We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ashlyn Colette a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Ashlyn thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear the story behind how you got your first job in field that you currently practice in.

My whole life has been a series of open doors, but I had to mentally be in the right space to acknowledge and accept them. There was a time when I was seeking fulfillment, and when seeking something so vast it can feel disheartening when you have no idea what direction to look in. In that same moment I was going sober, and meeting myself for the first time in my life. As I was discovering myself, I was trying out everything in my immediate surroundings. Yoga, painting, writing, meditation, reading books on psychology and the human condition, just to really uncover who I am. It turned out that all of these modalities were a part of me waiting to be embraced. At the time, I also had a friend that was nomadic staying with me. She studied shamanic work, and was very deep into energy work. She had a few crystal singing bowls, and my curiosity for unknown things worked in my favor yet again. I asked to borrow them and as I played it was as though it was apart of me my whole life. It helped me release the notion that I have to know what I am doing, to do it. Logic can only get you so far, feeling is what carries you. Life is a series of overlapping events that can’t be untangled until much later, to see how it all worked out, and that is why there is no wrong path. You just keep stumbling along, and then one day you reflect and see how you are where you are. People can act like they planned it the whole time, but really it is just the next option in front of you. All that being said, I started bringing a group of girls together, ones that I thought had a similar value system, and I practiced playing the borrowed bowls with them. After about 6 months of having gatherings, and using the same 4 bowls, my group of girl friends bought me a full set of 7 crystal bowls and from there I began doing sessions as studios and getting paid for what I was doing for fun. I never had the intention of starting a business, I just knew that from my experience of doing sound baths it was very healing and therapeutic, and I wanted to share that with others. Now my favorite thing to do is have one on one sessions with people, using talk therapy tools and then going into sound healing. The result of this experience on people, is a beautiful thing to witness. They come out feeling calm, centered, and knowing what the next step in life is for them. I will be the first to say, I was a skeptic, but truly seeing their transformation and the after effects, it made me want to share this with the world.

Ashlyn, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am a sound bath therapy practitioner, which means that I used different sound instruments to create vibrations that are healing to the body and mind. On a scientific level what I am doing is; The frequency and vibration of the instruments help take your body from a fight or flight state into a parasympathetic state, meaning rest and digest.. It creates a calming environment for your mind to go from Alpha wave state to Theta, therefore slowing down your mind so that you can focus more inwardly. The goal is to get your mind to stop being the “monkey mind” aka going from one thought to another, to the “wise mind” which is allowing feelings and logic to both be felt and understood. Deep healing happens when you allow your feelings to surface, we are not made to be constantly thinking. It is like a computer that is always on, it is bound to burn out. Along with this, because I study the human brain and psychology closely, and read books regarding different therapy tools, I integrate those into my practices. I do not claim to be a therapist, and I think therapy is a wonderful modality to use as well. But I do find it helpful when dealing with the emotions of another human to be able to direct that experience. Asking the right question will open a whole flood gate that person never knew was there, and that is where I find my teachings having such a powerful impact on the being I am seeing. For example; there was one woman I was guiding, and she is older and has been going to therapy for years. After our session we sat and processed through it, and she told me that a vision of a little girl in a box, and the little girl was buried under all this baggage, and she held out her arms to this child and then carried her forward in her life. She realized that the little girl was her, and she had buried her under all the pain of her life, she stopped taking care of that child version of her. It was a very profound breakthrough for her, and all the other problems she was facing in her life seemed to dissolve as she took care of the child within her. She thanks me still to this day, for the impact that I had, but the thing is she did the work. She had the visuals, and had to be open to taking care of her childhood self. I simply held space, and it is a wonder how effective just holding space can be.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

To me, anyone who has been through the dark can shed the most light. Their empathy is the greatest because they feel the place within themselves that sorrow lies. But, pain brings resilience. Some of the strongest people I know have been through the hardest times, all it takes is not giving up. But for me, there was a point where I wanted to throw in the towel of life and just allow the darkness to swallow me up. At 18 I was t-boned by a car that ran a red light. Nine pelvic fractures, seven days in the hospital, and six months of being wheelchair bound had me angry at the world. At the very same time (that’s how it always works right? Everything falls apart all at once, and you get uprooted) felt like everything in my personal life was crashing in around me, and the only escape from the mental and physical pain was through alcohol. I had to move out from my moms house, and stayed with friends for a few years, trying to work as a server while self medicating my pain. Life went on and my anger didn’t get any better, I was coming home crying after work from the intensity of pain in my hip, and I felt utterly hopeless and lost. I tried to escape to Florida to work at Disney world, thinking that would solve my problems. But no matter where you run, you are always there. I came back, surrounded myself with others that were angry at the world, was heavily medicated by a psychiatrist, told by my hip doctors they didn’t know how to help my pain, and had a psychologist tell me there was no helping me. So you can imagine how hopeless I felt, there didn’t seem to be a point in any of it. So shortly after, I gave up. I followed the darkness, and let it tell me “I was nothing”. I woke up in the hospital with a tube down my throat and being told I had to go to a Psychiatric ward. Well, surprisingly that is where this story gets brighter. I don’t know if you have ever been to a free mental hospital, but boy do I not recommend it. It is where the homeless go, where drugs addicts and prostitutes go. I had never been in an environment like it, and yet I became the go-to person in there. They loved me, I would talk to them on a human level, get curious about their life, and not judge them for being in there. Everyone had a story, and the people I met had not been heard in years, or possibly even their whole lives. They were tossed out, given up by society, and told that their life was their own fault. I was the only one that thought otherwise, and listened with compassion. It showed me how truly messed up our system is, and without that experience I wouldn’t be where I am today. I got out, not with the help of the hospital, but the help of my psychiatrist that just so happen to reside out of there, and I tried to go back to my old ways. For only a moment, but there was no going back to “normal”, I had hurt a lot of people, and they were not going to allow me to be the person I was. And yet again, my whole life was flipped around and I was alone. I had to solve my problems on my own, but now I had the glimmer of Hope that came from that Psychiatric ward. I finally had purpose, I am made to help others. I am now on the other side, the whole process being from 2015-2022. I have found my light, and intend to spread it to anyone I encounter. But getting to where I am now was not easy, I do not wish it on anyone, but it made me who I am, and for that I would not change a thing And at this point I don’t think anything could knock me down. Although, that is not a challenge.

Training and knowledge matter of course, but beyond that what do you think matters most in terms of succeeding in your field?

I truly believe that having the life experiences that I have, and coming from the family that I do, set me up to be able to empathize and see people where they are. My whole life has set up my perspective, and that is invaluable. There is only so much you can learn from books, but real life experience gives you the tools in real time to confront life’s challenges. I used to think the whole world was against me, now I see that it was setting me up to be where I am. In fact, I have a pretty wonderful life comparatively, and it makes me grateful to have so many bonus days. Life is not happening to you, it happens for you. It just takes some time to be able to see the growth from it all.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.becomingconscious.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ashlyn.colette/

Image Credits
Will von Bolton