19. Music is Magic: Stephanie Ball's Story of Healing Grief & Trauma Through Sound

In this episode of Success through Scars, I chat with Stephanie Ball- an opera singer, sound healer, and now recording artist- about navigating grief, honoring the body’s needs, and using music as medicine. Stephanie shares the raw story of losing her father to dementia, the repeated heartbreak of saying goodbye in small pieces, and how that grief unlocked old wounds she didn’t even realize still needed healing.

She dives into how sound healing helps release stored trauma in the body and why shoulders, hips, and throats often hold our deepest stuck energy. We also chat about her pivot from back-to-back opera gigs to crafting immersive sound bath experiences, working with corporate teams, and launching her new recording projects- all to help people heal physically, emotionally, and energetically.

Stephanie leaves listeners with a powerful reminder: it’s all temporary, you will make it through, and radical honesty about your needs is the first step to real healing.

https://stephanieannballsoprano.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamstephaball/

Transcript

0:01

Welcome to Success Through Scars, the podcast where we turn our most painful struggles into our greatest success stories. I'm Annie Esso, a multi-passionate entrepreneur, business mentor, and professional singer who's overcome anorexia C-P-T-S-D, depression and anxiety. Each week, you'll hear powerful stories of resilience from people who have transformed their deepest pains into testimonies of strength. If you are feeling lost or broken, but have big goals, you are in the right place. Whether your scar comes from a traumatic past, a breakup, a near death experience, or a mental health struggle, remember this, your scars are proof that you survived and scar tissue rebuilds and repairs itself, and you come out stronger on the other side. I hope this podcast can bring you the hope you need to keep going. Let's walk this journey of finding success through scars together.

Annie: 0:57

Hello, hello, and welcome back to another episode of Success through Scars. Today I have with me the beautiful Stephanie Ball. She is a professional opera singer, an entrepreneur. She is a sound healer, and today she's going to share her story of how she went through grief and use that to start her business. So welcome Stephanie. Thanks so much for being here today.

Stephanie: 1:17

Hey, thank you Annie. So grateful to have some time to chat with you and share with you, and thanks for the invitation to come on today.

Annie: 1:25

Yay. Of course. So can you start off by sharing with our listeners a little bit about yourself and who you are, what you do, and then we'll get into like the backstory as well.

Stephanie: 1:34

My name is Stephanie and I come, you know, we'll get into the story later, but the snapshot version is professional opera singer, and I'm also a sound meditation facilitator. So the short version that I usually give to people is that I help people use music as a tool for stress reduction, and it's been a wild ride getting here.

Annie: 1:56

That is so cool. So for people who have never heard of. The concept of sound healing. Can you kind of explain a little bit more about what that is?

Stephanie: 2:06

Yeah, totally. So if you've ever heard really relaxing meditation music on YouTube, or if you have the calm app or Headspace or insight timer, that kind of thing. Uh, that's essentially what I do. I work with a set of instruments that are called crystal singing bowls, and I play them. They make a really big, gorgeous resonant sound that. Puts people in a really nice state of deep relaxation. And I also pull my voice in, so I do vocal toning as well. And it's a great combination for getting the nervous system to balance itself out, getting that parasympathetic side to come back online and take people down and to rest and digest. So then on the other side, you get the focus and the creativity and your executive function skills improve and all that good stuff.

Annie: 2:52

That's so cool. So do you kind of work with the chakras, with the sound bowls or. Is each sound bowl a different chakra?

Stephanie: 2:58

Yeah, great question. So I have a set of seven. I'm like in the middle of them right now. Um, this is what they look like. So each, it's a c major scale tone tuned down to 4 32 and each note corresponds with a different chakra. So that's all show. You bring up a great point. I do the energy work alongside it for people who are interested in that as well. I'm also a reiki master and a hypnotherapist. And the, the stack of certifications is pretty deep at this point, so

Annie: 3:28

That's so cool. Okay, so thanks. I'm so curious to know, how did you get into doing this type of work? I know this'll probably lead into some of your backstory and the grief that you went through.

