Harry van Dalen

“Sound brings you back to silence, and that silence is love”

Harry van Dalen on music as a lifeline, healing and the art of observing without judgement.

Harry lives and breathes music. What once began as a survival strategy during an insecure childhood grew into a lifelong journey of discovery into the power of sound. He built a career in the high-end audio world, but gradually discovered that music and sound reach far beyond beautiful sound: they bring people back to silence, presence and connection. Through his company, Spirit Connection, he now guides people on this journey, using voice and sound.

In this in-depth interview, he tells his story – from the blues that kept him going as a child to the inner stillness he shares with others today.

How did music become a lifeline for you?
As a child, I was abused. Everyone goes through their share of difficulties in life, but for me it meant escaping into my own mind. It was as if I put on a pair of invisible headphones and then I was gone. Music was my refuge.

I was completely immersed in the world of the blues, of Jimi Hendrix. Later on, I started buying classical music too – difficult pieces that I didn’t understand at the time. As a lad of twelve or thirteen, I listened to the Messiah. A lot of cacophony, you might say. But for me, it was like coming home; I was immersed in that music and, for a moment, freed from everything. I still don’t know why it moved me. But I do know that it did move me.

I’d had no formal education and could barely read or write until I was thirty. My friends went to art college or technical college; I had only my intuition and music. It’s only in hindsight that I really realise it: that music literally kept me going. It held me fast in life, in the light. Sometimes I’d just burst into tears listening to it, because it moved me so deeply.

What is it about music that makes it so unifying for you?
At a certain point, I also started to understand lyrics better, especially those of someone like Joni Mitchell. That’s when I realised: I’m not alone in my pain. Other people have a story too. That gave me such a sense of recognition.

I remember listening to the Beach Boys in secret when I was a young lad. In my circle, that was ‘not done’ – far too soft; you were supposed to listen to Hendrix or something rough and tough. A friend of mine didn’t dare admit he played them either, until I caught him out one day and we both came out and admitted it out loud. What a relief that was. That sense of recognition, that connection – that, for me, is the magic of music. Music doesn’t judge. It doesn’t ask who you are or where you’re from. It resonates, and it gives you the space to just be.

You were captivated by jazz as a teenager. How did that come about?
Especially when you’re young, you’re incredibly sensitive to what’s supposedly ‘important’. But that ‘taste police’ wasn’t for me. I didn’t have any fixed preferences, and so I was the first person in my village to listen to jazz. When the North Sea Jazz Festival was just starting in The Hague, I headed there with my long hair, right in the middle of the smartly dressed crowd sipping champagne. They were there for the swing of Lionel Hampton; I ended up at Ornette Coleman, one of the greatest avant-gardists.

I had no idea what was happening to me. He was playing with a double trio – two trios doing something completely different at the same time – on the saxophone. The sound cut right through me. After the first number, half the audience walked out. I was about to get up too, until a man next to me said: ‘You shouldn’t just listen. You have to experience it.’ ‘Close your eyes,’ he said, ‘listen to everything at once, because there’s nothing to follow.’

I did as he said, and I vanished. Not just a little, but completely. Everything dissolved. For an hour, I was nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Pure freedom. From that moment on, I became fascinated by free improvisation. Not for its beauty or ugliness, but for the expression, for letting go. I also love a perfectly crafted song – a Paul McCartney or a Paul Simon – which is so brilliant that it moves me just as much. But this was something else. I travelled to New York and ended up in jazz lofts where legends were playing to an audience of fifteen. Jazz was supposedly ‘dead’, but to me it felt like a secret universe: raw, alive and completely real.

You also made music your career. How did that start?
In the 1970s, I started working in a record shop, and everything fell into place. I sold everything: classical, pop, Dutch-language music, without passing any judgement. I just listened. One day, my boss said: ‘You need to sell those hi-fi systems.’ I said I didn’t know anything about them. He said: ‘No, but you’ve got a feel for it.’ And he was right. I set up big speakers right in the middle of the shop, cranked up Pink Floyd and said to customers: ‘You’ve got to hear this.’ They felt what I felt, and bought it. Not because of the technology, but because of the experience. I had no qualifications, no technical knowledge. But I had that passion to let people feel what music does to you.
It has since grown into one of Europe’s largest high-end audio companies. Everyone who works here is a true enthusiast – not a techie, but a genuine listener.

