Unveiling the Mysteries of Sound Healing with Ashana

In this episode we get curious about:

• Ashana's Personal Experience with Nature and Sound
• The Role of Silence in Intuition
• Sound Healing Techniques
• The use of sound healing in indigenous cultures and ancient civilizations
• Practical Applications: How sound healing can help with mental, emotional, and physical well-being

Ashana's music played in this episode with permission: Cosmic Grace: Meditation with Crystal Singing Bowls Artist: Ashana, featuring Benjy Wertheimer

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=> Where to find Ashana:

Website: Relaxation, Meditation, & Sleep Music with Crystal Singing Bowls

Book: Crystal Singing Bowls: The Angelic Sound of Healing, Relaxation, and Spiritual Awakening

Gift: https://soundofashana.lpages.co/podcast-glhgift ==>Experience unprecedented levels of personal healing and transformation with the "Golden Light of Healing Guided Meditation" mp3, an excerpt from "Celestial Alignment for Healing":

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IG: Instagram (@soundofashana)

YouTube: Sound of Ashana

Apple Music: Ashana on Apple Music

=> Learn more about Laurin Wittig and Heartlight Wellness: Healing the light within you!

Bio: Laurin Wittig is an intuitive energy worker, Reiki Master, Shamanic practitioner, and the founder of HeartLight Wellness and the HeartLight Women’s Circles. She also hosts the Curiously Wise: Practical Spirituality in Action podcast, and is an award winning author.

Laurin’s non-traditional journey from poor health to robust wellbeing awakened her to her own healing gifts and sparked a passion to assist others to travel their paths with less pain, more joy, and a deeper understanding of themselves and the world around them.

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Credits:

Audio Engineer: Sam Wittig

Music: Where the Light Is by Lemon Music Studio

Photography & Design: Asha McLaughlin/Tej Art

Copyright 2024 Laurin Wittig

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If you’d like to know more about me, please visit my website Heartlightjoy.com. While you are there you can book a free call, join my newsletter, find out about energetic healing services, Heartlight Women’s Circles, and my novels. Links to the website, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIN are clickable in the show notes. I would greatly appreciate it if you would subscribe to Curiously Wise: Practical Spirituality in Action, and share it with a friend. This will help spread the information and the uplifting energy that is created in every episode. Thank you for joining me today and stay curious.

Interview Episode with Ashana

through practice. And then when the time comes and you know, you hear the voice and it goes, say yes to everything. And you go, okay. And then the doors go like this. And then you got to take the actions like, Oh yes, I will meet with this person. I will get them on the schedule. I will spend four hours with them on, on a video.

I will follow up with that. I will send them the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Laurin: hmm.

Laurin: Hello friends and welcome back to Curiously Wise, Practical Spirituality in Action. I'm Laurin Wittig, your host, and today I have a sound healer with me, Ashana. Let me tell you a little bit about her and then we'll officially welcome her on. Ashana is one of the premier healing music artists and new age vocalists of our time, weaving together soaring angelic vocals and the celestial sound of alchemy crystal singing bowls.

As a renowned master crystal artist, teacher, and sound healer, Ashana is an expert in the field of sound healing with crystal bowls, training students from all over the world in the art of applying crystalline sound to therapeutic and artistic healing modalities in her crystal bowl mastery program.

Ashana: totally did! Thank you so much for having me here, Laura, and it's really my delight, my pleasure.

Laurin: Yeah, the vibe is already, you know, kind of gotten high and fun and as we were getting ready for this. So it's, it's a joy as always when I have these wonderful guests on. So I'm really, really excited to talk to you today. I have 1 friend who is a sound healer and she was 1 of my very 1st guests almost 2 years ago when I 1st started this and we didn't have the sound really thing worked out very well.

And and so. I'm, I'm really happy to have you on because you know your stuff when it comes to things.

Ashana: We do our best. We're still learning.

