Dr. Jain Wells
The Gong is a powerful instrument that emits great energy and vibration, with a highly captivating sound. It is an important tool for supporting various forms of healing – emotional, psychological, physical and spiritual – with a commitment to regular concentrated sessions. It is also a non-invasive alternative to many harmful forms of treatment. The catch is you have to want to gong yourself regularly or have someone else gong you to get the benefits.
Buying a gong for the home is the best way to benefit from it as it’s always accessible and on-hand for immediate use. This greatly enhances the benefits – to gong when issues first present themselves when their energetic field of intensity is high and accessible. Most often, the worse you feel going into a session, the more noticeable the improvement, in a single session. The gong provides relief and promotes healing with many different types of ailments, with a concentrated sound-session of 45 minutes to an hour (or more) for best results. Ten consecutive sessions of 45 minutes a day can have a significant effect on one’s energy. Gong sound infusions can even help heal more serious health issues though there are other variables that influence its effectiveness. As well, it has yet to be tested on many conditions, though the results it has shown are surprising and promising.
You can position it at the end of your bed so it’s there when needed, or in a central place in the home so it’s accessible to everyone. One gong, one mallet (buy a matching pair), and an adjustable gong stand can get you up and running immediately. An adjustable stand means that you can gong while sitting on your bed, sofa, a chair or on the floor, and adjust the stand accordingly. The best healing gongs are made from alpaca silver, or a Chau gong as they are most resonant. The quality of the gong is also important (please see my website gong-page for more information.)
A gong of 28” up to 32” inches in size is good for the home (or bigger). A 32” sized gong is ideal because of its power and ease of playing to sustain the sound, and is better suited to gonging a few people (friends, family and neighbors in need). If cost is an issue, the Chau-gong is much less expensive, and equally effective. A smaller contained room is also better for groups to ensure adequate sound exposure. The bigger the gong, the greater the emission of sound-waves. Lying down or sitting in a chair or on the floor is fine. *Stainless steel gongs are not suited for healing.
What do you gong? Everything from anxiety to sadness, loneliness and depression, a sprained ankle, a broken heart, a stomach ache or fatigue.
A concentrated session of 45 minutes to an hour creates a significant wash of sound-waves directly into the body, affecting both the subtle energy fields, and cellular change at the physical level. It brings an immediate improvement in circulation, and significantly reduces inflammation and physical pain following a session. Noticeable improvements have been experienced with tinnitus and fibromyalgia with regular gonging. For many conditions, ongoing use is important. The gong is also used to treat heroin/opioid detox as the gong sound-waves moving into the body significantly alleviate the painful withdrawal symptoms – while the gong is being played.
The truth is gong healing needs more experimentation on more types of issues – not to validate its effectiveness – rather to see what else it can do, and to encourage more people to start using it – and to move away from more harmful invasive treatments. I’ve been working with it since 2015 and I am impressed by the wide range of results I have witnessed.
Not all people play the gong for focused clinical healing. There is a large ‘gong mastery’ community that incorporate the gong with other instrumentation in performances and concerts, and in relaxing informal sound journeys called gong sound-baths where people commonly lie down (ie., in a yoga studio for an hour) to experience the healing vibrations of the sound.
As an experienced practitioner of many different types of energy modalities, I put it to the test with two years of focused research and was amazed by what I witnessed, and published the findings in my book Gong Consciousness: Self-Healing Through the Power of Sound. It includes my research results from treating various types of issues and ailments, and my own method of working with the gong; combining various awareness practices with the gong vibrations to enhance personal development and spiritual awareness. The gong greatly supports this type of inner work.
Another fantastic example of the gong as an integrative tool is with Kundalini Yoga (as taught by Yogi Bhajan) followed by an infusion of gong sound-wave vibrations. Strengthening and opening the body in this way makes the power of the gong sound infusions exponential in effect. Adequate exposure to the gong sound-waves over a certain duration of time is significant.
My experiences with the gong led me to supporting individuals to get a gong for the home to combine with the awareness practices I teach, and training other experienced practitioners of other healing modalities to effortlessly combine gong sound-wave vibrations with all styles of yoga, Reiki energy healing, hypnotherapy and counselling, massage, acupuncture, and physiotherapy, etc. (See my gong-page videos).
