Peninsula sound healers strike a calming tone

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Whether you’re a bit worn out after the hustle and bustle of the holidays, feeling anxiety and stress about heading into 2025 or making a resolution to improve your self care in general, you may be seeking tools for relaxation and healing as you start the new year. Taking a sound bath is one practice that some locals say can be helpful in fostering mind and body health.

Sound baths – sessions at which resting participants are immersed in a curated, resonant soundscape in order to help relieve tension and promote health, have been popping up in numerous venues on the Peninsula in recent years, including the Palo Alto Art Center, Filoli, Stanford’s Anderson Collection, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Avenidas, and yoga studios all over. The idea is that “bathing” in the sound waves of certain tones can be therapeutic. 

“It can help release whatever physical, spiritual, or emotional blockages are going on,” said Melissa Zelada, a local practitioner of sound healing who uses a variety of instruments in her sessions. She said sound baths help regulate the nervous system, allowing participants to breathe deeper and think and feel more clearly. 

“It does alter the brain-wave state so you can get into clarity, and into being in tune with your body; that’s the main benefit,” she said. “I’ve had people that have actually said their physical pain they came in with was gone. It definitely is a mind-body-soul healing that happens in the space with a sound bath.”

Participants’ physical and emotional reactions vary, she said. 

“Everyone’s different with how they receive the sounds,” she said “Some get emotional, some laugh, some cry, some fall asleep.”

Zelada offers private sound healing sessions from her office in Los Altos and also holds group workshops and community events, including, currently, a sound-bath meditation series at Little Green A Plant Bar – a shop and event space in downtown Redwood City. In addition to her career as a healer, Zelada works for Stanford Medicine as education support coordinator, and she’s led sound-bath classes at Stanford for various programs and departments. She discovered sound healing a few years ago, while working in the office of a Peninsula psychiatry practice.

“I was on a different kind of path, a single mom trying to find some healing and start a new chapter in my life,” she recalled. She met a spiritual coach working in the same building and eventually went on a life-changing wellness retreat. Inspired, she began studying different types of energy work, including Reiki, and got trained and certified as a sound healer. For Zelada, sound baths are part of a holistic approach to health. 

“I also started to learn more and integrate my own native teaching from my heritage from El Salvador,” she said, learning from indigenous curanderas (experts in traditional healing). Now, she’s developed her own practice that she called a “mesh and mix of different healing modalities.”

“The way that I facilitate my sound bath is, I incorporate a lot of different cultural practices,” she said. In addition to singing bowls, “I also use different instruments – rattles, gongs, tuning forks as well – and when I go around during the sound-bath meditation I’ll kind of feel into the energy of the person.”

Sound baths often include the use of singing bowls – bell-like instruments that produce a resonant tone when struck or circled with a mallet. They have roots in Asia and, according to Julie Kalua, the singing-bowl and music buyer for East West Bookshop in Mountain View, are most often associated with the Himalayan region, particularly the Kathmandu Valley in Nepal. Some bowls, which come in various sizes, are made of metal, created either by machine or hand-hammered by artisans and tuned to specific notes. There are also crystal bowls, tuned to frequencies believed to aid in healing and health. 

Kalua, who’s also a longtime musician and a certified sound healer, takes joy in matching customers with the bowl that resonates (literally) best with them. 

“Your body always knows. Someone will go, ‘Oh!’ You see their whole body relax with that particular tone. They’ll feel it in their body,” she said. “Higher tones tend to be more activating and the lower tones more grounding. I’ll watch their whole body language shift when they hit the right one.”

Because there’s been so much interest, Kalua now leads workshops at East West introducing participants to using singing bowls. All three of her 2024 workshops sold out and she has more planned for 2025.

“Each workshop I teach is not the same as the one before. I tend to really go with the flow. Each group of people is very different,” she said. The aim is to empower everyone to feel comfortable trying their hand at the instruments. 

“Some bowls are just ready to sing the minute you touch the mallet to it and others are like, ‘Yeah, well, you’re going to have to work for this one.’ My goal is that everybody feels successful in playing a bowl,” she said. She gives a “mini sound bath” at the workshop so participants can get a sense of what the experience can be like. 

“Using sound and frequency and vibration, there’s science behind it. It’s not just this sort of ‘woowoo’ idea any more,” she said. 

Dr. Manuela Kogon is a clinical professor and integrative medicine internist at Stanford Center for Integrative Medicine. She said that while there hasn’t yet been much scientific research into sound baths and singing bowls, there is evidence that they can have benefits. 

In some traditions of healing and spirituality, “they believe it’s connected to the energy system – the chakras – that the sound waves and vibrations interact with those body’s energy centers,” she said. In terms of Western medicine, “that’s not a scientific view of how a physician would look at that.” However, “we do know that they’re clinically effective,” she said, referencing research that indicates that after using singing bowls, participants have had a reduction in tension and an increase in sense of well being. Studies have shown physiological effects on heart rate and blood pressure, she said, as well as emotional benefits. 

“People clearly feel better, so there is a physiological effect, we just don’t absolutely know what happens to the brain,” she said. 

While the practice of sound healing is not new, Kogon said sound baths seem to have gained popularity in the wellness world lately. “We’re in a sound bath wave,” she said. 

Like other forms of meditation, sound baths can help people get into a state of rest, by facilitating slower, deeper breathing and a focus on the auditory stimulus. 

“A lot of people think too much. If you can shift your focus to a visualization or music or a resonant sound from a bowl, then you can relax,” she said. “I notice in my work that people, if they shift their thinking in a different state of consciousness, they either relax or get activated in a positive way.” 

Future research may reveal more about the physiological effects of sound baths (and other sound-healing techniques such as the use of binaural beats).

“Anything that relaxes people, that’s wonderful. If we ever find out how this stuff works, wonderful as well,” she said. “You have accomplished something good even if we never find out how it works.”

Tanja Vierra, who attended Zelada’s December sound bath workshop, estimated that she’s taken part in more than 20 sound bath events so far. 

“I do sound baths regularly at all different spaces and places, just because I really like the different energies that different healers give,” she said, adding that it was her second time working with Zelada at Little Green. 

“I really like her energy. She’s just somebody that I feel very easily connected to and the space is great here too,” she said, of the greenery-filled venue. 

Vierra’s first sound bath, at a local winery, was a bit of an overwhelming experience, possibly due to the acoustics in the cavernous space. 

“The sound was just really intense and it was almost a little too much, and I sort of thought I didn’t like it,” she recalled. But since then she’s continued to seek out sound baths – at retreats, yoga studios and “just wherever I can find one that just sounds like it’s cool.” 

What made her try again? 

“I just keep coming back to it because I feel like it always presents itself at a time when I need it somehow – either spiritually or physically or however I need to process what’s going on in my life,” she said. “It’s always a sense of calm and connection. 

“I think it’s a really powerful way to, just, get to your deepest part of yourself, without having to, you know, work too hard,” she said with a laugh. “Because you really are just kind of laying there and letting it happen.”

Melissa Zelada’s next sound-bath meditation session takes place Jan. 12, 5:30-8:30 p.m., at Little Green, 1101 Main St., Redwood City. More information is available at eventbrite.com/e/sound-bath-meditation-chakra-series-root-chakra-workshop-tickets-1111832854999?aff=erelexpmlt. 

Julie Kalua’s next singing bowl workshop takes place Jan. 17, 7-8:30 p.m., at East West Bookshop, 324 Castro St., Mountain View. More information is available at eastwestbooks.org/workshops. 

— Anna Hoch-Kenney contributed additional reporting to this story.

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