Deva Munay

Deva Munay is a sound practitioner and musician who lives in Big Sur, California, where in 2018 she opened Sacred Sound & Wonder, a studio in an old art barn on K Paradise Ranch above the Pacific. Her interest in sacred sound goes back to the late 1990s, when she sat in on the Dalai Lama's teachings in northern India and was given her first instruments. Long journeys followed through Nepal, Thailand, Peru, Egypt, Bali and Central America. She has university degrees in biology, cultural anthropology, art and sound therapy, along with yoga and massage training.

Her main instruments are alchemy crystal singing bowls, which she plays alongside chimes, rattles and her own voice, and she draws on the Nada Yoga view of sound as a path to the sacred. Sessions are largely lying-down sound journeys for rest and deep listening, given one to one at her studio or over Zoom, and in community evenings around Big Sur and Carmel. She leads week-long retreats at Esalen, small group trips to swim near humpback whales off Mo'orea in French Polynesia, and online courses. On record she has worked with Peter Gordon as Lifting the Sky and with Edwin Huizinga and Penny Vieregge on settings of the poems of Hafiz.