Soulful Valley- Talking Crystal Singing Bowls, Perimenopause and all things in between.

Transcript:

Katische created her bespoke energy healing using crystalline sound in the form of crystal singing bowls, and Koshi chimes simultaneously with vibrational aromatherapy voice and colour therapy and is a distance healing that heals the subtle body energies, the etheric body, astral body, mental body, and the soul. The sound alchemy sessions she performs are not designed to be alternative or complementary vibrational medicine, the physical body may experience changes as a result of the sound session as the ethereal and physical bodies coexist within the same space, despite being at different frequencies. Hello, Katische. Welcome to Soulful Valley.

01:37

Thank you, Katie, thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

01:41

Thank you so much. And I’m so excited because you’re my first podcast guests in Australia. So I know it’s very late there for you. Thank you. I really appreciate you coming on to do this for us.

01:54

Well, it’s my honour. My privilege as well.

01:57

Thank you, I have the luxury of being invited to try out one of your Crystalline Sound Healing Sessions before our interview, so that I would know what it is that you do. And I have to say that it was such a beautiful experience during the session. And I had the best night’s sleep that I’ve had in a long time. So could you explain to our listeners what it is that you do?

02:26

Sure, Katie. I’m a Crystalline Sound Alchemist. So what I do is I use crystalline sound. So in the form of a crystal singing bowl, a Koshi chime and a shaker, plus vibrational aromatherapy, plus colour therapy to achieve transformational change in men, women and men of all ages. 

So the session that you had was the heart chakra session or the “Divine Love” session. And basically, it is a session which is designed to open your heart to receive love, not just give love. It’s designed to connect you to your highest self, and to be able to tap into the wisdom from your highest self. And to be able to feel better about yourself, and to feel more relaxed for the period after your session, and hopefully from a lot more relaxed, from then on. So it works at many levels. But I focus on the subtle energy level. So connecting with your highest self by opening the heart to receiving wisdom and receiving energy. So it’s a form of energy healing through sound.

03:51

Beautiful. And how long have you been doing this kind of work? And what led to it?

03:58

Yeah, sure. This is really new for me. I had a deep transformational year in 2020, I basically had a year of retreat. It was one of the bonuses of I guess, the whole world being in lockdown. And I did a lot of studying and a lot of energy healing. And at the end of the year, so about October, I developed my own modality which is this Crystalline Sound Healing. So basically what happened is though, in the last two years, I’ve been working with women who are transitioning through Perimenopause and Menopause, and teaching them in an educational capacity about this major transition in life and helping them with the transition from a physical level. However, what happened with this was that I got very frustrated with the intense focus that all my customer’s had and myself on fixing and eliminating the physical symptoms of Perimenopause and Menopause, and trying to, I guess, whack a bandaid on them so that they could get on with the rest of their lives. 

And in the process of this two year period, as I was going through Perimenopause myself, and going through deep changes in my cycle, I realised that I could try and recommend and use a billion different things, for hot flashes for you know, massive bleeds for headaches for anything. But that until I confronted the spiritual side of the transition, so what it meant to me and what it meant to females on that spiritual level, that nothing would actually shift. 

And that was why I wanted to work at the spiritual level. 

So I really wanted to not have interactions with women where women were treating each other as simply medicine dealers, for fixing body parts. I wanted to open up the discussion and create transformations for women so that they could understand the changes in the body and in the mind that you go through.

In the perimenopause, and menopause years, are accompanied by not only physical changes, mental changes, but also massive spiritual changes. And if we don’t, I guess take space to have a look at our life over that period of time. We can cause great physical issues in our body as our body stores all of the anger, the frustration at what our body is so called doing to ourselves. But we miss a major, major transition and opportunity to move from, I guess, nurturing everybody else, to nurturing ourselves and giving birth to our own new life. 

So the crystal singing bowls came about because I started to study “Integral Sound Healing”, and I was looking at going down the path of becoming a Sound Therapist. 

