You know how there are sounds that set your teeth on edge? Maybe it’s the warning beep of a truck backing up, or the whining pitch of a tired toddler. Some timbres just seem to suck the soul right out of you.
But the reverse is also true. We can experience the sublime hearing a piano play a melodic motif or a voice tracing a soaring melody. Long ago, healers and spiritual practitioners used sound to realign consciousness, and that tradition is still being shared today via a type of immersive sonic meditation session known as a sound bath.
Starting Tuesday, July 7, yoga instructor and salsa dancer Lydia Gascón Samaniego will offer weekly sound baths at Central Stage. Using hand-crafted quartz bowls, she creates resonant frequencies by rubbing along the bowl rims, “vibrating at a certain wave length.”
Lydia’s sonic submersions at Central Stage theater
What: Crystal bowl sound baths
Where: Central Stage, 6:30 p.m.-8 p.m., 5221 Central Ave., Richmond, Tuesdays
Tickets: $30
While it might sound like a New Age fad, cultural critic Ted Gioia became a fan, pointing out in a Substack post, “Sound is power…Researchers at UCLA are actually using ultrasound to wake people out of comas, including one case in which a man had been in a minimally conscious state for 14 months.”
“When I first had a sound bath it was so healing it put me in a deep sleep,” said Lydia, who practices solely under her first name.“Some people get in a really meditative state and others awaken in a half-hour or so. The amazing power of the crystal energy and the tones help us heal with our own energy wave length.”
There are a number of sonic healers working with bowls in the Bay Area, though some play brass rather than crystal bowls. The majority of the sessions take place in San Francisco and Marin, leaving East Bay denizens underserved when it comes to good vibes.
Lydia first experienced the power of the bowls as part of her yoga training in Mexico with Rosie Blake, who also sings in harmony with the crystal. Emerging from her first sound bath, Lydia felt “This is me. I need to do this,” she recalled, explaining that she trained with Blake.
Her wending path has taken her in a variety of interesting directions. Born in the United States to Mexican parents, she’s been a semi-professional Latin dancer, teacher, life coach and author of the self-help memoir “To Hell With You: An Adventure Through Tragedy, Love, Betrayal and Transformation.” The mother of four sons, she spent several years earning a master’s degree from Universidad de Salamanca in Spain. She recently relocated to Berkeley after years in the Lake Tahoe area.
Lydia connected with Central Stage through her Iranian boyfriend. The theater was founded by Iranians artists and community members dedicated to creating a space for Persian (and other peoples’) cultural expression. On July 11, the theater will present a different kind of sonic immersion with “Strings and Stories,” a double bill where North Indian classical ragas meet traditional Afghan music.
The first half features a sitar recital by Kamal Ahmad accompanied by Edrees Osman on tabla. For the second half they’ll be joined for a set of Farsi songs by multi-instrumentalist Siddiq Ahmed, a founding member of the pioneering Afghan rock band Kabul Dreams, and Mortaza Haqjo on vocals and harmonium.
Given a year of extraordinary anxiety and tension generated by the Iranian government’s crushing of protests and ongoing hostilities between the Islamic Republic and the United States, Lydia seems to have found an ideal setting for her calming sound baths. In her introductions, she prepares listeners to expect a variety of physical responses.
“I explain how the seven crystal bowls are attuned to seven chakras, to our energy systems in the body,” she said. “Our chakras are tuned to musical notes, and our bodies are musically inclined. So I tell people to be open to anything, and nothing you experience is abnormal.”
This music writer hadn’t thought much about the practice before reading Gioia’s blog and seeing that he’s written extensively about arcane musical practices that challenge constricted notions about the role of music in human development. Like him, I’m not a devotee of Eastern philosophies and medicine (“I can’t point to my chakras, and am not sure if they are the same as reiki, or something completely different,” he writes).
But in researching the application of sound in Western medicine for his 2006 book “Healing Songs,” and his own experiences with the Singing Bowl Lady of Austin, Texas, he had to recalibrate his understanding of vibrational power.
“It forced me to consider different capacities of music and sound, far beyond any I’d previously grasped,” he writes. “By the time I finished writing it, my whole conception of music had expanded considerably.”
For anyone looking to immerse themselves in a new sonic realm, Lydia’s sound baths might be a way. . And like with many healing experiences, it’s not necessarily immediate bliss.
“If something is uncomfortable, I tell people to breathe deeply and that sound will pass,” she said. “Sometimes a frequency is irritating, and that’s good. We’re holding onto something that needs to move, and the vibration is trying to move it.”