What did you feel was lost when music went digital?
I started applying that audio knowledge to recordings, because I wanted to understand what actually happens when you capture music. And when digital sound arrived, I was deeply disappointed. Everything sounded flat and cold, without any soul. Whereas an old Blue Note record from 1959 really grabs you straight away, because analogue has that warmth. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against digital. But I’m critical of how lazily it’s used. Engineers often say: it’s easier. Yes, a lot of things are easier. But convenience isn’t the same as quality. Music isn’t about perfection; it’s about connection. Look at a street fair or a festival: what happens there is that people are together. That’s what we’re looking for – often without realising it – that shared experience of music.

There came a time when things weren’t going so well for you. What happened then?
I wasn’t spiritual at all, not in the slightest. My ex-wife was into shamanism; I didn’t like that at all. But somehow I kept searching for that feeling of disappearing, that momentary ‘escape’ that music had given me even as a child. At one point, I wasn’t doing well, and I decided to go travelling on my own. Four weeks, with no plan. I ended up in Tibet, and I thought to myself: what on earth am I doing here? But something drew me in.

On the way, via Nepal, I had intense dreams about my childhood, in which I was dying. They came back every night. I eventually landed at a Chinese airport, and the moment the plane touched down, something snapped inside me – everything came pouring out. Not long after, I found myself in the middle of the mountains, where there was no one else around, in the midst of a fight between Tibetans and Chinese. It escalated, with machetes and shouting, and I simply jumped in between them. A few hours later, the front wheels of our jeep snapped off; we came to a standstill, two metres from a precipice. I looked over the edge and that’s when I really started to feel the fear.

What happened next was extraordinary. I was walking there deep in the Himalayas, near a monastery, and attended a puja, a Buddhist ceremony. Two men approached me, friendly but firm, and led me inside. It was only afterwards that I realised where I was: a room with a thousand Buddha statues and, in the centre, a large sand mandala. There, I pressed a sort of third eye against my forehead, and I was gone. Everything vanished – time, space, the sense of who I was. I fell to the floor and wept, deeply and uncontrollably. The woman travelling with me experienced the same thing. We never spoke of it again afterwards. But something fundamental had changed.

How did that affect your life, back in the Netherlands?
Everything fell apart. I got divorced, fell ill, and at one point I found myself standing naked in front of the mirror. No relationship, no job, no money. I looked at myself and the only thing I could feel was: I am the centre of my own misery. There was no one left. And it was precisely at that moment that the question arose which has never left me since: who am I, really?

That question marked the start of a radical journey of self-inquiry, together with others who were grappling with the same issue. Not some self-help gimmick, but the brutally honest question: who is this ‘I’? We saw how our personalities were built up from conditioning, memories and pain. We delved into Eckhart Tolle and his concept of the ‘pain body’ – brilliant, but not radical enough for me. I understood my patterns, but I didn’t break through them.

How did you find an answer to that question?
I ended up with a teacher in France, and it was nothing like I’d expected. Chaotic, inimitable; I genuinely thought I’d got the wrong place and wanted to run away. But then I asked him a question: how do I find love? He looked at me, silent and open, and kept looking at me. All I saw was love, a source of indescribable gentleness. And then he said: ‘You can go to India, to America, to a guru, but you’ll never find her.’ I asked why not. And he said: ‘Because it’s you.’ Those words were a hammer blow, not of pain, but of clarity. From that moment on, sound became my compass. Singing, vibrating, feeling: that brought me back time and again to that pure state of being, and whenever I lost it, I found my way back through sound.

