The Way of the Gong™

People come to study with me at my home studio. We get together from 2 to 8 hours at a time, going over all manner of ideas and techniques about Gongs, Bowls, and Bells. It can be rigorous. It can be insightful. It can give you enough to work on for weeks, months, years. It can set your head spinning in multiple directions. But here's the thing, I can teach you mechanics: how to hold a mallet, how to wield it, how to strike the instrument to obtain the desired sound. I can also inform you all about the instruments themselves: where they come from. How they're made. How they're different from, or similar to, each other. We can spend all day working and going over the finer points of everything, but there's one thing I can't teach you: I can't teach you what to play. I can't teach you what sounds to create, what order to create them in, whether they should be loud or quiet, high or low. I can't tell you any of that. You have to learn that on y...

From the mail box today, a question… “ I may have told you that I had some amazing experiences with sound; gong, and shruti box in the past and I was able to get to a pure kundalini/shakti state from this work from a teacher in the past but I cannot seem to get there since (which was a few years back).” I think we’ve all had peak experiences that are difficult to recreate or repeat. I know that I have. Two things come to mind here: 1) While experiences like these are amazing, they can’t be repeated, at least not exactly. A big thing is to allow each experience be its own experience. 2) Being relaxed and open is important. And again, being open to whatever experience happens, rather than ‘hoping for’ a repeat of a past experience. One doesn’t want to repeat the experience as much as to be able to repeat the conditions that allowed the experience to happen. A big part of my human side longs to repeat many of the great experiences of my past, but I...