Sound Bath by Sara Auster

Sound Bath by Sara Auster ISBN-13: 9781982132941 Paperback: 320 pages Publisher: Tiller Press Released: Nov. 19, 2019

Source: ebook review copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
Discover the use of sound in ancient traditions to transform consciousness, heal the mind, calm the body, build diverse communities, and help people live more mindfully. Sound Baths help people achieve a reflective, self-healing state. Sound therapist, meditation teacher, and thought leader Sara Auster has traveled the world facilitating sound bath experiences. Sara shares her personal journey to recovery from a traumatic accident and how she got involved with leading Sound Baths. She talks about what attending a Sound Bath is like and answers the most commonly asked questions about sound therapy, meditation, deep listening, and the ancient traditions that inspire her Sound Baths.


My Review:
Sound Bath is about the author's life, what led her into facilitating Sound Baths, and what her Sound Baths are like. The book sometimes came across as an ad for hiring the author to do a Sound Bath for your group or for buying her recordings. She spent chapters describing how she got into doing Sound Baths, what attending one of her sound bath sessions is like (with sound alone or in combination with scents, yoga, etc.), and how to get the most out of a Sound Bath session. There was a chapter full of letters from people who attended a sound bath and how it helped them.

She also gave an overview of the (mostly Eastern) ideas that inspired what she does in a sound bath. She talked about deep listening, yoga, mindfulness meditation (using sound as your guide), why stress is bad, your voice and words as sound, mantras, doshas, meridians, prana, chakras, etc. I thought the book was supposed to be about how sound benefits physical health, but she started talking like the point of Sound Baths is to achieve an altered state of consciousness. The author also briefly described the instruments that she uses and their history (origins, what they were used for in religious rituals, etc.). At the end of each chapter, she gave an exercise relating to that topic that you can do by yourself, but I felt like this was primarily a what-she-does book rather than a how-to book (especially if you're not interested in dabbling in Eastern religious practices).


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.