How did that develop into your own practice?
I met someone with whom I started making sound, and it happened again: I opened up, the sound filled me completely; it felt almost sacred. We knew: we have to do something with this. We bought some simple instruments and just started, without a plan. For six years we sat in silence, played, read to one another and meditated, from Friday evening to Saturday morning. A small but powerful book that accompanied us was *The Four Agreements* by Don Miguel Ruiz: don’t take anything personally, do your best, don’t make assumptions. That became a guiding principle, at work too. We constantly inspired each other, and everything within me was reflected and challenged.

During those years, something shifted. I’m not saying I’m enlightened – absolutely not – but my perception shifted. I began to see that everything I think isn’t necessarily true, and yet it’s all there. That’s the paradox I’ve been living with ever since.

Later, I invited friends to a sound bath, just as you’d invite someone to a concert. No spiritual frills, no yoga, no woolly language – just sound. And they kept coming back. Sometimes they’d say, ‘We’re coming for dinner, mind you,’ but then they’d be on the doorstep hours earlier, just for that sound bath. What I discovered is that sound brings people into silence much more quickly than music. Music still evokes all sorts of things: beauty, ugliness, taste, memories. Sound touches something more immediate. If I put on Bach, silence doesn’t just happen automatically; if I strike a gong, something happens. And when people let go of their thoughts for a moment, something happens that transcends all words.

What did you learn about the effects of sound?
I’ve never done many training courses, with one exception: Jonathan Goldman, the man who put sound healing on the map worldwide. I did a ten-day course with him in the Rocky Mountains. For nine days, we delved into the power of the voice, and I learnt an awful lot from him.

One day I mentioned that I wanted to write a book about chakra frequencies. His answer took me completely by surprise: ‘None of it is right.’ Take the note F, he said – in one system it’s associated with the heart chakra, in another with the sacral chakra, and in Japan with the crown chakra. So what’s the truth? Everyone’s just making things up. But he’d looked further into what actually works for healing, and it turned out to be very simple: intention plus frequency equals healing.

So it’s not about what you play, but how you do it, with what energy. That intention is palpable and it creates space. Sound doesn’t work according to fixed rules: there isn’t just one ‘heart bowl’. If I play a bowl, one person might feel it in their stomach, another in their head. Sound goes its own way and cannot be forced. And we must be careful not to cling too tightly to concepts. Someone says: 528 hertz is the frequency of love. Then I think: who decided that? If you look with true clarity, you’ll see that everything is already perfect just as it is.

You think it’s important that sound healing doesn’t become too woolly. Why?
People rang me saying, ‘You’re doing something special.’ And that was precisely because we didn’t approach it from a ‘woolly-sock’ perspective. No baggy trousers, no incense, no ponytails. At our first concert, my partner was wearing high heels and a tailored suit, and I was in a suit. Quite deliberately, to show: this isn’t some woolly-minded little world; this is for everyone.

And you can see that reflected in the audience. Care workers, police officers, women from the business world – everyone comes, and that divide is gradually fading away. Everyone who’s experienced a sound retreat says more or less the same thing: you slip into that state of being so quickly. A place where the story pauses for a moment, where pain or a laugh is allowed to surface, and where everything is alright.

Why do you call sound a ‘healer’?
I don’t cure anyone of cancer, let’s be clear about that; that’s not going to happen. What does happen, though, is that people reach a state of acceptance. And that is healing. I’ve had cancer myself, so I know how essential that is. True healing happens when you accept death, because only then do you truly begin to live, in every moment. People sometimes say: ‘I’m not afraid of death.’ But what it’s really about isn’t your own death; it’s about your mother, your partner, your children. When I was ill, I had just one desire: I wanted to stay, because it’s all about sharing, about connection. Many people going through such experiences don’t have access to that insight – that it’s all about fully embracing the moment you’re in, and sharing love from there.

What exactly does sound do to your mind?
Sound helps us come home, precisely because it is formless, pure vibration, without structure. Crystal bowls and gongs fill a space with a cluster of frequencies that touch not only your ears, but also your body and mind. You certainly feel that in a church: the sound fills everything, right down to the depths of your being.