Stephanie: 3:39

Totally. So we gotta go to the way back to the very beginning. This all began and snowballed really rapidly when I finished graduate school. So I got my graduate degree, a little bit late. I took a few years off after undergrad and then went back. So I was like 27 when I finished graduate school in vocal performance, and I was like. Ready? I said, okay, yes, I have the degrees. We have got this. I'm gonna go full speed ahead into an opera career and it's gonna work and it's gonna be amazing. And that is not at all how it works for most of the singers to come out of university. As you know, we get prescribed this really specific path that we're supposed to take. That means we have been a successful singer and that works out for like 2% of the population. And so when I came out. I noticed that like I was an okay-ish singer, but I wasn't singing up to a professional standard. Like my technique was all right, but it was not great. Didn't have the stamina to make it through really long rehearsals, so I found myself getting fatigued a lot and I was just endlessly frustrated that what I thought was gonna work easily was not working. And. I, at one point I was like, this is ridiculous. I'm gonna quit. I should have figured this out by now. But I didn't know that it was like the system and not my voice. I didn't realize that I was missing probably 75% of the skillset that one needs to survive in the music industry. So fortunately, I found a fantastic teacher. Shout out to Carol Kirkpatrick, and she was like, okay, first thing we need to do is get your technique like actually working at a professional level, which is gonna take some time. We have some rebuilding and some unlearning to do. And the other half of it is you've got, we've gotta get yourself together. Like this is 95% mindset and self-belief, and we have got to get you to a place where you are out of your own way. And she was. A practitioner of neurolinguistic programming, NLP, and when I say this woman completely changed the trajectory of my life and career, that is not even an exaggeration because she's the one who introduced me to personal development and personal growth and all the ways that you can learn about yourself and find that beautiful balance between self-love and self-acceptance, while also understanding that there's always a little bit of room to grow. Even if you're growing slowly, that doesn't matter. Like the point is to always be sinking into your favorite, most authentic, most embodied version of yourself. Because for singers, that's what gets us into the space where we can open up and become the channel and the vessel for the sound to come through so we can deliver some healing to the audience. That's what started all of this.

Annie: 6:33

Wow. I love that. Yeah. Thanks. Do you mind maybe sharing a few of those things? Like you said you were missing 75% of what you needed to be a successful singer. We have a lot of singer listeners on this podcast. Mm-hmm. Do you mind sharing what some of those things were?

Stephanie: 6:49

Absolutely. So, the well went pretty deep for me, like. Not a boundary to be found. No boundaries. Okay. Which is a problem, you know, for both your personal life, like when you're getting into relationships and things like that. But also I just couldn't figure out how to get things done efficiently. So learning music, I could do it fast. I've got a great memory so I could learn music pretty quickly. Giving myself a process to follow, to learn it in a way that didn't stress me out is the skill that I did not have. I was always a last minute procrastinating, cram kind of person. And that just doesn't, it just doesn't, it's not sustainable. Like it works while it works and then very suddenly it doesn't. So learning how my brain worked and what kind of. I call them guardrails now, but what kind of guardrails and systems I needed to have in place to thrive was huge. So just understanding myself better so I could set up my days in a way that allowed me to feel expansive and not rushed all the time was huge. What are some of my other favorite things? Oh, learning about my value system was massive because now I understand that all of our behavior stems from. Our values, and a lot of times our values are also. Clouded up with emotional baggage, limiting beliefs, things that we just pick up when we're little and we try to make sense of them in our brains, and it's not always totally accurate. So learning the things that were really truly important to me and the ways I needed to show up for myself to fully exemplify those values was probably the biggest, most pivotal thing, because that's the part where. My boundaries started to show up and I was able to start saying no to the things that I didn't wanna do and start understanding what a full body yes meant so I could align myself with opportunities that really were life giving instead of just doing a bunch of stuff because I felt like I was supposed to. So those are probably the two biggest things.

Annie: 8:54

I love that. Can you share more about like what was the disconnect between the values that you were. Placing at the top of your list before and what they actually are now, what's more aligned with you? What do you feel like school taught you to value and then what do you actually value?

Stephanie: 9:09

Yeah. Gosh, that's a great question because what I have found from working with so many clients is a lot of us, we think something is of value, but it's actually. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes our true values are buried so deep in our unconscious and we're just operating from a place of what we think our values are supposed to be, and that can really get in the way and mess a lot of stuff up. So for an example, I always thought one of my values was a success. And so all of the things that I was doing was tinged with this. Like program that I was running in my brain where I was gonna do the biggest competitions and I was gonna sing the most impressive arias, and I was gonna go for all this big stuff and I was gonna be successful because that was important to me. Now, do not care. I like, sure. Do I wanna be successful on some level, yes. But only because what I really want is the freedom that comes with that. Mm-hmm. And the peace to just live my life in a way that feels good and leaves me feeling full of joy and at peace and able to connect with people. So once I dug that up outta my, you know, the depths of my soul. I was able to shift the way that I showed up in life and shift all of my behaviors and my actions to align with freedom instead of success.

