Don Conreaux and his gong

Mark Worden (Standard British accent):

The April issue of Speak Up features an interview with gongmaster Don Conreaux. In this out-take he talks about his craft:

(Sound effects: Don Conreaux playing his “world peace gong”)

Don Conreaux (Standard American accent):

The sound of the gong puts people into a very beautiful dream-like state, much like when you sleep at night, and, after a gonging, you feel totally rejuvenated, you feel as though you really had eight or ten hours of good sleep. So it has a special power, we call it the power of regeneration or rejuvenation, it also has the power to bring more creative thought to the mind, by clearing out a lot of the worries and the cares that seem to be there in the background. So the gong has been used for almost 6,000 years because of this special power to cleanse and purify the mind. My teacher, my first teacher, was in 1969, his name was Yogi Bajan, and Yogi Bajan had a gong and a conk shell and a bell, and after we did our yoga set he played this gong and I experienced, for the first time, I believe, a feeling of having been lifted out of the body and being able to feel myself as a consciousness without an object, which is one of the high states you achieve in meditation. So I realised then that this gong had a very special healing power, a rejuvenating power, and I travel the world now, and I teach it, I have gongmasters now in many countries, including in Italy, and they do the same thing that I do, they take the gong and give what I call “gong baths,” sound baths, to people. Usually they’re lying down on the floor as though they were going to go to sleep and then the bath lasts maybe 45 minutes and it’s also a bath that includes other sacred tone-producing instruments, like the conk shell or bells, or didgeridoos, anything that is primal and doesn’t have a necessarily written script to it, that it’s open for interpretation, it’s open for spontaneity, it’s open… to the extent that there is no concern at all about hitting the right note, or being in rhythm, it just defies all the musical education that we’ve had, it’s a separate kind of music, we call it the music of freedom, creative freedom. Well, the gong works as well when there is an intention before you take a gong bath, or you… take a gong meditation and because the gong… the sound of the gong is able to pierce very deeply into even the DNA of the body, so that it’s able to help create what we call “new memories,” not memories based upon the past, but free, new memories based upon this lack of conditioning, we talk a lot about the gong produces the sound of unconditional love, because it embraces everything around it, all the sounds that you hear that might disturb you otherwise, like the sound of a radiator, the sound of the flushing of a toilet even, all those sounds that we consider noise pollution, even the hiss that we hear from the lightbulbs, the sound wipes all of this noise away, and it’s almost like being in total silence, except that it’s total sound, it fills all space. And in that space one is able to find a dynamic type of peace, a balance within themselves. So it works that way for everyone and so it’s a universal instrument.