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Sound has been part of how I make sense of the world for as long as I can remember, though my relationship with it began with silence.
I grew up in a busy, noisy household and, even as a child, sought out quiet places of my own. Later I found the same thing in nature: sitting among trees or beside water, listening to wind, birds and the small sounds that surface once everything else quietens. Silence, I realised, was never really silent. There was always sound inside it, and sometimes moments when even that stopped. I had no therapeutic language for any of it. I only knew it changed how I felt.
Music came next. As a teenager I found I could use it to lift myself, settle myself, or let myself feel something more deeply. Later I spent several years working in and managing music venues, which gave me a different relationship with sound. Night after night I watched a strong repetitive beat change a room full of people. Rhythm was not simply being heard, it was being felt through the body, expressed through movement and experienced collectively.
Psychotherapy later gave me a framework for what I had already found intuitively. I have worked in counselling and psychotherapy since 2006, qualifying as a Gestalt counsellor and psychotherapist in 2008, with a background in Gestalt and Body Process Psychotherapy, clinical hypnotherapy and therapeutic supervision. Body Process work is strongly somatic, interested in sensation, breath, tension and what the body says before words arrive.
Bringing sound into that felt less like adding a new therapy than extending something I was already doing. I found the College of Sound Healing through gong baths, took Mike Barron’s sacred drumming course, and knew within days that I wanted to teach it.
