We Focus on Love

By Maddie Luekbert

With tall, white crystal bowls and a mallet in hand, sound-healer Shawntay Fields uses an ancient remedy to soothe modern day problems. 

Sound healing more than a meditation for Fields. It connects her to a world she's lost.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_02 0:02

So let's first begin by closing our eyes. We take a deep breath in to our nose and allow your body to sink into the support that you have beneath you. Feel the earth holding you steady and strong.

SPEAKER_00 0:34

In a dark ballroom in downtown Newark, three women lie on their yoga mats. Shantae Fields, a sound healer with kind eyes and a bright smile, sits in front of them, surrounded by singing bowls, as she leads the women through a sound bath. A sound bath is a guided meditation accompanied by the soothing sounds of singing bowls, chimes, and drums. It is a practice thousands of years old and meant to unlock your chakras, providing relaxation to people who feel stuck in go mode. Shantai has built a business out of sound healing. Here's how. Eventually she sets the drum down and reaches for wooden chimes, each playing a tone associated with one of the four elements. The chimes are tube-shaped instruments attached to a chord that Shantae uses to spin the chimes in small circular motions. If stars made a sound as they flickered at night, I think it would sound similar to these chimes.

unknown 4:14

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 4:14

Yeah. Good light. Good relax. Alright, do you have any questions?

SPEAKER_00 4:25

Shantae's participants often walk away from a sound healing session feeling lighter, level-headed, kind of like they just got a massage. And while helping others find a sense of peace is definitely a perk of the job, it's not why Shantae began her practice.

SPEAKER_02 4:43

So I came across a book by Eileen Yakusick. Um I forgot the name of the book, but it was I read a few of her books, and it was about healing your body with tuning forks. And I was like, this is amazing, this is interesting. So I actually had gotten a gift from my sister-in-law. I got a gift card from Amazon, and I was like, oh, I'm gonna get those tuning forks I was looking at. So I actually got my first set of tuning forks because of my sister-in-law because of the gift that she gave me. And I started doing it on family first, and I noticed how they reacted, like and it was immediately like they would fall asleep. It was just an amazing thing. Yes, they would fall asleep. But that's how I got started. It was just I've always been into that type of studies, and to be honest with you, what really got me into that type of study even deeper, into esoteric um studies, was because I my father had just passed all of a sudden, died of a heart attack, left me feeling very empty, like really, really, really empty for that time. And I was just like, there has to be more to life than just this physical world, you know. So having that experience just opened my eyes to know that there's more to us than what we've been led to believe. And I think that's why I focus so much on the heart. We focus on love that helps to heal wounds, we focus on love that takes care of the pain. We focus on love, then we have this understanding, like this just a better way of connecting with people.