I went to a sound bath so you don't have to

I was on one of those sprees where you click a link that leads to another link that leads to another link and you find yourself falling down an internet black hole that often ends in instagram photos of men wearing cat slippers or reading impassioned blog posts about Lena Dunham's boobs. This time, though, I was reading about sound baths. It sounded like an interesting concept, and I took to Google to see if we had them in New York.

Whether you live in New York or not, you know as well as I do that if you read about a weird thing, it exists here. I knew I had to try it.

A sound bath is, according to the sound healer I saw, an opportunity for "deep listening." Both of sounds that are there, and of sounds that aren't (I don't understand that last part either).

I walked into the entryway, removed my coat and shoes, and took a seat in the sound bath room. It had carpeted floors with pillows strewn around and a whole set of differently sized bowls in the middle. I made a comment to the girl on the pillow next to me about how we were wearing essentially the same outfit - fuschia pants with black and gray striped shirts. Besties! We kept talking, and her friend and his dad - or, I suppose, it could have just been a much older male friend - joined in when I mentioned my Jewish place of employment. Because if there's one thing Jews like to talk about, it's Jew stuff.

Before we began, our leader passed around a bottle of lavender essential oil, which is supposedly good for relaxation. She said to massage it into the soles of our feet, and also to just smell it from our hands.

I massaged that shit into my feet and it felt amazing because, hello, fragrant foot massage! And then I put my hands up to my face and I got a big ol' whiff of lavender and feet stank because I had been walking around in my smelly TOMS all day. So that was pleasant.

Finally it was time to get started. We were told that this would be a special sound bath because they had a reiki...person (?) there to work with us. To be honest, I have no idea what reiki is, even now, after having it done to me.

We all stretched out on the floor, and our sound bath specialist started making all sorts of crazy noises using the bowls, which were made of rose quartz. Going into this experience I had this idea like, "So she's going to clang the bowls and there's going to be a BING BONG kind of deal and what is even the point of this?" But let me tell you, friends. The sounds that those bowls created were the weirdest things I have ever heard in my life.

For the first ten minutes I had to keep my eyes open because the bowls' sound vibrations felt like they were coming from INSIDE MY BRAIN and it was incredibly disorienting. I thought that something had gone horribly wrong and that the first 5 seconds of the sound bath had fucked up my ears so much that my brain was buzzing and I was going to hear alien hum noises for the rest of my life. SPOILER ALERT: this did not happen and I got used to it.

So the buzzing continued, along with the very melodic BING BONGs that I had predicted (high five, self). Then the reiki person started going around. She would put her hands very gently on your head for about a minute, and it was supposed to do something with your energy and the energy in the room.

Can anyone tell me what the deal is with energy in rooms and how I'm supposed to feel it? Serious question. I don't know what it is about energy that I don't get but I have no idea how to tap into that. I would like to learn though because maybe then I would care about feng shui, or whatever. Anyway. When the reiki lady put her hands on my head, I felt my muscles relax a lot. It is entirely possible (nay, likely) that I was doing this on purpose because what is the purpose of an old lady quietly resting her hands on you if not to feel something?

So the bing bongs and the crazy "the call is coming from inside the house" head vibrations continued for awhile, and then our sound bath leader got up to go around to everyone with tuning forks. She had explained earlier that they were different tones, and holding them up to each ear would do interesting - but positive - things to our brains. And then she would wave the tuning forks around our bodies to - wait for it - clear our energy fields. So even with my eyes closed I could sense her waving her hands back and forth in front of my face, and I will not pretend that I understood what the hell my energy was doing at that moment. But I still enjoy the mental image of me lying on the ground in my fuschia pants and having someone wave tuning forks around my lifeless body like some kind of deranged air traffic controller.

At some point, multiple people fell asleep, so the snoring added a nice little addition to our sound bathing. Bing bong CHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH SNORT buzzzzzzz. Something like that.

The last part of the bath was for us to work with vibrations from the inside. We sat up, and the leader played some kind of weird instrument while we all experimented with various vowel sounds. So I, along with everyone else, spent about 15 minutes sitting with closed eyes, crossed legs, and one hand over our hearts, going:

"AaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEOhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAyyyyyyyyyyyyIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII"

And then it was over.

We left the room, and in the foyer there was some tea that one of the participants had provided, so we sat around drinking tea and comparing experiences. My outfit twin and new Jew friends were super into the reiki and the tuning forks, so they are clearly both lightyears ahead of me as far as detecting energy is concerned. I will say though that the mood after the sound bath was super light and relaxed and happy and I could have sworn that maybe I was picking up on the energy in the room and not just my own mood. But who even knows.

I left the sound bath completely relaxed, which was more or less ruined by the fact that it was cold outside and I somehow managed to walk in the wrong direction for 10 minutes before even realizing what I was doing. But overall it was an interesting experience. I would be tempted to go back, mostly to see my sound bath besties again, who swore they would return each month. But I'm not 100% sure if I want to spend another twenty dollars for an hour and a half of bing bongs.