Now a Sound Therapist is somebody who does an additional year of study to what I’ve done, and they learn how to use the singing bowls, and place it on and around the body to heal specific ailments. So much more like you might go to a Massage Therapist or a Chiropractor, a Sound Therapist brings a client in, puts them on a massage table and talks to them about what’s hurting, what the experiences that they’re having. And then they use the sound waves, which are emitted by the crystal singing bowls to shift, move and heal those ailments. 

So as I started to study the science behind integral sound therapy, I was fascinated and it ticked all the boxes of what I wanted to understand about it. But I realised I was heading down the same path again that I would have gone down with dealing with Perimenopause and Menopause, and I sort of came to a screeching halt. And I was like, No, don’t do this again. You’re not here to put a bowl on a person and heal them. And so I just sat with it for a while and let the bowls tell me what they wanted to do. And at the same time, I really started delving into using the lockdown experience for my own energy healing. And I got some amazing energy healing through a number of different practitioners, one of them, Jonah Hunter, who you and I both have a relationship with. 

08:51

I felt and experienced the power of how energy healing can be done online through zoom. And previously, I would have only ever thought that you could do energy healing like a Reiki practitioner face to face and receive hands. Well not hands on because Reiki is not hands on. But you know what I mean? Like here being in the physical presence of somebody to receive a healing treatment. And what I learned through the different energy healing practitioners that I utilise the services of during lockdown was that energy healing happens irrespective of where you are, and it has to do with the intent and the vibration and the connection between the two people who are participating.

And that really led me into thinking what would happen if I was able to help people during lockdown via doing a zoom session and helping them to relax? 

Because the number one feeling that we have during lockdown with the Coronavirus is of stress and fear the two feelings that we have And if nothing else, the crystal singing bowls are an amazing way to help calm the autonomic nervous system, and to help people relax and release emotion and tension in their lives. And the best thing is you can be lying down on a chair or a couch. And if you fall asleep, you’re still getting the benefits of the session. 

And  it’s not stressful to the body, you don’t have to drive anywhere, and you don’t have to worry about person to person contact in this current state. So I started to offer those sessions to some clients and friends, and just found that the feedback that I got was just phenomenal. And so I’ve taken it from there and developed a couple of different kinds of sessions based on the feedback that are getting from people and the kind of things that they’re looking for. From a one to one session.

11:01

That’s beautiful, incredible. Who have been your biggest influences or inspirations in your business? Well, you’ve just explained a bit about what made you take it online. But if you want to talk about that a bit further.

11:17

Yeah, sure. So I think that the energy and the sound healing components, in terms of inspiration, started for me nearly a decade ago now, but they just started to come out in May now. So it’s amazing how things are a long journey and you don’t know where they actually start from. 

So when I was going through my divorce 10 years ago, I spent a lot of time at a Buddhist centre with monks and nuns and by their own personal physical presence. Monks and Nuns have amazing spiritual energy and by being in their presence, you receive healing. And I guess, there there was one major incident that happened for me when I was attending the Chenrezig Buddhist Institute, which was we did a was called the “Medicine Buddha Puja”, which was a chanting session, which was held for Lama Zopa Rinpoche, when he was unwell he had I think was a stroke. And so all the Nuns and the Monks all came into the room with the students who were there on a retreat, and we did a series of specific chants.

Now chants in themselves are healing because you’re activating the throat chakra. And they’re especially encoded, spiritual healing in the words plus the power of prayer together. So it’s a pretty darn energy intense situation. And when I was in the presence of the particular Geshe, at the time, I had very specific emotional reactions, which were different to other people in the room. And that was that I would start uncontrollably crying, which was a little bit embarrassing, but given that I was going through such a tumultuous time in my life, understandable. 

