Sound Healing As A Love Story
Nearly seven years ago, my husband bought me a harmonium for my 50th birthday.
It was a gift I didn’t know I wanted or needed.
He had heard me talk about the harmonium in my yoga classes, as something that changed me, and music and sound are “a special interest” of his.
If you’re neurodivergent—or love someone who is—you know special interests aren’t casual. They’re what you LOVE. They’re where your attention becomes devotion and where your nervous system finds steadiness.
His gift wasn’t just thoughtful. It was intimate.
It was him saying I see you in the language he speaks best.
Nicole and the medicine of sound
Nicole was my yoga teacher for many years during the time I became a yoga teacher myself.
She played “Om Namah Shivaya” and “Amazing Grace” on her harmonium almost every single class.
When she played, the sound was stunningly beautiful.
It was one of the only times I could bypass the part of me that wanted to analyze and control the world.
Her harmonium playing magically always brought me out of my noisy brain and back into my body. It brought me a kind of calm that was not accessible anywhere else.
Nicole volunteered to teach me how to play my harmonium a few months after my birthday. She was that kind of person. And then, within a year, she died of ovarian cancer.
My grief about her death hasn’t lightened enough yet to play the harmonium myself yet.
But the bridge she and her harmonium offered has grown into something incredible. The journey of the harmonium has grown even more powerful, healing, and connecting with my husband, playing it for me during sound baths at Nicasio Creek Farm retreats.
Together, we share Nicole's gift and this healing tool with hundreds of physicians every year.
Why can’t physicians relax?
Physicians have been trained to live in a constant sympathomimetic storm: holding, managing, anticipating, deciding, and carrying.
Our inability to relax isn’t a mindset problem. It’s physiology. Over time, our nervous systems have forgotten how to downshift.
Sound healing and the harmonium are a path back - one of the quickest doorways I know.
Sound is vibration. Frequency. Resonance.
It meets you where you are—without requiring you to understand, analyze, or figure anything out. It allows somatic softening in people who struggle to access it any other way.
Retreats and Sound healing as a love story
Retreats are our version of "I see you."
Soundhealing is not a performance. It is an offering of care, healing, and connection. It is part of a larger nervous system experience — mindful yoga to open the body, coaching to clear the mind, nature to widen perspective, community to co-regulate, and food to nourish you from the inside out.
I have watched women physicians—who struggle to relax anywhere else—melt into stillness during sound healing.
Once you’ve felt that, you can’t unknow it.