Jamie Bechtold

Early Background: Body Work, Movement, and Sound

Before sound baths, Jamie built her foundation in the body. She competed as a gymnast throughout her childhood, traveling across the United States for competitions, and that early training in movement, discipline, and performance shaped everything that followed.

From 1996 to 2000, she worked as a personal trainer in San Diego and later Pasadena, California. That work gave her an early understanding of how people inhabit their bodies and what habitual tension looks like.

From roughly 2004 to 2014, Jamie was also a professional hoop and fire hoop dancer, performing and teaching internationally. She traveled to Tokyo, Dubai, and across the United States, worked with Hoopnotica, one of the leading hoop dance training companies at the time, and ran her own hoop dance company, Dancing Spiral. Performance teaches things that classroom training does not: how to read a room, how to hold attention, how to stay present when everything depends on it. That experience is woven into the way she plays and teaches today.

Her formal education during this period covered an equally wide range. She completed a BS in Biology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, followed by two years of acupuncture training at Emperor’s College in Santa Monica and 500 hours of massage and bodywork training across Emperor’s College and the Santa Monica School of Massage. She studied sound healing and tuning forks with Kat Lyons, the practitioner who also sold Jamie her first gong, and later with John Beaulieu. She completed a 500-hour yoga teacher training at Yoga Blend in Burbank and earned her Reiki Master certification at Peace Place in Sedona, Arizona, training in Usui and Karuna Reiki®. She has also studied music theory, the physics of sound, and other sound and science-based subjects.

 

2003 to 2006: The Beginning of Sound Bath Practice

Jamie began offering private sound-based sessions in 2003, integrating Himalayan singing bowls, drumming, and tuning forks into her massage therapy practice. She continued offering these sessions, first as sound massage and later as sound-only one-to-one work, through 2017.

In 2004, she purchased her first crystal singing bowl and her first gong and began incorporating them into private client sessions and small group settings. Sound baths were not yet a recognized category of wellness practice. The word itself was only beginning to circulate, and the practitioners offering them as a dedicated service could be counted on one hand in Southern California.

Her first public group sound bath was held in September 2006 at Crystal Matrix in Atwater Village, Los Angeles, under the name Ascending Sounds. From that point forward, public group sound baths became the center of her professional practice.

One of the defining characteristics of Jamie’s approach, developed during these early years, was playing gongs and crystal singing bowls together throughout the sound bath. To her knowledge, she was among the first practitioners in the United States to make this combination the foundation of her work. At the time, practitioners played gongs, crystal bowls, or metal bowls as standalone instruments, and those who used more than one tended to treat them as separate elements rather than layering them together in real time. Jamie developed specific techniques for combining and layering the two instruments simultaneously, a method she refined over thousands of public events and later formalized as Sustained Sound and Layering™, one of the signature playing methods at the heart of the Group Soundbath Player Certification Course.

From the beginning, Jamie was also focused on building a multi-gong practice. Her original goal was fourteen gongs. She understood early on that each gong produces a distinct sound and feel, and that when played together with intention and skill, multiple gongs create a depth and immersiveness that a single instrument cannot. Today, she and Robert have a collection of more than fifty gongs, and their collection is still growing. Crystal singing bowls have always been an essential part of her sound baths, played alongside the gongs as a complementary layer rather than a separate offering. That relationship between instruments is one of the things the Group Soundbath Player Certification Course teaches in depth.

 

2006 to 2014: Building the Practice Across Los Angeles

Between 2006 and 2008, Jamie held public and private group sound baths at her home in Highland Park, private residences, and at Bliss Dance Studio in Pasadena. In 2009, she began a ten-year partnership with Yoga Blend in Burbank, collaborating first with yoga teacher Heather Hudson to offer restorative yoga and sound bath events, and later with Bekah Finch and Christy Hicks, along with monthly sound baths that continued through 2019. That same year she launched a seasonal sound bath series at the Center for the Arts in Eagle Rock, held four times a year, alongside friend and fellow sound bath practitioner Mary Frances Spencer.

In 2010, Jamie completed her 500-hour yoga teacher training and developed Yoga and Sound, her own format blending vinyasa flow with live gongs and crystal singing bowls integrated throughout the class and extended at the end as savasana. She taught this format at yoga studios across Los Angeles from 2011 through 2018, including Yoga Blend, Chakra 5, Yogala, Yoga House, and others.

By 2011, she was leading monthly sound bath events at studios throughout Los Angeles, a schedule that expanded steadily and continued through 2020. Studios included Yoga Blend, Chakra 5, Yogala, Yoga House, Exhale, Kinship, Wanderlust, Liberation Yoga, One Down Dog, Yoga NoHo, and many others. That same year, she became a Paiste Gong Artist, a relationship that lasted through 2015, when she stepped away from the endorsement to have the freedom to sell and recommend other gong brands.

 

2011 to 2017: Private Teaching and Group Trainings

Starting in 2011, Jamie began teaching private gong and bowl lessons alongside her playing schedule. That same year she launched group sound-based trainings covering how to use crystal singing bowls, gongs, and tuning forks. These trainings taught students how to offer one-to-one sound-based sessions and ran continuously through 2017. While the formats and focus shifted over those years, the teaching itself was constant.

