It was 8:00pm on a Friday night in the heart of San Francisco’s hippest neighborhood, the Mission. The neighborhood is the scene of some of the city’s best dining and nightlife, drawing in swarms of hipsters and yuppies alike. Nestled in a side street is a discreet brick building better known as the Episcopal Church of St. John, within which lay nearly 200 yoga mats and their owners, a varied crowd of largely the young tech elite. For the next hour, the entire venue would swell with sounds of gongs, flutes and crystal bowls in a dream-like aural journey. The sound meditation event, originally planned for only Thursday, was sold out within 18 hours. Organizer Simona Marie Asinovski and sound healing practitioner Guy Douglas then extended a Wednesay night show which sold out within a couple of hours and subsequently a Friday night show which sold out within minutes. The audience for all 3 nights totaled over 500 people.

I’ve been to my share of spiritual events, but never had I seen an independently organized one draw such a crowd. Simona and Guy’s sound journey, titled “The Holistic Chamber of Sound,” caught my attention as a wonderfully successful example of entrepreneurship in the mindfulness and spirituality space. I had the pleasure of catching up with Simona and Guy a couple days later to learn about their collaboration, the event, and what made it such a success.

Yijen: How did your collaboration begin?

Guy: We met in Los Angeles 4 years ago. I created a sound experience that I took across the country, set up in different places from Strawberry Fields in New York City down to New Orleans Jazz Fest. It was called the “gong chair” where basically you’re in a chair surrounded by 3 gongs playing.

Simona: It was a really intense experience. Your entire body is vibrating in sound. My favorite part was that it was just for you — the experience was created just for you because you are that precious and that worth it. It was so beautiful and so intense. Like a really really deep meditation for 15 minutes. Guy had it set up at Venice Beach. I saw this chair, crazy as it sounded, and yelled out, “gong me!”

Guy: And that’s where it all started. Then we started doing yoga classes together. Simona’s a yoga teacher so we created gong flow yoga. It was a venture we did for about a year.

Simona: The way I thought about gong flow yoga wasn’t that I was teaching a yoga class but instead that this was something new we were bringing to the world. So I learned a lot about entrepreneurship — about growth particularly because young companies are all about growth. If you have something meaningful you want to share with the world, you need to learn how to reach people and how to share your message. I spent a couple years working for Bay Area companies doing a bunch around growth marketing.

Yijen: Very cool. It’s great foresight to think about mindfulness and spirituality in such an entrepreneurial way.

Simona: I’ve been really inspired by a lot of people in the yoga community — Elena Brower, Shiva Rea, Colleen Saidman Yee and Rodney Yee, and Govindas and Raddha at Bhakti Yoga Shala, just to name a few. They use social media and all the resources available to them to reach people. At the same time, they still carry such a strong authenticity.

We’re looking to make experiences that fit around the lives and communication styles of people who are rushed and busy. If you have to be at work at 9am, you can’t really take a long yoga class before that. What we’re trying to imagine is one day being able to take a 30-minute sound meditation on your way to work…and then having the best day ever!

Yijen: What would a 30-minute sound meditation on the way to work look like?

Simona: Our goal is to have a studio in Soma [San Francisco neighborhood and tech hub]. As you can imagine, it’d be the perfect spot to bring this to a lot of really stressed out people.

Yijen: Switching gears to the Holistic Chamber of Sound event, it was quite the feat selling out 3 nights. How did you draw such a large audience for sound healing, something that so few people are familiar with?

Simona: We actually held a small pilot event back in September, so we were able to invite a core group of people who we knew already loved this. And then they invited their friends. I think something we did differently from most people who host these types of events was that we didn’t pose it as something you should do but instead a really fun and cool thing — something you want to do.

Yijen: Can you explain what a sound bath is and how it works?

Guy: The sound bath is a soundtrack to creation itself. When you put yourself in the field of that harmonic and resonance, there’s a reminder deep inside of us of who we really are. We come into this world very pure, but all the conditioning of life gets into our field — all the projections, all of our “stuff.” Sound is a reminder of that pure place that we all remember but can’t explain. It’s a creational sound experience of that familiar place, almost like we’re still in the womb.

Simona: These instruments create a forced meditation. It’s not really an optional meditation because it’s so intense that all you can really focus on is the sound and whatever comes up in you as the sound is happening. Most instruments have an initial strike and then an onset — the sound that emanates forward. With gongs, there’s the initial strike but the onset is actually louder than the initial strike and it goes back and forth. It confuses and interrupts the mind a bit, forcing a person to be present in the moment.

Yijen: What’s the motivation behind your work?

Simona: Guy and I just had a chat about why we’re doing this collaboration. I think it’s the same reason we both love Nine Inch Nails. We’ve both had the experience of wondering, “Can someone as weird as me ever be happy in this society?” There’s a lot of anxiety, shame, self-doubt out there. People can be really harsh on themselves. The reason Guy and I are doing this is we really believe it helps fight addiction, helps deal with depression and helps to clear your mind and give you a fresh start.

Guy: It’s really about making the world a better place. Especially in the despair of where the world’s at today, connecting with this creational sound takes people out of their minds. When we go into meditation, we deeply connect with ourselves.

Yijen: Thank you both so much for your time today. Any parting thoughts?

Simona: Our work is really taking off in San Francisco because of the community here. It’s not our messaging or positioning. People here really try hard to be kind, and live and love. They realize that spending time in silence and meditation — spending time taking care of themselves — has incredible rewards for both themselves and their community. It’s this realization that brought people together to say, “let’s do this, it’s going to be beautiful, and we’re gonna feel really great afterwards.”

Join Simona and Guy’s events at www.soundmeditationsf.com and download music at www.gongguy.com.