“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration.” —Nikola Tesla
I was having a particularly rotten week. Anger was near the surface. And grief was bone deep. I was tempted to book a session at the local Smash Room when I remembered a new business that had just launched in town. Sure, I could break some sh*t—and I still might—but before I sprained my hand crushing panes of glass with a mallet, I thought, why not book a session at Source Vibrations Sound Clinic in Fairfield?
Jason and Katherine Wild are the husband-and-wife team behind a new immersive sound clinic in Fairfield designed for restoration, wellness, and connection—through the healing power of sound. The studio offers both private therapeutic sound sessions as well as group workshops and specialized events.
Jason and Katherine share the natural ability to make people feel at home. Open hearts. Gifted listeners. And the comforting studio they’ve created—enhanced with natural-palette decor, acoustic panels, cushy chairs, and an impressive collection of beautiful, therapy-grade instruments—is a versatile space that invites you to slow your pace. A sanctuary, really.
When’s the last time you collapsed on a sheepskin pelt and got happy-zapped by a set of singing bowls—or enjoyed the ambient, soul-shaking rumble coming from a gong? If the answer is “never,” I highly recommend it. Sometimes bliss is when the only thing you have to do is “do nothing.”
But I was most curious about an unusual contraption they’ve got tucked into one of their private studios. Could a lie-down on the vibroacoustic lounger shake my inner discord back to calm? Begin to reprogram me toward peace? It was worth a shot.
Sound too woo-woo for you? I encourage you to modify the phrase to “woo-woo-wonderful.” Or “woo-woo-woooow!” Or, if you are me after my first session on the vibroacoustic sound bed with hair sticking out at odd angles, a stupified smile, and eyes that don’t want to open yet, more like “woo-woo-what’s my name again?”
After my first session on the sound bed, I gathered my coat and shoes in a state of hypnopompic happiness—that dreamy, not-quite-awake-yet state. I felt like a puff of whipped cream floating on a piece of warm pie.
My plan was to melt out the door and attempt to remember my own address, when I recalled that I was due at an audition for a holiday-themed play down the street. In my 30 years of sweating it through cold readings and monologues, I have never felt more relaxed—and more free to take creative risks—than at that audition. I will definitely be returning to, I’ll call it, “The Bed.”
Vibroacoustic Therapy
Taking time for self-care in the form of deep relaxation is one of the best things you can do for your health; your body doesn’t function very well in a state of stress. Using sound therapies to improve cognitive function and well-being has been well researched, but I was curious to learn a bit more about the mechanics of it—and about how the bed came to be.
Jason is a trained hypnotherapist well-versed in neuro-linguistic programming and a self-admitted former band geek. His passions for alternative healing modalities and music-making have now baked themselves into a tasty sort of cake for all to partake in, with a guiding hand from synchronicity herself. (And I don’t mean Katherine, although some might be tempted to call her that. Even those who barely know her would say she has some kind of magic.) I digress.
“I was always looking for alternative healing modalities,” says Jason. “Mostly to fix my own issues. You know, ‘healer, heal thyself.’ In my twenties I had a client who was a retired hypnotherapist. He really liked me, he knew that I was interested in music, and he said, ‘I have something I wanna give you.’ He comes back with a trailer attached to his truck, opens it up, and says, ‘Somebody needs to work on this. It’s probably you.’
“The trailer was full of metal things, and plastic totes full of all kinds of wires and gizmos, and I’m like, ‘What is this?’” Jason says. “He had taken an old hospital bed, rewelded it, and converted it into a sound bed. There were amps and speaker wires, and ten ‘bass engines,’ he called them. He told me, ‘You need to reassemble it and figure out how to reupholster the surface, but I was using it on clients who had respiratory infections and circulation problems. It just like, vibrates them, and can clear up a lot of problems, all kinds of things.’ And I’m like, ‘All right. I’ll figure it out.’ I was super into it.
“At the same time,” Jason explains, “I’d been practicing meditation for a long time. And I didn’t feel like I was doing it right. And then I came across these Hemi-Sync tapes from the Monroe Institute.
“They discovered in the 1970s that if you play two different frequencies, one into each ear, the brain kinda collapses them into a third tone, and they call that a binaural beat frequency,” Jason says. He tells me he began listening to the tapes, and noticed almost immediately that his meditations “started going deep.”
I personally wasn’t familiar with the term “binaural beats,” so Jason demonstrated for me on a set of crystal singing bowls, playing one tone, then overlapping it with a second. The tones merged into a wavering note, a sort of vibrato to my ear.
It sounds bizarre, but our brain waves synchronize with these patterns, these “beats,” a phenomenon called “entrainment.” And if you slow down the pattern, the brain will follow, facilitating a restful state somewhere between waking and sleeping. It’s a state of consciousness where a lot of good can happen.
