The Power of Healing Through Sound – An Interview with Kyle Lam

Tell us about how you got into sound healing and spirituality.

Kyle Lam: Well, I’d say it started when I was a child. I actually played piano for 10 years. I was also in symphony orchestra and marching band, where I played the clarinet for eight years too. So since I was young, I’ve had a fascination with music and really developed a deep love for all different types of music. When I was younger, I not only played a lot of classical music, but I also went through different musical periods throughout the centuries, as well as a lot of modern pieces too. My love of music back then really helped me to understand a lot of the emotions behind music too.

When we played different concerts and performances, there’s so much emotion that needs to be involved when you perform music. So I was able to really develop a greater understanding of my own emotional relationship to music. Since I was 14, I have always loved going to concerts and different music festivals, and I have really learned to love a wide variety of different genres of music. When I was younger, I was more into the rock and metal scene, of course, being like this angst teenager. Then, I grew up in a very rural area, so I fell in love with country music. As I got into my high school and college years, I expanded a little bit more, diving into hip-hop, electronic music, and so forth.

Across the spectrum, yes, indeed.

Kyle Lam: Now, of course, with my spiritual practice, I love mantra chanting. I love chanting different mantras from different languages and faiths. It has been a beautiful experience. What I’ve learned now is what I love most about music, especially certain genres, is the story behind music. I really love the portrayal of different scenarios that I have personally been involved in and also different scenarios that I can imagine being in, exploring the different emotions if I were in that kind of situation. I love going to concerts and music festivals too. So, in essence, it’s really no surprise that I ended up falling in love with sound healing.

How I really got into sound healing stems from my introduction to spirituality. I really believe that I’ve always been a very spiritual person, long before I even knew what the term spirituality means. I believe a lot of it comes from my heritage. I’m Chinese; my mother was born in Beijing, my dad was born in Hong Kong, and my entire family is actually still in China. In this country, it’s only my mother and myself. So I really do believe as a Chinese person, because of my ethnic background, there is a lot of spiritual connection ingrained in a lot of Asian, especially Chinese, heritage.

Growing up, my mother grew up in the Cultural Revolution, so a lot of faith and religion were not only frowned upon but abolished by Chairman Mao. Even though I didn’t have a lot of connection to faith or spirituality, my mother took me to Buddhist temples here in the LA area. So I had a good introduction from going there as a young child, doing some meditations with her, some prayers, and engaging with the monks.

When I was in college, I had an opportunity to take a philosophy course called the philosophy of simplicity. Part of that curriculum was a seven-day stay at a local Buddhist temple nearby, and we basically got to experience what it’s like to be trained as a novice monk. We had the robes and garments that the novice monks wore, we had conversations with the venerables, we had different dharma talks, and we did meditation three times a day. We did a sitting meditation in the morning, a laying meditation in the afternoon (which, I admit, sometimes I fell asleep during), and in the evenings, we would do walking meditations. Even when we were eating, we would practice the presence of being with our food and being quiet. We also did a lot of practice in service. We would serve our fellow classmates, serve the monks and venerables, and take part in cleaning the temple. So that was a good blast into the beginning stages of spirituality.

During my college years, I was dating this woman at the time, and she and I really started our spiritual journey together. A lot of it was through exploration of music, because we loved going to music festivals. We were really deeply in love, so all the emotions behind being in love and being in love with music played a strong part in my spiritual journey. But it was really after our breakup, that heartbreak, which encouraged me to learn more about myself, not only from a spiritual side but also to learn more about my emotions. Being very young, there were a lot of new emotions from that breakup that I didn’t understand. So there was a lot of yearning to learn more about myself and what’s really going on underneath.

At the time, I was living in the LA area. Being Los Angeles, a very open place with a strong conscious community, I was able to dabble in so many different types of modalities and practices. I’ve been to sound baths, various forms of breathwork from different practitioners, tapping (emotional freedom technique), kirtan mantra chanting, and different forms of yoga. But what I really fell in love with was Kundalini yoga as taught through Yogi Bhajan. That was really when every modality and every lesson and all my past experiences came together. Through Kundalini yoga, everything made sense. Kundalini yoga, for anyone unfamiliar with it, is called the yoga of awareness. It’s less about the body and more about the mind, the breath, and the heart, really channeling a lot of that Kundalini energy within your spine and integrating it into yourself. There’s a lot of intensity, of course, from that Kundalini energy. I consider myself a very intense person. I have no trouble embracing intensity or any form of high, intense situations or sensations. So that also helped me fall in love with Kundalini yoga. I devoted myself to the practice of Kundalini yoga; it became the bread and butter of my spiritual practice.

