Multiver3e, left to right: Roach, Lipson, Shadowlight

When I first got in touch with Multiver3e at the end of May, the group was still a sound healing trio. Jamie Shadowlight, Lindsey Roach, and Leah Lipson had by that point been doing events together for about three years, and I wanted to talk to them about sound, healing, community, and the sorts of gatherings they create.

But by the time I first made it to one of those events on June 6, Shadowlight — who had been diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer about a year earlier, and who had exceeded all expectations for survival — was between worlds. It was likely she had transitioned that day; Roach and Lipson couldn’t be sure. But they had set up a low table with flowers, candles, and photographs of their beloved third member. A palpable grief intermingled with the other vibrations of the evening. Earlier in the day, I’d thought they might cancel, but it was clear that they wanted to do this for her. They had been given one last chance to play for Shadowlight in person, just before hospice care shut down the window for visiting, and now they could offer the evening as a farewell.

We gathered in the glass conservatory building of the San Diego Botanical Garden in Encinitas. We began with some gentle movement led by Lipson, who originally found her way to sound healing through her yoga practice. We all drank a small cup of cacao, brewed by Roach with rose and spices, before lying down to receive the duo’s sounds — not just with our ears, but with our whole selves. According to Roach, sound did not work just through the ears, but affected our entire bodies. Even a deaf person would receive the vibrational effects of being bathed in sound. She said we should imagine the reception of the sound causing “the water inside of our body to create beautiful geometric shapes.”

A previous event held at the San Diego Botanic Garden

Multiver3e likes to do events like this, outside of a yoga studio or other customary site for sound journeys. Roach tells me they want to “find innovative ways to bring people in to experience sound healing, even bring in crowds of people who might not initially be interested in it.” That night, I was seated next to one such person — a sweet, elderly Dutch lady named Truus, a member of the Garden who came out of curiosity.

For the next hour or so, Leah and Lindsey moved patiently and confidently through an improvised sequence of rattling and drumming, chiming and striking. There was the leafy chakapa rattle, which Lipson shook over us as she walked barefoot around the space, followed eventually by the angelic tones of the many crystal bowls, some vocalizing from Roach, and some rich, heavy, shimmering gong time to close the sequence. The gong, Roach tells me, is her favorite instrument to work with, “because of all the tones that are in the gong, the undertones and the overtones. Our brain has a really hard time processing the sound, so it quickly drops us into those deep, meditative brain waves.”

After the sound journey, we listened to a recording of a song by Shadowlight while we held candles and passed a flame from candle to candle, one by one, in lines around the room: a simple ritual gesture that eventually illuminated the entire plant-filled room. Some of us were mourning a friend, and some were praying for someone they had never met. I suspect that even those of us who had never met her were moved by the her smiling picture in front of us, and by the picture that her friends painted of her with their words: a joyful woman who lived halfway in another world even while she was here, whose head was in the clouds in the most lovable way.

Lipson tells me that Shadowlight was completely devoted to sound and reliant on it for her serenity, right to the end of her life. Even while bedridden, she could be found regularly beating a drum, or playing tuning forks over herself. Her strength and bravery allowed her to struggle through pain, fatigue, and hospitalizations in a way that baffled those around her. At their last sound journey as a trio, which came just after a hospitalization for sepsis, Shadowlight stood up at the end and played her violin like nothing Lipson had ever heard, her kidney bags exposed and hanging off of her as she walked through the crowd with her instrument.

Shadowlight isn’t the only example of the healing powers of sound that Multiver3e has seen. Lipson once activated happy but faded memories of India, mantras, and travel in an elderly woman in memory care who was, most of the time, known as the formidable grouch of the place. Other seniors would come to Shadowlight after a session, soothed by the bowls and wanting to tell her about things they had seen or felt. Some would talk to her about angels and churches. She was more than just their break from La-Z-Boys and cable news.

For her part, Roach has brought her sound work to the bedside of the terminally ill; she sat with one cancer patient every week for months, and she was told that the hour she spent there was the most painless time the dying woman would have all week.

Wherever and however they do it, Roach says they always begin from “trust for sound, for the divinity of what sound is.”