BY TATIANA VERTIZ
Ohmmmm Ohmmmm Ohmmmm… That or any other meditation mantra might be what you think of in terms of sound healing. Or maybe your idea of sound healing is singing in the shower or at the top of your lungs in your car or at a concert with friends. In which case, you wouldn’t be mistaken! Music/sound does heal! Some tunes and lyrics just strike the right chord within us and give us tremendous emotional relief or uplift us.
The type of sound healing I’m going to focus on is called sound bowl or Tibetan bowl healing. It is ultra-powerful because the setting of the therapy and vibrations get you in a deep meditative state where the frequencies are able to penetrate at a cellular level without your mind (or lyrics) intervening.
I met Javier for my first ever session six weeks ago and have since done 5 sessions. Walking into his studio, you feel a relaxed vibe and it feels both comforting and protective that a massive Ganesh tapestry hangs on the back wall behind all his Tibetan bowls.
My first four sessions were one week apart, as he recommends, and the last one was two weeks from the previous. After the first session, I immediately felt less anxiety and had a more positive outlook. Although you can say this was a placebo because I believed in the therapy, something strange happened next. Almost exactly 3 days after each session, I began getting gnarly stomach pains and some nausea. Javier calls these effects a “curative crisis”. Healing isn’t necessarily pleasant and easy. My gut was telling me something and Javier aided me with some in-depth information on what stomach pains tell us about our emotional and mental state.
Naturally, I backed off two weeks and then something in me shifted and I began to feel incredibly empowered and positive. Suddenly, I was ready for another one. They were getting progressively more intense in the sense that I was feeling it at a deeper and deeper level. You realize you’re there at the studio laying on the ground but one part of you goes on a profound trip-like experience that I’d liken to a powerful meditation or hypnosis. At one point in my 5th session, I felt like a wave of the sounds, or what you could describe as an “energy”, from the top of my head down to my toes, rolling and then zooming off!
A few hours after that session, my creative juices were just flowing and I launched some personal projects with absolute ease and confidence.
Javier has been in Los Cabos since November 2020 after being a sound bowl therapist in Mexico City, Chiapas, Merida, & Guatemala.
The first time he came in contact with sound bowls was at the young age of 12. One of his friends had received a bowl as a gift from India. Javier says that when he held it in his hand and made it play a sound, the connection was very intense — so much so that he felt the urge to steal his friend’s bowl on several occasions to play with it at home and then return it without him noticing.
Many years later, at age 30, Javier’s mother gifted him his first two sound bowls. He began to use them on himself and his family. At the same time, he had also started experimenting with plant medicines like ayahuasca, which woke him up to this more meaningful purpose in life as a healer through a curative process of introspection and liberation from everything he had accumulated since he was a child.
After training under another sound healer, he began working with four bowls (nowadays Javier uses up to 25 bowls!) giving free group or personal sessions and continuing his restaurant business. It wasn’t long before he decided to honor this calling and be a full-time healer, receiving his certification from the Spanish Institute of Sound therapy.
Diving into the history of sound bowls, Javier shared that it’s a bit of a mystery as there are no written accounts on the first use/origins. What is documented is their use as eating bowls and especially to feed pregnant women shortly after giving birth as it was believed they transmitted energy that helped the mothers recover quicker. They were also used to pray.
Tibetan bowls didn’t become mainstream until their use in England and Germany in the last century as a healing mechanism for the mind, body, and spirit.
Now in Cabo, Javier’s business has taken off as word of mouth spreads of the healing and general positive effects of his sound bowl therapy. He works from his studio in San Lucas and also does group sessions at various locations as requested.
We are lucky to have access to these ancient types of therapy since, even if you don’t believe, they will have an effect because they work at a frequency level independent of the thinking mind.