I was very lucky to have very good teachers there. Many of the original students of Yogi Bhajan himself were teaching in the Los Angeles area. I was able to not only learn from them but connect with them. I’ve learned from Guru Singh, who was one of the primary students of Yogi Bhajan. I learned a lot from Tej Kaur Khalsa who was the librarian of his teachings. Specifically, Tej I really connected with. One is because I love her style of teaching. She was able to put a lot of practicality in spirituality. Even though we were doing a lot of these movements and kriyas and breath work and mantra chanting, and there’s a lot of practices that derive from the Sikh Dharma and Kundalini yoga, she always had the ability to apply that to real-world situations. So I loved that connection. It was really from her that I fell in love with the connection between spirituality and practicality. How can you apply real-world situations to really deep esoteric spiritual practices? Through Tej, I also really found the love of being in service. I was able to connect with her really well, randomly, not even through Kundalini yoga. We ended up at a writing workshop from one of our mutual friends, and we partnered up and just became very close. She’d seen me in her classes before, so I would go early after that, help prep up the space for her when she comes, walk her to the teacher’s podium, get her mic all set up, and help her pass out the snacks. A couple of times, I would even drop her off back home.

This relationship with my spiritual teacher really strengthened and blossomed my own spiritual connection to myself and, of course, to the practice of Kundalini yoga. It gave me the understanding of what being in service means. We call it seva, right, selfless service. You know how much benefit you can have by offering your services to other people without expecting anything back. In the end, we’re in service for the expansion of knowledge, the expansion of awareness through any practice. Around that time, I began to discover what sound baths and sound healing were. The unique thing about Kundalini yoga is they end every class with the gong. As my practice and my love of Kundalini yoga grew, my love of the gong also grew. I remember I did a four-hour gong workshop at the same studio where I was doing my Kundalini yoga, and that just sparked my love of the gong. Even sound baths—I love every instrument associated with sound baths: bowls, chimes, bells, whistles, and gongs. But really, the gongs are my forte. I understand the power and strength behind the gong from my classes.

What is the significance and history of the gong?

Kyle Lam: Sure. Historically, the gong really has had three primary purposes. One is to announce the incoming royalty. When the emperor, the prince, the princess, the empress, king, or queen would arrive, the gong would be struck, and that was the indication to the whole entire royal court that they were arriving. So everyone would shift to their positions and bow down to welcome the royalty. Even from that point, you see people just shift their emotional responses. They were also used in rituals, dance, and ceremonies to create a rhythm or a beat. In the end, a gong is a percussion instrument. It was used a lot in wartime to instill fear in the enemy because it creates this dark, ominous, heavy sound. Thankfully, we don’t use the gongs for that reason anymore. It’s a beautiful musical instrument still used today in rituals and ceremonies, especially with movement or dance. Now, in the past few decades, gongs are also used in wellness healing ceremonies. You see them in temples as a background with the mantras, with the scriptures, to help people connect in meditative practices together.

At what point did you begin to put all the pieces together and think, okay, I can do this myself?

Kyle Lam: I actually started by going to some sound baths by two notable sound healers in the LA area. One is Ana Netanel; she does a lot on the West Side. Then my girlfriend, Ambi Kavanagh, who at the time was doing these astrology sound baths at Wanderlust studio. As I was going to their sound baths, I ended up befriending them and getting to know them. Eventually, I asked them if I could be on their team and help them out. Part of that seva thing I was talking about earlier with Tej. So I got really close with them, became really good friends with them, and started helping them, not only with the production of the sound bath, from picking them up, carrying their instruments, and setting it all up, but also engaging with the people that would come to their sound baths. I would check them in, talk to them, and engage in conversations. I didn’t really have any intention of creating the sound bath; it was just something that I wanted to be a part of and loved doing. I had a long time with them, and eventually, my friend Ambi encouraged me to acquire my own gong. I got my very first gong from her recommendation and eventually got one for myself. Then I got a basic set of seven crystal bowls and played them for myself at home. Eventually, my friend Ana invited me to play with her, and I did. At the time, this was before she was doing any kind of formal training. Me and another one of my good friends would play with her all the time, so we were like this little team of sound healers playing for the LA area. On the flip side, I was also helping my friend Ambi produce these really big sound baths for the Hollywood area. A lot of that was my informal training. My formal training is for music. My informal training is just from being part of the experiences. That sparked something in me because I loved doing it. Why don’t I start offering it myself? I did my very first sound bath in Venice many years ago. It was a great success—very small, only about 12 people, which was pretty good back then. It was great, and I did another one after that.

