At certain points, I’ve been obsessed with making things. I once imagined making everything in our home, from the dishes to the art on the walls. Even the home itself. I hadn’t thought much about how much I would miss having other people’s work around me. These days, when I buy something, I want to feel that someone cared about making it.

If you’ve spent time with me at Yoga Sound Bath, you know how much I value the experience of listening. In a sound bath, we make space to notice what’s happening around us and within us. Making music with my boys has given me another way to explore that same kind of attention.

I was in Dayton visiting my parents, who have a farm outside the city. My oldest brother had brought me to meet a friend of his, a woman I’d wanted to meet for years. We were also there for a sound bath. The instruments were set up in the entry room, but first we went into the living room to talk.

People often tell me they fell asleep during a sound bath.

Sometimes they do. I can hear the change in their breathing, and occasionally someone snores. But other times, someone will sit up afterward and tell me they were asleep for almost the entire hour, even though I hadn't noticed any of the usual signs of sleep.

I've always found this curious.

I knew this piece. I had spent months making it. I had performed it only a few hours earlier.

But I couldn’t find the piece I remembered inside the one I was hearing.

At some point Finn looked out at the field.

He remembered the field from our other visits. The first time there had been almost nothing there. Then everything had grown really tall.

“And now it’s all dying,” he said.

I’ve heard people talk about how quickly life goes for as long as I can remember.

When I was younger, older people said it to me.

Now people say it about my boys.

Enjoy this.

It goes so fast.

Before you know it, they’ll be grown.

I don’t know when we begin to become conscious of ourselves being watched. When we start wondering how we look. When we start deciding whether to move instead of simply moving.

Maybe it doesn’t happen all at once.

Maybe it is a long accumulation of tiny corrections.

I would wake up and there was this stretch of time before I had to become whoever I needed to be that day.

Then I had children.

And without really noticing it, mornings disappeared.

I can turn something over endlessly. I can make a very convincing argument for one direction and, given another twenty minutes, make an equally convincing argument for the opposite direction.

I don’t think I’m unusual in this.

At first, a singing bowl may simply sound like a singing bowl. A gong sounds like a gong. Silence sounds like silence.

But sustained attention begins to reveal differences.

The question isn't usually, What should I play next?

It's closer to, What just happened?

A gong opens into a sound I wasn't expecting.

Two bowls interact and create something between them.

A tone hangs in the room longer than I thought it would.

Something becomes unsettled.

Something settles.

And I notice my response.

Interoception, pronounced in-ter-uh-SEP-shun, is a term for the sensing and processing of signals originating within the body.

Cambridge Dictionary describes interoception as the awareness of what is happening within your body and gives examples including hunger, thirst, temperature, tense muscles, and a racing heart.

The National Institutes of Health uses an even broader definition. Interoception includes the processes through which we sense, interpret, integrate, and regulate signals from within ourselves.

That last definition really interests me.

The vibration can feel enormous. When it moves easily through the body, there can be an extraordinary sense of being surrounded by sound. But people sometimes describe certain areas as feeling almost pressurized, as though the vibration has arrived somewhere it can't quite move through.

By morning, something was very wrong.

I was going about my morning, but it felt like I was watching everything on a screen.

I could reach out and touch something, but I didn't feel like I was actually participating in touching it.

My emotions were flat.

Sensation was numb.

It was almost as though the physical sensation of being alive was no longer present.

I could function.

I could walk around. I could think. I could do things.

I just didn't feel connected to any of them.

Maybe sometimes I create the conditions for it.

Get there.

Finish this.

Start that.

Use the time.

Catch the opening.

Do one more thing.

None of those decisions seems particularly significant.

But together they create a way of moving through the world.

At what point does honoring a tradition become repeating its container?

And when is choosing a larger pot not a rejection of what was handed down, but a way of helping it continue?

I think about this whenever I encounter a practice with a history much older than my own.

There is a traditional meaning. There is a form. There is a lineage that deserves respect.

But there is also the question of what happens when that practice enters another life.

I currently own four Raven Sounds tuned gongs, along with gongs from Paiste, Grotta Sonora, and Meinl. I use them as both a musician and a sound practitioner, in private sessions, group sound baths, and my own musical exploration.

Each maker has a distinct sonic identity. This is not an attempt to determine which brand is best. It is an account of how the Raven Sounds gongs behave musically and where they fit within a broader collection.

The breakthrough didn’t happen because I finally perfected those old ideas.

It happened because I stopped insisting they remain the point of the painting.

I knew changing my body somehow changed my thinking.

But looking back, I realize I interpreted that relationship backwards.

I thought I was finding tricks to improve my mind.

I never stopped to consider that my mind wasn’t operating independently in the first place.