Interview with Dr. Tim Hayes on the Journey’s Dream Network

Today, people are using gongs as a way of meditation. The sound vibrates through your frequencies and heals your stress and anxiety. This sound therapy has a way of raising your consciousness and awareness. It can put you in touch with the universe, it’s beautiful. Join Timothy J. Hayes, Psy.D as he talks to Gabriela de la Mora and Marian Kraus about the power of sound therapy when it comes to healing trauma. Discover the science behind this healing and how the process is done. Start your healing journey today!

My next guests are Gabriela de la Mora and Marian Kraus. For millennia, people of different cultures have used gongs to access and reconnect with their essence and higher consciousness through sound. Gabriela and Marian provide the vehicle for a guided meditative and transformational journey through a harmoniously layered multi-dimensional tapestry of sounds designed to deeply relax and invigorate participants simultaneously. The couple creates a soothing and healing environment of ambient sounds created by five large gongs, a didgeridoo, a flute, handpan, singing bowls, drums, rattles, and other sound tools, which lets you tap into your unconscious and conscious mind and positively rebalances the body-mind-spirit connection.

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Welcome. Thank you both for being here. It’s delightful to see you face to face.

Thank you for inviting us.

I’m hoping you’ll be willing to tell us a little bit about how you got into the work you do and what drives your passion for it.

For me, it started when I was eight. To give you a brief synopsis, I was literally pulled out of my environment during the Prague Spring, the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, because that’s where I was born. In an instant, I was pulled up and planted into a different society, West Germany, in those days because my family had immigrated from Czechoslovakia to Germany. It took me many years to unravel that conundrum of having pulled the rug from underneath my feet in an instant when I was a young boy. That ultimately led me to alcohol addiction. I began to drink when I was young to cope with life and all that goes with that.

When I turned 30, I knew that something had to change because one of my main models in life is if nothing changes, nothing changes. I joined Alcoholics Anonymous and have been sober since. Thanks to the grace of the universe. That essentially began my inner journey, even though I was always interested in nature, the universe, and metaphysics, even though I didn’t know that’s what that was at that time. I then began the process and the path of meditation, mindfulness in reflection, and on and on. I always had been a hand drummer. I was always drawn to the drums. Part of my journey was to leave my corporate career, which is the one that brought me to the US as a job transfer, and pursue the path of photography, working with light.

I became a full-time commercial and fine art photographer in 1999. I have been doing that ever since. As part of that, I came across the gong in 2011 and was instantly fascinated with it because of, again, the whole rhythmic element, the sound of what it does, and how it feels. I started to learn about it and experiment with it. I got some gongs. I connected with a teacher on the East Coast and read up about the neuroscientific element and neurobiology element of sound. In 2014, I was fortunate and lucky enough to meet Gabriela at a gong masterclass in Memphis, Tennessee.

How important it is to him to share and to reflect upon our initial stories because then everything makes so much sense.

In my case, I am originally from Mexico City in a large family. I am the number seven with the siblings. My parents are busy. They are not trying to make things happen. We’re six women and a man. In a society, that has a tendency or a trait of the macho. I don’t know if everybody’s familiar, but it can be difficult. You find a lot of abuse to this vulnerable population of women and children mostly. My family is a loving family. It’s a Mexican family and we were women. As part of that dynamic in childhood, I had a good idea of feelings of loneliness, abandonment, and emotional abuse because we were left for long periods of time. It was like the Law of the Jungle.

You need to be part of a culture and develop the necessary skills to be a human. Once you do that, you'll bring all of who you are.

My parents were wonderful in the sense that they would like to have this family. They would like to make things happen with their idea of making things happen. They worked a lot. They gave us education. I was able to study, initially, Communications at a good university. We were always given good opportunities for that. I got married. It was like they put me in a game without knowing the rules and having the skills. All of a sudden, I was there in an abusive relationship. I was not prepared for that. I started first understanding what was happening there, so many years began to pass.

When I gave birth to my daughter, that was a moment of questioning myself, “What am I going to do now? How am I going to save this innocent child.” That was a moment of awakening and wanting to save somebody that is innocent. I didn’t want her to go through many things that happen in life. At that moment, I started to find ways and try to understand. It helped a lot that I continued to study some other things that were opportunities at that moment. I was studying Religions because my sister-in-law, back then, was providing all these services as part of an important university in Mexico.

