not know their history with trauma. We may not know how sensitive their hearing or nervous system is. There may be physical or mental health considerations that change the way we work. Certain instruments, frequencies, volumes, placements or lengths of exposure may need to be adapted, and sometimes the most responsible choice may be not to use a particular sound or technique at all.
This is why, for Matty and me, learning sound healing has never simply been about learning how to play instruments beautifully.
Safety is part of the practice
When people think about sound healing training, it can be easy to imagine learning crystal singing bowls, gongs, drums, tuning forks, voice and different techniques for creating a sound journey.
Of course, learning our instruments matters. Understanding how to create sound intentionally matters. Developing our listening and musicality matters.
But there is another layer that may not be as visible from the outside.
We need to understand contraindications and when sound may need to be modified. We need to understand volume, proximity and duration, and how differently one person may experience something that feels completely comfortable to another. We need awareness around trauma, emotional and mental health, consent, nervous system sensitivity, energetic boundaries and scope of practice.
We also need to develop the capacity to notice.
What is happening to the person in front of us?
Are they becoming more settled or more activated?
Is the experience still serving them?
Do we continue, soften, change direction or stop?
There is no technique that can answer every one of those questions for us, which is where I believe knowledge and intuition begin to meet.
Intuition and knowledge were never meant to be opposites
Sometimes I hear intuition and structure spoken about as though we need to choose between them. There can be an idea that too much knowledge will somehow make our work less intuitive, or that learning a structure will disconnect us from our natural ability to feel.
My experience has been almost the opposite.
Within the yogic philosophy that has informed so much of my life and our work, I often think about this through Shiva and Shakti.
Shiva represents the container, the consciousness and the structure. Shakti is the creative life force that moves within it.
For us, the knowledge, foundations, safety, boundaries and understanding are part of Shiva. They create the container.
Our intuition, sensitivity, creativity, responsiveness and ability to listen deeply are expressions of Shakti.
When there is no container, intuition can sometimes become difficult to distinguish from assumption, projection or simply doing what feels right to us. Yet when we have strong foundations underneath us, we can become more spacious in our listening because we are not trying to work everything out in the moment.
The knowledge begins to become embodied.
We know why we are doing what we are doing, but we are not necessarily thinking about every piece of information as we do it. We have practised, observed, received feedback, made mistakes, asked questions and experienced the work from both sides.
The structure is still there, but it begins to live within us.
For me, this is where intuition can really begin to fly.
Training is only the beginning
When Matty and I came together, sound was actually part of how our relationship began. I trained Matty in the sound work I was teaching at the time, and as our relationship and our work developed together, we spent years exploring what it meant to facilitate sound in a way that felt grounded, safe and deeply connected to the other healing modalities and philosophies we had each spent years studying.
Eventually, this became part of the foundation from which we created Sound of Being™.
The training has continued to evolve because we have continued to evolve. Every group teaches us something. Every client teaches us something. Our students ask questions that make us look more deeply at what we teach and why. New understandings around trauma, the nervous system and facilitation continue to inform the work, alongside the ancient philosophies and practices that have been part of its foundations from the beginning.
After all these years, I certainly do not feel that we have sound figured out. If anything, experience has made me more respectful of how much there is to understand.
This is also why we do not see becoming a sound facilitator as something that happens simply because someone has completed a training.
Training gives us foundations, knowledge, experience, feedback and a container in which to practise, but embodiment takes time.
What does it mean to teach this work?
As sound healing has grown, there are now so many different trainings available, which in many ways is wonderful. More people are experiencing sound, more approaches are emerging and there are many different lineages, modalities and ways of understanding this work.
At the same time, I think the growth of the industry gives us an opportunity to keep asking what it means to teach another person how to hold space with sound.
For us, there is a difference between learning to facilitate sound and being ready to train other people to facilitate it.
Teaching brings another layer of responsibility because we are no longer only responsible for understanding how we ourselves work. We are helping someone else develop the foundations from which they may eventually work with hundreds or thousands of people of their own.
I do not think there is a particular number of years that suddenly makes somebody ready to teach, and experience cannot be measured by time alone. Someone can practise for many years without necessarily deepening their understanding, just as another person may immerse themselves deeply within a shorter period.
But I do believe there are things that only experience can teach us.
Repetition teaches us. Making mistakes teaches us. Mentorship teaches us. Receiving the work ourselves teaches us. Working with different bodies, personalities, sensitivities and life experiences teaches us. Being challenged teaches us. Continuing our own personal practice teaches us.
Perhaps most importantly, experience can teach us humility.
The more people we work with, the more we realise that what was beautiful for one person may be completely inappropriate for another.
There is no one way to work with sound
None of this is about suggesting that there is one correct way to practise sound healing or that everyone needs to learn the way that we teach.
There are many beautiful traditions and approaches to working with sound, and intuition has an important place within them.
What feels important to us is that, whatever approach we choose, we understand the responsibility that comes with offering that experience to another human being.
When someone comes into our care, we want to have enough knowledge to recognise when something may not be appropriate, enough humility to know when something is outside our scope, enough presence to notice what is actually happening and enough sensitivity to change what we are doing when the person in front of us needs something different.
Then, within those foundations, there is so much room for creativity.
There is room to listen.
There is room to experiment.
There is room for mystery.
There is room for the session or journey to become something we could never have planned beforehand.
This is the relationship between Shiva and Shakti that we continue to return to in our own work and in Sound of Being™.
The structure is not there to restrict the intuitive nature of sound. It is there to support it.
And perhaps one of the greatest things these years of working with sound have taught me is that the deeper our roots become, the less tightly we need to hold onto the structure.
It is already underneath us.
Shiva holds the container, and from there, Shakti is free to move.
