An Experience Shared: William Ward talks about Healing with Tibetan Singing Bowls

William at Down 2 Earth April 2012

William Ward, a former New Yorker who resides now in Pensacola, FL was a Chef for 13 years.  To relieve his job related stress, he discovered meditation.  He now has a full time sound healing practice and has been a Bodhisattva customer since 2009.  William will be playing his collection of Bodhisattva singing bowls on the program shifthappensradio.com on 6/21/12.  We are in the process of building William a two-octave Master Healing set.
 
How did you get involved with bowls?
 That’s one of the most important questions.  It started with a meditation.  In a meditation, there was a sound that I can’t even begin to describe with words – it brought a knowing of an unconditional love that was there – just the deepest experience of peace I’d ever had.  What it taught me was that God was real within us, which was what I was looking for and was the reason I was meditating.  A few months later, I walked into a conscious living store, heard a CD playing and heard the bowls.  Tears of remembrance of the sound I experienced flooded me, and I knew I had to look into it.  And that’s how it all started.

You started with Crystal bowls? 

The Crystal bowls and Tibetan bowls came at the same time.

What were you looking for?

I was looking for what I had experienced in that sound and I wasn’t finding it everywhere.  That’s why I stuck with you guys. I’ve done a lot of research and looked around and you guys connected very well with everything I was looking for.

Did you study with any one?

I read some books, Mitchell Gaynor, “The Healing Power of Sound”, and Jonathan Goldman “Healing Sounds”.  They were both very helpful, as they expressed my experience in ways I couldn’t yet grasp with my own words. Reading up on it helped me to find my own words, for which I am eternally grateful.

So you never studied with anybody, but you read the books and got started from there?

Yes.  It was more an intuition that just brought everything together – the more I worked with them and shared them, the more intuition expanded from the experience.  The experience was the knowing. I just followed that.

Please talk to me about how you integrate the Crystal and the Tibetan Bowls.  Usually people resonate with one or the other.

What I was looking for was to recreate that sound in the experience I had – it is my wish for everyone to experience that for themselves. I found that to re-create that sound, I had to use more bowls, I had to fill in certain spaces.  And it opened my eyes to see how chords were playing while I was filling in the spaces, and it expanded from there.  I loved the harmonies and the timbres and the higher frequencies when I brought in the Tibetans.

Tell me how you work with the Chakras.

I was very skeptical about the Chakras and didn’t understand them in the beginning. So I really put some time into understanding them for myself.  It’s psychosomatic, because our Chakras lie along our Central Nervous System.  I realized what effects our nervous system the most is our thoughts about reality. Who I think I am affects every way in which I will express myself.

We’re all spirit having a human experience; however, if I’m too connected to the human experience it limits that awareness.  Where our blocks happen is when we forget this reality.  Reality is itself the seen and the unseen working hand in hand.  I started seeing everything as vibration – whether you can see it or not, it is in vibrating form like an orchestra playing its song.  So when I say reality, everything in existence has its song that it’s singing, each component or instrument is vital for the whole composition.  And we as humans have that awareness of observation. So where and who we think we are, we are.  But we don’t have to stay there.  And that’s the correlation I was making with the Chakras being psychosomatic – reality is limitless, it always has been.

Usually when we hear the word psychosomatic, it refers to someone manifesting a physical condition simply by believing they have it.  Is that what you mean be psychosomatic?

Not manifesting, but knowing it to be true. For example, our Root Chakra is connected with physicality. And we can stop there, which most of us do, or we can look to see energetic origins of physicality, which would raise our awareness of that Chakra more.

How did you choose working with the diatonic scale system as the basis of the Chakras as opposed to any other system?

I never put any thought to it, I just went where I was guided, which isn’t as simple as it sounds.  I just went with my intuition.  But I do love to learn how other people use their styles and techniques.

When you do your sessions, you just put the Tibetans on the body?
Almost always. Sometimes I’ll also place the crystal bowls on the body.

How do you decide that?

Each session is different.  There’s a knowing in the moment.  What I love about the bowls is that it’s not imparting a verbal knowledge to them, it’s sharing the experience with them, which is priceless.

Why do you do what you do?

 It was important for me when I experienced that peace within, that became my new passion.  And I know that when everyone can find that place that is within them, we will all know, so naturally, how we can move forward together, in a sustainable way for the environment, our children and their children.

Tell me about the show you’re doing.

El – the host of Shift Happens radio – called me and said  that she’d heard from quite a few people about me, and she wanted me to come on for a two hour segment.  It will be airing 10 PM EST 6/21 and will be available on podcast afterward.  www.shifthappensradio.com.

Tell me about the collection from BTC you will be using tomorrow.

I’ll definitely be using my C# Highwall and the Pentatonic set, and then I’ll use Pentatonic cup set if I have the spacing.  I have one E that was gifted to me that’s a 10 or a 12”, so I don’t know if I’ll have the space for it or not.  For the crystal bowls, I have an Alchemy set.

So you will be giving us that experience tomorrow.  We’re really looking forward to hearing it!