Joann Schermerhorn — Sound Healer, Ayurvedic Practitioner, Kansas City
Twenty years of body-based practice: Ayurveda, herbalism, breathwork, lymphatic drainage, yoga, esthetics. It was all moving toward this. She just didn't know it yet.
A long, winding conversation between her and the body.
Most wellness practitioners have a single origin story. The injury, the diagnosis, the moment everything changed. Joann's story is harder to pin to one sentence. It reads more like a river: moving, branching, finding its way to where it was always going.
It starts in St. Joseph, Missouri, and winds through national parks, a spa management career in Atlanta, a permaculture internship on a farm in Bolinas, California, traveling throughout the United States and Europe, building gardens. Her journey was the kind where you learn that everything is connected before you have the language for it.
She came back to Kansas City. Built a practice. Went deeper into Ayurveda, Panchakarma, lymphatic drainage. Took her esthetics license and her clinical herbalism training and her yoga certification and started asking: what does the body need that it isn't getting?
Sound was the answer she kept coming back to. Not as an add-on, not as a trend she caught at the right moment — but as the practice that pulled every thread of her training together.
Resonance. The nervous system. The tissue. The thing that lives in the body that effortful practices can't always reach.
She trained with ISTA, earned her certification as a Therapeutic Sound Practitioner, and built Carried Sound — a Kansas City sound healing practice rooted in twenty years of knowing how the body holds, and how to help it let go.
Sound isn't something she does to you. It's something she creates space for you to receive.
The nervous system doesn't need your cooperation to respond to frequency. Sound works whether or not your mind is on board. This is the part that changes everything for people who struggle to meditate.
Joann doesn't try to convert anyone. The people who belong in her sessions already know they belong there. She speaks to them like they walked in knowing — because they did.
The funny moment during setup is not separate from the sacred session that follows. Safety is built through realness. She earns the depth of the drop-in by being genuinely, unperformatively human first.
I hold the room so that people can finally stop performing okayness. That's the whole job. Everything else — the instruments, the training, the twenty years — is just what I bring so I can do that well.
Every instrument in the collection earns its place in the room.
The collection is built on one principle: everything must be layerable, intentional, and nothing gets played just to fill space. Tuned to 432Hz wherever possible — the frequency that sits closer to the body's own rhythm.
Tibetan & Bronze Singing Bowls
Handcrafted metal bowls with centuries of ceremonial use. Where crystal bowls open and expand, the metal bowls ground — earthier, older, more complex. Rich harmonic layers that settle into the body differently than anything else in the collection.
Most practitioners play one or the other. Joann plays both — and the relationship between them is what makes a Carried Sound session feel like a complete journey rather than a single note held long.
Crystal Singing Bowls
The harmonic foundation of every session. Warm, spacious, deeply resonant. The sound clients describe when they say a session changed something.
Chau Gong
The sound that moves through walls, floors, tissue. Clients feel it before they hear it. The gong reaches the places that require size and resonance to touch.
Tongue Drum
Grounding, melodic, ancient-feeling. The tongue drum brings the earth element into a session — a sound the body recognizes as familiar before the mind has time to process it.
Koshi Chimes
The shimmer. The moment the room changes. Four elements, four voices — played together or alone, they create an atmosphere nothing else replicates.
Solstice Minichord
A drone that sits beneath everything like a steady exhale. Creates continuous tonal resonance — the kind of sustained sound that lets the nervous system finally stop bracing.
Wave Drum
The sound of water, of tide, of the thing that doesn't stop. The wave drum creates a sensation that bypasses thought entirely — and pairs with the bowls in a way that deepens the state significantly.
Tube Chime Chakra Set
Used for color and dimension — a sweep of tone that moves through the energy body. The transition instrument: the moment the session opens, shifts, or closes.
Shruti Box
The one instrument in the collection tuned to 440Hz — used intentionally to demonstrate dissonance and the body's own capacity to feel the difference. A teaching instrument as much as a playing one.
New instruments are added as the collection grows. Come to a session to hear what's arrived.
Find a session →The credentials are real. They're also just the beginning of the story.
Joann holds certifications across ten distinct disciplines — not because she collects credentials, but because each one answered a question the last one left open. The result is a practitioner who brings Ayurvedic eyes, herbalist hands, somatic training, and 20 years of body-based knowledge into every session.
Where it started — learning that everything in a living system is connected. The same principle that guides how Joann reads a room.
Plants taught her that the body has its own intelligence — sound healing honors that same truth.
Twenty years of working with the body at the surface taught her how much lives beneath it.
The foundation for the guided stillness and conscious breathing she weaves into every session.
A deep study in how the body moves and releases — exactly what sound frequency supports at the cellular level.
The lens through which Joann reads constitution, imbalance, and what the body actually needs — before she plays a single note.
Trained in the most intensive form of body-based reset there is — which is exactly what a Carried Sound session offers at its own depth.
Another thread of the same understanding: that plants, minerals, and frequency all speak directly to the body's own healing intelligence.
The certification that began formalizing twenty years of body-based practice into the work she was always moving toward. Carried Sound launched.
The full certification. Twenty years of knowing how the body holds — and how to help it let go — now fully formalized. The thing she was always moving toward.
I hold the room so that people can finally stop performing okayness. That's the whole job. Everything else — the instruments, the training, the twenty years — is just what I bring so I can do that well.
Come see what twenty years of experience and knowledge feels like in a room.
Open sessions every Wednesday. Private sessions by appointment. Corporate and events by inquiry.