After a gong bath last week, I was saying good bye to a friend. She said, almost to herself, I wish my whole life could be like the gong bath.
That got me thinking.
I started thinking about what happens when the session is over. I was then reminded of a culture shock moment I had after my very first session I gave in Switzerland.
It was December or 2019. For years, before that session, I had been giving sessions on the west coast of the USA.
The attendees of those US sessions behaved very different than their Swiss counterparts. At the end of a session, the Americans loved to talk about their experience. It was as if the session didn’t happen unless the people could describe it. Feedback at the end of sessions often went on for 1/2 an hour.
It was lovely in a way. The community of gong bath participants grew warmer and friendships were forged though those feedback sessions.
Without knowing differently, I naturally assumed the same sort of thing would happen when I finished that first session. Boy, was I in for a surprise! When I asked if anybody had any feedback they wished to share……………. there was nothing. Crickets. Silence.
No feedback at all!
I was surprised and even dejected. At dinner with my wife later, I wondered out loud if they hated it. She, a German, had more wisdom than me. She said it was just cultural. And, sure enough, most of those people came back again and again, so it wasn’t the gong bath. It was something else. Something ‘cultural.’
After a while I started to realize that as much as I enjoyed the verbal feedback sessions, the silence after a session was better. It was better for all of us, me included. For me after an hour of creating a deeply felt piece of gong music, I didn’t feel like then talking a whole bunch, or even listen to a bunch of words. I just wanted to be quiet. I already said what I had to say with the gongs.
For participants, I also noticed that the quiet was more natural, more organic, more gentle. I noticed that the session works on the participant long after the gongs have stopped playing. For this reason I started adding a chunk of time at the end of gong baths for people to be silent, alone with themselves ,before the ‘end of the session.’
Taking this idea further, to try to extend the magic of the gong bath to other parts of our lives, I propose these 7 simple actions anybody can take at the end of a session….or really any time for that matter.
These simple actions will ‘ground’ you, integrate your experience with your regular lives and even take you deeper into stillness, and spiritual realization.
Please try them and let me know how it goes.
One. Make Friends With Gravity
A gong bath can take you into sense of weightlessness, like being in outer space. Coming back to earth is important. The first force of the earth that every human and rock knows is gravity. This is the force we have known our whole lives. It is the force of being pulled down to earth.
When we connect with this force, it is a wonderful aid to our sanity and power.
It can help a person, any time and in any situation. If someone is overly mental or experiencing high emotions or even trauma, remembering the simple felt fact of gravity can be a wonderful grounding, calming, balancing force of healing. For a person who is coming off of a gong bath, reconnecting with gravity, intentionally directing focus to gravity, brings our bodies, minds and awareness back to the here and now. This can be powerfully revitalizing.
Practice: When laying on your mat, feel the heaviest part of your body. Feel how it naturally sinks down. That is gravity at work. Feel that sinking down. For a few minutes stay focused on this feeling. You may find yourself automatically breathing deeply and sighing into greater relaxation.
Two. Breath awareness
There is a saying, ‘Breath sweeps mind.’ The power of being aware of breathing is that breath is both conscious and unconscious. You can choose to breath and also breath happens automatically, by itself. When you are aware of breath, you are aware of the essence of your life. You are aware of what keeps the body alive, you are aware of your choice, and you are aware that things happen by themselves.
To stay aware of your breath for a few minutes after a gong bath, you use the clarity gained from a gong bath, to see your breathing and how it predominates any thoughts or emotions. It comes first and after a gong bath this is obvious.
As you leave the gong bath, your mind will naturally get busy again. This is ok. The key is to keep coming back to awareness of the breath. Every time your mind takes over and puts you in a trance, you learn to notice, ‘oh, I am lost in thought…’ and then, come back to awareness of breath, the power of your focus gets stronger.
So in this sense it is good for you to lose the meditation and then re-discover it….over and over again!
Three. Eat a little bit.
This one was recommended by one of myt gong students, Brigit. If you are feeling a little out of it after a gong bath, a little ‘spacey,’ a good idea is to eat a little bit. Eat with awareness. Taste what eat and even feel it going down into the body. This will bring you right back to the physical world. Like gravity, eating is a basic fact of animal life. I am sensing a theme in this list and that is that when a gong bath is over, we connect with the basic human facts of our existence as a way of integrating the space experience with the earth experience.
Four. Drink Water.
Like eating, drinking a glass of water will bring a person back to the familiar every day experience. But drinking water after a session is good for everybody! It is essential for all participants and the gong player also. So much energy, for lack of a better word, gets moved around through the vibrations in a session.
While I can’t prove that water clears the body of stuck stuff freed up in a gong bath, after many years of giving sessions, it absolutely feels that way. Drinking a nice glass of water always feels super refreshing and revitalizing after an hour of gongs.
Five. Walk Mindfully and Slowly
The great adventure writer Bruce Chatwin once said ‘Walking is my religion.’ That is how I feel also. Walking is such a basic movement, and we as humans have been doing it for quite a little while now. Our familiarity with walking can help us integrate the ordinary with the extraordinary. The basic movement of walking after session can serve to bring it all together.
Walking slowly, silently, with sensitivity, is a wonderful way to come back to this dimension. It doesn’t have to be a big walk either. 5 to 10 minutes is enough. Just make sure it is slow, silent and mindful, and stay off your phone while walking!
Six. Bring a Journal To a Gong Bath.
There is a reason people often have their best thoughts while in the shower, or when they just wake up in the morning. Greater relaxation brings out our most creative inspiration. It’s that simple.
A gong bath slows down the brain activity and the slower the brain, the easier it is for us to connect with the power of our creativity. There are writers who come to gong baths to get new ideas, or to get clear on problematic parts of stories. There are executives who come to gong baths for the purpose of solving thorny problems. People from all walks of life gain clarity and new ideas weekly.
This comes from how the brain works. The inventor Thomas Edison understood the role a relaxed body plays in invention.
He had used a practice that took advantage of the magical mind when it is between the states of sleeping and waking. Here is what Edison did: He would sit in a comfortable chair and place a journal and pencil in his lap. In his right hand, he would put a couple of steel ball bearings.
He would rotate these balls in his hand until he got drowsy and dosed off into sleep. As soon as he fell asleep, he would drop the balls which would crash on the floor and wake him. He would then grab his pencil and write the very first thoughts that occurred to him from his half awake, half asleep consciousness.
You could do something similar with a gong bath.
Anybody can take advantage of the effects of a gong bath with a journal. It may only take 2 or 3 minutes of writing after a session for some wonderful ideas, epiphanies, creative action items to come to the surface. Try it some time. Bring a journal and once the session is over just write the first things that come to you. Like Edison did.
Seven. Hold your space. Keep to yourself.
A gong bath is a precious opportunity to be intimately alone with yourself. This time and attention is valuable for everying that matters to us. Whatever you care deeply about benefits from you giving yourself time with you! If you give yourself an additional 10 or 15 minutes just with you, not talking, maybe sitting at a park bench or walking slowly down the street, or getting a coffee or even a glass of whine, whatever you choose to do, being alone gives you an opportunity for greater reflection and a deeply organic integration of the profound experience of a gong bath.
It is totally acceptable to not talk with anybody at the end of a session. Take advantage of this.