Annie: 10:36

I love that because I feel like so many singers are chasing this idea of, okay, I need to be singing at the Met in order to be successful. But there's so many different ways to have a successful career, so I love that so much. So I know it took you a long time to get here and a lot of trials and a lot of pain and a lot of hardship and a lot of trauma and a lot of grief. And I know when you were filling out your form for this call, you talked a little bit about losing your father and how that mm-hmm. Kind of led you into sound healing. Can you share a little bit more of that story for us?

Stephanie: 11:11

Yes, for sure. This was so pivotal, and I love that you brought up. The trial and error part,'cause I have burned this down and started over so many times, like, it's so insane. But where I started with my business, I started my business in 2017 and back then I separated the music out from the personal development stuff. This came about because since I fell in love with this kind of work and Carol had suggested, she was like, you're pretty good at this, and you kind of have a knack for this piece of it. So maybe. Considered teaching other people how to do this. And I was like, eh, but I'm singing, eh, I don't know. And you know how the universe has this hilarious way of like dropping stuff right to you when it's what you're supposed to do, and no matter how hard you run or you resist, it will find you. That's what happens. So people started asking me, Hey, how do you learn music so fast? How do you stay so focused? While you're on stage, how do you get through stage fright? And I thought it was gonna be singers. It was not. It was women in completely different industries. Lawyers. Therapists. Oh, doctors. Yeah. Complete, total. It was such a surprise. And so I went, okay, I didn't know this was a transferrable skill, but we're gonna lean into it and we're gonna use my skills as a performer to teach other women how they can show up like a performer in whatever they're doing in their life. And it got insane results really quickly. So I was rocking with that for several years while still singing, still teaching voice lessons. And my father was diagnosed with dementia in 2018. Shortly after I did a huge move to the East coast, move to Philadelphia. So I'm in a new city, new business, trying to figure out how to make this work, trying to learn a bunch of new skills that I didn't have.'Cause now it's a different kind of marketing and it's a different kind of putting my day together and also dealing with this insane. Really heavy blow to my family and I found myself also having to navigate all that stuff while stepping into like a kind of a supportive caregiver role for my dad. My mom was doing all of the heavy lifting. They were both living in Georgia. They had just moved to Georgia at the time. And so here I am, like flying back and forth to performances and flying back and forth to see my parents and. Spending my days on the phone trying to support my mom and get questions answered from the Veteran's Affairs office and from, you know, health insurance. So it was just a lot of extra mental stuff that I was very quickly thrust into. Plus the emotional piece of like, dementia is terminal. There is nothing we can do about that. And a lot of unanswered questions like. Well, how much time do we have left with him? How fast is it gonna progress? Is there anything we can do to slow it down? Just a lot of uncertainty. And so that 2018 to 2020 was pretty rough, like it was pretty tumultuous. And then Q Pandemic. Crazy town. So now we've got, I had a beautiful full calendar, like so many other singers gone in the blink of an eye. I'm doing this business, I'm taking care of my family, I'm trying to take care of myself. And it was not going well, which is, we'll get to that. And there was just one day where I woke up and I was like, oh my God, I hate this. I hate this business. It feels like a prison. I don't care about helping people. Figure out what sort of organizational system works best for them. This is just not, it's not it wasn't hitting And in early 2021, that's when I started listening to Sound Baths because I was such a wreck. I was so tense and anxious and on edge all the time because every phone call, almost every text message I was getting was something difficult, some kind of stressor that needed to be navigated. And I just, my capacity was like, it was so small and nothing felt good. I wanted to crawl outta my skin most days. So I started listening to sound baths and there was one day where I was like, Hmm, I wonder what would happen if I put the music back in to the other work that I was doing. And I don't know if you've ever sat down and asked the question, I wonder what would happen if it's a good one. You gotta be open to what comes at you on the other side. But every time I've asked, I wonder what would happen if this heaven's part for me and I get beautiful, intuitive wisdom and something hilarious and. If you have the courage to follow, what comes after you ask that question, it will change your life. And so I started asking, I wonder what would happen if I'm listening to these sound baths. And I said, okay, you know what? I'm gonna check the data. I'm a data girly. I love a science moment and a statistic. So I said, let me look through my client records and see who has gotten the best results, and I'm gonna see if there's a pattern because I had some clients who were doubling up with me and taking voice lessons and doing coaching or. Singing in a professional choir and doing coaching or taking voice lessons from me and doing self-development work elsewhere. And sure enough, there was a correlation. Every single person who was doing both, they had the music and they had the coaching aspect. Absolutely crushing it in major ways, opening private practices, winning competitions, starting their own businesses. Just, it was awesome. I said, okay. I have to put the music back in. So I started with adding a voice lesson component to my coaching so people could access their own voices and start opening themselves up. And this turned and expanded right around late summer fall of 2021 when my dad. Took a dive healthwise, and Carol also took a dive healthwise right around the same time, and I was like, okay I don't know. Well, now what? This is too much. This is a lot. And my father passed in September 5th, 2021, and Carol passed away in December of 2021. So back to back. Real close. And when I say this was a pit of grief I did not think I was gonna be able to come back from, and it was the sound meditations that like quite literally saved my life, I'm pretty sure. And that's when I was like, you know what? I think maybe this is the thing I'm supposed to do. It was so deeply healing and restorative for me that I said, I think this is how I'm supposed to be using my voice. And so that I burn everything down and that sent me on a path that's now looks completely different from where it began. So being forced to sink into my own grief and revisit what was important to me, that has what created the biggest shift in my business.