Ashana: Yeah, they just announced the 2024 COBR, that's the Coalition of Visionary Resources Awards, and I think we won eight? Could be eight or nine of them. I can't remember. I hate to say this, but I lost count. Isn't that awful?

Laurin: awesome.

Ashana: It's awesome. Yes the, the book one which was really remarkable because we did an audio I did an audio version of the, the crystal singing bowls book, as well as a print version.

And that one best in media audio and visual and print for the year. I think best, best all around media. And then the music cosmic grace on the golden light of healing meditation, all one in their categories from gold to bronze, which is just delicious.

Laurin: Yes. Yes. Congratulations.

Ashana: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It

Ashana: You know, the, the invitation was there for us to submit. And so we submitted and I was kind of like, well, it'd be nice, you know, because the field is really big and there's lots of submissions yearly and I was just like, well, maybe we'll win 1, you know, just like.

My little, what do they call that? Tall puppy syndrome. You know, you don't let your head stand out too far. You know, that old story, right? And my assistant was just going, no, this is going to be awesome. And I'm like, going, okay,

Laurin: Well, congratulations

Ashana: and partying.

Laurin: Yeah. Yeah. So, so let's just start with how did you come to be a sound healer?

And so that was in and of itself, that was like a long arc of time because I was so identified. In music and, you know, quite honestly still am. But you know, when I was researching for the book, for the crystal singing bowls book, as I was writing it, I read the most beautiful thing, which I think completely changed my perspective on all of this, and [00:06:00] that was that in ancient Greece, and as in most cultures, the musicians were the healers. And that made me go, well, of course, now we're, we're in this place where sound healing is really trending and we have lots and lots and lots and lots of people that want to become sound healers. You know, it's the same way we had that big resurgence, not resurgence, but influx of yoga teachers coming in after Paramahansa Yogananda came in and he gave all of his teachings, he really was the one who, who ignited the, the, the yoga movement in the United States and West in, in Western culture, you know, others did, you As well before him Swami Vivekananda and of course other [00:07:00] people came in, but it was really Paramahansa Yogananda and that autobiography of a yogi that, you know, blew beautiful pranic breath on the flames and the fires of Eastern spirituality into, into the United States and into our Western culture.

And so there was a big arc of time where yoga was really slow going and then it just kind of. Gradually disseminated and caught on and caught on and caught on and all the, and now, you know, we have 8 bazillion kinds of different yogas and three yoga studios on every street corner practically. So the same thing now is happening with sound healing.

Sound healing was a nothing at that time. So a friend of mine called me up one day says, Oh, have you ever heard of a crystal singing ball? And I went, no, she goes, these are right up your reality. You should get one. I was like, Oh, okay. So I ordered one immediately that day site and sight unseen. I said, Oh, throat chakra.

Laurin: Mm hmm. Ha

Ashana: And I was like, and the second thought I had was immediately one day I'm going to put these into music. And three weeks later I had seven. Can you see I am a bowl hoarder.

And what you don't see are the eight therapeutic hearts that are on the other side. And I just bought a hang drum.

Laurin: Oh, I love hang drums.

So of course I took it out of the box this morning and I'm like, and he's like, stop, we would never have this interview right now. I would be back in the living room playing that thing.

Laurin: Love, love, love

Ashana: it's just, I know they're just absolutely delicious.

Laurin: And let me just interject here for just a second. For those who are not looking at this, she has, I can see 4 shelves basically filled with beautiful bowls. Most of them look crystal. There's at least 1 that looks metal. And she's apparently got a lot more on the other side of the room that I can't see.

Ashana: 115 in this room.

Laurin: Whoa.

Ashana: Yeah, there are 115 in this room. There's a whole wall

Laurin: And a handgun.

Ashana: see, and a hangdom, and eight therapy harps, and a whole bunch of tuning forks, and a crystal lyre, and a bunch of Tibetan bowls.

