Let the Sound of the Bowls Wash Over Me

The bright, clean, healing energy of Adriana Barone was palpable from the moment she opened the door of her sunny space in North Haven. And as we passed the artworks in progress, the shelves lined with paint hues, and the precisely drawn Buddhas, to ascend to the upstairs sanctuary, I already felt more at ease.

It had been a stressful couple of months, and as Adriana eased me into one of the low armchairs, decadently strewn with cushions and Indian throws, I was open to what she had to offer. I didn’t exactly know what that was yet, but I was open to it.

She started by asking me what was going on in my life — and before I knew it, I was sharing my heart’s most tender desires. Clearly a master of holding space, Adriana listened attentively, asking probing questions, before concluding that she could help me to align.

That’s when she led me into the next room, a beautiful space with vaulted ceilings that let the sunlight pour in. And, at the helm of this space, 13 healing crystal bowls.

Adriana Barone leads group sessions for Sound Healing: She will lay out a dozen or so mats for a group and play the healing bowls as they lie on their mats and allow the sound to penetrate them.

“The body experiences a kind of activation in response to the sound,” Barone explained to me later. “If you think about putting water in a singing bowl and playing it, the water will start moving, and will even jump around. We humans are 70 percent water — so we get movement within all the molecules and cells in our bodies. And the acoustics of the room amplify the sound of the bowls, so it really vibrates through your whole body in my space.”

On this lucky day, I got to experience what Barone would provide in a private session.

After our conversation, I settled onto a massage table. She started beside me, with one hand under my shoulder blades and the other under my hips.

“I want you to allow yourself to be held,” she said, and I started to settle back into her hands. She directed me to let my heart soften and release, that those heart’s desires that were so eagerly expressed were actually pressing my chest forward.

Through subtle surrenders, I started to allow my chest to sink back into her hand, into the support beneath me.

She went over to the healing bowls, and I was already breathing more slowly and steadily. But as the sound of first one, and then another bowl, began to fill the room, it also seemed to absorb into my own bones. The harmonies and the dissonances stirred up energy inside me that felt in one moment stressful and then, in the following, deeply grounding.

I kept coming back to her direction, to allow myself to be held. Every desire, every hope, every dream that bubbled up in my heart was acknowledged, and then quieted. The vibrating, undulating sound was like an ocean washing over me again and again. And each time I came up for air, thinking I had come to some kind of conclusion, another wave washed over me.

It’s this constant rise and fall that brings such a healing quality to sound: With the rise, the nervous system kicks into higher gear, wondering what’s next, excited. With the fall, it’s a return to being held, this time deeper, quieter, more completely.

So, there I was — the ambition, the desire, the dreams — all rising to a near frenzied pitch, and then the depth of the bowls, the constancy of their hum, just holding me, holding me, holding me.

Again and again, my mind wandered to the things I needed to do to get to the place I want to be, and, again and again, the sound of the bowls called me back to being held in this moment, to the fact that I am already there.

“I was playing,” Adriana said after I had emerged from the trance of the experience. “And it clicked, and I felt, ‘This is for her.’ This is where I should be.”

She pointed to the largest bowls. “These bowls are powerful. This experience was about depth, and awakening to your own power.”

The way she talks about playing the bowls, it almost sounds like the bowls are playing her. “After 30 years of energy healing, I have learned to let the energy pass through me. It’s not me.”

She brings that sensibility to playing the bowls. “I play guided by intuition,” she said. “I have gotten very adept at getting out of the way.”

It’s in that space that she created that I was able to receive the fullness of the sound vibrations, from the crown of my head to the balls of my feet: cleansing, clearing waves washing over me.

Adriana Barone has found that people ask for her sound healing more and more — she offers a weekly session on the beautiful grounds of LongHouse Reserve each Saturday morning, as well as group sessions in her home, occasional Sound Baths at The Church in Sag Harbor, and private, couples, and group sessions in her healing space in North Haven.

To learn more, go to her website, www.adrianabarone.com.