But then, I ultimately decided LA is very saturated with healers of all sorts, practitioners, facilitators, and especially sound baths. Almost every other person does a sound bath there. I didn’t want to be a part of the herd. I wanted to build my own community, my own brand, and my own style of sound baths that’s different from everyone else’s. At the time, I was living in Whittier in the East LA area, and I ended up doing it there for about two years. I was very fortunate to partner up with a crystal energy store where I did weekly sound baths. That area is primarily of Hispanic background, and they generally had little knowledge about what sound baths were, let alone meditation or anything associated with it. Most of them didn’t even know what yoga was; they just knew the word yoga. They had no idea what it was about. As an ethnic culture, they go through a lot of emotional trauma and wounds, and there’s not as many resources to bring awareness about what they went through or what they can do about it. They just had to deal with it or not talk about it. Of course, I’m not saying this is limited to Hispanic culture; many other cultures have that too.

In my experience, I learned a lot from working with that community. I did it there for two years, every single week. The space fit about 21 people, and we were selling out every single week because the people loved it. About 70% of participants for each event were new; they’d never been to a sound bath before. Through my time there, talking with people, engaging with them, and learning about their experiences and lives, I saw a lot of people transform their lives. They propelled themselves to become the person they wanted to be and resolved a lot of past wounds.

In many ways, I call that time period my dissertation, my PhD in sound. I got to work with a community that was new to mindfulness, awareness, or any kind of emotional inner work. I really fine-tuned my style and learned about the potentials of healing that sound baths can do. It’s very interesting because that particular time, the majority of people needed deep healing. Now, the community I work with still needs healing, but most people need a reset, relaxation, or more clarity and clairvoyance about what they need to do, versus resolving past issues.

You mentioned that there are a lot of sound healers and sound baths available in Southern California. How would you say that the events you put on are unique and stand apart?

Kyle Lam: One thing is, if you look at a lot of sound healers these days, primarily they’re all women. Not all, but mostly women. The feminine energy embraces the emotional side much more and has no problem going into that emotional realm. I am a man, and there aren’t too many men who do sound baths. There are also not too many men of color who do sound baths. I think I only know about two to three other Asian males among all the sound healers I know who do sound baths. Having that masculine energy creates a different experience than the female practitioners. I have a lot of intense energy and have no problem embracing and sharing that intensity in a safe, protected container. The masculine energy is supposed to create a safe environment for evolution, support, and healing for the community as a whole. My sound baths are more intense because they bring out more potential for who you could be and how much healing you could do from a physical, emotional, and mental standpoint.

There’s no doubt that my musical background plays a big difference. There’s always this debate about whether you should be musically trained to do sound baths. Many years ago, there was a big debate in the sound healing community about that. That’s a whole other conversation, of course. But if you compare sound healers with a musical background to those without, there’s a clear difference. We, as musicians, know how to incorporate notes, octaves, and tones into unique melodies and harmonies to create a story within our sound baths. My sound baths have a unique story of their own, encouraging you to look at your own story—not just the chapters written and the words being written now, but also what you could create. What is the story you could create? It’s a blend of past healing, becoming present, and becoming more aware of what you could be.

If you look at my setup, it’s quite big. On average, I use about five gongs, 12 crystal bowls of different sizes, and a variety of other instruments. It’s a combination of my masculine energy and musical background that makes it unique. One final thing to say is, from my time with Tej, I care more about practicality. I care more about how a person with absolutely no background in spirituality or meditation can benefit greatly. My sound baths are geared for everyone; there’s no prerequisite or need to understand something to come to my sound baths. I offer it in a way that is relevant to everyone and doesn’t cause intimidation. Spirituality can intimidate people who don’t have a conscious spirituality because it’s foreign to them. So there’s an open invitation; it doesn’t matter who you are, your background, or the language you speak. What we’re working with is very universal.