Laurin: Oh wow. You went all in

And I'd been recording. Writing songs and recording. And, you know, my, my career as a singer was, I was classically trained from the Manist College of Music in New York City, which is now part of the new school I sang [00:12:00] musical theater. I sang opera. I sang with symphony orchestras. I've sung, you know, you name it, I've pretty much done it.

And and then I was. When I met my bowls, I was a choral conductor and doing a children's music program, which actually was quite life changing for me. So meeting the bowls, it was like, oh, I come to this certain point where I knew I was completely done. Teaching children's music. I'd learned what I needed to learn.

I had one buyer and I took the, what came out of that selling the business. And I decided I was going to make my first album and I didn't have a producer. And I literally met my producer, Thomas Barkey, the day I closed my business. It was, I mean, we were literally at the bank that day, signing it over, here are the keys, and that, that evening I met Thomas.

I'm not exaggerating on the timing.

Laurin: The universe provides, doesn't it?

Ashana: was summer solstice,

Laurin: Oh, wow.

And I was just. Like letting go and I was in this flow and by the next year I, I was on the road, I was singing and it hasn't stopped since. So except more bowls and way more toys.

Laurin: So one of the things I just want to kind of pull out of that is that not only were things lining up for you, but you took action on them

Ashana: Absolutely. That is necessary.

Laurin: yeah, yeah. So you set an intention of sorts and, and then, and then things started to happen and you, you said yes.

And so that day people were asking me to do things that I never would have done. And normally I'm like, I'm, you can't tell, but I'm like, actually very introverted. I, I I'm like this, you know, my husband is the opposite. And so, you know, I kind of hide behind him when we go out and do stuff like that. But we, I set this intention.

Laurin: Mm

Ashana: And so. We get the intention, and then we have to use discernment, really deep discernment, I feel, connection, very significant connection to your soul, your higher wisdom, your guidance, your team, whatever it is you want to call that, we, we, we, we foster, nurture, nourish, cultivate that connection on a daily basis.

through practice. And then when the time comes and you know, you hear the voice and it goes, say yes to everything. And you go, okay. And then the doors go like this. And then you got to take the actions like, Oh yes, I will meet with this person. I will get them on the schedule. I will spend four hours with them on, on a video.

Laurin: hmm.

Ashana: team can only get you so far. You got your feet and your hands and your, you know, your brain. You gotta do the work.

Laurin: so, you know, we don't, we don't have to say yes, but boy, when you do say yes, that's when the really cool stuff starts to happen.

Ashana: Yes.

Laurin: speak on that as someone who resisted saying yes for a long time,

Ashana: I get it.

Laurin: yeah. Yeah. No, it says, I had a similar experience to you in that I saw a psychic, a friend of mine had seen him and she's like, Oh, Laurin, you gotta go do this. It's awesome. And I trusted her. So it's like, okay. And he told me that I had been a shaman in many lifetimes and I could be a shaman again in a year if I wanted to.

Ashana: is fun. We're, we're incredibly creative humans and there are so many doors to open. And when you think about us being eternal beings, it's like, wow, why would you want to spend a lifetime doing just 1 thing? How like. Really?

Laurin: yeah, yeah, yeah,

Ashana: Let's learn and grow.

Laurin: exactly. And allow yourself to be done with something. And allow yourself to get curious about other things. You may not know why you're curious or where it could ever take you. But I find my curiosity is usually my, my guides going, you know, this would be really interesting.

Laurin: and then people like you show up on my show. So, okay. So, well, that's, yeah, that's a beautiful story that you shared with us. I, there's one other thing I want to kind of tease out of that because you talk about meeting your bowls. So what's, what's that experience for you? What does that, what does that mean?

And so it's not just, it's actually kind of spiritually arrogant of us, but it's also a sign of our deep disconnect and separation with all that is. And we think that, you know, the only consciousness is here. And so we may look at this, you know, glass, this water. Bottle and this jar and the water within it.

