Before there was a name for anything I’ve built, there was sound. Breath moving through the body, tone shaping silence into meaning. Over time, that sound became the Sacred Syllable — and from it, Sacred Hoops began to take form. But as my understanding continues to mature, a realization has come quietly and clearly: the hoop doesn’t create the sound. Sound produces the hoop.
The Sacred Syllable: Where Sound Spins the World into Being
Every tone begins as movement — a vibration passing through air, water, and bone. It doesn’t stay still; it travels, resonating outward in widening spheres. That motion is creation itself, the unseen geometry from which all form arises.
The Sacred Syllable lives in that first motion. It’s the work of returning to the original language — sound as meditation, chant, and mantra as medicine. Through these practices, we rediscover what breath has always known: that vibration precedes speech, and tone carries truth long before words arrive.
When we chant, tone, or hum, we aren’t decorating silence — we’re remembering it. Each syllable becomes a seed of coherence, a frequency that restores balance within the body and the field around it.
This is where my focus now lives: in the spin, in the sound, in the remembrance that vibration is both the teacher and the teaching.
Returning to the Source of Chant
As part of this next phase of work, I’ll be returning to the place where I first encountered chant — through the lay practice of Zen Buddhism that began for me in the early 2000s. Those early mornings and late evenings in shared silence gave rise to a rhythm that still lives in me.
To honor that beginning, the first round of chants and structured content I’ll be working with draw inspiration from the written liturgy and chants of the Mountains and Rivers Order, based in upstate New York, and from Zen Chants: Thirty-Five Essential Texts by Kazuaki Tanahashi — a renowned calligrapher and Zen teacher who has long collaborated with Roshi Joan Halifax at the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
These sources provide a structure of authenticity and lineage for this stage of the Sacred Syllable’s unfolding — a way to explore tone, rhythm, and breath through living texts that have shaped generations of practice.
This work, however, is my own interpretation. It is not endorsed by, nor representative of, either sangha. The intention is to honor the essence of these chants while bringing them into new forms of sound meditation, spoken rhythm, and contemporary contemplative practice.
Expanding the Field of Sound
As the Sacred Syllable continues to evolve, its reach will extend beyond a single lineage into a global chorus of sacred sound.
Future work will begin with Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow) — visionary, sound mystic, and teacher whose insights into the sacred vowels and sound as ceremony continue to shape modern understandings of vibration as a creative force. His work reminds us that the voice is a bridge between worlds, and that every utterance carries the power to heal or to harm.
Building upon that foundation, the project will also draw from Deepak Chopra, Roger Gabriel, and Dr. David Frawley, each of whom has illuminated the science and spirituality of mantra through Vedic and yogic traditions. Their contributions reveal how sound is both structure and awareness — a tool for aligning human consciousness with the rhythms of the cosmos.
In time, other influences may also enter this resonance field — including Tibetan Sound Healing practices as taught by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, whose work joins sound, breath, and luminous awareness in the ancient Bön tradition of Tibet.
And beyond these Eastern and Indigenous roots, the Sacred Syllable will welcome exploration into the Abrahamic traditions — the sacred recitations of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, where psalms, prayers, and invocations carry centuries of devotion through tone, cadence, and breath. These chants, too, are languages of vibration — voices seeking harmony with the divine.
As the website continues to take shape, other traditions and voices will also find a place within this living archive. Although documenting all the world’s chants is far beyond what one person could undertake, the invitation stands open for benevolent traditions and practitioners to share their sacred sounds — not as artifacts, but as ongoing acts of healing and reverence.
Each lineage brings its own vibration, its own way of shaping silence into meaning. The Sacred Syllable listens for that shared heartbeat beneath them all.
Rethinking Sacred Hoops
If the Sacred Syllable is the vibration at the center, Sacred Hoops is the field that may yet emerge around it — a conceptual idea still taking shape. It was first imagined as a gathering space, a circle of connection, a network woven from shared resonance.
While the original inspiration drew from the First Nations of North America and the symbolism of the hoop as a medicine circle, Sacred Hoops has since revealed itself to be as much about language as lineage. The hoop isn’t only a cultural emblem; it’s a living metaphor for communication — for how voices find one another and form a shared rhythm.
In this light, Sacred Hoops remains an evolving idea: a possibility for dialogue, for collaboration, for honoring the languages of healing that arise across peoples and lands. Its full expression will come naturally, as the sound continues to produce the circle that holds it.
Sound Produces the Hoop
The more I listen, the clearer it becomes: the hoop doesn’t precede the sound. The hoop is the visible pattern produced by vibration.
The Sacred Syllable is the generative center — the source of spin, the origin of resonance. Sacred Hoops is its echo — the form that arises when sound meets community. Together they describe the same living process:
— Sacred Syllable — sound as origin, breath as creation.
— Sacred Hoops — form as echo, language as connection.
The Path Forward: From Sound to Healing
In the months ahead, the Sacred Syllable will become the primary home for written chants, followed by sound meditations and mantras gathered from diverse traditions. It will serve as an evolving compendium — a place where sacred sound takes written form, and where language itself becomes an instrument of resonance.
As this work unfolds, Sacred Hoops remains a tentative idea — a concept still taking shape, arising naturally from the same current of vibration. It gestures toward a wider circle of exchange, a place where sound might one day find community, dialogue, and shared reflection. For now, it lives as potential — the faint outline of a future form produced by the sound itself.
Together, they remind me that coherence within naturally leads to connection without. That tone becomes pattern, and pattern becomes relationship.
Sound remains the medicine that unites them — through chant, through silence, through the act of listening itself.
I keep returning to that simple line — sound produces the hoop. From vibration, form arises. From one breath, a thousand circles emerge.
Sound Meditations, Chants, and Mantras — Sacred Syllable
A Circle of Healing — Sacred Hoops
Two names, one breath. The sound and the circle it creates.