“I put the bed together,” says Jason, “and got very deep into how frequency works, and how we can use it with music and therapeutic interventions.” He began incorporating the bed into his practice, “using binaural beat frequencies, nature sounds, and simple tones,” and noticed that his clients were going “way deep, way quick.” Breath and heart rates were slowing down, facial muscles relaxing, eye movements slowing or stopping. The bed became a tactile sort of “anchor” for his clients, allowing them to settle into their session very quickly.
For Jason, all of these synchronistic events brought into focus “the relationship between music and health and consciousness, and how we can use music in a way that’s really productive for our life conditions,” he says. “I probably should have been a schoolteacher,” Jason says, smiling, “but this felt like a calling.”
After years of fine tuning, the Vibro-acoustic Therapy (VAT) bed Jason and Katherine now have in their studio combines two main elements for a full-body experience of sound. Binaural beats and balancing frequencies are subtly woven into ambient music experienced through a set of headphones, while patterns of vibration in the bed move in sync with the sound. “It’s like listening to music with your whole body,” says Katherine.
The vibrations range from head-to-toe deep-bass rumbles to softer stirrings that oscillate through various parts of the bed, interspersed with delicious periods of total stillness. The experiencer has full control of the headset volume and vibration strength, and there are more than a dozen different soundtracks to pick from, compositions all created by Jason, each about 20 minutes long.
Katherine—a writer, storyteller, performer, and vocalist, among other things—has had ample opportunity to sample the sound bed, and finds that her sessions often serve as a creative primer. “When I go into that hypnagogic state,” she says (i.e., the transitional state from wakefulness to sleep), “it can help everything congeal, themes will pop out, certain ideas will rise to the top. It’s almost like a clarifier.”
“The nerd level of it,” Jason adds, half-joking, “is that the sound bed is bringing the brain into a state of coherence and integration. If we’re easily confused—or have scatterbrain tendencies or A.D.D.-type things, or if we’re overwhelmed by emotions or have self-doubt or negative self-talk—and we start to focus the brain in a new way and create new network connections, it’s a very different experience of life. It can clear the slate in a really powerful way.”
“The benefits are cumulative,” explains Jason, who by this time has logged thousands of hours on the bed. “There’s a novelty element to it at first. It’s an exotic experience—you’re feeling sensations that you’ve never really had before in any other way—but the benefits really come with regular use. Because you have the neuro-aerobic benefits that come from listening to binaural beat frequencies, which tend to improve cognitive function and help the brain work better. Then there are the benefits of clearing the traumas or the stuck energy out of the bioenergetic system. It is a cocoon of ‘me time’—where you can really dive deep into your own inner experience and have that happen in a safe and supportive environment.”
“Not everyone finds the vibration to be enjoyable,” says Jason. Meanwhile, others can’t get enough. “We had a friend come in for a session,” says Jason. “A few people were hanging out in the front room, and somebody says, ‘Ummm, why is the building shaking?’ She had cranked it up full tilt.” To each their own!
As for me, it took a few minutes to acclimate to the vibration, but once I got used to it, I adopted a sort of intention as I
lay there basking in the ambient sound and getting shaken. I visualized the old stuff falling off the ends of me. Just falling right off.
Community & Connection
If getting vibrated is just not your thing, there are plenty of other Source Vibrations offerings to explore. Try a live-instrument sound-therapy session played by Jason in the second private studio. Attend a cacao ceremony and sample single-origin cacao from Guatemala. Come out for a candlelit full-moon sound bath; grab a body-length cushion and let it all wash over you. Jason’s binaural beat-based Source Vibrations soundtracks—which have been in demand online for several years now—are also available for download. If you’re interested in acquiring therapeutic musical instruments for use at home, Source Vibrations can help with that too.
The clinic also hosts a Wednesday night drop-in improv class taught by local actor and Source Vibrations operations manager Solomon Davis. With all of the supportive sound going on here, it’s only fitting that a few nights a month the room be filled with riotous laughter, too. There is healing power in pure play.
Based on the attendance numbers of their first month of events and enthusiastic reports from around town, it would seem the community has been thirsting for something like this—not only a place to uniquely experience the profound power of sound, but a place to connect meaningfully with other people. I mean, do you know of many other places that erupt into spontaneous fits of music-making on a regular basis?
“I really think that is the primary purpose of this,” says Jason. “The community. The connection. The events. That’s what we’re putting most of our energy into. These sound-bed services are great too—and people are taking advantage of them, which is wonderful, but there’s a collaboration happening that I think is really interesting.”
As Katherine and Jason thanked a room full of guests with glowing faces at the clinic’s grand opening celebration last month—a truly magical occasion of live music, studio tours, sound bathing, and call-and-response song—they warmly invited the community to make the space their home.
It’s such a gift to walk into a place where you feel cared for. And a gift to walk out feeling even better.