I also explain how it can be used to learn to meditate, as well as describe the types of issues that it healed through my work with my daughter including ovarian cysts and tumor, fibro-fatty nodules, and a near-death experience with a blood infection, to name a few. It helped most every condition I worked with, though in many instances longer periods of gonging were needed as most of my research groups only had eight gong sessions. My daughter had months of ongoing sessions, which is how the more serious benefits were experienced. The gong’s potential for healing is untapped.
There is no downside to having exposure to gong sound-wave therapy, as the gong shows tangible benefits at all levels: physical, emotional and psychological. It’s the ongoing exposure to the gong that offers deeper levels of healing.
The biggest limitation I discovered while working with the gong is that while it calms feelings of anxiety and depression in an important way, it doesn’t access deeply embedded unconscious emotional and psychological content connected with low self-worth. The gong responds however to those who are more open and in touch with their feelings. It is affected by consciousness. For many years I have been teaching people to process emotional content, and a variety of other practices for the purpose of raising consciousness. The practices on their own are very effective, though with the gong there is a tangible increase in the movement of energy to support a shift.
I encourage those at home to get to the gong when emotional issues first present themselves as the potential for a shift is enhanced as the field of the disturbance is active and primed for healing. Emotional issues of low self-worth require individuals to truly face themselves and to heal their pain and self-judgments. The gong can’t raise someone’s level of consciousness without their active participation in understanding and facing themselves at the level of their internalized pain. Certain diseases are caused by unworthiness, often from experiences relating to abuse and trauma, for example, and will not just be corrected by gonging as the only action taken. A high degree of willingness to feel and to accept responsibility is required, through some form of guidance or self-knowledge (read ‘My Story’ below about my daughter’s serious health issues and the gong).
For this reason, it is my belief that individuals already engaged in some form of self-development and spiritual practice can accelerate more quickly with the gong on their own at home because their energy is, in most cases, more receptive and open than those who are not engaged in active self-improvement. The vibratory field of one’s awareness aligns with the gong sound-wave vibrations. The gong responds to intention and attention – the precepts of consciousness. Those in a high state of resistance aren’t even aware of their resistance and will most certainly have some blockages and limitations that prevent them from healing. Many people carry shame and live through this lens of self-limitation. There is also a strong link between emotional problems manifesting as disease.
Gonging serious health issues over many weeks and months elevates the gong into another league altogether in terms of its potential. This was the primary reason I wrote Gong Consciousness, because I felt the gong was not being utilized to its capacity. My gong sound healing research has already led to more research and education in this area. Not many people can afford to have a gong-therapist come into the home every day for weeks or months to gong them. That’s why having a gong in the home is full of such potential – as long as someone is willing to surrender to it and put in the time and effort to do it (or a family member/loved one).
Gong sound healing is an act of communion with the sound.
The Inside Story of How the Gong Changed My Life
I discovered the gong at the exact time I entered into several years of crisis when I found out my daughter was a heroin/opioid addict – caused through the medical system by over-prescribing pain medication through multiple hospital stays, including two surgeries. It was due to the pain of recurring ovarian cysts over a 2.5 year period of suffering, and a large painful ovarian tumor that also appeared. (I lived on another continent at the time and moved back to help her).
I watched the gong affect surprising change at every level. She told me that she could not detox from opioids without first healing the pain. The doctors at the hospital urged her to get her ovaries removed as a solution to the pain. Giving up her opportunity to have another child was not an option. Shortly after re-connecting with her, a life-threatening health issue emerged. A blood infection. She had been hospitalized with this condition several weeks prior, for a month, before I had arrived on the scene. High doses of antibiotics, and morphine were prescribed. They did not know the cause and had no other treatment solutions. She was told she would likely die as they didn’t know how to treat it. They reluctantly released her from the hospital as the condition subsided with the antibiotics, and they told her it would return. Which it did.
She called me crying and in a panic while waiting for the ambulance to arrive. She couldn’t feel her arms, thighs and lower back, which were all numb.
