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The eye of the hurricane
GWEN DE JONG (1971) is one of the three people who make up Spirit Connection. They give workshops and massages with singing bowls and gongs. 'The vibrations of a gong literally give relief.'
'I didn't do anything with music; I was an administrative assistant in a big office. Until I met my current husband Harry, with whom I would later found Spirit Connection. He was a musician and through him I discovered what music can do to you. He let me hear things and I sank into the sounds.I discovered that I can easily listen without judgement, experience sound, experience it.
Together we went to Nepal where we learned about singing bowls and gongs, and also how to work with them, we both found that very interesting. At that time I was very much looking, but I didn't even know exactly what for. I was looking for myself, I know now, and the sound of the gong really allowed me to go inside. That sound does something to you on a level I didn't know: it's a very direct way of getting to yourself. To the 'I', to the silence that you essentially are. It may sound crazy to find silence in sound, but you can think of the sound of a gong as a hurricane: it blows everything away, but in the middle it is windless. When you get through the cacophony of sound, you get to silence.
We started taking training courses, including in America. And now we give training sessions ourselves, and concerts and individual sessions with the gong. Even if I give a concert for someone else, I experience the effect myself just as well. You get a bit detached from all the thoughts, from the feelings, the emotionally charged, the sensations in your body. It appears to you, but you yourself are just the silent observer. Without judgement, without importance. That makes me feel peaceful. There is the chaos of sounds, but within it or through it, there is the peace that desires nothing, that needs nothing. Of course I still hear the world, the truck driving by, the neighbour coughing. But the gongs put you in a state where you are no longer a participant in it, but a spectator. I find that fascinating.
What I notice, and also hear from clients: the more often you work with the singing bowls or the gong, the faster you are back in that detached state. It anchors itself in you. In everyday life, too, you become more quickly aware of conditioning, all the layers we put on everything. As if reality becomes more true. Thanks to the gong, I am more conscious in life. It makes sense. Gongs and singing bowls and other overtone instruments vibrate conditionings loose. It literally gives us some relief. The gong in particular is a unique instrument: a trillion harmonic vibrations are created with each beat. They fill space and press against your body and against your thoughts. These dissolve automatically, you cannot escape them. I have a saying hanging in my room by Sufi mystic Hazrat Inayat Khan: 'Everything has come about through the power of sound'. From sound, form arises. So through sound we can also return to the formless. To silence.'
Text and photography: Happinez
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