And I remember in this particular Medicine Puja that I started, you know, just silently crying. And then I could not chant the words. And then, as everybody kept chanting, I was so overcome with grief that I couldn’t move, I was just overwhelmed with emotion. And the only words that wanted to come out of my mouth were like, mother or mother help me. And the Nuns came in, aided me at the end of the session and made sure I was okay and set me down. And they said, what you’ve just experienced is actually an a form of energy healing due to the connection that you have from the Geshe, who’s the, you know, the very intensely spiritual person in that area, and the fact that we were chanting the sacred chants for the Lama who was overseas. So it was like the first ability or the first impact that I had, from a personal energy healing from somebody and I didn’t really think about that ever again. 

Other than that, I used to like to listen to the Tibetan singing bowls, because when you’re in a Buddhist environment, there’s always singing bowls being played. There’s gongs being timed and wrong. And I like to listen a lot to that through I'm a very auditory person. And so I like to put my headphones on and relax to the sound of chanting, Gregorian chanting, any kind of chanting, really, I found calm me. And then I really got into listening to binaural beats. So we have two different resonances in the different ears. And I found that particularly helpful for anxiety and stress and insomnia. 

And then I guess people around me started to use crystal singing bowls. So one of my friends, Jessie Reimers, started to have this wonderful collection of these elaborate bowls, then I was like, wow, what are they? And I went to a business retreat, when I was using essential oils in my business. And she played the crystal singing bowl, and she had an energy healer there who used the didgeridoo, and crystal singing bowls and chanting with his voice and a whole range of other sacred instruments. And it was mind blowingly, powerful, like, again, tears. And it shifted major things in my life from this one, one session with all these other people.

16:15

To the point that I then thought, wow, I actually find and benefit really, from energy healing by a sound. It was like this whole new thing, because I had been to Reiki before, and other modalities, but they didn’t, they worked, but they didn’t really, really create major shifts for me, like sound, and I’m clairaudient as well. So anything in life for me, comes to me through my hearing. And so it just sort of all, I guess, came together at once. And that’s how I didn’t realise. Well, if I’m affected by sounds so profoundly. How can I learn more about that? How can I explore more about that, and then, over this process of having a year of retreat to myself and being exposed to so many different energy and and sound healers, they do say that once you are exposed to sound and energy healers themselves, you then start to open up to having that ability to yourself. 

And so it naturally progressed from there to the stage where now that I’ve decided to, to offer that service, and people are just like, wow, like, you’re so like, you have this natural gift for it. And if you’d asked me 10 years ago, that I would be here today,  because my background is as a university lecturer and a management consultant. So it’s I’ve gone from complete logic, reason, and one side of the brain to the complete opposite side of the brain. And I can only say that it’s been catalysed by the deep transformation that’s gone on through my life with both, you know, going through a divorce and the death of my father. 

And also the Perimenopause transition, where, you know, I really did have a major debilitating experience. So for example, for this year, at the start of the year, I had two separate bleeds, which were 60 days each. And those bleeds were the heaviest of heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy bleeds and I and I basically couldn’t leave the house. They were so heavy. And I got to the point where I was like, This is either going to go one of two ways, this is going to go the hysterectomy way. Or this is going to be I have to heal this from within. And when I I went and did an online course, which was called the “Holy Womb Grail Gates”, which uses the energy healing from Mary Magdalene, Mother, Mary and Yeshua and goes through the eight Grails of the womb. And each level opens up a different level of womb healing. And through that I accessed profound inner healing and acceptance of what I believe is really got deep down and dirty with understanding my own, perhaps not inner revulsion and anger at the belief that I had the frustration at the blood, the the pain associated with the blood, the I guess the anger that was stored in in my womb. 

We’re sort of conditioned from the minute we get our period to see it as an inconvenience- something to hide something that the society sees as disgusting. Something that is not celebrated at all in any way, shape or form. And, by really having such a heavy, heavy experience, I had to really get deep down and in with it, and release that emotion that it was associated with so that I could then surrender to it. I could surrender to the bleed and as soon as I surrendered to it, and stop trying to suppress it with medications or different kinds of therapy, or herbal medicines, or, or whatever it was, when I stopped throwing money at it, and surrendered to it, it stopped by itself. Yeah, so it’s been that sort of alchemy, alchemical transformation all involved in one. 

