08/05/2026
Early on, when someone cried in one of my sessions, I'd talk.
I'd say something. Anything. Fill the silence before it got too heavy. This is your body releasing. This is safe. This is exactly what's supposed to happen. Anything I thought would make them feel better about what they were experiencing.
I was managing myself. Not holding them.
It took me a long time to see that clearly.
In those early years, silence felt like failure. If the room got still and someone started to cry, some part of me read it as a sign that I'd taken them somewhere wrong — somewhere I wasn't equipped to go. So I'd narrate. Explain. Offer context they didn't ask for.
What I didn't understand yet was that the moment I started talking, I was pulling them back up to the surface. And they were finally, finally going somewhere.
The over-explaining wasn't care. It was self-protection dressed up as guidance.
It took years of sessions, of sitting with my own discomfort long enough to stop reacting to it, to learn what it actually means to hold space.
Not to manage an experience. Not to label it or validate it out loud or make sure they know I know what's happening. Just to stay — grounded, present, playing — while they move through something that belongs entirely to them.
That shift didn't come from reading about it. It came from doing it badly enough times that I finally got out of my own way.
Six years in, I don't fill silence anymore. I hold it. There's a real difference between those two things.
When the room gets big, I get quieter. When someone cries, I stay steady and hold the space — because that steadiness is the container. My regulated nervous system is what makes theirs feel safe enough to soften. The moment I introduce my anxiety into the room, even through well-meaning words, I've changed the environment they're trying to release inside of.
No forced comfort. No "this is your medicine." No performance of being a healer.
Just space. Held with enough skill that they can have their own experience — fully, privately, without my commentary layered on top of it.
This is one of the things I'm most passionate about teaching in my 50-hour training, because it doesn't get talked about enough.
The mechanics of sound are learnable. The instruments are learnable. But the capacity to be present without needing to perform presence — to stay regulated when the room gets emotionally big, to trust the silence, to know when your job is simply to keep playing and get out of the way — that's the real training.
And it's available to you. It just takes practice, reflection, and someone willing to name the things most trainings skip over.
In October, we go deep on holding space — the science behind it, the felt sense of it, and how to stay grounded when the room gets big.
If that's the kind of practitioner you want to be — this training was made for you.