We’ll study all these Master’s degree because I was her assistant. That was wonderful to me because at least that one day when I was starting, it was full of light and more understanding. The layers of all the cultural aspects, including everything, religion, family systems, and values, how everything is relative to that point in the planet where you are born. That, to me, was like, “This is amazing.” I was happy and so much into that.

Anything that was an opportunity for me to study, I studied it. More and more, I was aware that I needed to do something even more profound and consistent. I wanted to understand why I ended up experiencing what I was experiencing, which now I understand from a psychotherapist that it makes a lot of sense. When you’re experiencing something as an adult, it is because something happened in your childhood, and it’s a repetition of the same configuration of elements and emotions. Whatever the individual experience, if it was abuse or abandonment, you’ll find a lot of the answers in that initial formation of your psyche.

Here, it was exactly that. It was fascinating, at least, to begin to understand what happened, what was wrong, and why I was experiencing that. My children hear that motivation. By that time, then I had a second child, Amelia. It was ten years of marriage. Two years before that, I started taking myself into therapy, but it was more my wish to understand and to go further. I started studying it as I was treating myself. I always wanted to help other women and children, people in situations of abuse, for them to know that they have the right and it is possible for them to have a life with dignity, respect, love, and feeling safe to be who they are.

It was wanting to do so much. In a society or in the moment where I was trying to do this, I didn’t find openings. I was living back then in a state near Mexico City, as I was married. All those 13 years, 10 years married and 3 more, I was trying to find out ways to help these people. I was active in writing a column. If I was in a rush, I wanted to allow people to know the possibilities and be of assistance. I thought that I understood deeply those layers and possible human behaviors, I was trying to understand them more. Even beyond that, ways to heal, transmute, transform, and overcome whatever an individual needs to overcome and understand for you to begin the second part of your life, which is to come back to who you are.

I understood that all our initial story is necessary as humans. When we arrive here, we need to get information. We need to become part of a culture. We need to develop the necessary skills to be human. Once you have all that, then you begin to bring what you are, who you are, and even better, because now you have a context and understanding of possible behaviors in humanity, you can help. That brings or creates a strong passion and determination to help in a specific way or share what you can share. I started studying. I liked the sequence because, in the beginning, it didn’t make any sense and then it makes perfect sense. It was religion to understand different ways of understanding the connection with the divine and beyond who we are now as humans.

When you’re experiencing something as an adult, it’s because something happened in your childhood. And it’s just a repetition of the same configuration of elements and emotions.

Religions and Arts are different ways to express that unconscious, and then it was History to understand that the context matters. Different values and ways of understanding life. Finally, I came to the one that I was like, “This is what I was looking for.” It was Psychology. I was able to connect with a wonderful Mexican doctor and psychologist, Eduardo Dela Fuente, who then became my director for the thesis. That moment, I met Marian. In the story about the marriage, we got separated ten years after we got married. We met in 2014. I got separated in 2005.

2008 finally, I got the divorce because that was a tough situation, and struggling a lot, but becoming stronger and understanding how that society works in many ways. Always the straight the macho in the system is something prevalent. I met Marian as I was doing this workshop to learn and to get certified in this modality, the gongs, which are ancient. Now, they are using the gongs as a way of meditation, releasing stress and anxiety, expansion, and healing, which is beautiful. Before meeting Marian, I worked on different TV programs as a host, and writing my column, and had radio programs for many years.

It was all always focused on balance, harmony, how it is possible to live a better life, and so on and so forth. Doing that with media, I also was able to present my book, Un Minuto Para Ti. It was talking with somebody that let me know you know for the work you are doing because also I was active now with different leaders. We were together creating these programs to work directly with the community, women, children, and in general, but more women and children. As I was doing these workshops, they let me know about the gongs.

That is when I went there to Memphis, and I met Marian. Now, we are doing together these group experiences with the sound, which is beautiful. I continue to work individually with other tools of psychology and life coaching, which includes a lot of meditation with universal energy, and then the sound. More or less, this would be the part of my story.

The question I have is, as the two of you were exploring gongs, vibration, sound, and healing, what have you learned that you could start sharing with our audience? I know a lot of people will read this have not had any experience with sound as a healing modality.

