When SOUND BECOMES STILLNESS AND STILLNESS BECOMES RENEWAL
4 min read
There are moments in life that invite a deeper kind of surrender. When the mind softens, time dissolves and the body remembers what it is to rest.
For me, one of these moments came as the beautiful conclusion of my Gong Practitioner course with the amazing Gong Goddess Sheila Whittaker. We held an all-night gong Puja.
The hall had been lovingly cleansed with sage. As we gathered we all connected with the space and many of us pulled oracle cards. The space was transformed. Eight gongs arranged in a square in the centre of the hall, with sheepskin rugs in the middle and soft twinkling lights around the bottom of the gongs. Our beds formed a gentle circle around it.
From the moment I entered the room the energy had such a positive presence. The beautiful Danielle North sang mantras and then Sheila opened the Puja with the first hour of playing. I was taken away.
My turn to play was at 2am. The sound wasn’t something I was creating, it was something moving through me. The gongs sounded totally different than I have ever heard them before. The sound felt magnified by the presence of so many individuals honouring the sacred space, presence and intention. A powerful constellation of people and gongs. Everyone and every gong held their own personality and presence, yet together we sang as one.
It felt such a privilege that three of my own gongs were part of the circle. Resonating not just through my hands but through the hands of everyone who played throughout the night. That shared exchange of energy felt profoundly special, as though their frequencies were being blessed, expanded and woven into the collective sound forever.
As the sound of the gongs faded there was silence. A deep, resonant silence that seemed to hum with everything that the night had carried. It wasn’t empty, it was full. Full of clarity, integration and alignment. The silence distilled the experience. It was as though the vibration had woven itself through every layer of being, and now, in stillness, everything could settle into harmony.
Just as the first light of morning arrived a cockerel crowed, clear, certain and perfectly timed. It felt like the Earth herself acknowledging the balance restored, a gentle call to awaken renewed. Everything in that moment felt aligned.
The timing felt potent. The Puja was just as we were leading up to Pluto going direct into Aquarius. A planetary moment of transformation truth and collective evolution. The air carried that feeling of rebirth, as though we were all quietly aligning to a new frequency.
With autumn, the season of shedding and renewal, just like the trees release their leaves, the Puja felt like a chance to release the energetic weight I no longer needed, to clear space for something lighter, freer and more aligned.
Gong Puja
The energy of our Puja will stay with me always and will carry on in the gongs in their tone, a shared imprint of devotion, unity and sound.
When morning came I felt newer. Grounded, nurtured, connected. Every call seemed juiced up, alive, sparkling. An inner sense of peace and knowing all is and will be well.
The greatest lesson the gongs continue to teach me is the power of surrender. To let go of effort, expectation and the need to understand. To trust vibration to do its work. Sound travels through the body, into the places that words cannot reach.
Surrender isn’t about giving up. It is about opening up, to flow, to feeling, to faith in the intelligence of energy itself.
That night reminded me that healing unfolds when we rest, soften and let ourselves be held by the vibration and let the body remember its own rhythm.