20:50

Thank you for sharing such vulnerable stories. And so many of us women go through this don’t win and don’t really talk about it. So the important thing to understand Isn’t that how, how your responses to these natural things that we go through, create more pain and more suffering for the duration of this?

21:28

Do you have one tip or piece of advice that could help any of our listeners who are struggling with their mental, spiritual and emotional being right now?

21:42

Firstly, don’t blame and shame yourself. If you are suffering, suffering is part of the human experience. However, we don’t need to prolong it. So firstly, don’t shame and blame yourself for suffering. Everybody does it. And secondly, if you are somewhere where there is a wall, put your feet up the ball, one of the things that I learnt, which is a weird thing from one of my interviews, during my perimenopause teachings, I interviewed a yoga teacher in the UK, Jane McPherson, and I was experiencing a lot of anxiety and insomnia as a side effect. And she taught me that when you use Yoga Nidra, one of the most powerful things that you can do when you’re feeling anxious, is to literally lie on the floor or on your bed, and put your feet up the wall. And what that does is the blood runs down from the tip of your toes to your heart. And you will guarantee that within five minutes you will start to feel very calm. So calm that on times, when I actually do this myself, I can fall asleep with my legs up the wall.

22:55

That’s great.

23:00

And I know that I fall asleep because halfway through the night, I will have numb legs. Wake up and re orientate myself. And now I can put my legs down and you know fall back to sleep straight away. But, you know, that’s an easy and fast tip. And I’ve shared that with friends. And they’re like, wow, that works fast. Because in the last five years, when I was working with essential oils, I used to teach people which oils they could use to help with various emotional feelings that they had. And I could use or I also got into tapping and EFT and but sometimes when you’re in the, in the moment with a severe emotion, like a really heightened emotion, your rational mind can’t work. And so you can’t go where’s my sandalwood? Or how do I sit here and start tapping and you freeze and you get caught in that complete state of fear. And you’re not all the things that you know that you should do, you can’t do but that one tip from Jane about sticking your legs up a wall. 

Generally speaking, you can lie down because that’s one of the natural responses when you’re stressed is you need to sit down or lie down and put your feet up the wall. I mean you can be in a supermarket and find a spot and put your feet up the wall or you know if you work in an office just sit on the floor for a minute and it’s a really fast and effective way to to calm yourself down. So yeah, no shame and blame. We all go through it and find a wall. 

24:34

Thanks for sharing though. Can you tell me how spiritual healing with sound, particularly using crystal singing bowls can help you connect with the Divine Feminine and Masculine and promote unity as well as healing your heart and your womb chakra?

24:50

Yes, so the crystal singing bowl itself. The bowl is the symbol of the Grail, the chalice and the womb. So the ball itself is a divine feminine energy, it is the lunar aspect. And the wand is the masculine, it’s the Divine Masculine. And it is the solar aspect. 

So when we play the bowl, we are uniting the masculine with the feminine. 

So just by simply playing a singing bowl for yourself beat Tibetan or a crystal singing bowl, or being somebody who’s listening to in receiving the energies of the singing bowl, you are working in a transformation, which is utilising both the masculine and the feminine energies, and working together as in as in unity. 

So in unity, what we are trying to do is to realise that we need both to honour and embrace the divine feminine and the masculine energies within us, we have them, both within us. And when we not only look to an embrace, and learn to use both of those energies at the appropriate time, without shaming, one energy or the other, we can create greater sense of stability and harmony and a feeling of wholeness. 

And when we have that feeling of wholeness, we then can get much more easily and connect to a greater sense of self and self love. And when we have that greatest sense of self love, we can actually open up the doorways of perception, which we realise that we are not only us as a human being, but we are from the divine, and are divine. 

If we don’t love ourselves, we’re actually not loving the divine. So whether you call that source or God or whoever it is, when we hate on ourselves and are cruel to ourselves, and have low self esteem and self shame, what we are forgetting is that we were put here on Earth, in this physical form. 