Annie: 18:25

Wow. Oh my gosh. I'm tearing up listening to your story because when you said that was a pit of grief, I didn't think I could ever come out of, I. Have friends that have recently lost parents and also gone through lots of other grieving times, and with losing a parent on top of something else, and like losing two people that are super close to you. That sounds like unimaginable grief, so, yeah. Oh my goodness. How did you actually come out of it? Did you just listen to the sound baths every single day? Like how did you navigate that?

Stephanie: 18:59

So this is the journey that I'm still on, frankly. And you said it so beautifully that you don't ever really recover from grief. Grief just kind of changes. And you figure out how to live alongside it. And there's frameworks for how you handle losing a parent. And for me it was. So interesting because the world just doesn't feel like the same place without my dad in it. And so I had to learn how to continue living when everything looked different and nothing felt the same. And yet I still had to go on and there's no framework for losing a mentor. I studied with Carol for. 10 years at that point. And having a teacher that knew techniques so well, but was also such a champion for me in so many other ways, personally and professionally, nobody teaches you how to handle it when like a teacher dies. And so I felt like I was kind of waiting in these strange, uncharted waters and I just felt so adrift all of the time. And. The thing that helped me the most to get out of it was this is the caveat. I fully avoided a lot of things for a while. I threw myself into work. I went and I got a sound meditation certification. I went back and I got the next level cert of NLP hypnotherapy and mental emotional release. And I did a little bit of grief work, but I wasn't doing it the right way. And so I would say it took me a solid. It really took me like two years honestly, to let go of enough of the dysregulation from the dementia process to actually get to the emotions underneath the grief. I would say I didn't really start doing that until. Sometime in late 2023. It took a while and it took a lot of therapy, a lot of coaches, a lot of learning to do things that were always uncomfortable for me, like voicing my emotions. That is something I've always struggled with. But being able to sit down and say, I am really freaking sad today. I had to learn how to be able to do that to actually let it out. Mm-hmm. So it's been a process. I think it's gonna keep getting deeper and. You know, we're just gonna see where it goes.

Annie: 21:19

Yeah. Thanks so much for sharing all this. That sounds like an incredible, amazing journey that you went through with all of this. And I know that voicing your emotions is so hard for so many people, but that probably has to do with throat chakra and the singing and everything. It's kind of all connected. Can you talk a little bit more about how specifically sound healing helped with that? Process? Yes. Are you like screaming while you're doing so Like are you like letting it out, like somatically processing, is that part of it or is it just sitting.

Stephanie: 21:51

It's all of that. This is such a great question. Okay, so can I put my, I'm gonna put my science hat on for a moment.

Annie: 21:58

Yes, please do.

