Sound Bath Practitioner Carlin Danner visited the Rhode Island PBS studios to demonstrate a sound bath for our ART inc. series. After the 45-minute meditative session, Danner sat down with us to shine some light on what sound bathing is all about.
Dewey Raposo: Can you tell me a little bit about the history of sound bathing?
Carlin Danner: The history of sound bathing is a little precarious just because there are a lot of different cultures that have integrated sound into their healing exercises first centuries. So, Native Americans definitely used drums and flutes, all sorts of other instruments, whereas in Asian cultures, we see the singing crystal bowls, we start seeing the Tibetan metal bowls. Pythagoras was actually the first person to prescribe music as medicine, which is pretty interesting. But all of these cultures kind of integrated sound from their own experience at their own time.
DR: Can you tell me about your introduction to sound bathing?
CD: Back in 2019, my husband and I were planning a trip out to California and during our planning of it, we were having dinner with a couple of people that I’ve been friends with since high school and one of their siblings lived out in the desert in Joshua Tree and they were like, ‘Carlin, you really have to go and do a sound bath at The Integratron. And I said, ‘What is a sound bath? I don’t really understand what that is.’ And then they were like, ‘just don’t even think about it. Sign up.’ So we did, we went to The Integratron, which is this wooden structure in the middle of Joshua Tree. It was started to be built by this guy who was abducted by aliens and he basically said that he came back with a blueprint to make a building or an age reversal machine. It does kind of look like a spaceship to some regard.
So when we went there in the first five minutes, I was like, I don’t know about this. I’m not sure if I can handle being here. But then I just decided to relax and it felt like a full-body massage for me.
DR: What inspired you to become a sound bath practitioner?
CD: It was during the pandemic and I wanted something to calm myself down and I was going through a lot of anxiety at the time, and there were no sound baths to be had during the pandemic. So I decided, well, if I wanted to do a sound bath, I guess I’m going to start learning how to do them because I don’t know what the feasibility or how many people are doing them in this area. So then I found this woman out of Brooklyn...who taught me how to do sound bath bathing. It was all online courses because it was still COVID time, technically, so they didn’t want to gather. There were people from Australia all over the world and all over the U.S. there. So that was kind of a cool little community that I met through training, and I still talk to some of those people today.
DR: Can you tell me about the instruments and some of the feelings associated with the different instruments you use?
CD: With gongs, it’s an expansive feel. For some people, that feels great; other people react differently. Some of my friends will just tear up at the sound of a gong. I use ocean drums at times. Ocean drums for a lot of people, especially in Rhode Island, they feel comforted by. Other people feel like they’re little pellets of stress that they’re listening to instead of an ocean drum. So everybody is really experiencing sound in a different way, which is very interesting and part of the human experience. I’m also influenced by hearing the buoys from when I grew up next to the Sakonnet river. I would hear the buoys while I woke up and they sound similar to me, like the bowls that I’m chiming my mallet against. So those are the experiences I’m thinking of as I’m moving through a sound bath. But the interpretation obviously is different for every participant. Some people are thinking about rain and being in the forest. Some people are thinking about, I don’t know, the groceries they need to pick up after the bath [chuckles].
DR: What do you hope someone will get out of one of your sound baths?
CD: You go to an art class, you come back with something obtainable. You go to a welding class again, you do something obtainable. You go to a spin class, you come out and you feel either good or terrible if it’s your first one in a long time. But when you come out of a sound bath, you feel good. But for some people, they’re not getting that finality or understanding that that feeling of good is something that you should be having often. We don’t have an actual permanent product when we do sound bathing. However, that permanent product is right here in your heart and how you feel at the end. And I think that’s also important, but sometimes we don’t necessarily as a society value or take the time to recognize that importance.
