Somadome Is A Personal Sanctuary For Relaxation And Healing Through Meditation

My mind is going miles a minute with countless thoughts, each running over the next. The more I tell myself to relax, the more I realize how hard it is for me to sit still and calm my racing mind. I am told to take a deep breath and close my eyes. It isn’t before long that I am climbing up the side of a mountain to my own private sanctuary. It sits near the beach. I hear the waves crashing and I almost can smell the salt in the wind. I open the door to my sanctuary and get lost somewhere where there is no space and no time. The deeper the mind goes into a meditative state, the more weightless my body feels. Both my body and mind feel like it’s floating. And then I hear bells chime and the green light around me fades off, the signs that it’s time to get back to reality. I am in a Somadome, the “escape pod” for meditative healing.

I walked away from a session feeling rejuvenized, free from stress, and with a positive mindset that carried with me for the rest of the day. Somadome is a mini-retreat, a getaway for the mind where technology and holistic healing approaches come together to align the body, mind, and spirit.

“It’s a sanctuary for the self,” CEO and founder of Somadome Sarah Attia told RunnerClick.” It does different things that bring us into alignment, and it addressed the entire person with different healing modalities that we know to work from a mind, body, spirit perspective.”

Photo Credit: Lauren Keating | RunnerClick

Good Energy

At the core of a Somadome session is mediation. Meditation has multiple science-backed benefits including the ability to reduce stress and anxiety, boosts self-esteem, improves sleep and helps to control food cravings and treat addictions.

But Somadome is much more than meditation alone. The Somadome is lined with a specific type of microcrystalline tiles called BioSyntonie that was created by French geophysicist Pierre Nicolas. The microcrystalline tiles are said to promote both mental and physical wellness and bring on calm and connectedness.

The ceramic tiles have a microcrystalline charge that uses vibrations to block out and dissipate the harmful electromagnetic field (EMF) frequencies. “The electromagnetic frequencies are just rampant in our environment from our cell phones and Internet signals to pretty much any type of technology that has radio frequency,” Attia said.

“The tiles are a proprietary system that I found works with the energy systems of the Earth,” Attia said. It’s a system of energy that is used by acupuncture that uses parts of the body to block EMF and works to get the body’s channels open, which is called chi in eastern medicine which is our essence.”

Color Therapy

While the microcrystalline tiles are the core of the holistic healing properties, the Somadome also comes color therapy and binaural beats, each used in different ways depending on the user’s goal for a session.

While color therapy isn’t a hardcore science, there is a connection between colors and its influence on our psyche. “There seems to be a lot of evidence that color affects our mood,” Attia said. “Chromotherapy and color therapy are systems of environmental therapy where colors impact our well-being.”

Photo by Arif Wahid on Unsplash.

For example, green is shown to have healing properties. Light blue is very calming and fuchsia is linked to creativity.

The session starts with a white light that promotes balance and increases harmony. Then the escape pod light changes based on the customization of the user. The idea is that color creates electrical impulses in the brain that causes different chemical reactions in our body. So even though the user’s eyes are closed as they meditate, the color therapy is working its magic.

Sound Therapy

Along with color and light therapy comes the guided or unguided meditation tracks that help the user go into “different states of consciousness that are aligned with different healing properties,” Attia said.

There are currently 20 tracks users can choose from in four categories of wellness: mental performance, emotional or “Attract Intentions”, physical wellness and spiritual or “Going Inward.” Each track features different binaural beats that have their own healing characteristic as they trigger specific brainwave states. This includes Alpha, which increases creativity and reduces cortisol and BETA which increases focus and reduced ADD.

Those looking to unwind and decompress after a long day at work should look for a meditation with Delta waves like Snooze, whereas those looking to unlock their imagination should choose to Create. There are even tracks targeted for athletes and runners like Fit which is meant to reprogram the mind to think positivity and is best when looking to start living a healthy lifestyle.

At the heart of each meditation is getting in touch with ourselves, something we often neglect to do.

“Depending on your goals you pick the track that speaks to you at that moment,” Attia said. It’s recommended to try duplicate sessions and mix up the options based on what the person is feeling at that given moment.

“I wouldn’t say Somadome is ‘meditation’ as it is targeted healing,” she said. “Really the goal is to give the person the ability to pause and heal ourselves.”

An Escape In The City

Somadome is located in spas, gyms and wellness centers all over the U.S. such as in Los Angeles, CA, Las Vegas, NV and at two locations in New York City. There are even domes in London, Moscow, and Dubai.

Located at Modrn Sanctuary, a luxury wellness center in the NoMad section of Manhattan, Somadome provides an oasis of solitude and quiet in juxtaposition to the hustle bustle and noise that is just outside.

Modrn Sanctuary NYC. Photo Credit: Lauren Keating | RunnerClick

“I think where we live—and just being alive on this planet today—we need access to different tools that help us process life in a more balanced way and medicate the damage caused by a lot of the elements coming from the crazy, whether it’s social media and all the distractions disrupting a lot of our social values,” Attia said.

After selecting to “Heal” through the guided meditation, I did leave feeling this general sense of well-being. My mind was refreshed and it felt good not to be so fast-paced for once.

“Everything starts in the mind, the thoughts that we control,” Attia said. “Research has shown that so much of what happens in the body is actually living in our minds. A lot of it is subconscious. It’s programming around how we live our lives, but as of controlling our patterns and our different ways of operating. A lot of our goals behind the dome is to give ourselves the chance to realign because most of us are living kind of chaotic existence that is not present and connected and aware of the lifestyle choices we make.”

This was arguably one of the best choices to make when it comes to taking time to care for self and mental health.

The pod itself is comfortable to the point that the body just melts into the cushioning. There is no claustrophobic feeling once the “lid” of the pod is closed. The body and mind drift off to another place, another space. The visions, sounds, and lights vary, but the results the same. Somadome takes meditation to the next level, tapping into consciousness to be in tune with the body and mind and to allow for healing.

I also left feeling like my body got a boost, somehow recharging my system which is in overdrive from half marathon training.

“The feedback we’ve had, people get into better sleep cycles, better work performance, feeling more creative, more focused, more balanced overall, calmer and at peace,” Attia said. “Some people say they recover faster if they aren’t feeling well, they get a little immune boost. Again, it goes back to the body’s ability to heal itself and putting ourselves back into that state of alignment with ourselves.”

Next Level Meditation

The dome is used by athletes looking to boost performance to those just looking for new spa treatments to those looking to relax after a long day. It is for both those who enjoy meditating often as well as those who have never done it before or need help relaxing.

Photo Credit: Somadome | Facebook.

“It provides a bridge for people who don’t know how to get there or people that do, but to just have that space that is accessible,” Attia said. “Some people can meditate anywhere they go and access that state of being, and that’s great. But for most of us, that’s a challenge. So it’s an access point.”

Sessions are 20-minutes long, but Somadome will launch a 10- minute session that is ideal for in-between work or when at the gym. The price of the dome varies depending on where customers go but generally, cost between $25-45 a session.

Like anything that is healthy and good for us, going regularly will increase the benefits.

Essentially a sanctuary for wellness, Somadome, provides a meditative experience for users that is so unique, to say the least. It provides a way to be able to connect back to self.

“I think that we’re the only ones that have the keys to our well being so if we get inside our minds and get to that moment of stillness then we can access that voice, but it’s it’s loud and crazy all the time we never get there,” Attia said. “Somadome is that chance to connect to self in the context of reality, which is not a perfect picture.”