Stephanie: 21:59

I love an energy moment and I love a science moment. So this is the very short version of why sound meditation and really music in general, like what about it is so healing and so good for the body. And this works in two ways, receiving sound and also creating sound. So I mentioned the nervous system a little bit earlier. Snapshot of this is we have two pieces to the nervous system. We've got the sympathetic side. This is what gets activated when there is some kind of threat present. This can be a real threat. It can also be a perceived threat, like if you get an email. And you have a panic over it. This is your brain going, this is something that is going to kill me. When the reality is it's just an email. Your brain doesn't know the difference between a real threat, a perceived threat and also can't really understand the difference between the past, the future, and the present. Which is why trauma responses can be so debilitating, even if there's nothing out here to get you, your body and your physiology is gonna feel like it is. When the stress response gets going, all kinds of things happen in the body. Heart rate goes up, oxygen starts flowing to the muscles in case we have to run away. Breathing gets a little bit shallow. We get a boost of cortisol, we get some adrenaline. We get this cool like neurochemical. Hormone response that happens to get us away from the threat. That is the only objective when we're stressed out. This is great in very short bursts. If we need to hit a deadline, if we've got a performance to get through, we want this reaction. That's the idea. We have to have this, but what happens to so many of us living in a society where there's stressors coming at us all the time and. Many of us have experienced a whole boatload of trauma in a lot of different ways. We get stuck at the top. So the parasympathetic nervous system is supposed to kick in, but it doesn't always kick in fast enough, and we don't always get all the way back down. So the idea is once we're away from the stressor. Then heart rate goes back down, cortisol balances out all the other hormones start to chill out and go back to what they were supposed to be doing. Digestion starts to get better and we get back into that nice relaxation state. Sound is one of the most fantastic ways to coax that side of the response to come back online and do its job because when the sound wave enters our ears, our brain translates it to electricity, sends it down through the nervous system, it activates the vagus nerve, which is like a huge piece of what keeps us calm and. It really can facilitate and encourage that beautiful relaxation in response just by the sound waves moving through the nervous system. So when I get people who come in and can't seem to unwind and they feel tense and anxious all the time, really just listening to the sound bowls and listening to a really kind, loving voice gets them right back where they need to be. So I. Absolutely adore sound medicine as a way to achieve actual healing. And it can help with all kinds of stuff. Like it can help with physical pain as well, because all the little auxiliary nerves attached to the end of the nervous system that are surrounded by muscles and tissues and fascia, when they start vibrating, they can bump up against the muscle knots and actually work them out of your body. Musicians are magical beings. Like we're all walking around with this incredible, magical healing gift, and I think it's so special.

Annie: 25:34

That's so cool. I never thought of it that way. Mm-hmm. Because you know that my background is also in kinesiology and biomechanics, so I have my strength for singers program. I had no idea. Mm-hmm. I had no idea that sound could help release muscle tension.

Stephanie: 25:47

Yep. It's so awesome and what's cool to me is this is not a surprise. Like it's not new. People have been using sound as a modality for healing in every culture on the planet since humans have been here and. The difference is now we've got the technology that can actually take a look at what's going on. So we've got all this data coming out that is catching up to what people have known for a very long time. Mm-hmm. And when it comes to making sound, we are a noisy people like humans. We are wired for vocal expression and noisiness to demonstrate our emotions. And I mean, if you go to a sports game. It is just people hooting and hollering and clapping and stomping at what's going on because when you get that buildup of energetic tension, sound can release it and release the stress response that's happening in your body. So you were so right on like screaming, crying, laughing with a friend. Singing is one of the best. Ways to get emotions out of your body when they are stagnant and causing you any kind of drama. So I love encouraging people to sing. I help my clients do their own vocal toning so they can access their own voices and do it on their own when they're at home. I love it. I can't say enough about it.

Annie: 27:07

That's so cool. So both singing yourself helps to release the sound and then also listening to. Music or someone else singing or, or sound tones, which I'm sure you'll explain in a second'cause I'm not sure what that is yet. But that kind of leads to vibrations in the body that also are healing. So it sounds like it's both ways, whether you're making the sound or you're listening to the sound. Mm-hmm. That's so bingo. You've got it. That's so cool.

Stephanie: 27:33

Yeah, I've never

Annie: 27:33

thought of it that way, so thank you for sharing that. Welcome. I'm sure this is gonna be new for a lot of our listeners too

Stephanie: 27:38

yeah.

