Sonic Immersion
Facilitated by Shawn Feeney and
Nirmala Nataraj
Sunday, May 10
6-7pm
Shawn Feeney and Nirmala Nataraj offer a live sound journey with guided meditation and storytelling. This is an invitation into altered, expanded states of awareness: the subtle terrain where nervous systems soften and begin to remember how to listen. Playing his unique set of tuned quartz singing bowls, Shawn composes immersive sonic landscapes that shape the sensory ground of the experience. Onto this soundscape, Nirmala weaves poetic excursions—evocative journeys through inner and imaginal landscapes rich with story, discovery, and subtle invitation. Together, sound and story form a braided pathway in which sensation and symbol intermingle, generating new, somatically experienced mythologies that unfold in a terrain of wonder and quiet transformation.
Participants will be free to recline (savasana pose), sit or stand as needed. Some yoga mats and blankets will be available but please bring whatever materials you need to feel warm and relaxed.
The event will last 60 minutes.
Option to stay overnight at WildHeart before or after – come early or stay late. Reach out to us at contact@wildheartcenter.art to confirm your stay.
About Shawn
I’m a multidisciplinary artist working within the realms of music and visual art.
As a musician, I compose, perform, and record using a variety of instruments such as quartz bowls, tankdrums, tuning forks, strings, voices, and electronics. I craft sonic worlds that reward deep listening and attentive immersion. My recordings include Cascades (2025), Bloom Infinitum (2021), and Thin Places (2020). I have performed at venues throughout New York City, the Hudson Valley, and the San Francisco Bay Area.
I am a 2025 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Music/Sound from The New York Foundation for the Arts.
As a visual artist, I work primarily in the realms of sculpture, drawing, and animation. My animated visualizations of musical phenomena feature prominently in the Concert Theatre Works touring show, What Music Is (premiered in 2025). In June 2015, I was artist-in-residence at the de Young Museum in San Francisco for my Musical Anatomy work, featuring my drawings and sound sculptures. My work has also been presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Audiofoundation HQ in Auckland, and CounterPULSE in San Francisco. To hone my skills, I worked as a forensic artist in New York (with training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, VA), and in the Art Department of Lucasfilm’s visual effects studio Industrial Light & Magic.
I am also an educator and mentor. I have led sound-based classes, workshops, and retreats both online and in-person at venues such as Lifebridge Sanctuary and COSM. I’ve taught art at SUNY Orange College and I’ve been facilitating a Creative Accompaniment Group for years.
At Harvard College I studied music, and worked with electronic music pioneer Mario Davidovsky as my thesis advisor. I earned my MFA in Intermedia in New Zealand, studying with instrument inventor Philip Dadson. At the California Institute of Integral Studies, I studied Sound, Voice, and Music in the Healing Arts with vocalist Silvia Nakkach. In 2017, I became a certified facilitator of Deep Listening®, based on the work of Pauline Oliveros. My other teachers include Timothy Hill, Iva Bittová, and W.A. Mathieu.
My clients and collaborators have included Adobe, Teatro alla Scala, the San Francisco Arts Commission, Concert Theatre Works, and the Exploratorium. My creative work has been featured in New York Magazine, The Today Show, The New Yorker, Esquire, NY Daily News, SF Weekly, Food Network, and Guinness World Records. I am based in the Hudson Valley of New York.
About Nirmala
I’m Nirmala Nataraj, a New York–based writer, editor, book midwife, theater artist, and mythmaker. Welcome to my site, which is the crossroads between your creativity, life force, and personal fulfillment via the portals of myth, storytelling, word magic, and collective liberation!
As someone who has woven in and out of a number of different word realms—nonprofit communications, advertising, theatre, publishing, and community arts, to name a few—I know that liberation is possible through the stories we choose to tell. As a first-generation South Asian American, I myself exist in the liminal spaces between cultures, art forms, and languages—and it is this multiplicity of narratives that informs my personal and professional approach.
I am the author of three bestselling books about space and cosmology, the ghostwriter of a dozen works (primarily in the arena of spiritual writing, memoir, and young adult fiction), and a book development editor who lovingly stewards my clients from planting the seeds for their stories to watching them burgeon and flourish in the world. My zeal for storytelling and mythmaking, wedded with my former work as an activist and counselor, has led me to craft a variety of books about overcoming addiction and moving beyond self-help and into collective liberation. My strengths, passions, and areas of interest include subjects as varied as the cultural effects of technology, public art, sustainable architecture, sexuality, ecology, performance studies, and what it means to seed revolutionary acts of beauty in a world steeped in suffering and injustice.
I believe that every book has its own spirit, and it’s up to us to simply get out of the way and do whatever is necessary to usher that spirit into form. Some of the guides on my journey include: irreverence, play, the incantatory power of words, the gifts of the more-than-human realm, and the grace of falling apart and dispensing with preconceived notions about what creativity and power are supposed to look like. Oh yeah—and tons of plant tinctures, organic skincare, bottles of biodynamic wine, and Epsom salt baths!
My colleagues include New York Times–bestselling authors, spiritual teachers, social changemakers and shit starters, mushrooms, trees, and some particularly talkative chipmunks who come to visit me during the golden hours before dusk, when I am most creatively potent.
In all my work, I emphasize the power of claiming authority over our voices and personal truths, while also surrendering to the creative process and ceding control and ownership over it.
I am committed to steadfast creative inquiry (I dig questions more than answers) and new definitions of self and community that work to dismantle heteropatriarchal/imperialist/misogynist/racist frameworks about whose words matter and how they should be arranged on a page or stage. As a multi-genre collaborator and creative facilitator, I believe in messiness, multiplicity, competing and coalescing narratives, generativity in the midst of strife, the coexistence of love and justice, and breathtaking beauty as a natural consequence of this wild ride.
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Location
Caution: Our driveway has been plowed and salted, however, please still be extremely careful when driving in and walking as there are some icy spots.
WildHeart is located on 46+ beautiful acres in the Hudson Valley. Retreatants will have the option to stay in a single room, double room, dorm, or camping in either our main retreat center or in private two-bedroom cabins. All options have access to shared kitchens and bathrooms. Daily events will take place in the studio, shared common spaces, and outdoors. Retreatants are welcome to enjoy the lawns, walk in the forest, and swim and boat in the lake during their stay! More info about directions and transportation options HERE.
If you have any questions, concerns about pricing, or need assistance attending, please do not hesitate to reach out personally.
Registration
$15-25
Registration is only for the immediately upcoming event. To register for events father out please wait until the preceding event passes.
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