Lavender Suarez is a sound and energy healing practitioner and educator in Hillsdale, New York. Through performing and exploring music she began to experience the healing properties inherent in sound and vibrations. Now she shares that with others through classic and emerging sound healing techniques. Lavender further went on to develop her energy practice with Reiki. She has led meditation workshops centered around sound and been a featured speaker about sound healing in music at MoMA, PS1, Oral History Summer School, Kite's Nest and more. In 2015, she conducted a four-hour outdoor "sound bath" of live gong playing at the Basilica Soundscape music festival in Hudson. I am a sound and energy healing practitioner with a background in music, counseling and art therapy. By using vibrational instruments such as singing bowls, tuning forks and gongs along with a gentle energetic touch known as Reiki, I help people relax, deal with ailments and find peace. After 10 years of touring the country performing music, I began to notice the way sound directly affected the audience and me. Having studied music therapy in college, sound therapy was a natural progression. We all have a personal relationship to sound: our ears are always listening. It's a very natural and non-invasive therapeutic method. Even if someone has never meditated or tried alternative therapies before, they can easily sense the tangible effects sound has to quiet the mind and heal.
I love the feeling of assisting someone who is dealing with stress or pain by giving them a customized sound and energy treatment to help them find calm and relief. People often report feeling a sense of clarity and deep tranquility after a treatment and leave feeling like they're better suited to conquer what may have been troubling them when they first came to my office. After a class trip to the home of Franklin D. Roosevelt in Hyde Park in high school I knew I wanted to live in the Hudson Valley. I was enchanted with the beautiful fall foliage and the history of this region. For five years I lived in Hudson, but I recently moved to the border of Hillsdale and Austerlitz and am really loving the quietude and mountains here. Having grown up in Bergen County, New Jersey, about 45 minutes outside of Manhattan, I wanted to be somewhere with more wilderness. Living in Columbia County allows me to envelop myself in nature without being too far from my friends in NYC or my family in New Jersey. I've been very fortunate to find a place to live and work that's on over 100 acres of protected land. When someone comes for a sound and energy therapy treatment, they're also enveloped in nature. The main sounds out here are the gentle stream, birds and wild creatures. I rarely hear cars or other sources of noise which is very important to me to help people on the path to relaxation. Scheduling an appointment for a sound and energy treatment at my office is like a "mini-retreat," where one can be immersed in nature, healing music, and gentle energetic touch and counseling. I conduct sound healing classes in this area in a monthly class at Bodhi in Hudson, and also travel and teach elsewhere, but it's always nice to come home after a long day of traveling to my quiet office and cabin to listen to the leaves on the trees gently sway in the wind.
