“Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.”

~ Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 33

Something is shifting in the people I speak with, and perhaps in you. There is a growing exhaustion with outrage, a quiet recognition that our anxiety, and our familiar attempts at solutions, however justified, are not solving anything. Underneath our exhaustion, a question:

Is there another way to meet this moment?

I believe there is, and it begins closer to home than we imagine.

We can choose to evolve. We can begin to move beyond the old patterns of conflict, domination, and division that are no longer sustainable.

We are facing multiple, converging crises: a wild competence in wholesale destruction; the consequences of believing that our mastery of science makes us lords of nature; the development of alien intelligence (AI), predicted to demote us from our perch as the planetary alpha species — not as myth, but as reality. We appear to be reaching the end of an old way of being.

A new consciousness is becoming possible.

Join in a group endeavor to develop that consciousness to meet the future.

Why Small Groups Matter Now

Large-scale transformation has rarely begun with the many. It begins with a smaller number of people who take inner work seriously and stay with it over time. Small shifts, repeated and lived in individual lives, gradually achieve a mass that reaches far beyond their numbers.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has”.

~Margaret Mead

The Work

For many years, I navigated the gap between the life I was living and the life I sensed possible. The aim was simple, though not easy: to become happier, to figure out what was going on. Was transformation possible?

Ultimately my path led me to develop a process called MediSounds® which unfolds through four intertwined practices.

Compassion of the Heart. If you are alive, you have been wounded — by loss, by betrayal, by life itself. Many of us respond by closing the heart in the name of safety, only to discover that life becomes smaller, flatter, less luminous. The work of this group includes a deliberate cultivation of the open heart. We employ MediSounds practices that soften us toward compassion (the long AHHH sound is one of these), and through the patient art of staying present to suffering, our own and others’, without armoring against it. In an age when machines may soon surpass us in nearly every measurable way, the heart’s capacity to love, to witness, and to soften is what no algorithm can replicate. It is also, in the end, what sustains us.

The Power of Our Own Voices. Through specific, intentional MediSounds meditative sound practices, we work with vibration as a tool for transforming energy and consciousness. Each sound corresponds to one of the energy centers described in the ancient symbol of the Tree of Life. The Tree of Life symbol contains within it a ladder of awareness available to anyone intent on climbing it. The voice becomes both instrument and teacher, and you can benefit from its gifts anywhere, every day, for the rest of your life.

Self-Observation. Through the patient work of coming home to ourselves, noticing our reactions without judgment, watching the patterns we have lived inside for years, we begin to know our truer selves, and we are freed to perceive different ways of being more aligned with our essential nature. This clarity changes us. We become clearer, calmer, happier, and live with purpose.

The Power of Community. The inner journey can be enhanced when we sit regularly with others who are doing the same work, who reflect back what we cannot see in ourselves, who hold us steady when we waver. In addition, our work will hopefully be part of creating a better shared future.

This work is not about withdrawing from life. This work is about meeting life differently — with joy, and compassion to oneself.

Community is not the social wrapping around the practice.

Community is part of the practice.

The Group

I am forming a small, closed founding group designed as a sustained, year-long journey — not a short course. Depth is the point, and depth takes time.

The container. We meet twice monthly online for one hour. Confidentiality is both respected and expected. Sessions are not recorded, in service of the privacy and presence of the room. The group draws on honest conversation in a space where depth is not just permitted but assumed. Participants are welcome to bring concerns from their private and public lives. Together we learn to observe our reactions without analysis, and to see the openings to which that noticing leads.

What a meeting looks like. Each meeting opens with a short MediSounds practice we do together — a few vocal sounds that settle us into the room and into ourselves. From there we move into the heart of the hour: honest conversation about what each of us has been noticing in our daily life, what is asking to be looked at, where the practice is meeting resistance and where it is opening something new. We notice how the simple act of noticing alters unwanted behavior. I offer guidance and reflection along the way.

The practice. Between meetings, each participant will have a daily practice of sound and self-observation, integrating them into the texture of ordinary life to inform it.

Who this is for — and who it is not. This group is for those who have already begun the inner journey and are ready to go deeper — not as beginners, but as sincere practitioners. It is not intended for those looking primarily for relaxation techniques, nor for those entirely new to contemplative life. If you are uncertain whether the fit is right, please reach out; a brief conversation usually makes it clear.

Equally important, you will not be doing this work alone. One of the quiet gifts of a committed group is belonging to others who understand the journey and are genuinely trying to live it. That companionship is itself a form of healing and a gateway to laughter.