So that source or God, the Creator could experience an element of contrast and an element of themselves to expand greater consciousness for source and greater experience. And so you come from love, you are love. And when you negate or minimise or have a wrong perception of your own self, you’re having a wrong perception of source. And that’s easy to talk about theoretically, but not on a practical day to day level. And I just find that the energies of sound healing, and in particular crystal singing bowl, what it does is that without you having to activate your logical brain or your ego, it can work with the subtle energies and the subtle bodies to create transformative change. 

And how you actually play the bowl will either ground and harmonise. So the clockwise motion is grounding and harmonising. And the anti clockwise motion is the release. So depending upon which way you play, the bowl actually releases energy, so releases emotional energy, or it harmonises and grounds. And so again, that is both forces releasing and harmonising the clockwise anti clockwise it's all in one component there. 

So it’s something that works with the whole body. Because what it does is it works with the crystalline structure of our body. And so it creates change that we can see and change that we can feel right down to a cellular level. So when we work with the cellular level of the body, and we work with all the crystalline structures, we impact also our pineal gland and our pineal gland is the crystalline structure that receives the subtle energy and also the communications from your higher self, and soul. And so it’s just this one of these really mystical and magical experiences that I think that whilst all the scientific papers and investigations are important, sometimes we need to go back to the magic of life and not try and analyse everything and not try to understand everything but just to surrender. And let the sound envelop us and let the sound dictate where we need the healing. 

So when I do the sessions, I ask Shamael Angel of sound, to dedicate the session to the greater healing of all involved, and I let the sound be the guide, not me. 

So because if I’m dictating what the session is going to do, then I am being acting in my ear l fashion and trying to invoke the linear side of my brain. Whereas if I surrender and play the bowl and let the bowl take charge, then the bowl works with the resonance of your body. 

What do I need to bring into resonance? resonance? What do I need to entrain what you know what’s out of sync with each other, then equally is the energy centres that it finds are blocked. And it’s not me, activating that logical mind and looking for signs and trying to be the God or superhero of the body. And saying, there’s an energy that’s bigger than me in this, I had the body that can play it. Now, let the magic unfold. 

And that’s, let’s say, my session is to provide a general outline of what the overall intent is, but then to surrender and say, here you go, bowl. This is the relationship between you and the person at the other end of the zoom camera. And it’s a sacred relationship between you and your two energies, I’m the facilitator. 

Yeah, you know, and that’s, that’s where I try to keep it at that higher magical level, rather than the detailed level. So at the end of the day, for each different person, their experience will be dictated by the intent that they bring into the session, and then what their body and what their different bodies. So from here out to, you know, all the different energy levels that we have. That’s the relationship and that’s going to be different for each and every person. It’s not like going to a doctor and getting a prescription for something. It’s highly highly personalised based on what you need at that moment, according to your energy.

31:43

I’ve got a singing bowl myself, which I don’t use as often as I should. And I’ve really inspired me to use it a bit more. Yeah, sharing all of that.

31:52

You’re welcome. 

32:10

Are there any books that you can recommend for our listeners that want to learn more about spiritual sound healing?

32:17

Absolutely. My favourite book is called “Crystal balls and crystal bowls” And it’s by Ted Andrews. It’s an amazing, amazing book. I’ll give you the show notes. It goes into everything that you need to understand about crystal singing bowls, and also interesting stuff about crystal bowls. I love also the work of Jonathan Goldman. He’s a legend in the field of sound, and he has a book called “The Tantra of Sound”. It’s excellent reading. And then the other Bible that I have, for those who have the questions about the scientific side of all subtle energy healing, is “Vibrational Medicine” by Dr. Richard Gerber

33:14

For anybody who’s interested in Buddhism, there’s a fabulous book, which I use a lot by Lama Yeshe , which is called “Becoming your own therapist”. And that basically talks about the role of your mind in mental health and how you can be your own therapist, by taking charge of your thoughts.

