When someone calls me a sound healer, I stumble. Not because I'm modest, and not because I'm precious about language. Because I genuinely don't think it's true — and in a field already swimming in overclaiming, I'd rather say the uncomfortable thing than ride a wagon I don't believe in.
So when people ask what I do, I usually say: I play bowls and sing. Which sounds, I'll admit, a little unsensational. But it's the truth of it.
The problem with "healer."
The word implies something specific. A healer is a person with a particular power — someone you seek out as an external resource, the way you might seek a medicine woman or a doctor, with the reasonable expectation that they will do something to you that results in you being better. The healer acts. You receive.
I don't believe that's what happens in a sound bath. I don't believe it's what happens anywhere, really.
We can only heal ourselves. That's not a deflection — it's the most empowering thing I know how to say. Whatever shifts during a sound journey, whatever releases or settles or surfaces, that's you. Your nervous system. Your willingness to be present. Your openness to the experience. I'm not doing that. I'm just showing up with bowls and a voice and an intention of wellness toward the people in the room.
There's a term for what the alternative looks like: spiritual materialism.1 The idea that you can acquire your way to wholeness — the right teacher, the right modality, the right healer — outsourcing the inner work to someone with a more impressive title. I understand the appeal. It's exhausting to be responsible for your own healing. But I can't in good conscience position myself as the solution to that exhaustion. It wouldn't be honest, and it wouldn't actually help you.
What I think sound actually does.
It creates conditions. That's the most precise way I can put it.
A well-played bowl — one with real character and sustain — gives your nervous system something to follow. It slows the breath. It interrupts the internal monologue that most of us mistake for thinking. It creates a kind of acoustic environment where something other than your usual mental noise gets a chance to surface.
What surfaces is yours. I didn't put it there. I just made it slightly easier to hear.
That's why I think of what I do as art rather than therapy. Art at its best does the same thing — it creates conditions for something in you to respond. A piece of music doesn't heal you. But it might reach something that needed reaching. A sound journey, done well, works the same way. I'm not your medicine woman. I'm closer to your guide — and even that feels like too much sometimes. Mostly I'm just someone who shows up, plays, and gets out of the way.
Why this matters for you.
If you've ever left a sound bath feeling like something shifted — something loosened, or settled, or became briefly clear — that was you. Not the bowls. Not the person playing them. You brought that capacity into the room. The sound just gave it somewhere to go.
Which means you don't need me, specifically. You need consistent access to something that can help create those conditions — whether that's a session, a practice of your own, or a bowl that lives in your home and reminds you to stop for 10 minutes.
That last part is actually why I started BlackCrow. Not to sell objects, but because I believe everyone deserves direct access to this — without needing to find the right healer, pay for the right retreat, or outsource their inner life to someone with an impressive Instagram.
A good bowl in your hands is you doing it yourself. Which is, if you ask me, exactly the point.
Ram Dass put it better than I can: "We are all just walking each other home." Well — maybe I'm not walking. I'm singing. But the destination is the same.
If you're looking for a bowl to start or deepen your own practice, I'm happy to help you find the right one. Contact me to start your inquiry.
1 Spiritual materialism is a term coined by the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche in his 1973 book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. He used it to describe the ego's tendency to co-opt spiritual practice as another form of self-improvement or status — accumulating teachers, experiences, and identities rather than genuinely surrendering them. It remains one of the more useful and honest critiques of modern wellness culture. ↩