by M H May 27, 2026

Last year, we added the Musical Mushroom to our stores. This invention is an amazing way to upgrade your sound baths and ambient performances. What makes this tool amazing is the ability to control the sound of the bowls with the wave of a hand.

If you haven't been able to check out this unique tool, I recommend you watch our video below to see if it's right for you.



Eric, the creator and inventor of these magical, musical tools, recently shared his story, explaining the development of the Mushroom itself. It can be easy to forget that the powerful instruments and tools we sell are the product of inspiration, creativity, intention, and effort from real people, not just the product of faceless AI robots on production lines.

Read on for his story, or read the original post here, on the Musical Mushroom website.

If you're interested in checking out the Musical Mushroom in our store, you can see it over at Unlimited Singing Bowls by clicking here or you can get them at Gongs Unlimited by clicking here.

My name is Eric. I am an engineer, a seeker and the inventor of the Musical Mushrooms. This is my story… 

I was born and raised in a small town on the East Coast of Canada, surrounded by nature and by the salty air of the Sea. A Maritimer, Acadian, the eldest of two sons. My father was a science teacher at our local high school, teaching physics for most of his career. My mother was an elementary school teacher who taught me how to read and write at an early age. Although I had been brought up in a religious family, religion never really resonated with me until much later in life. Instead, I was always very scientific-minded and left-brained.

 

As far as I can remember, I was always fascinated by science through many trips with my dad to the equipment room of the high school science lab, playing with all the cool things such as tesla coils, Van de Graaff generators, oscilloscopes and lasers. I was particularly drawn to electricity and electronics and spent most of my teen years designing and building electronics projects and participating in many high school science fairs. After winning the top award in engineering at the Canada-Wide Science fair in my final year of high school, I received a small bursary to be applied towards a future summer employment. By that point, I had already been accepted in the Electrical Engineering program at the University of Ottawa. Unbeknownst to me, this was my first (and not the last) encounter with manifestation and synchronicities.

About two years earlier, I remember watching a TV documentary featuringa Canadian aerospace company responsible for designing the robotic arm on the space shuttle. The documentary showed two employees performing advanced robotics experiments in a research laboratory. I remember being riveted to the TV and telling myself “I really want to work there” and intensely believing it. I hadn’t given this experience much thought in the years that followed. After being awarded the bursary and arriving back home from the science fair, I decided to not waste any time and to immediately try and line up my first summer job. I used my father’s first generation IBM PC and dot matrix printer to write application letters and physically mail them out along with my short resume to prospective employers with all the eagerness and naivety of a 17 year old about to embark on a magical journey.



The timing couldn’t have been better! The science fair generated some media coverage in a national newspaper with a picture of me and my hand-built robot in the tech section talking about the science fair results. The hiring manager at the prospective aerospace company I envisioned working for told me the story years later… He was sitting at his desk with a stack of resumes in front of him from applicants all over the country. He was on his lunch break and decided to finally read his old newspaper which he had put aside and hadn’t had time to read until then. He took a look at the tech section and saw my photo as well as my name in the caption.

He read the article about the science fair with much interest. Once finished, he put down the newspaper and picked up the very next resume on his stack and did a double-take. Looking back at the article, he realized that it was my resume! I was flown in for a job interview followed by my very first job offer. And that TV documentary I saw years earlier while living 1,500 kms away on the East Coast of Canada? Remember the two people in the video working in the robotics lab? Well, I ended up working in the very same lab with the exact same two people featured in the documentary!

Over the following 30 years, I worked as an engineer in a series of startups as well as aerospace companies designing, building and selling products worldwide. I pushed myself hard and worked long hours. I spent my life tackling ever increasing challenges until one day, the bottom fell out and my life changed forever…

Around the age of 46, I was working in a small startup aerospace company experiencing typical growing pains with lack of funding, personnel and process. In trying to perform many jobs at once and not setting personal boundaries, I was unhealthy, not exercising and having no work/life balance. Some very alarming physical symptoms started appearing. My body was trying to send me loud messages which I was ignoring. Years of doctor’s visits and hospital emergencies yielded no explanation other than stress, which I was unwilling to believe as a diagnosis. This eventually degenerated into a deep depression and burnout. As if that weren’t enough, I simultaneously went through a dark night of the soul and a mid-life crisis. I was broken, I had no idea how to get better. I was suffering in silence. I felt helpless. I wanted to end it all.