In 2012, Jamie opened a small private studio in Los Angeles for one-to-one sound sessions, small group trainings, and private sound baths for up to five people. The studio did not have a formal name but operated as her primary teaching space from 2012 through 2015. It was also in 2012 that she launched sound-bath.com, the domain that has served as the online home of her sound bath practice ever since.

By the time the first group Soundbath Practitioner Training launched in January 2017, Jamie had been teaching sound-based skills in one form or another for six years. The 2017 training was not her first experience teaching others how to work with these instruments, but it was the first to focus specifically on teaching students to play crystal singing bowls and gongs in a group sound bath format. It was the formal, structured version of what she had already been doing.

 

Instrument Retail and Industry Relationships

In 2011, Jamie began retailing Paiste gongs through Gongs Unlimited and started selling crystal singing bowls, sourcing from one of the first businesses in the United States to sell them commercially. This work ran under Ascending Sounds, her original business name, which has since become Beyond Percussion, the parent company behind The Soundbath Center, SoundbathPlayer, and The Gong Room.

Her instrument retail work grew steadily alongside her playing career. In 2015 she began working with Meinl Sonic Energy, selling their gongs and related products. In 2019 she became one of only two retailers in the United States for Gongland gongs, a designation that reflects the trust those makers place in serious players rather than general music retailers. In 2020 she added Tone of Life and Oetken gongs to her offerings. Over the years, Jamie and her businesses have also partnered with other premium instrument brands including Schlagwerk, Terre Drums, Remo, Dragonfly Percussion, and Ollihess.

In 2020, Jamie partnered with Crystal Vibes to sell their crystal singing bowls, including a gemstone collection. In 2023 she began sourcing her own line of bowls under the name Beyond Bowls: premium white and black frosted bowls sold in professionally curated sets of three, five, or more. Where most bowl retailers sell sets of seven notes covering a full scale, Beyond Bowls sets are curated specifically for professional, therapeutic-style sound bath use rather than following a standard format.

This retail history is not separate from her playing practice. Every brand Jamie has carried is one she has played, evaluated, and chosen to stand behind. That player-first perspective is what distinguishes her instrument recommendations from those of retailers who sell without deep playing experience.

 

2015: The Sound Space and Meeting Robert Lee

In March 2015, Jamie opened The Sound Space in Los Angeles, the first public venue in the city dedicated exclusively to gong and crystal bowl sound baths. The space held ten people per event by design. A month after opening, she met Robert Lee, a personal trainer and breathwork instructor who had been leading wellness programs in Los Angeles since 1998. Their first joint event, Breathwork SoundLab™, was held in June 2015 in Santa Monica, California. From there they continued building events together at The Sound Space and other locations around Los Angeles, including annual multi-day wellness retreats in Sedona, Arizona and Joshua Tree, California under the name Soulful Summit. The combination of Jamie’s playing experience and Robert’s structural approach to wellness programming became the foundation of everything that followed.

 

2017: Coining Soundbath Practitioner and Launching the First Training

On January 2nd, 2017, The Sound Space was renamed The Soundbath Center. That same month, Jamie and Robert coined the term Soundbath Practitioner and launched the first Soundbath Practitioner Training, held January 28 and 29, 2017. It was the first course of its kind focused specifically on teaching people how to lead group sound baths with gongs and crystal singing bowls professionally. Before this, sound-based trainings were widely available, but they focused on teaching students how to offer one-to-one sound healing or sound therapy sessions, not group events. Jamie and Robert created an entirely new category: practitioner training specifically for leading group sound bath events using gongs and crystal singing bowls. The term and their original training format have since been widely replicated across the sound bath field.

 

Media and Recognition

Jamie’s work has been featured in major national and international publications and media outlets. A selection of coverage includes Paris Vogue, the New York Times, Elle, the LA Times, Pasadena Weekly, Pasadena Magazine, LA Weekly, LA Magazine, the LA List, Live Happy, Reebok, Spiritual Gangster, Voyage LA, CBS New York, and KTLA, among others. She has also been featured on the Take a Deep Breath Podcast and the Solluna Podcast, and has appeared in editorial content from One Down Dog and Expressing Motherhood.

She appeared in Meinl Sonic Energy and Sweetwater promotional videos and was a writer and contributor to the 2019 Meinl Sonic Energy Catalogue. She has also appeared in the Schlagwerk catalogue. Her work has been cited in coverage of the sound bath field more broadly, including lists of best sound baths in Los Angeles across multiple publications.

 

2018 to Present: GongPlay®, SoundbathPlayer, and The Gong Room

In 2018, Jamie and Robert established GongPlay® as a registered trademark, formalizing their signature approach to playing gong and crystal bowl sound baths. In 2021, the original practitioner training was rebranded under the SoundbathPlayer name. The course continued to evolve through a brief hybrid format and eventually to a fully online format, launching in its current form as the Group Soundbath Player Certification Course in November 2025.

In 2025, Jamie and Robert co-founded The Gong Room, a gong-focused business based online with a physical studio near Joshua Tree, California, dedicated to gong sound bath events, workshops, GongPlay® Practitioner Training, and in-person gong consultations. The Gong Room represents the next chapter of a practice that began with a single bowl and a single gong more than two decades ago.