Not all healing happens in the same room. Ethan lives in London. I live in the Pacific Northwest. When he reached out about working together, the first thing we had to figure out wasn’t his chakras, it was Zoom audio settings.

He found me through a mutual connection. He’d had a sound bath before, a group experience with a friend, and it had left an impression. But he hadn’t done anything like a series of one-on-one sessions, and certainly not remotely. He was curious, a little skeptical, and in a lot of pain.

What Ethan Was Carrying

Ethan has fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, both consequences of long COVID that hit him in 2020. Before that, he’d already been managing lifelong gut issues. The aftermath of a serious medical event in his younger years that left lasting damage. Layer ADHD on top of all of that, and you get a picture of someone whose body and mind had been working overtime just to get through a normal day.

His pain, on average, sat around an 8 out of 10. On the worst days, a 10. He’d learned to function through it the way people with chronic conditions do, not because the pain got better, but because he got used to carrying it.

He was drinking six or seven cups of coffee a day just to stay productive. His mornings started with walks around his neighborhood, guitar in the afternoons, and psychic readings for clients at a local shop. He was a writer, too. He had been working on complex philosophical ideas, but the words came slowly, weighed down by fatigue.

When I asked what he wanted from this, his intention was grounded and clear:

“I am strong, healthy, and can walk with ease and endurance.”

He wanted to walk without pain. He wanted to feel like his body was his own again.

The Distance Question

People ask me about remote sessions, whether sound healing works when the client isn’t in the room. It’s a fair question. Sound is physical. Vibration is physical. How does that translate through headphones and a video call?

What I’ve found, through Ethan and through other remote clients, is that the connection is the container. The sound is the instrument, but the intention, and the energetic link between practitioner and client, is what makes the work land. I prepare for remote sessions the same way I prepare for in-person ones. Singing the Orphic hymn to Hekate while burning a special blend of incense. Cleansing myself, then my instruments and the room. I then connect with my healing spirits, set the space, and focus my own intention, to facilitate healing and transformation for Ethan’s highest good and good of all.

Ethan used deep-meditation headphones on his end and laid down with a mask to cover his eyes. We were 5,000 miles apart, but once the session began, the distance became irrelevant.

Session 1: Finding the Frequency

Before any bowl was played, I assessed Ethan’s energy centers using a pendulum. What I found told a clear story: his solar plexus was overactive, his heart was depleted, and both his third eye and crown were overactive. Too much energy running through the mental and power centers. Not enough reaching his heart.

It made sense. Someone who has spent years managing chronic pain through sheer willpower, pushing through, figuring it out, getting things done despite the body’s protests, often develops this pattern. The doing centers are in overdrive. The feeling center gets starved.

We set his intention together using what the Sound Healing Academy calls the transformation crucible, it is a guided process where I ask the client to see themselves already healed, to feel it in their body, to breathe that vision into every cell. Ethan’s phrase was simple and powerful: “I am strong, healthy, and can walk with ease and endurance.” I asked him to visualize it in vivid detail as I played my F4 Grail and F3 bowl, creating an octave with overtones, together, they help create a space for grounding and openness. Not as a wish but as if it were already true.

I started with my fire koshi chime. Ethan had come in excited, energized, optimistic and my intuition told me to meet him there instead of trying to slow him down too quickly. The chime’s bright, dancing tones matched his energy and gave it somewhere to go. From there I transitioned to my grail while working through the crucible, and my crystal bowl tuned to F3, playing it with soft taps and gentle drones. The overtones of the grail create something I can only describe as a feeling of oneness, a vibrational field that wraps around the connection between practitioner and client and makes it tangible.

Throughout, I was visualizing golden healing light flowing into every layer of Ethan’s being, focusing particularly on his legs, seeing him walking with comfort, with strength. This is co-creation. I hold the vision. He breathes with it. The sound carries it.

For the releasing work, I moved to the E bowl, the solar plexus, tapping it gently to the left to begin loosening the overactive energy. I worked through intervals: the minor second (E-F), the major second (E-F#), the minor third (E-G), the major third (E-G#). Each interval goes a little deeper, breaking up stuck patterns layer by layer. Since his third eye and crown were also overactive, I added the A-B and G-B intervals to address those centers.

For grounding, I played the C-F interval, then the octave, high C to low C, before closing with the rainstick and a moment of spoken intention: “Now let go, move aside, and surrender to the power of the universe.”

Then, silence.

What Ethan Felt

When Ethan came back from the silence, he was amazed. His legs, which usually hurt, didn’t. He told me he’d been waiting for the cramps the ones that always came, but they never showed up. He looked at me through the screen with a gratitude that was quiet and real, and said: “Thank you. I think this will take some time to truly reflect, but thank you.”

I gave him his homework: chant the Bija mantras, Ram for the solar plexus, Yam for the heart, Om for the third eye, Ah for the crown, while visualizing golden light entering with each sound. Simple practices, but ones that keep the work alive between sessions.

What This Session Taught Me

I’ll be honest, the Zoom setup was a challenge at first. Figuring out audio routing, making sure he could hear the bowls properly, managing the technical side while staying present energetically. It wasn’t seamless. But the healing was. The technology was imperfect; the connection was not.

What I learned from this first session is that sound is an incredible force for healing and transformation, even with remote clients. It felt just as potent as if Ethan were in the room. The key is the envisioning, the connection. You have to hold both at once, the practical and the spiritual and trust that the sound will find its way.

I also learned to give myself more time to prepare. Don’t rush the technical setup. Breathe.

Ethan went home, well, he was already home and the real work began between sessions. What happened over the next week would surprise us both.

Continue reading: Part 2 — What Changed Between Sessions