At rock bottom, I read an inspiring article written by a gentleman in a similar situation who indicated that he got better not by finding one single fix but by instead doing 5 different things. That article resonated with me. That was my “Aha!” moment… the moment of my spiritual and physical rebirth. I finally decided to seek help. First, I changed jobs. I then spent the next year doing more things than I had experienced in my entire lifetime! I started reading about spirituality and various faiths, hoping to find answers to my existential questions. I listened to a variety of gurus and enlightened individuals. I read literally a hundred books on self-help topics and on how the brain works. I saw a therapist, a naturopath, a reiki healer and joined a yoga studio. The yoga community was absolutely amazing and key to my healing. I made many lasting friendships. I started walking 10,000 steps daily. I did weight training. I started eating well. I did Wim Hof breathwork, cold exposure, acupuncture, osteopathy. I learned to play the ukulele and the guitar. I attended new moon ceremonies, did past life regressions, sound baths, tarot readings, sacred cacao ceremonies. I discovered later in life that my entire life until that point had been very one-dimensional. The universe was so much bigger than I ever imagined! Several years immersed in this new culture gave me a much more balanced perspective. My former left-brain traits started migrating into the right hemisphere…

One day, I was lying down on the floor during a group sound bath. Probably my 20th at that point. The sound healer was a new person I hadn’t met before. Her name was Margo. She was playing singing bowls dispersed throughout the room. Each singing bowl’s vibrations would quickly fade away as she walked between them. That is when I had the original inspiration for the Musical Mushroom, like a seed planted in my mind. I thought I could make the bowls vibrate electronically and remotely control them using a smart phone with a Bluetooth connection.

As an engineer, I would often get new ideas and ignore them or convince myself that they wouldn’t work. Somehow, I felt compelled to see this one through. Not out of selfish desire or profit motive, but instead like a steward entrusted with a mission to raise global vibrations. I quickly got to work on prototyping several ideas, most of which didn’t work. After several iterations, a basic prototype was developed. It had a long stem and a dome cover which looked like…a Mushroom! I demonstrated it to the sound healer who loved the idea. The Musical Mushroom concept was born…



It soon became clear that controlling the Mushroom from an app wasn’t the way to go. I learned that sound healers still prefer physical interaction with their bowls and want to minimize the use of technology/smart phones during healing sessions. Following another Eureka moment, I decided to pivot and replace the smart phone interface idea with a hand gesture sensor. I quickly hacked together some circuit boards to add the gesture sensor to the prototype. A player could now control the bowl sound through live gestures and also auto-hold drone notes, which was a big improvement enabling layering and multitasking.

The very first prototype of the Musical Mushroom, followed by the 2nd generation and the 3rd generation showing the evolution of the design over time.

After filing a patent application, I spent about 6 months touring the province to get feedback from real world users at different yoga studios and events. This led to countless improvements to the sensing, operation and internal software.

In my quest to refine the product and bring it to market, I wanted every detail to matter. I recruited the help of my yoga studio owner Claudia, an artist in her own right, to hand-draw a beautiful mandala design which she recounted accomplishing in an uninterrupted 2 hour long session without looking up once! I reduced the size of the design to make it fit onto the top of the musical mushroom’s top surface. At first, I could see the imperfections in the drawing when looking up close. The engineer in me thought I might digitally cut out a pie-shaped portion of the design and clone it 8 times to make it perfectly symmetrical. Then I sat with that thought for a while and realized that this was actually a metaphor for life. When zoomed out, things might look perfect on the surface. When you zoom in, you see all the struggles and imperfections of daily life. That realization made me decide to keep the entire design exactly as-drawn on the final product, squiggles and all. It gives the product a genuine human quality. As another interesting synchronicity, I had given Claudia very few constraints to give her full creative freedom. She ended up drawing 8 points. When overlaid on top of the circuit board with 8 LED’s, the tips of the mandala lined up perfectly with the LED’s! My first spine tingling moment.



The next design element was a mantra which I wanted to integrate around the mandala. While doing a past life regression with my good friend, I mentioned this to him. He suddenly remembered having done a session the previous evening with a lady who spoke in trance. She uttered the saying: “INASH KAYA-SAWA”, which she translated as “REMEMBER THE LIGHT”. He wasn’t sure what to make of this at the time, but it now made complete sense to him!

As soon as I heard it, tingles went up and down my spine! In yet another unbelievable synchronicity, after contacting the lady to ask permission to use the phrase, I realized that not only did I already know this person, but that she was attending the same yoga studio despite both of us being unaware of working with the same past life regressionist! Third spine tingling moment.

Over the next two years, I have made (and continue to make) additional refinements and improvements to the product. I have now had the opportunity to ship products from Canada to places all over the World. I have received a lot of feedback from sound healers and from a growing reseller network. I have made many new friends and met some very unique and interesting individuals. I still hand-assemble every unit with my own hands as a part-time labor of love. The community support, feedback and encouragement has been greatly appreciated.

When I look back to make sense of all of this, I can’t help but think that ironically, the “engineer” in me would never have been exposed to the spiritual community. The “spiritual” in me would likely never have had the engineering know-how or interest in it. It is the intersection of these two worlds that made this product possible. The first part of my life prepared me with the technical knowledge and skills to make this product happen. The second part of my life gave me the purpose through the dark days that transformed me. I feel very grateful for all of it. I now understand that difficult times are meant to make us grow.

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