Sound is something that we cannot turn off. We can close our eyes for sight, but we can’t close off sound, so we are constantly surrounded by different sounds. If we consider that the vagus nerve starts in the brainstem and connects all our major organs, weaves its way through the body, and connects all major organs, it’s closely located to the ears. Anything that comes through our ears essentially touches the vagus nerve. Through that, it resonates through your entire body.

Let’s say the importance or influence of sound on our well-being cannot be underestimated. If you consider that you are subjected to a jackhammer, for instance, on a construction site or to bird’s songs, there are vast differences and contrast. You will notice when you hone in on it what kind of an effect those two different sounds create within you. One is stressful. At least that’s what it would be to me. The other one is soothing. This is a crass example of what sound does.

You can close your eyes if you don't want to see but you cannot turn off the sound.

In addition to this example, imagine the voice of your mother as you are a child. It can be so soothing. If she is singing a lullaby, telling you, “Good. Wonderful. I love you,” or she can be in a different frequency.

Gaby mentioned it, and I wanted to get to it, the word. The word is solid. What we think and what we say is of immense importance. What I wanted to continue with was that the sound of the gongs has been used for thousands of years. The oldest written record of gongs has been used in shamanistic, ritualistic, celebratory healing, and ceremonial purposes, going back about 4,000 years. Thankfully, we have been rediscovering the healing and transformational properties of the gongs. To come back to your question, what have we learned or found out? As far as I’m concerned, it is a powerful and effective tool to raise your consciousness and awareness.

When you are surrounded by the sound of gongs, you connect with the universe with the unified field, with God, or whatever you choose to call it based upon your belief system. It surpasses your thinking mind. It goes beyond that. It allows you to tap into your unconscious as well as your conscious mind. If you combine it with an intention, which is extremely important in all of this to get the full benefit of it, the intention of the presenter as well as the receiver is a wonderful vehicle for personal transformation. It triggers the parasympathetic nervous system and deep relaxation response, which then allows you to go into the homeostasis aspect of your being, where you begin to heal, replenish, and literally reboot your system.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s a powerful and effective vehicle for healing and raising your consciousness and awareness because that’s essentially what life rests on, how aware and how conscious we are about our words, actions, behaviors, and the resonance. Since you mentioned resonance a little earlier, I completely agree about the importance of resonance and entrainment because it’s the resonance that then brings us back to what life mirrors to us in terms of what we put out or what we share, whether it’s behavior, words, thoughts, and so on.

The symbols and situations of the past that you are not even aware of but they are there in this part of the mind. Always active in sending signals to the environment that make you connect with similar circumstances, similar people, and of course, making you feel familiar emotions. What I found, for example, with the sound was this beautiful sense of freedom, the space and necessary space, which is something that you cannot describe. It’s something that you need to feel.

This is something that when I experienced for the first time in this workshop, I wanted to find more and then understand what I experienced. What I found was this bubble of freedom and well-being, harmony with nothing else I needed. We are searching for that space to feel who we are, be able to feel safe, go to those parts of our childhood, and understand better.

The sound provides that is powerful in many ways. I wanted to understand and research a little more. I could not find any research and information in those years. I thought I was going to start doing my own observations with the sound. That was my thesis. It was focused on the case of an eleven-year-old girl with brain paralysis and some traits of autism. I started working. It was not a long study. It was the opportunity to observe through four months what could happen if, in the different practices, we included the sound of the gongs and even for her to be able to make the sounds.

Now, people are using gongs as a way of meditation. They are using it as a way to release stress and anxiety. It’s also used for expansion and healing, which is beautiful.

It was based on different practices, such as regression. It was incredible. The same team of therapists was treating this girl because she was receiving therapy for speech, movement, vision, and all that. They were like, “What is happening with her? Something is happening. The body is relaxed. Now she is not constipated.” She used to be constipated for 6 or 7 days, and then all of a sudden, every day, she would do a release or, for example, the voice.

All that she could say in Spanish is si, which is yes. She would only say, “Sss.” This was in the first session with a singing board. It got released the voice. It was, “Si,” but a deep, “Si,” and then she said, “Vaca,” which is cow. For many other things, for example, she would only interact with inanimate objects. This was an observation of the dad. He was saying, “Before I could do anything and everything for her to look at me. Now she would avoid it. She would just look to the world as it happens.” After the gongs, she was interactive. Even though she didn’t have the speech, she was interacting and looking in the eyes. They were even annoyed. Now we can stop it. We’re driving, and she wants to participate. Something incredible happened.

