with Maria del Carmen, MBA Certified Sound Healer Practitioner
About Maria del Carmen Rodriguez
Sound healing has been Maria del Carmen norm in many capacities since her childhood spending time at the peak of the family sacred mountain in Puerto Rico. Maria del Carmen always turned to sound when coping with fears and joyful moments. She continued turning to different sounds as a form of meditation into her adulthood. In 2017, she had a guest come on her GyrlSense talk show introducing the foundation and benefits of singing bowls. This is when she connected lived experiences into the label of sound healing. After attending curated sound healing sessions, she decided to become a practitioner herself and pass on the gift onto others.
During a sound healing session, the participant simply lies on a yoga mat or sits on a chair (whatever is comfortable for them) while she plays the crystal and Tibetan singing bowls, chimes, ocean and buffalo drum and other healing instruments that connects with the tissues within creating a holistic outcome. The synchronization of the body’s vibration will bathe your mind, body, and help reconnect you with your emotions ultimately leaving you feeling relaxed and rejuvenated.
Maria del Carmen currently offers sound healing at the Bridge Healing Arts Center in Farmington with her Life Partner Kelvin Young every other Thursday as a standard. She also offers private group sessions, one on one sessions, at nonprofits, gyms, schools, and corporations throughout CT and MA. She is honored to now offer sound healing for the Town of Windsor which is her hometown beginning May, 2023.
860.462.0738 • mariadelcarmen.soundhealing@gmail.com soundhealingbymariadelcarmen.com
About Bigger Than Me: A Solo Exhibit by Ryan Murray
Through the unflinching medium of spray paint stenciling, Ryan Murray unearths and examines unsettling but important conversations about the stigma of mental illness, with the goal of normalizing the discussion and treatment of mental health in Black communities. To examine Black mental health is to examine the effect of events in both the past and present, socioeconomic factors, how patterns of suffering repeat themselves, and the burden of certain societal expectations. By utilizing repeated symbolism and autobiographical elements, Murray's work not only seeks to address the reality and the reasons that people of color suffer in silence more than their white counterparts, but urges him to navigate his own upbringing as an African-American struggling with mental illness and raised in a predominantly white community. The biggest source of comfort in making this work recently has been realizing that his own situation is not a unique one, that millions of African-Americans struggle for the same reasons, and this work speaks to them as well.
Ryan Murray received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Carnegie Mellon University in 2014 and is currently located in Springfield, Massachusetts. His specialties include printmaking and spray paint stencils. His work starts out as collages of drawing, photography and Internet stock images, which are then edited in Photoshop, printed out and hand-cut in layers. His work centers around unearthing the under-representation of mental health in communities of color. He has exhibited in numerous galleries and shows in western Mass and has several permanent installations in the city of Springfield, including in Union Station and Pynchon Park. He is a recipient of grants from the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, Artist Relief and Mass MoCA's Assets 4 Artists.