Our Tutors

James Schindler-Ord is a tutor on the Sound Healing with the Drum Practitioner Diploma Course.

His relationship with sound began, in many ways, with silence. Growing up in a busy household, James sought out quiet places and later found the same sense of space in nature, in wind moving through trees, birdsong, water, and those occasional moments when everything seemed to become completely still.

As he grew older, music became an intuitive way of shifting and exploring emotion. Later, several years spent working in and managing music venues, and experimenting with sound at home, gave him a very different experience of sound: powerful, repetitive rhythm, dancing, and the way a beat can be felt physically and collectively as well as heard.

James has worked as a therapist since 2006, primarily as a Gestalt and Body Process psychotherapist, with their strong somatic focus. His longstanding exploration of animistic and shamanic practice, particularly drumming and journeying, became an important bridge between psychotherapy and his later work with therapeutic sound.

His principal sound practices are drum and gong, alongside an exploration of other therapeutic sound approaches. He is particularly drawn to the drum for its grounded, earthy and elemental quality. At its simplest, rhythm can be stripped back to a beat and a space: sound emerging from silence and returning to it. The gong offers something different, a single strike opening into a rich and changing field of resonance before it too slowly returns to silence.

James has studied subjects as diverse as physics, psychology, political philosophy and poetry at degree level. That breadth informs his approach to sound healing: curious about sound, vibration and the physical world, while equally interested in embodied experience, relationship, meaning and those often more subtle aspects of human experience that are harder to measure.

Central to his work is intention, not simply deciding what outcome should occur, but the quality of the attention, presence, purpose and awareness the practitioner must bring to the work they undertake. For James, the same sound or rhythm can be experienced very differently depending upon how it is held and offered.

Alongside his therapeutic and sound-healing practice, James practises, and teaches counselling and psychotherapy and co-runs Devon Counselling College as well as helping to manage a local mental health charity. His teaching brings together body, rhythm, resonance, silence, presence and intention, encouraging students not simply to learn techniques, but to develop sensitivity, confidence and their own authentic relationship with the drum, and with sound more generally.