During your sound baths, you are fully into it. What’s going through your mind, heart, and body as you’re performing, leading, and guiding?

Kyle Lam: Thank you, I appreciate those kind words. I see sound baths as an opportunity to create art. Art goes beyond anything physical; it’s channeling energy from within or around you and presenting it in whatever form you want to create. I also teach a lot of sound baths, and I always mention that when you engage with these instruments, not only are you having a dialogue with them, but eventually, it turns into a beautiful dance. The more flow and flexibility you have within you, it translates into your playing. When I go into my artist mode, I have such a deep connection with my instruments and a loving relationship with them. I’m able to explore all sides of myself when I play—the fast, intense, invigorating movements, heavy swings, and grand movements, as well as the soft, gentle, slow movements. Even though it’s slow, there’s still a lot of power and energy behind it.

In many ways, I think, when I do sound baths, it’s not really me playing the instruments; it’s the instruments playing me. These gongs and bowls, many consider them as energetic entities of their own. As you’re in this beautiful cycle with them, it ends up with you playing the instruments and the instruments playing you. You’re responding to how these instruments are. I also love movement and dance. I love going to big concerts and music festivals, hopping around and dancing everywhere. I’ve always let the music flow through me. So, in essence, I’m letting the sound flow through me, and I follow the sound through my body. There’s no doubt, when I’m in this intense and gentle state, something from above is coming through me and facilitating the sound baths. Externally, it looks very beautiful. I’ve had people describe it as seeing an acrobatic dancer. Internally, it’s the same thing. I feel like this beautiful duet inside of me with the sound and the instruments.

Talk to us about the course where you train other people on how to lead sound baths. What does that involve?

Kyle Lam: I’ve done sound baths for many years, and when I started teaching, I realized that as much as I love doing sound baths, I love teaching them more. There’s this honor of being able to share your knowledge and wisdom and encourage students to expand on what they can develop within themselves. I have three different types of offerings for my training, broken down into three levels: level one, level two, and level three.

Level one is the sound bath course. When you first learn about sound baths, you’re really learning about yourself. These instruments reflect who you are. As you’re playing them, you’re projecting your energy into them, and they’re sending it back to you. It’s important to learn your relationship with sound healing, music, and the emotions that come out when engaging with these instruments. What are your interpretations of certain notes, octaves, and tones? Becoming more aware of yourself through sound and using sound as part of your mindfulness and meditation practice at home is crucial. Before you can offer it to others, you need to understand what’s going on inside you with it. The emotional side can be complex, and we need to understand the layers beneath us as they’re opened up through sound baths. Level one is about developing that self-practice.

Level two is where we explore what makes us unique as sound healers. As we begin to offer and share our energy with others, we learn intermediate techniques. By level one, we’ve learned the basic foundations of sound healing and music. I like to share my musical background and knowledge with everyone I teach. There’s no requirement to know music; I help develop a musical ear. In level two, we do more intermediate techniques and explore what your unique sound is. What is your style of sound? By the end of level two, you have a unique 30 to 45-minute sound sequence you can call your own, a baseline foundation to evolve from. This process gives you confidence, knowing how to play correctly and sparking wisdom from within. Devotion to these sequences and techniques will bring out your potential.

Level three is an advanced mentorship, focusing on the business side: marketing, production, and all that. Some clients want coaching in their sound baths. In the end, I wish for you to know what you’re doing, bring out your potential, and offer sound baths to others.

If someone wants to get into sound healing, besides taking your course, what other advice would you give them? How would you encourage them?

Kyle Lam: Offer to help in other sound baths. Find a practitioner whose sound baths you enjoy and offer your help. Volunteering played a big part in my early career. Not only did I get informal training, but I also gained confidence by witnessing and experiencing firsthand what goes into a sound bath. One of the sound healers I helped had a vast collection of gongs, and because she trusted me, she loaned me many gongs, which helped propel me. Being of service will benefit you and give you firsthand experience in sound baths. You become part of the healing experience for the people in that group. Patience is key. Have the courage to approach a teacher, share your experience, and offer your help. Over time, you’ll become closer to them, and they’ll trust you more. Worst case scenario, they say no, and you still get a good sound bath experience.