Annie: 27:39

Can you explain what the sound toning is?

Stephanie: 27:42

Yeah, totally. So vocal toning. This is another really like ancient healing modality, and you can do it on different vowels. You can just do it on whatever feels natural, but it's as simple as just singing an ooh or an ah, connected to your breath. So try it for a second. If you just go and just tap into how you feel.

Annie: 28:02

It's very relaxing. It's almost like doing the M in yoga.

Stephanie: 28:06

Yes. Bingo. That's exactly it. And science side is, it stimulates the vagus nerve. We love that. But also. If you do it with intention and just sit and feel into your body, you'll start to notice where you're feeling any kind of internal tension. You might have some tears come up. You might start laughing hysterically, but if you do it long enough, you will have a shift of your emotional state. It's the same effect as if you're in your car and you're in a bad mood. Your favorite song comes on, you belt it out for three minutes and you feel better when it's over. That's kind of what's going on.

Annie: 28:42

That's so cool. I didn't know any of the science behind why this actually makes us feel better,

Stephanie: 28:47

mm-hmm. I

Annie: 28:48

love this. Thanks for sharing this. This is fascinating.

Stephanie: 28:51

Um, you're welcome. I adore this stuff.

Annie: 28:54

So what was your journey like when you were healing from the grief and the pain or, or I guess not really healing from, but also moving through, because I know we never really fully heal from the loss of a loved one and the grief of that, but. What was that process like for you? Did you do this every single day? Like how for our listeners who are going through something similar, how would you recommend that they move through it?

Stephanie: 29:16

Yeah, so I think this is such a personal individual experience and when you're going through something, you really do have to figure out what your body needs and what your soul needs, for me listening to music regularly, sometimes it was a sound bath, sometimes it was rocking out to my dad's favorite music. He was a musician. We had a ton of memories around music together, so some days that just looked like me putting on, george Clinton and like crying on my floor in my room. Aw, it looked different every day. Grief is so non-linear. Sometimes it just doesn't make sense and it just will come out of nowhere and you'll have a crazy reaction that you didn't expect to have over something that you didn't think would trigger you and. Leaning into that and just having the courage to give your body what it needs and to examine what is going on when you get triggered by something was what I found to be the most healing Some of this was awful, but the gift on the other side of it was it unlocked a bunch of trauma that I thought I had addressed that I totally hadn't. And it gave me this really interesting, unique opportunity to look at all of the other places in my life where I was still boundaryless and where I was still caught in anxious control patterns and where I wasn't showing up for myself as much as I needed to be. And. Let me think of an example. Okay, so this is like kind of a light one, but with dementia, forms of dementia and Alzheimer's. You get, like a checklist to follow, which is so nuts because it's essentially, it's a list of all of the things that are going to happen in the progression of the disease. And every time something changes and you get a little check mark on the list, that means that the person that you love is closer to passing away. Wow. Yes. So it's this crazy world of knowing exactly what kind of horror my father was gonna go through next, and being able to predict the timeline of like, oh, he is walking a little slower. That means I have to call the nurse and let them know. Or, oh, he can't use this hand anymore. That means I have to call and let the nurse know and. Having to say goodbye to someone over and over and over and over in small pieces for years is absolutely excruciating to go through because it's grief over and over, and also this constant like anxiety of waiting for the next thing to happen. And so now I understand that I can push through like nobody's business. I can handle a crisis. I can. Get a lot of, I can get things done when everything else is falling apart, but to my own detriment, and that was one of the reasons why I was so burnt out after we laid my father to rest, because I was just pushing, pushing, and not giving myself enough time in between to recover. So I had to really take a hard look at like, goodness gracious, why do I do that? How have I been functioning my whole life? Have I been doing this forever? And I cannot believe that I have run my body so ragged just from not taking time. To nurture myself in difficult moments. And so that was one of the silver linings, was to really look at all of the traumatic places where that came from for me, and feeling like I needed to keep it together and I needed to be the strong, tough one. And what I really needed was to just go take 30 minutes to cry to a friend and be sad after some bad news, and then take a day off if I needed to, and then feel better and then get back to it. Learning about all of that was the catalyst for the actual healing that I needed to do, if that makes sense.

Annie: 33:14

Yeah. And actually I don't know if you have read this book called The Body Keeps the Score.

