A clear note from pure metal rises in the air, reverberates, and somehow over seconds continues until it eventually fades away. These notes on the air, and the silence between them is at the heart of Winnie Rode’s work. There’s an ancient feel to the music that he frees from simple metal alms bowls, and these are the simplest of harmonies, one of the first ways in which music was made, with the striking of metal. Pleasing sounds arise, but in Winfried Rode’s case, they can also produce healing in the mind and body of the listener as well as an unusual sense of calm.
The sounds are an expression of a highly complex individual, with Winfried, or Winnie, as he prefers to be known, being someone who has explored education in a number of unusual ways and who has more focus than most people could ever hope to achieve. I’ve come to interview him about his life and we’re at his house in the south of the island of Koh Samui, Thailand. It’s just off the Ring Road, and a few hundred metres up a dirt track. There’s nothing at all to suggest we are in a major tourist destination; this is more like the countryside, undisturbed, unhurried. We sit and drink pungent green tea under the awning of a traditional wooden house, its deep orange-red bedecked with prayer flags. We might be in a previous century.
“Many people say I have led a very interesting life,” Winnie begins, disarmingly. “I don’t really think that’s the case. To me, my life often seems quite ordinary.” Asked about the long journey from his roots in Germany to life as a Buddhist on a small tropical island, he says how he first trained to be a dental technician, learning how to set children’s teeth right. “But I found that my heart wasn’t in this kind of work,” he says. “My heart was in the theatre, and so over a period of more than four years I became a theatre director.” It’s work he still does, and enjoys doing. Every year he goes back to Germany and for three months directs plays by the likes of Shakespeare, Dario Fo and Jean Anouilh. After starting this new career, Winnie still felt the need to complete his academic schooling, and took exams so he could go to University. He passed them, and putting aside the theatre for a while, he started studying Biology, Archeology and Classical Philosophy. Even while he was doing this, other currents were at work in his life and once he’d graduated, he set off for India. It was hardly some giddy jaunt born in a moment of recklessness, but the results of an idea that had been growing in him since childhood. “It was my father who was the inspiration for this. He’d always talked about Buddhism and the idea of re-birth,” says Winnie. “I made up my mind to become a Buddhist monk, so once University was over, I went to India so I could go into a Tibetan monastery.” Winnie began the traditional education to become a lama, a teacher of Tibetan-style Buddhism. It takes 8 years, and is known to be extremely tough. Winnie: “There are 14 exams and if you fail one or miss one, that’s it. You can’t take them again; you just have the one try.” He went on to train as a yogi, again in the Tibetan tradition, where the practice is mental, not physical. He also became a shaman, thereby completing all the facets of study in the Tibetan Buddhist path – something that very few westerners can say they’ve done.
Being a serious practitioner led to Winnie being asked to do a unique job. He met the Dalai Lamai, who on his trips to Germany and Austria needed a bodyguard. Winnie was chosen. It involved a lot more than keeping a wary eye out for dodgy people stepping out of the crowds and possible assassins, and preparations would start some three months prior to the Dalai Lama’s visits. Being close to the Dalai Lama greatly influenced Winnie, who became one of his disciples; after all, it was hardly an average boss that he had. Later, when the Dalai Lama was given the Nobel prize, the German authorities decided he needed still more protection. They asked Winnie to lead the team. Amongst other things it became his job to decide what route the Dalai Lama should take when he went to a venue. “We’d always have three possible routes,” says Winnie. “It was my task to decide at the very last moment which it would be. The Dalai Lama would be in the car, waiting to leave, and the chief of police would ask me my choice…” How exactly did Winnie choose? He says by intuition alone. A gut feeling.
These days he’s spending more time in Thailand, where he’s often to be found at Kamalaya.
Asked about his work there, Winnie says how he’s running a workshop called “Non-meditation in daily life.” That might sound bizarre – after all, most of us might take a shot at trying to meditate, but what can you achieve through non-meditation? After all, it sounds like normal consciousness. Winnie says it’s not so. “I’m trying to create a bridge between non-meditation and meditation. The highest form of meditation is actually something called non-meditation.”
