The first time I struck a Himalayan singing bowl, I was twenty-three years old and sitting on the floor of a studio in Silver Lake. The teacher — a woman named Miriam who had studied in Nepal for seven years — told us to close our eyes and simply listen. Not to the sound, she said. To what comes after.
I did not understand what she meant. I was a person who filled silence. I talked too much, thought too much, planned too much. Silence was not a destination for me — it was a gap to be bridged.
But then she struck the bowl.
The sound rose like something alive — warm, round, complex. It filled the room and then, slowly, it began to fade. And in the fading, something happened that I still struggle to describe. The sound did not disappear. It dissolved into the room, into the air, into me. And for a moment — maybe three seconds, maybe thirty — I was not thinking about anything at all.
"The present moment always will have been. Nothing can take it from you."
— A teaching from my first sound healing teacher
I have been chasing that moment ever since. Not the sound — the silence that the sound revealed.
What Sound Actually Does to the Brain
When I began to study sound healing formally, I wanted to understand the mechanism. I am not someone who accepts "it just works" as an explanation. I needed to know why.
What I found was both simpler and more profound than I expected. Sound waves are vibration. Vibration is information. When a singing bowl resonates at 432 Hz — a frequency associated with the heart chakra in traditional systems — it is not magic. It is physics. The sound waves interact with the body's own electromagnetic field, with the water in our cells, with the nervous system's electrical activity.
Research from the National Institutes of Health has shown that sound-based interventions can measurably reduce cortisol levels, lower heart rate, and shift brainwave activity from beta (active thinking) to alpha (relaxed awareness) and even theta (the state between waking and sleep, associated with deep creativity and emotional processing).
"Healing is not something done to you. It is something you remember."
But the science, as useful as it is, only tells part of the story. The part it cannot tell is what happens in the silence.
The Space Between
In music theory, the rest is as important as the note. A melody without rests is noise. It is the space between the sounds that gives the sounds their meaning.
I have come to believe that this is true of consciousness as well. Our thoughts, our emotions, our sensations — these are the notes. But what we are, at the deepest level, is the space in which they arise.
A selection of Himalayan singing bowls, each tuned to a specific frequency. The larger the bowl, the lower the tone.
When a bowl is struck and its sound begins to fade, something interesting happens in the listener. The mind, which has been following the sound, suddenly has nothing to follow. And in that moment of not-following, there is a gap. A tiny window into what is always there beneath the noise of ordinary consciousness.
Most people close that window immediately. A thought arises — "what was that?" or "I should remember this" or "my back hurts" — and the moment is gone. But with practice, you learn to stay in the gap a little longer. And then a little longer still.
A Practice You Can Try Right Now
You do not need a singing bowl to access this. You can do it with any sound — a bell, a chime, even the sound of your own breath.
Strike a sound, or take a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then, instead of waiting for the next thing, simply attend to the fading. Follow the sound as it diminishes. And when it is gone — stay there. In the silence that follows. Even for just three seconds.
That is the practice. That is all of it, really. Everything else is just preparation for that moment of staying.
A short demonstration of the 432 Hz singing bowl technique described in this article.
What I Have Learned from a Decade of Practice
I have been facilitating sound healing sessions for over ten years now. I have worked with people in grief, in burnout, in physical pain, in existential confusion. I have worked with executives who had not cried in years and with children who could not sit still for five minutes.
What I have learned is this: the sound is not the healer. The silence is. The sound is simply a doorway — a way of tricking the mind into stillness long enough for something deeper to emerge.
If you are curious about sound healing and would like to experience it for yourself, I offer private sessions both in person in Los Angeles and online. You can view my availability and book directly through my profile on Spiritual California.
And if you take nothing else from this piece, take this: the silence you are looking for is not somewhere else. It is always here. You are always already in it. The practice is simply learning to notice.