It was related to her initial story because when she was born, her twin sister was there for one month in the womb of the mother. She was always, in the beginning, surrounded by fear, contraction, and frustration. Also, when she was born, for a longer time, she was not with her mom, in disconnection and feeling safe, but connected because they needed things to happen for her to be alive.

It was so much trauma that with the sound of the gong, she began to release, no longer in contractions. The body was moving and the voice was flowing. She would be able to go to the bathroom. These were powerful to me and incredible. What I find for myself, and beautiful too, in therapy is to overcome childhood trauma or simply to reduce the anxiety that is growing. They were saying 120 million additional cases of anxiety and how it is affecting children and young adults. This is a beautiful vehicle, plus it happens at that moment, during that session. There are people that had reported to us, “This was better than mushrooms or ayahuasca.” However it is, people are taking these vehicles to overcome trauma and feel that they are not trapped in this fear. For them to tell us, “This was even more powerful. It doesn’t have side effects,” which is beautiful.

You say the word side effects. That’s just semantics and playing games. It’s not a side effect. It’s an effect that I’m taking because I want this effect and this effect, but I take it and get all these effects. It’s an advertising gimmick to get us to take something that’s poison to say, “Take this and you’ll have this effect and these side effects.”

It’s cruel.

All of the effects are beneficial from sound, vibration, and healing.

When you are surrounded by the sound of gongs, you tap into your unconscious, as well as your conscious mind.

We can see there that we are frequencies because we are these trillions of molecules in different frequencies that when we are happy and loving, creative energy, it means that your frequencies are high in good frequency and every molecule. When we are in fear, anger, or experiencing symptoms and disease, that is because the frequencies are low. Imagine that these sound waves are helping our frequencies to be amplified. At that moment, they feel like, “My pain is gone.” Emotional pain is gone. It’s incredible.

It goes back to the principle of entrainment. We mentioned resonance a little earlier. Entrainment is another aspect of this because entrainment was discovered by a Dutch clockmaker in the 1700s. He had one large cuckoo clock going at a certain pace. The surrounding clocks in the room that he was making were going at a different rhythm. When he came back in the morning in the same room, he discovered that all were going in unison. If you want to see that in action, we have a page on our website under Vibration. You can see a video of 40 metronomes being started randomly. After about 3 or 4 minutes, they are all in unison.

The principle of entrainment essentially is if there is a larger energy source or a higher frequency range, it entrains the surrounding ones and pulls them or resonates with the others to be in sync. These gongs, with the broad spectrum they provide, harmonics, and the whole tonal spectrum, depending upon how you play them and what you do with them, provide a wonderful way to entrain. Again, it’s coupled with the intention. We set our intention every time before we begin one of our events upon love, harmony, joy, peace, and healing.

All those emotions that you feel expansive and feel good.

By putting those out into the space, we perfume the space with the specific intention of what we want individuals to experience. It’s an experiential event.

There is another experiment. It is for people to imagine those experiments. This is a Japanese man creating with these rubber mallets on a surface.

Anything that comes through your ears essentially touches your vagus nerve. And through that, it resonates throughout your entire body.

It’s a steel plate.

What he does is to put some powder, I don’t know if it’s flour or something, and then he begins to rub and to create this kind of sound. It creates this beautiful organization and perfect symmetry. It’s symmetrical and in such perfect order. Imagine that that happens on a molecular level.

Thank you for bringing that up. That is the Science of Cymatics, the study of waveforms.

You can understand what is happening.

We have a wonderful page on our website about Cymatics where you can see a number of different videos that clearly show what Gaby mentioned. The fascinating element about that is that those patterns that essentially are created by sound frequencies are repetitive patterns that occur in nature. Visually, you will see how many of the patterns that are being created on these different media resemble visual patterns, for instance, occurring in zebra stripes or leopard skin, and things like that. Make sure to look it up. It’s a fascinating subject. If you consider that we are all molecules, we consist of about 70% of water, and water is a conductive element of sound. You can only imagine what happens to us when we are subjected to different sounds.