33:37

And synchronistically. My journey started in 2010, when I started a new job in an NHS hospital. So I had an admin job. Somebody invited me to a Buddhist meditation. And then three years later, the lady that came in to take over that meditation, who is a Buddhist monk, she's one of my closest friends. They’re one of my closest allies. So I’ve got I’ve spent a lot of time at the Buddhist centre. If you lockdown Say, say, yeah, it’s Yeah, there’s a reason for that.

34:13

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's been a huge, huge influence on Buddhism and the essential oils and the perimenopause have all led to this in ways that were totally unexpected. But it’s a beautiful, beautiful way to navigate through, especially, you know, now that I’m in my mid 40s, halfway to 90, it’s a fabulous thing to do something totally unexpected.

34:40

I’m 52. I’m even further along halfway to 100 and soul, I plan to get right. Good reframe.

34:51

What is the impact that you hope to make with your work?

34:57

The impact that I hope to make with my work is to get people to experience the healing that can be done through sound. And so really understanding not just sound from singing bowls, but sound that surrounds us. 

So understanding how sound influences us and can heal us in our daily lives, through the music that you listen to, by being out in nature, by really becoming aware of listening to the sounds that are around us and listening and identifying what the emotions are, when we hear sounds, what the triggers are, if we like or dislike a sound, and why that makes us feel that way, and to go back in there and find the original root cause of why the sound makes us feel good or bad. 

Because if we can identify what we are being triggered by in life, and what makes us feel pleasurable, what makes us feel not pleasure, or angry or frustrated, we can then work at removing those triggers in life.

And then just understanding that it’s a sound, it’s us, that puts the meaning on sound. And with anything in life, a lot of our mental state issues come from the interpretation of meaning that we put on the thing that is, rather than just appreciating it for what it is. 

So it’s, I’d like to see people, you know, Crystal singing bowls might not be their thing, classical music might be their thing. Or maybe they really love the sound of wind chimes. Or they love the sound of rain, to really just go in and allow themselves to indulge in the soundscape of their environment and really, I guess, play a more active role in creating the soundscape of your life. Because it has a huge impact on our mood, and our health. And it’s something that doesn’t need to cost anything.

We can all access Free Radio, YouTube, the Internet, and we can make sounds that are pleasing from things in our own house, so it's really an invitation to take control of your mind. Listen for sounds, learn what you like. And let’s get more of what you like more of what you enjoy in your house and create a positive soundscape in your life because it’s healing for you. And it’s healing for everybody else.

37:18

Thank you. Finally, where can our listeners find you? 

37:23

The best place to connect with me is my website, which is katische.com. And all my links for social media there. I've just opened a Facebook group, which is called the magical sound lounge. And I will be sharing small sound healings for free in that group. On my website, if you use the code, Soulful Valley, you can receive a 25% discount as a podcast listener for a sound healing session, specifically the out of the womb chakra and the heart chakra session. 

And I’ve also got to give yourself permission and journal because I think that part of the journey to connecting to your highest self is realising that you are the authority on your life and that you are the only person whose acknowledgement recognition and approval you need in life, you don’t need it from any external source. And when you can approve of yourself, you can get self love. And that’s how it taps right back into the whole singing bowl thing there. 

So that’s your invitation via the Facebook page and group, a free journal to really start thinking about how only you need to prove yourself in your life and give yourself permission to do anything in life and then the 25% discount if you’d like to join me for a sound session.

38:57

Thank you. I really appreciate that. Thank you for coming in today. It’s been

39:01

Thank you for having me

39:02

wonderful at learning a bit more about this and I will be in that free group.

39:12

Bye. This

39:26

Thank you for listening to the soulful Valley podcast. I hope that you’ve heard something today that makes your life a little lighter. Our aim is to share love light and wisdom and to raise consciousness and ease suffering. If you’ve enjoyed this show, please subscribe rate and review and let others know about this podcast if you think they would benefit from listening to it for a free EFT guide or to join my alignment seekers free Facebook group or to work with me one to one and find more information at soulful Valley on Facebook. And Instagram on Twitter. You can email me at soulful Valley podcast@gmail.com Bye for now