The Sounds Are Not the Point

Most people who have heard of a sound journey expect Tibetan singing bowls, crystal bowls, gongs etc. That particular lineage of healing sound has become very well known in recent decades. It is beautiful work. But it is not my work, and it is not where this practice comes from.

My work began in Africa. With people who played natural instruments: the didgeridoo, drums, maracas, voice, marimbas, balafons, flutes. Percussion instruments, every one of them. Instruments rooted in the earth and in the body. That is where this practice has its beginning, and remains so today.

In the early days I would set up a tipi at music festivals and invite people to come in and lie down. I would play the didgeridoo over their bodies, moving the sound close to them, letting the drone do what it naturally does. What happened surprised me deeply. People began to experience visions. They regressed into what felt like previous lives, other times, other versions of themselves. Some cried. Some laughed. Some lay completely still and then afterwards could barely find words.

Then I did a didgeridoo healing with an American woman. She had a traumatic experience when I played. She experience being in a black persons body as a concubine. But she wanted to do it again a few days later. Again, she had the same experience of being in a past life as a concubine. At this stage I had no reference, I did not have any understanding of past life experiences at that stage. I got nervous. I put the didgeridoo down for a while. I was not sure what I was doing, or whether I had any right to do it. This is a sacred instrument and I thought that perhaps I was doing something wrong for these things to be happeneing.

Then one Easter festival, a man arrived from the United Kingdom, English or Welsh, I am not certain which. We fell into conversation about the spiritual world, which was still relatively new territory for me. At some point he reached into his bag and pulled out something that looked like a piece of yellow putty. He said: do you know what this is? I shook my head. He said: this is DMT. I want you to experience it.

I agreed. I had never heard of DMT but I was open to anything in those years.

We went down to my tipi in the green field with two or three friends. I inhaled the first puff from a glass pipe. Immediately the tipi disappeared and I was sitting inside a fractal of snakes, multicoloured, very real, very alive, moving in perfect geometric patterns. I became part of that fractal. The experience was so pleasurable and ecstatic that I had no words to describe it.

Then the elves came. Small beings who appeared at my ear and spoke to me, chatting, telling me: we are the sound workers. We are the healers. Stop being so nervous. Just blow your didgeridoo. Stop worrying about how it is played and what people think of it. Just blow, because the songlines come through the didgeridoo, and we are the beings who take the notes, the sounds, the harmonics, and carry them to each individual in the room. For each person the experience is different. Each individual has a different ancestral lineage. And each individual’s experience of sound is their own.

I picked my didgeridoo back up and began holding formal Sound Journeys.

A few months later I found myself at a gathering in the Magaliesburg Mountains, a workshop held by two Peruvian Curanderos named Sergio and Reggis. I had arranged to offer a sound journey for those who wished to attend, in exchange for covering the cost of the workshop for myself. The Curanderos agreed to give me the church facility for one hour before dinner.

I expected perhaps ten people. I prepared with what I had: a didgeridoo, a maraca, and a Tibetan bowl.

Everyone came. All fifty people from the workshop, Fifty-two people in total lay down in that room, and there I stood alone with three instruments.

I had no choice but to continue.

I got everyone on the floor and began to play, remembering what the elves had told me: just play. We will do the healing. I did. It was one of the most powerful journeys I have ever held. At the end, when the circle closed and everyone went upstairs for dinner, I counted what people had left in my bowl. I had needed six hundred rand to cover my exchange with the organisers. There was exactly six hundred rand in the bowl.

Not more or less. Exactly what was needed.

After Magaliesburg I began holding regular sound journeys in and around Johannesburg and Pretoria. Somebody with a good room would gather ten to twenty people, and I would travel to their home and hold the space. This gave me years of experimentation with different instruments, different rooms, different groups of people. Through all of it, one thing remained constant: the didgeridoo. Of all the instruments I have worked with, it is the one that most reliably opens the door to ancestral connection. Something in its frequency reaches further back than the other instruments.

I also learned, through that experimentation, that I work best alone. Not because I cannot work with others, but because of what happens to the space when there is only one person holding it. When two people play together they need an agreement, however subtle, about how the sounds will move. That agreement shapes the journey before it has even begun. When one person holds the space, there is no agreement. The sound follows the environment. It follows the people. It follows what is needed. That is the difference between a shamanic performance and a shamanic journey.

There is something I have come to understand very clearly over these thirty-five years, and it is this: the sounds are not the point.

The sounds create a frame. A stable, monotonous, unwavering frame of rhythm and drone that the brain can hold onto. And what that frame does is free the rest of consciousness to go somewhere else entirely. The Digeridoo or a particularly strong and stable drumbeat does something precise: it gives the brain a single thing to track, which is what allows everything else to let go and generate its own inner landscape. The visions, the ancestral connections, the releases, the encounters, these do not come from me. They come from the person lying on the floor, from their own body, their own lineage, their own deep interior.

What is in the spaces between the sounds? That is the question. That is what we go to discover.

I have always approached this practice by quietly connecting with my own ancestors before I begin, and then holding the space open for each person in the room to find their own connection. Not through prayer, not through doctrine, not through any tradition they may or may not follow.

Because this is the thing about ancestors: you do not have to believe in them. They exist. Everyone has a mother and a father. Every mother and father had mothers and fathers. Look back seven or ten generations and there are thousands upon thousands of beings who have some part in making you who you are today. Their lives are woven into your DNA. They are not separate from you. They are part of you.

Religions are created by us and our cultures. The ancestral lineage simply is. It does not ask for belief. It does not require initiation. It just exists, and because our ancestors are inside us rather than outside us, they are far easier to reach than any external spiritual entity. The sound opens that door. The vibration speaks a language the body already knows.

This is why the journey goes inward and not outward. Not to the heavens, not to the spirit world, not to any deity or cosmic force. Into the body. Into the being. Into the ancestry that is already there, waiting, in the space between the sounds.

Nixiwaka has been holding Sound Journeys for over 35 years, currently based in Costa Rica. Sessions are available privately and for groups in the Jacó and Playa Hermosa area. Learn more about the Sound Journey →