It happens in one second. You can see it there in itself. Another experiment or a way to explain it was by the assistant of Dr. Masaru Emoto.

When you look at the crystals that get formed in water when you quick freeze it after the water has been exposed to these various sounds, positive words, and different types of music, you see the impact of the vibrations on the water. This vehicle that we’re traveling in is more water than anything else. Imagine the impact on your body when you walk into a room. People are pouring those positive intentions and adding the vibrational frequencies of your gong in a therapeutic way. It’s off the charts beneficial.

By working with the frequencies of the gongs, it amplifies your own frequency.

It begins with the thought because, at the end, everything is frequency. Not only the sounds that we can perceive, but there are sounds that we cannot perceive because the frequencies are in a different range from what our ear can listen to.

We get less than 1% of the frequencies of both the electromagnetic spectrum and what we would call the audible spectrum. We get 1% of it, but it’s still there.

That’s why the water became our perfect teacher, showing us, “Look at those frequencies that you are not even aware of.” Even the written word and everything has a frequency to be exposed or share those frequencies.

I want to tag onto and build on what you were saying. Bruce Lipton’s work, looking at human cells under an electron microscope, taught us that every cell in your body has either this rest and digest function or protect shutdown function. Also, every cell in your body has this receptor site for your mind energy. Even though you might be in a safe environment, if your mind is saying, “This is dangerous,” all the cells in your body go into this shutdown protective mode, which is good for a brief period. The young girl you were talking about in your thesis example was constantly in that tension shutdown mode.

The natural state is to grow, relax, create, and expand. You set the intentions in that positive way and then we assist the body in softening, relaxing, and allowing people to flow with a simple loving thought, and then you assist the body to vibrate at that higher, more natural frequency. It wants to go back there, be healthy, and heal. It isn’t that it’s so much work to heal. It works to identify and release the trauma that’s more important.

We can apply different affirmations and positive and loving words, but the trauma remains without knowing. All of a sudden, thoughts happen. It’s not that I’m going to think horrible thoughts. No, they just happen without being aware because you are distracted, and there they are.

It’s there as that energy. Like when you tap the gong, it keeps resonating the energy. You don’t have to keep banging the gong. It’s going to vibrate the energy and will do traumas in there. If something in your life reminds you of that trauma, it gets the gong going of the negative vibration. It’s dangerous and we better shut down. It’s all that automatic process that we can, with the help of tools like yours, become aware of and start to release.

The principle of entrainment is if there is a larger energy source or a higher frequency range, it entrains the surrounding frequencies. It pulls them or resonates with them to be in sync.

It’s all about release and opening up blockages.

I would like to mention something related to what you were sharing, Tim. At the beginning, when Marian was sharing the sound, explaining the regions of the gongs, why the gongs, and all of that, of course, there was this possibility that people would come with deep trauma would have a bad reaction. That’s when we started.

I’m very much proposing to prepare the path and allow people to focus on a specific experience in that specific moment with the sound because everything gets amplified. Not anyone can play the gong. That’s the healing. It’s healing, but also, in specific cases where there’s a lot of trauma, there is more that we need to add for it to get released and then for people to be able to tap into the different frequencies of love and gratitude.

To finish the example of the assistant of Masaru Emoto, she was trying to show the same what Masaru would do when he was alive by using the tuning forks in different frequencies. Let’s say she had a 34 Hertz and a 35 Hertz, very close, and then she, on the other hand, had a 35. If she would play that 35, the only one that would resonate would be the 35, not the 34.

This was the way for her or for him to explain to people that it is ours. The one that is attracting and finding resonance with specific people and circumstances in the field of life because of the frequencies we carry in our unconscious mind and conscious mind. With the words that we speak and the same patterns, we are so familiar with.

That awareness of the Law of Attraction or Law of Resonance was beautifully explained there. By working within using the frequencies of the gongs to amplify our own frequency, your complete life changes. Not only this life that we are seeing in front of us and our interactions, job, and relationships but our biology, as we know, Tim, because we are sending those frequencies to every cell.