Stephanie: 33:21

It's, oh, yes, I got mine right there. Yes. It's one of

Annie: 33:24

my favorite books, and it talks about how trauma is stored in the body, and I can definitely relate to what you're saying because that's what caused my stomach on my right, on my solar Plexus chakra to rupture, you know? Yeah. Because it's so interconnected and it's like, if we don't release this trapped energy, or this trauma, or these emotions, it's just gonna keep building up.

Stephanie: 33:47

That's right. They will come out one way or another. Mm-hmm. Absolutely.

Annie: 33:52

So does sound healing help to release those things?

Stephanie: 33:56

Yeah, absolutely. And that this is where the science meets the metaphysical.

Annie: 34:03

Yeah,

Stephanie: 34:04

because, yeah, so we have the cool stuff where when you are less stressed out, your body has a greater capability to heal itself and recover. So you get the better benefits of rejuvenation just like you do with really great sleep quality. Your muscles can repair themselves. So any of that, like muscle tension just starts to get better faster when you are doing regular sound meditation work. But the energetic benefits of it is these bowls are so powerful and when I combine them with reiki then you get the extra added benefits of being able to look for things in the energy field that we can't heal with any other messes. And so it's this really beautiful opportunity to heal the physical body, the emotional body, and the energy body all at the same time.

Annie: 34:51

That's so cool. So that's what you do in your sessions, right? You kind of combine mm-hmm. All of these healing modalities.

Stephanie: 34:57

Yes. Bingo.

Annie: 34:58

That's so cool. So yeah, who do you usually work with? Like what do people come to you with and what are their results usually?

Stephanie: 35:05

Mm-hmm. So I, these days I work with, a lot of people in the tech industry and the health industry, so people with really demanding, stressful jobs they're kind of into the metaphysical stuff, or they're just now starting their spiritual journey, but they know something's wrong, they don't feel good, and they want to feel better. So pretty typically, I get people who have a really big mission, a big purpose, but they're filled with anxiety because they don't quite know how to achieve it. They have some self-worth stuff going on that they can't quite get through that's showing up somewhere and they just need a second. Set of eyes and a second soul to help escort them through it. Physical pain people I get people with a lot of lower back, hip and leg pain. That's probably the one that is the most common for me. And shoulder pain, I get a lot of folks with shoulder pain, which makes sense. Energetically speaking. Shoulders are connected to the heart chakra, sometimes the throat chakra. If you've got trouble speaking up about things, if you've got a lot of self-doubt and it's showing up and not being able to ask for what you want, gotta look at the throat chakra and see what's going on and then check lower and see if that's coming from somewhere else. It gets really, really interesting. So I love. Every single one of my clients, they're all so fabulous. I love getting to do group events. I do some, a fair amount of corporate work as well now, and that has been so fun is finding the people in big corporations who were into this, which was the huge surprise. I didn't see that one coming. Um, but they're out there. People need healing and need calm more than ever, I believe, and so I love getting to do it.

Annie: 36:49

So what are the corporate events like? How do you tailor that to the whole group? It's probably a group of what, 50 people in a company or something?

Stephanie: 36:55

Yeah, exactly. Sometimes even bigger. And sometimes I'm going to them to their headquarters and other times it's virtual, which is also nice because then they can just pop on in their middle of their. You know, their day and then get their little reset and go back to their next meeting feeling better. But I generally will speak to the point person and be like, okay, what's coming up? What's coming up with your employees that you're noticing? Is there an area where you're seeing them be particularly stressed? Is there something that's not working? Like is everybody. Feeling stressed out by a big project deadline and the company culture has shifted into one that doesn't feel great. So I just kind of source out what is the problem that you're seeing manifest in the workplace. And then I just use the bowls to, to fix it.

Annie: 37:45

That's so cool. Wow. I love all of this.

Stephanie: 37:49

Thanks. Me too. It's grand fun.

Annie: 37:52

So what's the breakdown between like how much singing are you still doing and how much are you doing? Sound healing.

