Pasadena Magazine is the bi-monthly magazine of Pasadena and its surrounding areas – the diverse, historically rich and culturally vibrant region that includes Glendale, the Eastside of Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley all the way to Claremont.
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Bang A Gong If you're having trouble relaxing and letting go, a sound bath might be the ideal way to wash away your stress. STORY BY // CUYLER GIBBONS PHOTO BY// KEATON KOECHLI "IF YOU WANT TO FIND THE SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE, THINK IN TERMS OF ENERGY, FREQUENCY AND VIBRATION." —NIKOLA TESLA Stress is a seemingly ubiquitous fact of life. It's also highly detrimental to your health, causing the infl ammation that ultimately leads to disease. Some of us can be so debilitated by stressful factors in our life we turn to medica- tion, prescribed or otherwise, in an effort to "stop the noise," with often deleterious, if not deadly results. Ironically, the world of alternative therapies may have a benign and effi cacious solution to stress reduction that involves even more sound. A full body bath of sound in fact. The idea and practice of sound therapy goes back over 2,000 years, to the ancient Egyptians, Australia's aborigines, and Tibetan "singing bowls" that are still employed in meditative rituals today. Indian tantric tradi- tions stress the importance of vibration in regulating the function of the body's chakras, or energy centers. Different frequencies, it is believed, affect different centers of the body. As is so often the case recent science is confi rming what ancient people came to believe through intuition, close observation, and abundant experience. According to the Journal of Anesthesiology certain tones and frequencies can help "tune" the brain, and make it easier to achieve deeply meditative brain wave states. Other recent studies have shown that resonant sound immersion can reduce heart rate and blood pressure more dramatically than meditation alone, and that binaural beats in particular—two tones of slightly different frequency played in unison—demonstrably reduced anxiety and produced enhanced moods. Clearly there's something to this. To see for myself I attended a recent session at Jamie Bechtold's (formerly Jamie Ford) Sound Bath Center in Eagle Rock. Bechtold is a former biologist with a life-long interest in fi tness and yoga who was introduced to the gong as thera- py in a yoga class back in 2000, and as she says "Over the next year I noticed that I was feeling more confi dent, more peaceful, had less stress, and was able to better discern where I wanted to put my focus. These benefi ts were due to the ability of the sound of the gongs to more easily bring me into a relaxed and meditative state." Fully convinced of its effi cacious power she has SEPTEMBER 2017 133 B O D Y, M I N D A N D S P I R I T HEALTH & WELLNESS