Jon offering sound healing at The Beloved Festival
“The gong is the first and last instrument for the human mind. It is the basic creative sound. To the mind, the sound of the gong is like a mother and father that gave it birth. The mind has no power to resist a gong that is well played.” ~ Yogi Bhajan
The breadth of the Bridgetown sprawl has rendered the topography of Southwest Portland, Oregon unrecognizable since my last visit in 2007. That said, Jon Reinschreiber hasn’t really changed much since then. He looks pretty much the same: with long white Merlinesque hair and beard and sporting a tribal print T-shirt. Reinschreiber is a shamanic sound healer and fixture in the larger Portland healing community who sold his house on Craigslist and followed the medicine path around the world before returning back home to Portland.
Twelve countries and five continents later, with a wealth of collected instruments and esoteric knowledge of vibrational healing, Reinschreiber has meticulously fashioned a fusion of traditional healing styles from techniques imparted by indigenous healers to create his modality. In short, he showed up, got the downloads, and put them to practice.
Over the last decade he has toured extensively leading meditations and facilitating performances from Burning Man to The Beloved Festival as well as for a long list of yoga studios, churches, and even prisons.
“Everything just blended together to create the harmonics that I was looking forward to creating,” he says while sitting in his Shamanic Vibrations Temple in South East Portland. The Temple is spacious loft with red walls and trippy ambient lighting effects. Here he sets up large chrome gong racks in preparation for this evening’s meditation.
Among his extensive collection of sacred musical instruments are Himalayan and crystal singing bowls, Chinese wind and Chau gongs, Javanese temple gongs, bells, whistles, flutes, drums, rattles, shakers, and a few rare healing instruments including bird quill pan pipes, Peruvian Chimu water whistles, and Peruvian flutes.
“People need to be practicing radical self-care,” Reinschreiber says. He’s operating on this simple premise, “If sound and vibration can create, they can heal,” he says. “Each human body has it’s own natural harmonic resonance.” He cites disruptions in that resonance as the cause of disease and imbalance. “Gongs, singing bowls and other instruments can create a harmonic field that restore the body’s natural vibratory resonance to vibrant health,” he says.
Watch the video of Jon Reinschreiber and his Gong Medicine.
Gongs have the capacity to create deep complex harmonics that suspend linear time, allowing chaos and order to co-exist beyond the mind’s reactions. This induces a creative meditation where internal blockages, conflicts, and traumas can be resolved, dissolved, and healed.
Yogi Bhajan said about this process, “The mind has no power to resist a gong that is well played.” That is exactly what happens in Reinschreiber’s meditations.
“The gongs are great for shutting down the monkey mind,” he says. A few minutes after he strikes the first gong, everyone in attendance has gone deep. An hour later it takes a little time before they begin to integrate the work.
Later Reinschrieber reflects as he packs up his tools, “I get what the people are willing to receive.” With gratitude he says, “I get to work in the energy of people doing deep healing work.”
You can sit in Jon Reinschreiber’s gong meditation series in Portland where he also offers everything from private healings to a variety of workshops ranging from introduction to master circles. You can also connect with him on tour and download recordings on CD Baby or on his site Shamanic Vibrations.
And Silver Fox said to Coyote, ‘Let us sing the World’ and they danced and they sang until the earth was created.”
~ Miwok Creation Legend
Award-winning journalist, documentary director and long-term LA Yoga contributor Sam Slovick is the director, writer and producer of the Radicalized documentary, currently working on the Kirtan Road Dogs documentary.