During meditation, you can sometimes disappear. A thought, a memory, a fragment of your soul passes by and is gone again. I call this the dance of Shiva: everything moves, but you remain the still core. Meanwhile, the frequency in your brain drops from beta (ordinary thinking) to alpha, where you find peace and intuition. In theta, the images become more colourful, often lucid. And in delta, you simply are, without experience, without a story. You are there, but you know nothing. And yet that is the place where you come home.
Once you sense that consciousness precedes everything (before your body, before your thinking), your whole perspective shifts. Most people think the other way round: that matter comes first and then a little bit of consciousness. But that has never been proven, and science is increasingly discovering that it might actually be the other way round. Imagine if everyone truly realised that we all stem from the same consciousness – would we still wage war?

What do you mean by ‘observing without judgement’?
We spend far too much time in our heads, and I notice that in sound healing too. Sometimes someone comes in full of resistance, looking at me with judgement, and I sense that straight away. But when that person relaxes, they suddenly say: ‘No idea why I found you so irritating at first; you’re actually quite a nice bloke.’ And then we have a laugh. Because that’s what we all do: we project, we make up stories, we label each other.

People sometimes ask me if you have to unlearn that. No. You just need to realise that you’re doing it. And sound helps with that – it helps you break through your own assumptions. For me, that’s the essence of healing: realising that your idea of yourself, or of the other person, isn’t right. True healing doesn’t begin with the disappearance of illness, but with letting go of what you thought about yourself. That opens something up. Because when I truly see you, without a narrative, without judgement, that’s when connection arises.

My wife Glenn works with this flawlessly. With someone suffering from severe burnout, she plays gently and subtly; with someone who is mentally stuck, she plays rhythmically and powerfully. You don’t think about it with your head – you just know it. That’s where the difference lies: many people ‘do sound work’ but lack a foundation, an intention. That’s why, in our training courses, we don’t teach technique (you can learn to play a scale in half an hour) but instead bring people back to intention. You don’t learn to become a sound healer; you remember that you already are one.

Do you have an exercise that makes that tangible?
I often invite people to try something simple. William Blake put it beautifully: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear… as it is, infinite.” When our perception is cleansed, judgement falls away. Suppose I look at you and you simply keep looking into my eyes: at first we still see each other as a man and a woman, but if you really keep looking, that falls away and there is only pure seeing.

Then try to see me and, at the same time, that plant over there, at 180 degrees, without focusing. Then we both fade away. You don’t need to say anything. And then the sound comes in, your senses awaken, and what you experience is peace. No story, no ‘I’, just being. That is meditation – no trick, no method. You can experience it on a mountain in Tibet or right in the middle of Piccadilly Circus.

Sound helps with this; it brings you into your body, out of your head. One strike on a bowl, two sounds – that’s all it takes. Because that sound leads you to silence. Not the silence of a soundproof room, but the inner silence, the space within you. At the end of a sound bath, that is often the most powerful moment: something falls away, sometimes old patterns surface, but they simply lie there in that silence. And that silence is love. Not as a concept, but as an experience. You don’t need to learn it. You just need to remember it.

What music would you like to recommend to the reader?
If I may name two things that really changed something for me, the first would be Ornette Coleman. That concert at the North Sea Jazz Festival was a turning point: pure chaos, two trios at once, a plastic saxophone – and it was precisely there that I learnt that you don’t have to follow music, but are allowed to experience it. I was completely absorbed in it. Try not to try to understand it, but simply let yourself be carried away by it; close your eyes and listen to everything at once.

And secondly, Joni Mitchell, mainly for her lyrics. Through her music, I began to feel that I wasn’t alone in my pain, that others carry a story too. That gave me a deep sense of recognition. Whilst Coleman taught me to lose myself, Joni Mitchell helped me recognise something within myself, and both touch on the same thing: music that brings you back to yourself.

Spotify for music recommendation

Further information:
https://spiritconnection.nl/