And we say, we treat it as an object to be utilized for our own service, and then we discard it. Well, I had a really different experience of that a number of years ago when I was recording one of my albums called the infinite heart. And I was after a long day of recording, I was lying in a bathtub and.

It was, it was for me to be grateful because they were there to be of service. And I can say this now, it makes me cry, you know, that, that, that this jar loves so much and is so filled with light to be, to hold the water that is consciousness itself, nourishing the waters within me. And so

So this must've been around 2012. So at that point in time, my whole orientation and relationship with them, you know, they are alive. If you were to come into this room and people do, you know, when people come into this music room, they go like this because they can probably feel the energy. [00:24:00] And that goes for the harps that goes for the tuning force that goes, you know, I took the hang drum out of the box this morning because I was like, Oh, my God, I need to bring it into the family so it can sit and be. so that it can readjust, you know, we'll, we'll bless it and do some ceremony with it and welcome it in to, to, to the family so that it can literally wake up and in consciousness. I know we're really talking about this

Laurin: I know. I, this is why I love this stuff.

Ashana: while you're stopping so I can say this to you.

Laurin: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. One of the, one of the first, my, one of my first experiences was that was a tree talked to me.

Ashana: Hmm.

Where have you been? I live, I have a heavily wooded yard and then it backs up to a trail and in the winter time. I walk it a lot in the summer. Not so much because we have ticks and mosquitoes here.

Ashana: Yeah.

Laurin: But so like when I first start walking, when the weather cools, I always get, Oh, you're back. Was just over there, but it's like, but it's, they have a sense of humor too, you know, and, and that really brought it home that these are just beings, just like the rest of us.

They are, they are every much as, as the native Americans call them, they're the standing people.

Ashana: yes

Ashana: Exactly. Exactly.

Laurin: it's honoring that we are not the penultimate.

Creation of everything, we're just a part of the whole and and we just take this form in this lifetime and let's do what we can to make it a great lifetime for everything around us.

Ashana: Absolutely.

Laurin: All right. So let me ask you a couple of specific questions. One of the things that I read on some of the information you sent me was that sound healing enhances or how you, yeah, sound healing enhances intuition and inner guidance. And we've been talking a bit about guides.

Ashana: You have been talking about this.

Laurin: So,

Ashana: really want to ask me a question about this?

So it's hard for me to teach other people how to be intuitive or how to tap into their intuition because I don't really know how I do it. It's just always. It's been something I do. So whenever somebody comes up and goes, I have something that helps with intuition or helps find your intuition, I'm like, let's talk about that because I want to learn how to do that.

I want to learn how to help other people do it. So let's talk about that. How does it enhance intuition and inner guidance?

Ashana: Well it's really, it's really actually quite simple and elegantly beautiful. And that is, is that number one, we, we must quiet down the mind. You've got that place where it's just going, nah.

That those beautiful words you know, from unity or from, from, it might be biblical. It probably is. I just don't know. Listening to that still small voice within now, if there is a riot and a racket of sound around it, you simply cannot hear it, but there is a reconditioning of the nervous system that must take [00:29:00] place.

in order to grow one's intuition. And the intuition is, and everybody knows this, your intuition, your intuitive hits are when you actually attune yourself. You can feel it in your body that it's a rightness. You know, the minute it says, You need to leave that job and you go, I'm making really great money and my friends are working there.

You know, if you look at indigenous cultures, there's a reason that the Native Americans gathered together, placed themselves around a drum, used specific chants to shift into altered states of consciousness. And so we're [00:31:00] really, you know, our indigenous cultures have been doing this all over the world for millennia, millennia.

And then if you go, you know, back before the cultures and you go, you know, to Egypt and you go to Mesopotamia and you go to those cultures that we don't even consider really were cultures, the Lemurian and the Atlantean cultures. And, you know, prior to that, you will know that. Sound and vibration was the way to fully expand consciousness and connect to divine knowing to that greater sense of self.

