Healing Vibrations: Phyllis Kanti Berg

I first met Phyllis at The Old Stone House last fall after a group reading I’d been asked to participate in by Reiki practitioner Linda Gnat-Mullin. The topic was “Women on Worth,” and each of us had been asked by Linda to speak about our own worth.

Phyllis bounded up to me during the wine and cheese reception, dressed all in bright happy colors with a big, true open smile, and was so excited. I can hear her now, see the sincerity in her eyes, hand to her heart, “I just loved what you said, it really touched me.”

I had written about shame, actually, and how my self-worth often comes and goes with the vagaries of life, how I can feel worthy and then not in the span of a moment.

She was so familiar with the cycle, personally and professionally. She told me she was a yogi and a healer, and my eyes got wide. My yoga teacher for InspireCorps, Carmen Guzman, had just told me she had a conflict and couldn’t teach, and I was in a swirl trying to find someone to step in. Could Phyllis be the answer?

She gave me her card for the yoga and healing practice she’s built up in Park Slope over the years, Sanctuary by the Park, where she offers a variety of “vibrational” crystal sound therapies, as well as aromatherapy, light therapy, color therapy… so many things that work to correct the mental, physical, emotional and spiritual imbalances in one’s system that can lead to disease and depression.

As happens when I meet a certain kind of inspirational artist in service to helping others, I wanted to make her part of our team, and Phyllis agreed that it felt right. A few days later our weekly caravan to PS81 included the bright light of Phyllis Kanti Berg and her pink “Happy Magic Music Bowl,” a huge crystal bowl wrapped tenderly and carefully that she brought along to help relieve the children of negative energy, stress and trauma.

It was the amazing resonant vibration of the bowl that wowed the children from the start, to be sure, but it was also Phyllis, a born-and-bred Brooklynite, clearly young at heart, with a booming voice and personality far larger than her tiny frame, that won them.

I can hear her smile through the phone when I call to have her walk me through her history, how she got to this place of healing others.

“My religion is love,” Phyllis says in that sweet sideways Brooklyn twang she has, a nice Jewish girl.

She noted that it all started in the 70s, when she and her cool partyer friends were all smoking tons of pot to relax. A freshman at Brooklyn College, it was her 17th birthday when she encountered Swami “Baba” Muktananda, the Indian master and guru, in town on his second world tour with Werner Erhard, the American creator of self-help group est (later, The Forum.)

“I had an out-of-body experience, it was just really blissful,” she explains. “When I saw him, I left my body and I thought I was in heaven, surrounded by the light.”

It was the beginning of a lifetime of learning and teaching yoga. Phyllis dropped the drugs, and took up yoga because, she says, “it brought me such a sense of peace.” She didn’t mind so much that yoga was considered weird then, since she’d always moved to the beat of her own drummer. She felt in her practice that Swami “Baba” was working miracles through her, and in 1983, doing a three-month cleanse in Hawaii, she met Guru Mayi, a follower of Baba’s, and became a devotee of her Bhakti yoga and chanting practices.

“It is yoga of the heart, devotion,” Phyllis says. “I met her and had no idea it would change my life, but it did. She transmitted her energy to me.”

Since then, Phyllis, under the guru name, “Bright Light Kanti”, has been passing that energy on to others in the variety of ways she has trained and learned to use to heal, from yoga classes to crystal healing.

“I’m a seeker,” she says, and I can almost see her throwing up her hands and pursing her lips in that ‘whatcha gonna do?’ way she has, the Brooklyn way.

She began working with crystal bowls in 2003, doing energy work for a chiropractic office in Park Slope.

She calls it “Sonic Bliss,” that feeling the crystals create for people.

“Crystals have power because they are a mineral from the earth that helps us thrive, and opens and amplify our energy,” she says. “There are thousands of different kinds of crystals, and each of them contains different qualities. Because our body is crystalline in structure, it resonates with the frequencies of the crystals, and allows for accelerated healing throughout the body, balancing brain chemistry, stimulating endorphins and boosting the immune system.”

The clear vibration of the bowls clears away stress, trauma and negativity.

“It’s instant peace,” she says.

I went one day when I was feeling stressed to lay on Phyllis’s crystal bed. She gave me ear acupuncture, and left the room to allow for the vibrations of the crystals to work their magic. Her apartment itself was healing, with its Victorian charm and Phyllis’s nurturing energy throughout.

She has brought that same energy to PS81, working with very young children from the projects who, she says, “blew my mind with how they started to share about how they had a lot of stress, how they couldn’t be with their mothers or fathers…So many of them are on drugs for hyperactivity.”

Before she played her “Magic Music Bowl”, the kids—7 and 8 years old-- told her they were ‘sad’ or ‘stressed’, and after?

“Happy!” she reported, clapping her hands together, obviously incredibly rewarded by her work.

Phyllis believes implicitly in the balancing power of her crystal bowls. She took one out on the sidewalk in front of the school after class one day, in the shadow of the Eleanor Roosevelt Houses most of the kids live in, to show another artist. Two young men walking by stopped on the sidewalk to take it in.

“Man,” the one said, brightening with the sight of it. “I could really use that, to clear my chakras…”

He started explaining to his friend about energy work, and meditation, and the healing that comes from it, and his friend nodded. They stood together, eyes closed, as Phyllis played the bowl.

‘It’s happening,’ I thought. People are seeking healing, in beautiful ways, and healers like Phyllis, early adopters of Eastern methods in our Western culture, can help. It is a wonderful thing.

See for yourself! Join us for Sounds of Peace: Healing Vibrations with Phyllis Kanti Berg, this Thursday, July 6th at my home – 420 12th St., F3L buzz 1026, at 7:30. Suggested donation $25 goes toward Phyllis’s teaching at 81. RSVP for a spot to inspirecorps@gmail.com.

Shalom. Inshallah. Peace be with You.