I am a gong, you are a gong

I had my first gong bath, folks. While I was too scared to leave my body completely, that was certainly a possibility.

While lying on the floor, what you hear and feel are vibrations from an oceanic and at times frightening sound, which is obtained not only by drumming the instruments but by rubbing their metal surface. The most immediate effect for me was an intense desire to laugh, something that was particularly triggered by master Don Conreaux’s curious reflection, “I am a gong. You are a gong.” The symptom is apparently a common one, indicating, for one, that the solar plexus has been tickled. On more psychological terms, the need to laugh also comes from a release of tension, or perhaps as a release of tension.

Conreaux (that’s him above) had this to say in an interview:

[…] The idea is of these quasi-periodic patterns that come out of the chaos, the great ocean around us. We can begin to find these patterns. That’s actually what you listen for. When you teach people to play gong, you have to direct their ears into a particular area so they’ll catch onto it and go with it, but the patterns that you can create with the gong are in a strange place. They are in a non-dimensional world. […] You don’t have to go anywhere or do anything. Everything seems to be right there, like the thousand angels on the head of a pin. […]
I think it’s fascinating. It makes you exercise a certain part of the brain that has to do with intuition. 90% of our brain is still undeveloped, and it’s all in that area of the frontal cerebral cortex, which has to do with intuition. So, as we help people develop their intuition, they use more of their brain. I think that’s going to be the great value of this music.