And so here we, we, we must learn stillness. We must remember what stillness is and the bowls, sound and vibrational healing are re-educating us, they're teaching us to become still, for our nervous systems to power down. I, you know, so many people now have difficulty just being quiet. So if you say to them, Oh, let me, let me just close my eyes and be quiet.

Laurin: Yeah.

Ashana: And when we're silent, when we begin to relax our nervous system and we literally retune and reharmonize the cells, the whole energy system, all our energy centers from the root to the crown, they begin to, you know, it's like flipping the switches and coming back online. Doosh, doosh, doosh. You know, you click them all and we get everything up.

Laurin: Yeah, it's great. Yeah,

Ashana: down, and now we have activity.

Hmm. I wonder what that could look like. And then we actually start asking the questions that lead to taking action.

Laurin: yeah. Getting curious.

Ashana: that's my experience

Laurin: Yeah, no, that's a beautiful explanation of it makes total sense to me. And it's, it's something that I think, I know for me, I discovered binaural beats years and years ago, and that's how I learned to meditate. I started with that because I knew I used to use it when I was writing.

I was reading an article not too long ago that said the most therapeutic sound is the kind of music you do with nature sounds.

Ashana: Yes.

I mean, it's, it's called being an impact, but you can feel all of that vibration and very often I would be feel attacked. So I learned, you know, I learned how to protect myself from that, but it was a long, slow learning curve because, as I said, I resisted a lot, but so it makes a lot of sense to me that the sound healing is, is another tool for us to calm and quiet and go within.

And, and really cultivate that internal voice, that small, small, quiet voice because it leads us so much better than our conscious mind does.

Ashana: That's my experience. For sure.

Listen to it and enjoy it. And if you're on video, we'll have a clip from her video version of it for you as well.

Uh,[00:41:00]

Laurin: So I want to thank you, Ashana, for, for giving us that, that music to listen to and to, and to, and to see, or to view your beautiful graphics with it. And I, I know that everybody will be wanting to hear more. So can you tell people where they can find your work and find you?

Ashana: Many places, I'm super glad to say primarily come visit my website, which is soundofashana. com. It's, it's like stepping into a world there because you have all of the musical resources, access to the book, to the crystal singing bowls, to the harps. To teachings, you can come be with us on retreats.

Laurin: Okay. All right, great. And of course, I'll have links in the in the show notes so that you can find her without having to write things down. All right. Is there anything else you want to share with us before we we end this.

Ashana: Well, I'd love to just share with everybody to tell you a bit about a program that's really near and dear to my heart that we are now publicly launching it's probably by the time this airs, people will be able to hear more about it. The golden light of healing meditation that you'll be getting.

And so we brought together a bunch of different things that we think are important on the healing journey. And then we've infused every step with music. It was actually the music that started first and the bowl started first, and then we, we put it together. And. And the beauty of it is, is that we beta tested this program twice already, and people are having extraordinary experiences.

We've had. Many, many healing practitioners take this program and, and tell us that their stress and anxiety levels have significantly diminished. So we're getting ready to launch Celestial Alignment for Healing and make it available. We'll probably be doing it in conjunction with practitioners so that we can.

Kind of cultivate it and craft it, make it more specific to people with particular concerns, but keep your eye out on that because it's going to be amazing.

Ashana: Yeah, and sign up for the free meditation that we're sending you. Please, you're

Laurin: Yes. Yes. So we'll have that link to in, in the show notes and I just really have enjoyed this conversation. I've learned a lot from you and I'm a little jealous. I kind of want to come and stand in your music room there and just be with all the, all the, the bowl people there. Yeah.

Ashana: do that. Come, just give us a little advance notice.

This program that she's got coming or just listen to her music. It's really beautiful. I spent the morning listening to it as I was preparing for this. It was awesome. And I hope that you'll join us next time. We come out pretty much every other week and I'm sorry, once a week. And in the meantime, until the next time I hope you'll stay curious