Stephanie: 37:58

This is funny. This is another twisty turn that this has taken, um, really just in the last six to eight months, which is so funny. So I still sing a decent amount. I like a big. Needy job maybe once a quarter. So either an opera or an oratorio. That's about the speed. That's all I can handle at this point. I did that like back to back opera life once. And I said, I will never do this again. It's just it for me. It's too hard. I have so many colleagues that love it and are thriving, and I love that for them. I'm cheering them on from afar, but I need a break in between performances. So I like one big gig every few months and, smaller things. I love curating concerts. I've been doing solo recitals in all kinds of different venues for many, many years, and that's one of my favorite things to do. So I do a lot of that. And now we are getting into being a recording artist, which is so hilarious because. It is one of the things that I wanted to do when I was a little girl, and then I went opera track and that, you know how that goes. It was so different that I was just focused on the live performance aspect of it. But when I started doing all these sound baths, people were like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. Where can I hear more of this? And I went, huh. Maybe I should start recording these. So I have this very dear friend named Jesse Rhodes. He's a fantastic executive in the Seattle area. He's a leadership coach, he's an author. He's on a bunch of boards doing all kinds of. Charity work that's really, really meaningful. And he has this way of like noticing what people need to step into their next era. Mm-hmm. Which is wonderful and also gets on my nerves sometimes'cause I can't get anything past it. So last year he wrote a great book and asked me to be a contributing author, which I was so happy to do. And then he calls me one day, he's like, Stephanie. Will you write a song for the book to commemorate the book launch? And I was like, yeah, I didn't think about it. Sure, sounds great. I don't know what I'm doing. And then I hung up the phone and I went, oh no, what did I just agree to do? I don't know how to do this. So, but because I had been like kind of messing around, I just took it as an opportunity to dive in and figure it out. We have figured it out. We've got a single coming out very soon. In a few weeks, we've got a live show coming that pulls together original music, a little bit of opera, some of the sound meditation, all in like a crazy unified moment experience, if you will. Fully working on an album now, that's gonna come out sometime in 2026. I have. Sound meditation library that is in the works and I'm pretty hyped about all of it.

Annie: 40:56

That sounds so cool. So can you share with our listeners when your show is gonna be, where can we listen to your music?

Stephanie: 41:03

Yes, I'm so happy to share. So show's gonna be in early August in Seattle, Washington. I'll make sure you have links and stuff so people wanna get tickets or if they're gonna be in the area or want a cool vacation. Yes, please come through. It's gonna be really fun at this place called the Collective, which is an awesome, like very cool venue we're gonna have appetizers and like a little networking moment. It's gonna be really fun. So I'll drop all those details. Mark your calendar for early August for that. I think it's gonna be August 8th. I have to confirm the date with the venue today, but that's what I'm shooting for.

Annie: 41:39

Cool. And then.

Stephanie: 41:40

Yeah, definitely like follow me on YouTube. That's the spot where I'm gonna be dropping all of the fun stuff. So I'll make sure you have links for that. I'm on all the socials. I'm very easy to find, and I'll also make sure I get you links. So for anybody who wants to grab a subscriber spot in the meditation library at the pre-launch price, that's something that you're gonna wanna lock in early. So I'll get you all the details.

Annie: 42:05

That sounds so cool. Yay. Thanks for sharing all this, Stephanie. Is there anything else that you want to share with our listeners? Maybe someone who's going through a really tough moment, whether that's grief or loss, or they're just feeling lost. Anything that you'd wanna share with them as some kind of parting advice?

Stephanie: 42:24

Yes, totally. First of all, thanks for having me. This was super fun. Like, yay, I have, this has been such a great chat and I'm so grateful. Harding, words of wisdom for people who are going through it know that it's temporary. There is an other side, you will make it outta the storm. That's probably the most important thing to remember is temporary. And when you're in the middle of it and it's just feeling. Super awful and heavy. It's very easy to lose sight of the fact that things change all the time, and to get yourself through it, you gotta be really radically honest about what your needs are, which for those of us who have a history of overgiving over-functioning, people pleasing stuff. It can be really difficult to admit that we even have needs, let alone be able to identify them. So if you can find the courage, get support, like get a therapist if you need to get one to help you figure out what you need. Because when you can start to nourish yourself by meeting your needs on your own and finding the people in your life who can help you meet them, that's when things will start to shift.

Annie: 43:39

I love that. And this is exactly what success through Scars is all about. Talking to wonderful people like you who have used their deepest pains and traumas that they've been through to create something really beautiful that now helps and impacts people that are going through something similar. So that's exactly what you did. It's so amazing. Thank you so much for being here, Stephanie.

Stephanie: 44:01

Oh, such a pleasure. Thank you, Annie.

Annie: 44:03

Of course. I'll talk to you soon.