This is not a lecture series. It is not a wellness class. It is an intimate gathering for people who sense that the inner life matters, and that tending it is perhaps the most urgent and most hopeful thing any of us can do right now.

Practical Details

Group size. The founding group will be intentionally small — maximum six participants — so that each person receives real attention and the work can go to genuine depth.

Dates. We will begin the week of June 29, once the founding group is gathered.

Cadence. Meetings will be held by Zoom, twice monthly , (for example, the first and third Tuesday of each month), for one hour. Times will be set with the group, balancing the time zones of those who join.

Preparation. No prior materials are required. Those who would like to begin familiarizing themselves with the work are welcome to visit shulamitelson.com/books-cds, read the Substack entries, listen to recordings at youtube.com/@medisounds, or sounds on soundpharmacy.com or on greatoctave.com

Investment. The fee is $80 per month, with a one-time administrative fee of $25 at enrollment. The minimum initial commitment is three months, so the first payment is $265 ($240 plus the $25 administrative fee). After the first three months, the work continues in three-month intervals of $240 for those who choose to stay. The group is designed to unfold over a full year, when the benefits of this practice will become apparent.

If the payment structure is a genuine obstacle for you, please inquire. We will find a way.

The prize of a cultivated heart is

joy, presence, and connection.

About Me

At its center, this has always been heart work. What I have learned about love, loss, and the cultivation of compassion is what shapes how I teach, not as theory, but as the ground beneath the practice.

I have spent more than thirty years following a thread that first appeared in my own life as a question I could not answer any other way.

I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home and spent twelve years studying scripture. A life-threatening kidney illness in my twenties intensified a yearning I had carried since childhood — a sense that there was a deeper structure to existence than the one we are usually shown. I went on to earn a master’s degree from New York University and build a corporate career on Wall Street. By every external measure, the life worked. Inside, the question never quieted.

At forty, sitting in meditation during the time I was working at an investment bank, specific vocal sounds began to come through me, sounds I had never been taught, that did not belong to any music I knew, that carried something I recognized without being able to name.

I eventually left corporate life to follow them. A trip to Jerusalem deepened the work. I encountered the writings of Joseph Gikatilla, a 13th-century Andalusian mystic and student of the vocal meditator and innovator Abraham Abulafia. Abulafia’s process of using vowel sounds to ascend states of consciousness mirrored what I had been hearing from within.

Those teachings, coupled with the sounds I had received in meditation, became MediSounds, a vocal “ladder” of practices rooted in the Tree of Life. No doctrine is required. No musical training either. Only sincere intention. The vibration itself carries the wisdom, meeting each person where they are.

I have had students from different faith traditions. The work is non-denominational.

For decades I have taught this work at the Omega and Esalen Institutes, in private practice in New York, and across Europe, India, Singapore, Mexico, and the Holy Land. I have taught at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center and walked with people through profound hardship — parents of children with cancer, AIDS patients in Mexico City. I was once invited by a U.S. Congressman to sound in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, where the dome offered a unique resonance.

I authored Kabbalah of Prayer: Sacred Sounds and the Soul’s Journey and recorded Vibration, a collaboration between my voice and eight Tibetan monks from the Drepung Gomang Monastery in India. I developed Snap Nap App for restorative sleep. Through the SoulSongs® School I mentor individual students; through The Great Octave Foundation I bring MediSounds to the wider public, in service of the cause of peace.

A Personal Note

This work, pursued with discipline and care, brought me great gifts: resilience, presence, joy, wisdom, and everyday happiness. My own relationship with the sounds has carried me from confusion to simplicity, from sorrow to purpose, and sustained me through the deepest loss of my life, the death of my daughter. That lived experience shapes my teaching: the work has to be grounded to inform a life.

I wish to share this gift with you, especially now, when we each need a centered, compassionate presence to meet the radical changes before us — and to help birth a new world we would be proud to participate in.

Words from Students

“Guided by Shulamit Elson and her grounded teaching, MediSounds has become a tangible and powerful organizing pillar of my daily life. The regular practice of MediSounds continues to deepen my connection to myself, to those most important in my life, to humanity, and to God.”

— David, MD, Maryland

“After a year’s work I have evolved to live more freely, completely, and honestly, in each and every moment — to truly feel deeply.”

— DD, Rochester, NY

If This Calls To You

If something in you resonates with this invitation, I would love to hear from you. I respond to every inquiry personally, and we will set up a short conversation to see whether this is the right group for you at this time.

Contact: shulamitelson@gmail.com

(Please include “MediSounds Group” in your subject line.)

With warmth and gratitude,

Shulamit

Resonance