She went to a different hospital than before as she had moved. She had blood taken and was told to return in three days when the blood results were back from the lab. I urged her come home with me for a gong session. At this point I did not know what the gong could do, other than my own powerful experiences with it (the first one I experienced when the sound concentration was high), and positive feedback from participants in the informal public gong sound-bath sessions I had recently started.
She laid down on the bed and I gonged her for 45 minutes. By the end of the session the numbness was gone and she said, “I can feel my thighs and arms again.” Then she said, “At first it was painful and I almost asked you to stop, then about ten minutes in it started to feel better.” At the end of the session, all panic was gone, hers and mine, and the feeling returned to her limbs, with no other painful sensations. She was back to normal. This was a miracle to witness. FYI: It was then completely healed within a week, with seven daily electronic-acupuncture sessions that I took her to (EAV technology).
As a therapist I was astounded at this result with the gong, and formed my first research group within two weeks, offering eight gong sessions (over five weeks) to a group of individuals with a variety of different types of ailments – emotional, psychological and physical. They were not engaged in any other forms of therapy at the time and were not taking medication. These were the requirements. I had studied various research methods at the academic level, and conducted peer-reviewed research as well. This was a qualitative study recording written personal experiences, and conducting before-and-after interviews.
I gonged her at every chance I could over a few months. She came over often for sessions of an hour or two. It made her feel calm and improved her mood. She was also highly medicated. During this time the gonging was not impacting the cysts and tumor. A friend who had healed her breast cancer from doing ‘emotional and spiritual work’ only (without dietary changes or allopathic treatment) reminded me that cancer was linked to low self-worth. As a therapist, that made sense to me, and to my daughter who was very familiar with my healing work. Her relationship with her boyfriend ended and I got her her own space to live, and gave her a gong (28” Mercury planetary gong). She knew what to do, as painful as it was to open that door of denial. She had grief and disappointment from painful childhood and teenage events, and lost her son due to the addiction. These were all second chakra issues… where the ovaries are located. I often tried to get her to talk about her troubles though her mantra became, ‘I don’t want to talk about it’. She accepted that healing her emotional pain was dependent on healing the ovaries.
She gonged daily, often two hours or more though always for over an hour she said. She ‘cried into the gong’ and loved being surrounded by the healing vibrations. She also reduced her opioid dosage along the way.
The gong vibrations helped her body re-absorb the cysts in four months of daily gonging (never to return), and the ovarian tumor broke apart and began releasing from her body at seven-months of daily gonging (never to return). At a certain point she said that she felt the tumor ‘switch off’ and knew that it had reversed itself. The amount of gonging required for this was not light by any means. She loved doing it and badly wanted the healing and relief it provided. Low self-worth was holding her to a path of self-destruction. The gong also healed the painful fibro-fatty nodules in her lower back at a later date with ten weeks of gonging, 45 minutes, four times a week. These are ground-breaking results that need to be shared so that other people may find healing through the gong. There is no other research like this available, or that I could find within the gong community. The book has been embraced within gong sound-healing community, though some in the gong industry went to great lengths to suppress my book and teachings through unethical and criminal behavior.
The world is in crisis and families can greatly benefit from the gong vibrations – if they are willing to do it – a few full sessions every week, and especially when things are not going well.
The gong and crisis are a beneficial combination. It also helped me personally through ongoing crisis as a mother, which I know had a significant impact on my energy. I noticed how well I recovered from crazy, frightening and dangerous situations that came up, again and again. I noted how unfazed I was the next day. I was both feet in, and not giving up. It would not have turned out well without the gong (or me). It saved her in multiple ways. It was a powerful karma ride for both of us, and I feel a karmic-duty and responsibility to sing its praises because it’s a tool that anyone can use, and that happens to perform particularly well in crisis situations.
The awareness practices in my Gong Consciousness book relate to self-exploration and reflection, emotional healing, and meditation etc. while using the gong to accelerate the movement of energy – while engaged in the practices. However, even if you only went to the gong when you felt down or had a specific problem, this would make positive change in your life. I know many people with gongs who love their gongs yet do not gong themselves and their issues. There seems to be a certain type of person who wants to engage with the gong as a regular self-healing practice, or perhaps someone who is suffering so much that it inspires them to want to engage with it in a committed way. If a gong was sitting at the end of your bed, would you be gonging yourself to feel better and to transform your energy?