Mairéad Ní Fhlatharta fell in love with sound baths a few years ago. When she experienced one that included singing it set her on a new journey. The award-winning sean-nós singer from An Spidéal has now set up her own enterprise, Blathú, using different instruments and her beautiful voice to create sound vibrations that help people relax and re-energise. JUDY MURPHY tries it out.

It’s 7pm on Sunday as seven of us, mostly strangers, relax contentedly on yoga mats, cocooned under blankets in a cosy, candlelit room, while rain is pelting on the roof overhead.

None of us want to leave – and it’s not because of the rain.

We’ve just been on a glorious, relaxing sound journey, led by Mairéad Ní Fhlatharta of Blathú Sound Baths in An Spidéal, and we’re seriously relaxed.

Sound baths – in Irish, folcadh fuaime – is a new venture from Mairéad, a teacher and sean-nós singer from An Spidéal. It’s a calling she clearly loves and is well-suited to.

Sound baths are designed to help people relax and retune, quieting the mind and emerging refreshed and ideally calmer. Those of us attending this one are required to do nothing but wear loose clothing, lie down, get comfy and keep an open mind as we’re immersed in a world of sound that includes gongs, chimes, ocean drums, singing bowls, a shruthi box – a drone instrument – and Mairéad’s beautiful singing.

There’s more too, including a waterfall and birdsong in the background, as she creates diverse sounds and vibrations from the instruments, sometimes focusing on one, sometimes on another.

Afterwards, one woman who had come from Carna for the event, reflected on how hearing the ocean drum had brought her back to her youth, evoking a local bay she loved. We all agreed that the instrument had been particularly powerful, perhaps because of the proximity of the Atlantic – in daylight, there are great views across the bay from the space.

The gong likewise; it was deep and resonant, vibrating throughout the body. Impossible to ignore, it’s very powerful.

Mairéad discovered the world of sound baths in the wake of a road traffic accident about a decade ago.

“It brought me on a long journey of healing,” she says of how she embarked on treatments, including reflexology, massage and acupuncture.

“One door led to another” for Mairéad, who first experienced a sound bath about four years ago and loved it so much that she decided to learn how to give them.

That one was in County Clare as part of a day-long retreat where the woman who was giving it added her singing voice to the instruments. It added “an extra layer” to the experience, according to Mairéad. She loved it and felt it was something she could do too, given her lifelong passion for and involvement with sean-nós singing.

“The meeting of human voice and instrument created a depth, warmth and emotional resonance,” she says, adding that this resonance remained with her long after the session was over.

A friend who’d attended the retreat separately, had the same idea and said to Mairéad that she could do something similar.

That comment also resonated with Mairéad, who felt her friend’s encouragement was “affirming and timely”.

The same friend recently attended the very first sound bath that Mairéad led in An Spidéal, squaring “a quiet and gentle circle” for the grateful facilitator.

A primary teacher in Gaelscoil Dara, Renmore, she can offer these experiences in the evenings, but is currently on a jobshare, as she creates the space to develop her fledgling enterprise.

Pictured: Mairéad Ní Fhlatharta, at her Bláthú studio in an Spidéal with the crystal bowls she uses during the sound baths. PHOTOS: BRIAN HARDING.