It then translates into what we experience. It all begins on the inside, and then it goes out to the outside. As Gaby was saying, we attract what we think about and what we envision and on and on. Allow me to briefly mention since we mentioned gongs and tools that we use. If we consider the didgeridoo, it has been used by the Aborigines of Australia for about 40,000 years for healing, transformative, celebratory, and simply purposes to connect with the higher realms, thereby recreating a connection or reconnecting with the higher realm within ourselves.

We attract what we think about and what we envision.

As we know, we are all consciousness, and consciousness is all there is. We are part of nature. We could talk about this for hours. We use the didgeridoo, Himalayan singing bowls, native flute, drums, rain sticks, shakers, ocean drum, and different tools. There’s so much to talk about when it comes to this, but it is important to understand that this is a powerful tool, a vehicle to accompany us in the process of healing, understanding, and integrating the things that we mentioned and that we talked about. It comes down to integration and then remembering and practicing it.

As we know, the tsunami of thoughts continues, and it is our choice what we choose to think about. It is our choice to remember whether we literally feed ourselves good, positive, expansive thoughts, healing thoughts, supporting thoughts, or whether we go into the fight and flight response mode and think about gloom and doom or whatever. This is obviously amplified by media. If you open up social media or news, it’s a swamp.

Talking about that capacity to choose. When I mentioned the sense of inner freedom, that space within ourselves, as Viktor Frankl refers to it, there is a space always for people to see it this way. There is what life is presenting to you in front of you and then it’s yourself. There is a space now between the event and the receiver or you. This pace is the one that you can utilize to choose, “How am I going to feel? What am I going to think?”

That is our right and a possibility, but without this space and the awareness that this space exists, then I cannot choose. All of a sudden, without thinking and wanting, I’m in this anguish and anxiety because there was something in the environment that reminded me of my childhood and the feelings that I used to have when my abusive dad, mom, teacher, bully sister, or whatever. You’re already there in that emotion.

This is perfect. I want to make sure that before we wrap this up, we give people an opportunity to find out how they can tap into Gaby’s website and your team’s website. There was an offer you were going to make, Marian.

Before we get into that, I also wanted to mention it briefly. I understand we need to cut it off here, but one of the elements that we provide as part of this is a guided meditation. That is an integral and important part of this. Gaby, with her beautifully soothing voice, I always say that she could be reading the Yellow Pages and I would be melting. Anyways, she provides a wonderful guided meditation of about 7 to 9 minutes in length that pivots around a specific topic, whether it’s expansion, gratitude, healing, flow, and things of that nature. That is important to mention because it’s about mindfulness, meditation, introspection, and healing. Our website, where Gaby and I work together to provide various vehicles of what we talked about, is Delamora.life.

One of the elements we have on there is a monthly membership where we provide 4 or 5, depending up on how the dates fall, live stream events in this setting right from where we are right now, where we provide an hour-long sound mediation. The offer I wanted to mention, and maybe we can somehow blend it into the video part, is a free month for you to try it out. We’ll somehow figure out how to code. It’s something that needs to be experienced.

It is your choice in what you choose to think about. You can feed yourself good, positive, and expansive thoughts, or you can go into fight-or-flight mode and think about gloom and doom.

There’s also the website where I provide my services, which is GabyDelamora.com. There, you will find what Marian was mentioning, the guided meditations, but you can also get your own guided meditation for your situation, specific healing, or whatever you are needing or struggling with. That’s powerful because it’s also with the sound of the gongs. There’s also the offering of therapeutic spaces and talking therapy, always in combination with the sound.

You will find different mindfulness practices for free, either on the website or online courses with mindfulness and sound, which to me, is the way to transform your life. What Tim does and this combination of different modalities for you to become mindful, the observer, release what you need to release, and transform what you need to transform. You will see it. It is not that the medication is going to give you that peace. It is you that is going to understand what is happening. You transform that, and then you see this balance and harmony in your life. Look up those websites.

If they mentioned that they heard it on the show, they could get a free month of that online experience.

We’ll share the code, but we want to thank you, Tim, and all the helping angels you have in what you are doing for giving us the opportunity to be a part of it.

You’re most welcome and deserving. I’m going to tap in and see if you’ll be willing to do another interview in the near future where we can expand some of these things.

What we can do during that one, we can maybe give a little sample. It’s about experiencing it.

Thank you so much, both of you. It’s been a delight. I will be in touch soon to schedule a follow-up.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Tim.