Everything you need to know

Yes. Most people who come have never been to a sound session before.

You don't have to be good at meditating for this to work. You just have to be in the room and lie down.

Something comfortable to wear, warm socks, and a blanket or shawl if you have one. Your body cools down when it rests deeply.

Bring a journal if you have one of your own, otherwise I'll have paper as well.

Try not to eat anything heavy in the hours before. Cacao lands better on a lighter stomach, and so does lying down.

I also advise you to go easy on the caffeine later that day. It makes it harder for the body to drop into rest.

That's no problem at all. The cacao is 100% pure from Guatemala, mixed with a bit of oat milk.

If you have any allergies or you'd rather skip it, just let me know and I'll make sure there's something else ready for you.

Yes. If you're pregnant, have epilepsy, a pacemaker, recent surgery, or any other condition I should know about, let me know so we can make sure everything feels safe and comfortable for you.

And mention any allergies at least a week ahead, so I can adjust the cacao and the incense I use.

We open with a moment to feel the body and check in. Then we set intentions for the night and open our hearts through a cup of ceremonial cacao. From there I guide you into a meditation, followed by sound and inner stillness with the crystal singing bowls, windgongs, chimes and my voice.

We close gently, with time to come back, land, and connect.

No. Cacao is part of the evening, not the shape of it.

We drink it after setting our intentions, because it opens the heart and brings you out of your head and into your body. From there the writing and the sound go deeper.

Anyone who is curious.

People who want to reconnect with their body, come home to themselves, and are open to seeing what it brings them. That might be emotional regulation, a deeper way of experiencing consciousness, connection with the people in the room, or simply a very good nap.

Most evenings are held for women. Some are open to everyone, and it always says so in the description of that session.

The circles stay small on purpose, so there is room for every person in it.

In Rotterdam. The exact address is in the email you get a few days before, along with how to find your way in.

The evenings are in English.

An hour where you lie down and do nothing, while sound does the work.

Where it comes from. People have used sound to change how they feel for as long as there have been people. Chanting, drums, bells. Something surprising turns up when you look closely at it. A Latin rosary and a yoga mantra, two traditions that never met, both settle your breathing at around six breaths a minute. Different words, same tempo. The tempo is the part your body answers to.

The instruments in this room are much younger than the practice. The crystal bowls especially, and there is a good story in that further down.

What actually happens. Slow sustained sound, an hour lying down, nothing you need to do. What responds are rhythms you already have. Your breathing lengthens and the rest follows. Nothing is being tuned or repaired. Your own system is getting the space to drop back to its own pace.

Meanwhile, in your head. Your brainwaves slow from beta into alpha, then into theta. Theta is the state right before sleep, the one most people only reach after years of meditation. Here it takes about twenty minutes. Sound also reaches the feeling part of your brain before the thinking part, so you feel it before you understand it.

What happens in the rest of your body, and in the night that follows, has its own answer further down.

So you don't have to be good at meditating for this. You just have to be in the room.

No. Nothing here asks you to believe anything.

You are not being fixed and you are not being sent anywhere. You lie down. The sound moves through the room. Your body responds whether or not your mind is convinced.

Being skeptical is completely fine. I would rather have you here honest than pretending.

But there is a difference between healthy skepticism and lying there with brick walls up, waiting to see whether anything manages to get through. The sound does its thing either way. What changes is what you are able to take from it.

There is a name for this. It is called confirmation bias. Come in certain that nothing will happen and you will count every moment that nothing happened. The rest quietly slips past you.

It works the other way too. You buy a red car and suddenly the road is full of red cars. They were always there. You just started seeing them.

So you don't have to believe. You only have to be open to the possibility. That is all it is.

Being open and receptive is your best friend on an evening like this. And if there is something you are unsure about, tell me. We can always talk about it first.

There are two ways into this question. I will walk both with you.

Through the mind. Some of it is measured, and I would rather tell you which parts. The way your heart and your breathing slow down has been measured. The rolling pulse between two bowls is plain acoustics. And the effect of writing something down is one of the better studied things you can do on your own. Those are the pieces that hold.

What I will not tell you is that a single frequency repairs your cells. What I do think is quieter and closer to true: an hour like this puts you in a state where rest goes deeper. The rest is what does the work, not the sound.

Through the heart. Then there is everything that has been carried for generations without ever being measured. People have gathered around sound and warm drinks and each other for a very long time, and they kept doing it because something in it held.

Sometimes the two meet. That chanting example is one of them. The practice was right, and the explanation arrived centuries later.

Where the method runs out. Science is a method, not a finished map. You cannot rebuild a whole human situation in a lab, because you cannot hold everything else still while you look at one thing. Research also rewards staying inside one field. There is a study showing that the more disciplines a proposal crosses, the less likely it is to get funded, in every field. So the whole picture is the hardest one to pay for.

