Who
Surya Maarten Adriaenssens
Sound Healer & Musician
"From an early age I felt a fascination for understanding and feeling through the mystery of life. 'Who am I? How can I truly be happy? How can I serve the world?' These questions moved me into several years of travelling around the globe. In the east I encountered meditation and holistic healing, what could offer me a lot of answers to my questions already. I started intensive courses and retreats as well as a daily sadhana (spiritual practice).
The connection between my musical work and healing work became stronger and I naturally rolled into a study of sound around 2009. Listening to, practicing and studying sound gave me insight in my own nature and opened up my path of life. Sound in different forms of expression began to function as a daily tool to direct myself towards the inner silence.
This inner silence I experience as God, or call it Allah, Shiva, Great Spirit or the Universe. I believe every single problem can be solved by restoring the connection with the inner silence. Because sound is a perfect tool to reach this, it became the path that I share with the world. By studying sacred sound traditions from different cultures, I feel it is a part of my mission to reintroduce the sacred in our lives. For this I aim to built bridges between cultural belief systems and spiritual traditions. Behind every thought, belief or tradition there is the same essence: Love. I believe this is the one and only goal of the work that I'm offering: unveiling and awakening Love."
After years of intensive study and practice Surya started the Soundhealing Institute in Belgium in 2013. The need of people for more connection and spirituality in their lives brought him to co-found Universa, a bridge-building spiritual community project around Antwerp. After some years he passed on this coordinating task and returned to the east for several years, where he deepened his study of sound and meditation, mostly with his master Sri Prem Baba, as well as with Himalayan shamans. In this period he also started to share his work in different parts of the world, in order to built more bridges through sound, between people, cultures and spiritual lineages. After having facilitated sound healing work in different centers Belgium, other parts of Europe, Turkey and India, he founded Akasha Retreat Center, where he currently lives and teaches daily retreats and courses.
Sakshin (Victor G. Cruz)
Yogi & Musician
Sakshin was born in the Canary Islands (Spain). He studied a degree and a master in Philosophy at Universities Complutense (Madrid) and Vincennes-Saint Denis (Paris). Following the path of self-study, he is a committed practitioner and studious of the yogic tradition as a whole, as well as a musician focused on mantra yoga, the indian classical music tradition of dhrupad, the research around global shamanic sounds and the deep listening of nature. He devotes himself, since 2013, to sharing the teachings of integral yoga, focussing on nāda yoga (the yoga of sound) and the sapiential philosophies of yoga through courses, workshops, concerts, sound-healing sessions, one-to-one work and experiential retreats in nature under the frame of the projects anāhata nāda yoga and saṃtoṣa āyurveda (together with the therapist Ana Gabriela Terra).
Currently, he lives a nomadic life between India, Brasil and Spain with a thorough dedication to practice (sādhana), teaching and study: fully immersed in the investigation of dhrupad and mantra chanting (under the guidance of his masters, the Gundecha Brothers), deepening on yoga as a life-line through the path of the heart illumined by his guru Prem Baba, training on āyurveda and vedic philosophy from his teacher Swami Narayanananda (Dr Ruguê) and completing his initial base in Satyananda Yoga by exploring Iyengar and Krishnamacharya’s yogic tradition.
Sakshin and Surya met in January 2017 in India, where they played music together for Sri Prem Baba. The connection, both musically and personally, they felt during that time was a seed that sprouted soon into a warm friendship and close collaboration. Since that time they were teaching and playing together in both Belgium and Spain.
