The Sound Bath

Reflections on a brain that goes from chaos to quiet

Friendship, by artist Agnes Martin (1963)

Have you ever experienced a sound bath?

Imagine lying on your back, eyes closed, with people gathered all around you. They hum and sing and chant and grunt and shower you with noise until the noise resonnates each particle inside your body.

You can get the same experience biking along Highway 403 on your way down to St. Catharines. The bike path buts up against the highway though you only have bike this horrror for a few kilometres. The noise of the highway and the tight, claustrophobic echo off the sound barrier — the only thing separating you from instant though restful death — is enough to pulverize your brain. Or, your conscious brain at least. The unconscious brain is pedalling as hard as it can to get you away from this highway.

A soundbath overloads your aural faculties. It fills your mind with white noise that shoots calming vibes through the rest of your body. Your mind doesn’t need to work to figure out what the sounds are — they just are. They’re there and you’re there and that’s all that matters.

Being in a noisy bar, with voices shouting into your ears and hitting every part of your body is a bit like a sound bath. Dozens of people over three days asking you telling you wanting to know saying hi making you laugh you making them laugh, all of it making you tired but also making you happy is a bit like a sound bath too. You don’t notice it at the time but as you come down from your days immersed in the cold and then hot and then cold water of others’ words and vibes and energies and passions and eyes, you feel their absence as if you had been something before and now you’re different.

Like the way you feel the cold when you step out of the bath or like you feel the hot when your forests are all on fire and the visions you had of hell are made apparent in real time.

Yes, I am coming down from this, from these sensations. My brain is processing where to put everyone in the chambers of my mind. The silence is good for that too. In the silence, I can sort names and faces into rooms and places, tuck that person into the same place as this person, keep them over there, and so on.

Some of you will know that I am desperately sentimental about saying goodbye. Because of my work and travel schedule, I say goodbye a lot. Remember this?

Formally closing oneself down from a few days of a human sound bath comes with a lot of emotions and mine all get rolled up in the goodbyes. The loose hugs or the one armed hugs or the hugs that the moment they hit four seconds your brain asks if you’ve left your hand on a hot stove for too long. Or the nothings, whatever the last moment was with someone. The running for the planes, the hotel check outs. The seeing someone leave and think, damn, I guess I’ll be in Ottawa soon enough so I don’t need to run over and say bye.

But it isn’t really the goodbyes that plague me. It’s time, personified by dozens of strangers who become friends, strangers whose voices and halted conversations find places in my already cluttered and buzzing mind and who talk to me long after those goodbyes have happened.

That time that we cannot stop. That thing — time — that hurls us all towards our deaths. But before death, we are thrown over and over towards strangers who become friends, strangers who become precious, strangers whose hearts, I dunno, beat absolutely in sync with ours, strangers who become part of us, as we borrow their stories, the ways in which they talk about their passions, the flame licking the ceiling fueled by them talking about the work that they do for others. They become us and the voices ring on and on and on in our minds, just above the nagging, ceaseless question: what’s next? When next? What even is next if everyone is always right here with me right at this moment.

There are some fifty people watching over my shoulders at this very moment. They are fast and I’m too slow to catch them as I turn around. But they are there. And while the sound bath that they give me is silent — silence that’s threatened by the mechanical sounds of the street sweeper — there’s a unmistakable vibration in the air.