That does not make any particular claim true, and I want to be clear about that. It only means that no study yet is not the same as nothing there.

One thing I like holding. Your heart has its own nervous system. It senses, processes and responds without asking your brain first. That is anatomy rather than poetry, and it is a good thing to sit with whichever way you walked in.

Bowls made of quartz, and the youngest thing in the room.

Where they come from. Singing bowls are usually assumed to be ancient and Tibetan. The bowls are old, but they were household objects, and in Nepal people still cook in them and eat from them. Using them for sound and stillness is a Western practice from the twentieth century.

Crystal bowls are younger still. They come out of the semiconductor industry, where quartz crucibles are used to melt silicon for computer chips. Someone noticed they sang. They are fused quartz, which is technically a glass.

I like that story better than the one usually told.

How a bowl makes sound. The wall bends. The rim goes oval one way, then the other, hundreds of times a second. Two parts of the wall bulge outward while the two between them pull in. Everything moving out pushes air away and everything moving in draws air back, and that push and pull is the sound you hear.

When I run the mallet around the rim it does not glide. It grips and slips, hundreds of times a second, in steps about the width of a hair. That is what keeps feeding the tone so it holds instead of fading. Striking a bowl sets off several vibrations at once. Bowing quiets the messier ones, so what is left is almost a single clear note.

Why every bowl sounds different. Size does most of it. A wider bowl is lower, and steeply so, because the width counts twice over: double the width and you drop about two octaves. Thicker walls lift the pitch a little. That is why the big bowls sit at the bottom of the room and the small ones ride on top of everything.

You will see bowls sold as notes and matched to chakras. The note is simply what that size produced. The colour system it gets matched to was put together in 1977, so that pairing is a modern convention rather than something ancient.

Why it is called a sound bath. Because you lie in it. A low tone has a wavelength longer than you are tall, far bigger than the bowl making it, so it does not travel at you from one direction. It bends around everything and fills the room. There is no spot you can point to and say the sound is over there. That is the bath.

Two prongs, one note, and two quite different ways of using them.

Weighted forks have heavy ends. They move slowly and are placed on the body, so you feel them more than you hear them. Unweighted forks are light and quick. Those are held near the ear, and there you are mostly listening.

The rule underneath is simple. Low and heavy is felt. High and light is heard.

There are many sets and many frequencies, and depending on who you ask you will get different answers about what each one is for. Plenty of people report they get something from them. I use them for what they do alongside the bowls, not instead of them.

One thing worth knowing. When two forks sit close together in pitch you hear a slow pulse between them. That pulse is exactly the difference between the two notes. Nothing more mysterious than that, and it is the same effect you hear when two bowls are played together.

Something similar happens between people. When a group listens to the same slow sound their breathing tends to settle into the same tempo. It has been measured in choirs and in concert audiences. Not the same breath at the same moment, which would be too neat, but the same pace. A room finding one rhythm.

Two opposite ends of the same evening.

The wind gong is a flat disc with no rim turned over. It vibrates in so many patterns at once that no single pitch survives, which is why you cannot hum a gong. And it does something nothing else in the room does. After the strike, the energy travels from the low vibrations up into the higher ones. So it grows. It gets brighter and fuller after I have already hit it, instead of fading away. That tends to be the moment in an evening where something lets go.

Chimes are the opposite. Short thin rods that bend rather than stretch, which is why they sit so high. Their overtones do not line up into a note, so what you hear is closer to a shimmer than a pitch. They also move very little air. That is exactly what makes them right at the end: enough to bring you back up, not enough to pull you out.

Real cacao, made the slow way, from one farm in Guatemala.

What makes it ceremonial. The whole roasted bean, stone ground into a paste, cacao butter and all. That butter is about half the weight of the bean and it carries most of the aroma. Cacao powder is what is left over after the butter has been pressed out, so it is a different thing entirely.

You will see the words ceremonial grade on a lot of packaging. It is not a protected term, which simply means the label on its own will not tell you much. The ingredient list will. One ingredient, one hundred percent, no powder.

Where mine comes from. A farm called Kampura, in the north of Guatemala. It was planted in 2011 on land that cattle had worn out, and it is a forest again now: a hundred and sixty thousand cacao trees growing under mahogany and rosewood. Everything happens there. Fermenting, drying, roasting and grinding, all on the farm.

And the Maya. Cacao grows in Guatemala in the same zones that were Maya land thousands of years ago. The oldest traces we have come from vessels found there, dating back to around 600 BC. The people who work the land at Kampura are Q'eqchi' Maya, and the farm keeps the old indigenous Guatemalan varieties alive.

