Inspiring Conversations with Sara Bousiali And TR Gourley of Calming Spot

Today we’d like to introduce you to Sara Bousiali And TR Gourley.

Hi Sara Bousiali and TR Gourley, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
We’re Sara and T.R. husband and wife and the co founders of Calming Spot, a candlelit sound bath studio in Santa Monica.

The idea came during the pandemic. Everyone around us was stressed and stuck, and we were too. We kept looking for a place where you could just be still for an hour. Not a gym, not a class where you had to perform, just somewhere to lie down, breathe and switch off. We couldn’t find one, so we decided to make it ourselves.

Sara studied psychology and philosophy and was working as a mental health coach. Her grandfather had Alzheimer’s, and near the end he didn’t know her name anymore, but he still responded to music and rhythm. That really stuck with her. It made her believe sound could reach people when words couldn’t. T.R. had spent more than ten years producing events in 18 countries, so he knew how to put together an experience people actually want to show up for.

In 2021 we started doing sound baths on Santa Monica Beach. At first it was our friends. Then their friends. Then people we’d never met were showing up every week. Eventually we moved into a studio behind an unmarked door in Santa Monica, painted the whole room black, filled it with candles and crystal bowls, and opened it up.

Since then we’ve given over 50,000 sound baths. We’ve never taken outside money and kept it authentic. With most clients coming through friends telling friends.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Definitely not. We started a wellness business in the middle of a pandemic with no studio, no investors and no real plan beyond showing up at the beach every week. Everything we’ve built since then we’ve paid for ourselves, which means we’ve had to be scrappy about pretty much everything.

The harder part has been getting people through the door. Most people have never meditated and a lot of them think it’s just not for them. We figured out pretty early that we weren’t going to talk anyone into it. So instead we put our energy into making the space and the experience so good that even the skeptics would want to try it once. Usually once is all it takes.

Honestly the biggest challenge now is that a lot of people in LA still don’t know we exist. The people who find us love it, but we’re tucked behind an unmarked door, so getting the word out is something we’re always working on.

Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Calming Spot is a sound bath studio in Santa Monica. Most nights we run 50 minute sessions in a dark room lit only by candles. You lie down on a mat with a blanket, and we play crystal singing bowls and guide you through some breathing and meditation. Up to 24 people at a time, and you don’t need any experience at all. A lot of our guests have literally never meditated before.

In spring and summer we also do sunset sound baths on Santa Monica Beach at Tower 24, which is where the whole thing started. Once a month we host Full Moon Glow on the beach, and that one usually draws 100 or more people and a big group of sound healers. It’s one of the biggest regular sound healing events in LA.

We also run different workshops where you pair a sound bath with something hands on like painting, pottery, dance or Kintsugi, and more. Sara built our Sound Healer Training program, and we’ve now certified hundreds of people who are taking this work back to their own cities. And we bring sound baths to companies too. Google, L’Oréal, Pinterest, YouTube and UCLA have all booked us, in our studio, at their offices, on the beach and once even on a boat.

What makes us different is that we don’t feel like a typical wellness place. There’s no chanting and no incense. We just wanted to build a room that feels so good to be in that people who would never call themselves spiritual still want to come back.

What we’re most proud of is when someone walks in skeptical, lies down, and an hour later tells us it’s the first time they’ve really relaxed in years. That happens a lot, and it never gets old. Our big goal is to make sound healing as normal as going to the gym.

What’s next?
The big one is just getting more people to try it. We really believe sound healing can be as normal and respected as working out, and we’re not going to wait around for the wellness industry to get there on its own. So a lot of what we’re doing next is about reaching people who have never heard of a sound bath and would never think to look for one.

We’re also growing the training side. We recently added Reiki trainings at the studio, and we keep building out the Sound Healer Training so more people can learn this and bring it to their own communities. Sara has been developing something she calls The Sonic Regulation Protocol, which brings together what we’ve learned about sound, brainwaves and meditation into one framework, and we’re excited to share more of that.

And we’d love to keep bringing this into workplaces. More and more companies are realizing their teams need real rest, not just another app, and we want to be the people they call.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.calmingspot.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/calmingspots
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@thecalmingspot
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.de/biz/calming-spot-santa-monica?osq=calming+spot