SAGE STORY
SAGE ACADEMY OF SOUND was founded in 2008 by Lea and Philippe Garnier in Woodstock, NY. Committed to a respectful and gentle approach to healing, our workshops, events and private healing sessions uplift the body, mind and spirit to a higher frequency. Set in both a tranquil and sacred atmosphere our focus is on Sound Awareness for healing, combining complimentary modalities to achieve our mission of supporting health and wholeness.
LEA GARNIER, Director and Founder
Integrative Sound Practitioner, Craniosacral Therapist, Yoga Teacher and Educator
Lea Garnier has worked in the healing arts for over 25 years and is an established practitioner in the field. She began her journey as a painter. Her healing art has been displayed and sold in Europe and the US. Lea found Craniosacral Therapy in NYC after suffering neck and back injuries sustained in an auto accident. The relief she found from this work was so inspiring that she put down her paint brushes to pursue training as an Upledger Craniosacral Therapist, practicing now since 1990. In 2007 she became a certified yoga instructor trained in the Desikachar lineage, and co-founded Sage Academy of Sound and Center for the Healing Arts in Woodstock, NY.
Lea is a student of the shamanic arts which inspired her ongoing interest in therapeutic sound for healing, which led to the organization in 2010 of the first annual comprehensive SoundHealing retreat in the northeast, The SoundHealing Retreat Intensive.
This ongoing platform is created specifically for sound healing pioneers to come together and share their knowledge and wisdom, often resulting in deeply transformational experiences for participants.
Due to its massive appeal, and to meet the demands of this emerging healing modality, Sage created The SoundHealing Certification Program in 2013. The program focuses on the fundamental areas of sound healing and caters to an international audience of practitioners working in the healing arts. In 2013, Gong Camp, with 89-year-old master Don Conreaux, was created. Gong camp is a rare opportunity to study with Don, who has been travelling the world for over 40 years, teaching the wisdom and power of the gong. In 2014, Lea created an innovative program that integrates sound healing and various styles of yoga, specifically Yin and Vinyasa. This became a teacher training called The Yoga of Sound, a Nada Yoga Retreat.
Lea and her sound sangha facilitate weekly public sound baths for the community. They offer sound healing for private ceremony work, weddings, and death passages. Lea has a CD of healing mantras, icaros and sacred sounds available on Bandcamp.
Her teachers are many, and she is grateful for the opportunity to share the knowledge ascribed to her over the years within the art forms she continues to study passionately.
Philippe Garnier, Founder
Originally from Paris, Philippe Pascal Garnier discovered the healing properties of sound 15 years ago during his quest to cease vertigo brought on by Ménière’s disease. Not wanting to undergo the operation doctors offered, he turned to alternative practitioners. During the time he spent with the indigenous people of the Upper Amazon in Peru, working with spiritual healers, he experienced a transformation that altered the course of his disease and his life. He then pursued intensive training in Energy Healing and Sound Therapy. Philippe has been initiated into sacred ceremonies and practices in various Native traditions. His sound healing knowledge comes in part from living year-long within an Apache tribe in New Mexico and working extensively with the Amazonian curanderos, training in techniques that facilitate healing of the soul and body. Philippe's work has also been very much influenced by his friends and mentors, John Beaulieu, N.D., PhD., and Grand Gong Master Don Conreaux, both advanced and original researchers in many aspects of sound healing.
Philippe has relocated to France, where he started the “Académie Française de Sonothérapie,” a sonic bridge across the ocean in the world of Sound Healing.
You can follow his work by visiting his site here.