So it is the same ground and the same region. It is a farm rather than a Maya community, and that difference is worth naming.

Reiki is gentle, hands-on energy healing. Where sound moves through the whole room, Reiki is close and still: you rest, and I work with what your body is holding.

It's a Japanese practice, developed in the early twentieth century, and the name says what it is: "rei" means universal, "ki" means life energy. Reiki works with the idea that this energy flows through the body, and that stress, emotion, and holding on can leave it stuck. During a session I place my hands lightly on or just above the body.

Like the sound work, Reiki is not a medical treatment and never a replacement for medical care. It is a supportive tool for wellbeing.

For me, writing has always helped me understand life in a way my brain couldn't. Everything in my head moves at once, and it can feel chaotic and like too much at the same time. But on paper it slows down. The words land somewhere, and they start to mean something.

Four things turn out to matter, and none of them is talent. Give it at least fifteen minutes. Do it more than once, three times is where it starts to show. Write to a real question instead of a blank page. And let it stay private.

The blank page is what stops most people, so I work with prompts. In the sessions we write to one question, together, after the cacao and before the sound.

The arc I use goes in four steps: arriving, peeling back, meeting yourself, coming home.

Two rhythms, doing two different jobs.

The moon sets when. Sessions gather around the new and the full moon, roughly once a month. New moon is for beginning something and for setting intentions. Full moon carries more energy, and it suits releasing and a fuller room.

The Tzolk'in sets what. The Tzolk'in is the sacred 260-day calendar of the Maya. It weaves two cycles into each other: thirteen tones and twenty day signs, the solar seals. Every combination of tone and seal is unique, so no day repeats for 260 days. Each day, the tone shapes how the seal's energy expresses itself.

Where our calendar measures time, the Tzolk'in describes its character. That is how it is used here: as a daily compass for planning, creating and resting, and as part of how each session finds its moment and its theme.

So the moon tells me when to open the door. The Tzolk'in tells me what the evening is about.

The short answer is that it slows you down enough for your body to do things it only does at rest.

Slow sound that you find pleasant brings your heart rate down and lifts your heart rate variability, which is the sign that your system has come out of alert. Your breathing lengthens without you steering it.

What happens afterwards matters more. Most people sleep deeper on the night of a session. Deep sleep is the only stage where your body does its real repair work: growth hormone peaks, your brain flushes out what built up during the day, and the day gets moved into long term memory.

So the hour does not really end when you go home. I want to be honest about the shape of that claim though. The sound is not doing the repairing. It puts you in a state where deeper rest becomes more likely, and the rest does the work.

The main thing in it is theobromine, not caffeine. Caffeine peaks after about half an hour and is mostly gone within a few. Theobromine takes two to three hours to reach its peak and stays with you for seven to twelve, and it does not cross into the brain as easily. So it is slower and wider than coffee, with no spike and no drop afterwards.

The fat matters here. Because the cacao butter is still in it, everything arrives gradually instead of all at once.

The flavanols open up your blood vessels, so more blood moves through you, including to your brain. That peaks around two hours in. More blood flow is not the same as thinking more clearly, and I am not going to pretend it is.

You will read a lot about PEA and anandamide, the so called love molecules. Those two do not really survive the journey to your brain, so I would not lean on them.

What is left is simpler and holds up better. It is warm, bitter, slow to drink, and you drink it with an intention in a room with other people. That combination is most of it, and it is enough.

Putting a feeling into words changes how strongly you sit inside it. Naming it seems to take some of the charge out of it, and that shows up in the brain as well as on the page.

It is one of the better studied things you can do entirely on your own, across more than a hundred studies. Not therapy, not a technique. Just a pen and fifteen quiet minutes.

In a session we write after the cacao and before the sound, to one question rather than a blank page. The blank page is what stops most people.

And nobody reads it. That part is not a detail. It is most of why it works.

Then you fall asleep. Your body takes what it needs, and it doesn't need your attention to do it.

Sound reaches the feeling part of your brain before it reaches the thinking part. You feel it before you understand it.

It's why people cry here without knowing why. Nothing is wrong. Something is just moving.

Through Hipsy. All upcoming dates are on hipsy.nl/tune-in and on this site.

Sessions are around the new and the full moon, and they're small on purpose, so they tend to fill up.

Yes. The group evenings have a ticket for two, so you can bring someone with you.

And if you would rather have the room to yourselves, I hold private ceremonies for two, or for your own circle. You choose the date and bring your people, and the evening is shaped around what you want to experience together.

Mention who you are bringing in your message, and the session will be ready for exactly that.

Yes, alongside the group evenings I do private sessions and Reiki. Send me a message and we'll find something that fits.