Healing Sound Session with Gateways To Brilliance

A few years ago I had not even heard of sound healing. I have arrived at the Gateways to Brilliance sacred sound chamber by way of a long wellness journey. A journey that had me completely fed up with Western medicine. A series of dangerous infections in 2014 had almost killed me but also left me with chronic pain wreaking havoc on my everyday life. In 2015, I was being rudely tossed around the standard clinics and specialists covered by my insurance with any relief to show for it, only bills. That is when I started to look outside the traditional methods of Western health towards holistic wellness.

In the past five years, I have tried nearly everything on this crusade for wellness. Many different things have brought me the most benefit and I promise to write another blog about that soon. One of the things I have been the most amazed by, has been the experience of sound healing. What is sound healing? In a nutshell, it’s a practice that uses vibrations to influence and connect with the human body. The tools of the craft usually entail instruments like gongs, Tibetan bowls, crystal singing bowls, tuning forks, drums and voice. Many proponents, including myself, believe it can be a wellness tool for ailments, clarity, intuition and more. 

Fast forward, February 2021, I’m still on my healing journey. I have improved many of my chronic conditions, but still I continue to have some lingering issues. I had also set an intention for 2021 to increase my intuition and tap into the energy of the divine. In the aftermath of 2020, a major goal was also to start living in micro-moments because life is short and getting shorter (literally, theU.S. life expectancy has dropped as a result of the pandemic and related stressors). My business LovesToGather was doing well, but I knew I could benefit from a improved sense of awareness. So, I scheduled an appointment with my friend and events industry peer, Carolyn Vinup at Gateways to Brilliance. Carolyn has been an early adopter of the wellness lifestyle. She feng shuied before the masses and harnessed the power of crystals long before the millennials were born to gram about them. She was instrumental in building the Integrative Health Education Center at Normandale Community College.

I think it is also important to note Carolyn has worked with sound and the crystal singing bowls since 2001. She has developed a relationship with the singing bowls where a “story unfolds” for each client. Because of this intuitive relationship she has developed a deep respect for the messages and information shared while working in a co-creative process between her and every client. After 20 years of working with the crystal singing bowls, Carolyn has identified how certain bowls communicate certain types of messages (meaning intuitively guided information from various levels of consciousness). When messages begin to show up, she pays attention and her client’s individual unique experience unfolds.

The sacred sound chamber she has curated over the years was charming and cozy. Not unlike a massage room at a spa, but with much more warmth, tools of the trade, and fabulous crystals everywhere. Carolyn’s session was quite different from the others I had experienced previously. She does a really good job of explaining the process and talking about the science of sound healing. She created an upfront spiritual agenda for the session which helped us to work together to get the most from the experience. Carolyn began with tingshas followed by a guided meditation that included visualization, breathing and deep relaxation. Her key words during this meditation were love, light, breath, clarity, and confidence. She then, picked up her practitioner crystal singing bowl, (she calls this bowl, the Angel bowl.) As she played the Angel singing bowl, she gently invited any energy (thoughts, memories, experiences, beliefs, situations, misunderstandings, perceptions, disappointments, stuck energy, trauma, wounds, hurts, consciousness, in this lifetime or others) that no longer support me to lift and release from my energy body. 

During the session, I was laying on a massage table with warm blankets and cushy pillows. My main job during the session was just trying to tune into the experience through breath, presence and listening. I am not an intuit, yet! So, my experience is very different from that of Carolyn as the practitioner of the tools which speak to her. So she began to play the instruments, the vibration and sound in the room is really something else, every time it amazes me. As she plays the first sequence of three singing bowls, she silently converses with the instruments, starting with “Liz you are loved”, “Liz you are loved.” Then it turned into “I am safe”, “I am safe”, “I am safe.” She noticed the shift and followed guidance to pick up a different bowl which communicated fear as she placed the bowl over my body. She played this bowl for quite some time, communicating to all the chakras and the energy around me that it was safe to release the fear. She was then led to pick-up a singing bowl that communicates universal messages which at that point began singing to her “Liz is releasing fear.” The Angel singing bowl was up again next, instructing her to play it directly over the center of my chest. That is where things got intense for her. She started to see what looked like old bodies peeling up and out of me. Crazy right, several old bodies were released in this same way back-to-back as she kept on with the Angel singing bowl.

Photo By Konstantin Korotkov

During this time, I was experiencing many visualizations. There was white energy pulsing around behind my closed eyes with dark figure shadows at first. Then I started to have a warm feeling of calm all over my body except for a massive tightness in between my ribs in my chest. It felt as if something was stuck there. I am at this point completely clueless about what Carolyn is witnessing, though I can hear her breathing intensely and jotting down notes frantically. I was thinking that I could not wait to share our stories at the end of the appointment.

Carolyn was then guided to smooth the energy down again with the Angel singing bowl and play another bowl directly above my forehead (third-eye), about 12-18” from my forehead. Just after she started she saw a beam of healing energy coming from above into the bowl at a 90-degree angle (L shaped). The angle was straight into my third-eye and then shooting at an angle straight through my body. The bowl spoke to her that this was an activation for healing light energy. She then got to witness my spirit gently moving into my body. The message the bowl was imparting was “My spirit is back fully in my body.” She looked on as my spirit filled out my body, now having room to stretch out and be fully present. I remember Carolyn asking the healing light to fill up space over my head to about an arm’s length from my scalp. The image in my head at that very moment was a visualization of myself jumping in a big X shape with what looked like lightning bolts shooting out of my arms which were outstretched over my head. 

Carolyn then received the message, “I am finally me!” A lot more certainly took place, but this was the piece de resistance. Carolyn worked further with the Angel singing bowl for a while receiving the message “I am filled with healing light.” The final balancing of energy took place, and the two crystal singing bowls were played to signal the session was coming to an end. I then rested in silence for around 20 minutes while Carolyn continued to direct healing light energy toward me, seeing the room filled with support, light, awareness and shifting consciousness. It was when we debriefed after the session that we put together each of our experiences. 

It was thrilling to hear where our experiences intersected. After processing our time together, Carolyn did some research and found amazing images which demonstrated what she had been seeing. I left the appointment feeling upbeat, vocal, and really light on my feet. I should note that for a full two weeks prior to the appointment I had felt depressed and unmotivated. We closed the session by having me pull a random Power Thought Card by Louise Hay from a deck of cards which I personally shuffled three times. The card I pulled nearly knocked me off my chair. It said, “I love my body on the front”. On the back, it said, “I create peacefulness in my mind, and my body reflects this peacefulness as perfect health”. Carolyn and I just looked at each other and started laughing. 

The universe is a lot more than us earthlings sometimes give it credit for. Our bodies are capable of a lot more than we often realize as well. While a single sound healing session is not going to cure all woes, it will likely be eye-opening and relaxing. My wellness journey has led me to unlock and experience things I would never have dreamed of. Since the session, much has been revealed to me. My thoughts are full of ideas, inspiration and wonder instead of the heavy sluggish feelings which I had gone into the sound healing appointment with. Life is short. We are all surrounded by energy. There is so much to tap into if we can be open to it.

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