The first thing I heard was the door upstairs. Then someone walked across the floor.
Oh my God, I thought.
I was in the middle of playing a sound bath on Sunday morning. Something was being moved around above us. A phone rang and a woman answered. Through the ceiling she sounded like the teacher in Peanuts. I couldn’t make out a word, but I could hear the part of her voice that said she was helping a customer.
Then came the footsteps on the stairs. A family of five was coming up for a photo shoot. Then the baby started crying. That was the sound I kept hearing, even after the other sounds had come and gone.
I played louder.
For a while it worked. Then a bowl would fade and I’d hear upstairs again.
Sunday mornings are usually quiet upstairs. My neighbors know when I’m playing, and we’ve agreed to give each other a heads-up if our schedules overlap. Sometimes we miss each other.
I don’t usually mind a little noise. Someone could stand outside the studio door and talk on the phone for five minutes, and I’d keep playing. On Sunday, I’d hear something end and think, okay, that’s it. Then the baby would start up again.
Eventually I stopped playing.
I asked everyone to take a moment to acknowledge the noise. I asked them to notice what was happening in their bodies and what their minds were doing. We took a few deep breaths together. If you feel the tension creeping back in, I said, take as many more breaths as you need.
Then I asked them to come back to the bowls. See if you can let the sound of the bowl sit right at the front of what you’re hearing.
I started playing again. The noise upstairs was still there. I moved from the bowls to the gongs sooner than I usually do. The gongs have more weight. I played the ocean drum, too. People like hearing that one.
When we finished, we stayed sitting for a while. A woman who’d come for the first time said she’d been wondering if it was like this all the time.
She told us she’d felt the tension building in her chest and in her throat. She took a breath and felt it ease. When it started to build again, she took another. Each time she felt herself settle a little deeper. Others said the noise had eventually blended into the background. Someone called it training for real life.
There was a part of it that could have been a sitcom. The baby would cry and the rest of the family would make little noises to try to soothe the baby. One of them kept making monkey noises. The more they tried to quiet things down, the more there was to hear. Upstairs and downstairs, we were all waiting for the same thing.
We were all still sitting there when people started laughing.