But how do you actually go about teaching a course such as that? Winnie ponders the question and comes out with an anecdote. “When I was in Hong Kong teaching for the first time, I was a bit nervous beforehand and asked my own teacher how I should proceed, and he said quite clearly, ‘You will feel what you need to teach to the audience.’” And that’s how it’s turned out to be. Faced with a new group of people, Winnie says he senses what they need. No notes, no pondering beforehand – he feels with his intuition. Apparently it’s successful. Winnie has many disciples of his own and now teaches in Hong Kong, India, Germany and in Thailand.
As always, learning remains crucially important to him. He goes into some detail about quantum physics. “It’s what I’m studying these days. It’s a little bit complicated,” he says modestly. “It’s close to the emptiness that Buddhism speaks of; basically the main point is that there is nothing solid. You don’t find anything ‘real’ in quantum physics; you don’t in Buddhism, either; there is only vibration and energy; expansion and contraction. I try to deal with this in the workshop. If you believe in Big Bang theory, then we’re all made out of sound and light. Everything is connected…nothing on its own; everything interdependent.”
If we are just sound and light, then what is healing? Winnie explains, “When a person goes into disharmony in their body or mind, their frequencies are out of harmony. Healing is to bring the person or body back into harmony. Healing can be transmitted to someone – it’s not something that an individual does by himself or herself. When I do sessions with the singing bowls to heal someone, I place the bowls on the body, where they are needed. I sense where the places are. It’s not me that heals.”
Winnie switches effortlessly between Buddhism and quantum physics, and why not, if they are so similar? – before returning to the idea of disharmony. “Neuroscientists observe that our brains produce brain waves between alpha and delta. These are the waves we experience when sleeping, dreaming and brainstorming. But most people are losing the ability to produce these waves. Why? There’s too much trash sound around. So our brains lose the ability. The bowls, however, resonate to the same waves, and hence can help restore the diminishing ability. Most people feel better after the treatment, but of course, once you begin to immerse yourself in ordinary life again, the new feeling dissipates over time. To change the vibration, you need to go very deep into the body.”
Asked about the music he performs, Winnie says the singing bowls are basic pentatonic music. The sounds are good for a number of conditions, he says. “It’s been proven to help people who are suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. That’s the only scientific research that I know of, but the bowls help with all kinds of stress symptoms, as well as skin problems, insomnia, mourning, depression and a broken heart. It’s good for tinnitus too. You can see the singing bowls as a vibrational de-tox.”
Winnie plans to spend some time next year in Germany helping therapists use the singing bowls; in turn they will help elderly people experience something of the inner peace and healing that the bowls seem to transmit.
Winnie also ‘plays’ the singing bowls. Recently he released three CDs. Healing Therapy Music – Singing Bowls – Sound Therapy features Winnie solo, using the bowls to produce the kind of sounds familiar to anyone who has ever experienced a healing session of this kind. InThe Third Ear – Overtone Joy – Harmonic Singing Bowl Music, Winnie plays alongside two guitarists and in Brainwave – Music Therapy, Winnie provides exactly what the title suggests… Obviously singing bowl music will appeal to some more than others, but it’s worth listening to as it is so different from anything else. With music of this kind, it’s impossible to know beforehand what you will think. Winnie also gives concerts at Kamalaya and these are timed to coincide with the full moon, the black moon and the silence there after.
Details:
Singing bowl concert with Winnie Rode
12. and 13. of April 2009 at 6 pm
at THE MANSION Resort Hotel & Spa, Sayan Ubud.
Tickets 36,- US$.
Information: omeco@atomharmonx.com
Ticket Sales at
• Xclusive Property on 0361-8475955 Seminyak
Jl. Sunset Road #10x
• Xclusive Property on 0361-8473244 Kuta
Jl.By Pass Ngurah Rai 826
• The Mansion Resort Hotel & Spa, 0361-972 616, Sayan Ubud Jl. Penestanan
Singing Bowl Sound Therapy with Winnie Rode
at the Spa of The Mansion Resort Hotel & Spa
Booking : ph 0361-972 616 * www.themansionbali.com
See also ad page 3 of the March 25 issue of Bali Advertiser
