About Amanda: My story on becoming a sound bath practitioner and creating my training.
Before I was a sound bath practitioner… before I ever held a gong in my hands… I was a hairstylist. I’ve been self-employed since I was 21 years old. I’ve always taken the nontraditional path. I went to beauty school at 16 years old and received my Cosmetology license at 18. I worked in salons in Washington state then moved back to California where I worked in a rock-and-roll barbershop for a year before running head first into opening my own salon suite at 21 years old. For the next fifteen years, I built a successful business behind the chair.
Around 2015, I felt myself fall out of love with doing hair. I had reached the top of the metaphorical mountain in that career and felt I had achieved what I set out to achieve. Yet something inside me was restless. That was the same year, I went to my first sound bath. I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t even understand what it was but when the practitioner walked on stage to introduce herself, I had the strangest, most overwhelming knowing. I felt my inner voice say “I am supposed to be doing that.” It made no sense to me at the time. I was terrified of public speaking, had no musical training and at that point had never even touched a crystal bowl. I pushed the thought away immediately. But the feeling never left.
Grief, Burnout, & The Thread That Wouldn’t Let Go
Over the next few years, I searched for the path I was meant to be on. I felt intuitively that I was meant to be doing something else, but I couldn’t name it. Then in 2017, I unexpectedly lost my Dad. He was an acupuncturist, natural healer, and musician.
When I would visit him in Washington I looked forward to receiving treatments from him which were always a mix of acupuncture, crystals and intuitive healing. One of my favorite memories as a child was asking him to play the wooden flute while I closed my eyes and drifted away. As my interest in sound healing began, we would talk about sound healing instruments we dreamed of owning. I distinctly remember one phone call where I told him about the gong baths I was attending and we discussed how we both wished to own a gong one day. My Dad never got to see me pursue this path. It happened several years after he passed. So when I bought my first gong, I opened the box and thought to myself, “Look Dad… I did it. I finally got a gong.”
When I play my instruments now, I feel him with me.
His abrupt and unexpected passing changed everything for me. It shifted my health, my work, my relationships. I even began taking college courses thinking I might follow his path into acupuncture. At the time, while deep in my grief, I thought that made perfect sense but I quickly realized that didn’t feel quite right either. I tried reshaping my hairstylist career thinking that could be the answer. I adjusted my schedule. I let clients go. I brought intuitive readings, breathwork and crystal bowls into the salon and still, that thread kept tugging.
2020: The Year That Everything Changed
In 2020, salons in Los Angeles were ordered to shut down due to the pandemic. What most of us thought would be a two-week pause turned into one of the most difficult seasons of my life. At first I felt relief and maybe even a little excitement that I didn’t have to work in the salon because something outside of me had forced me to stop. Then the person I had built a life with for over ten years unexpectedly exited my life and I was forced to face the grief and trauma that unfolded as a result. I leaned heavily into practicing my instruments and honoring the time and space I had to myself to process everything.
I had recently purchased a small pink crystal bowl that I used in the salon. Then, during lockdown, I bought a few more and began practicing daily. As the summer of 2020 began, the restrictions in Los Angeles had started to shift, allowing for small outdoor gatherings. I started offering outdoor sessions to my friends in their backyards and in parks hoping to support people processing the fear and grief resulting from the ongoing pandemic. Then the teacher whose sound baths I had been attending regularly for 5 years announced an outdoor training. I signed up immediately. That two-day, in-person certification marked the formal beginning of my professional practice. But the truth is, it felt like a remembering more than a beginning.
After certification, I assisted in public sound baths and practitioner training cohorts hosted by that teacher for over 6 months. At the same time, I quickly began to co-create alongside yin yoga classes with my favorite local yoga studio and facilitated in wellness spas and studios throughout Los Angeles. The following year, I completed a twelve-week musical mentorship that deepened my technical skill and strengthened my confidence as a facilitator. And somewhere in all of that, something unexpected began to happen. People started approaching me after sound baths asking if I offered trainings. Caught off guard and a little shocked, I would laugh and say, “No! I just started doing this.” But they kept asking.
I started to notice a pattern of people asking the same things, such as: “How long have you been doing this?” and “Do you have a training? I want to learn from you!” Not only was I surprised to hear this after feeling as I was just getting started but I’d also never seen myself as someone that would be a teacher of any subject. I didn’t think I was ready and I didn’t think I was ‘enough’. Then about a year into my practice, after weekly facilitation, assisting my teacher and holding hundreds of in-person sessions, my sister asked me to teach an online training to her esthetic students. It was just an introduction to instruments and how to use them in treatments yet every part of me wanted to say no and run and hide. Instead, I said yes and I did it scared and unsure of myself.
To my surprise it felt… natural. easy and fun! Like something I had always known how to do. Shortly after, I began creating my own practitioner training.
Why My Training Exists
My training was born from the discomfort I felt as a highly sensitive person in healing spaces that lacked trauma awareness and the desire to put something out into the world that made a difference. Although it’s always felt like the path to sound bath facilitation and teaching chose me, I now see the thread had been there since I was a child. Since my Dad’s flute and the first time I closed my eyes and drifted away in sound. Although I experienced real gaps in my early training and in many healing spaces I attended, they helped me clarify what I wanted to offer. They ultimately helped me to understand what I was passionate about and what type of teacher I wanted to be.
After finally realized how dysregulated my own nervous system had been for years and having to face a life that wasn’t unfolding as I had planned, I began studying trauma, stress physiology, and nervous system science more deeply. I saw clearly how many healing spaces (even well-intentioned ones) lacked awareness around pacing, consent, overwhelm, sensitivity and regulation. Some spaces labeled “healing” felt intense, overstimulating and destabilizing to me. I knew there had to be another way.
I hold certification in Comprehensive Trauma-Informed Yoga through Transcending Trauma with Yoga, and my continued study has been shaped by trauma education and principles drawn from polyvagal theory and nervous system regulation.
My approach is intentionally grounded in:
Nervous system awareness
Ethical facilitation
Relational safety
Musical integrity
Clear scope of practice
I do not teach trauma processing. I teach responsible facilitation. I firmly believe and know from first hand experience that a sound bath can help to regulate the nervous system but it can also overwhelm it if applied without discernment and proper training. My work prioritizes safety and avoiding overwhelm or re-traumatization.
The Philosophy Behind My Practitioner Training
My practitioner training is one-on-one because that’s how I believe this work should be learned. I’ve spent nearly two decades self-employed. I understand entrepreneurship. I understand burnout. I understand what it means to build something from nothing. I wanted my training to go beyond learning to play crystal bowls or gongs and have a focus on trauma informed facilitation. I wanted it to be a safe experience for other highly sensitive people who don’t thrive in group trainings or simply find it too overwhelming. I created this training because I wanted to share what I wish I had known earlier. I wanted to blend musical technique with nervous system literacy. I wanted practitioners to feel confident, ethical, and grounded and I wanted sensitivity to be honored rather than bypassed.
And if I’m being honest… I never chased being a teacher. Teaching kept finding me. Sound healing felt like it chose me but teaching felt like it chose me even more. Now 6 years into this path, I am so glad I chose to ignore my fears and instead had the courage to step into the unknown while allowing myself to learn and grow along the way.
If you feel that same quiet knowing, the one that doesn’t make logical sense but won’t leave you alone… I see you.
This training exists for the practitioner who wants depth. For the one who cares about safety and honoring sensitivity of the self and others.
For the one who knows healing spaces can be powerful and wants to hold them responsibly.
If that’s you, I would be honored to walk alongside you.
