Healer of the Year - Contender

Ange - Sound of Soma

Public Name: Ange - Sound of Soma
Location: Melbourne VIC, Australia

Public Name: Ange - Sound of Soma
Website / Social: https://www.soundofsoma.com.au/
About The Contestant: I'm Ange Monitto, an Integrative Frequency Healer and the founder of Sound of Soma in Windsor, Melbourne. My work addresses the mind, the body and the energy field together, because treating one layer on its own is why things keep coming back.

I came to this through my own health. For years I was anxious, burnt out and constantly sick, with chest infections that kept returning and a fatigue no amount of sleep fixed. Then at 30, after travelling overseas, everything collapsed. Debilitating fatigue, heart palpitations, joint pain, brain fog and symptoms that looked like fibromyalgia, which left me bed-bound and unable to manage the basics of a day. Test after test came back saying nothing was wrong. My first sound bath was the first genuine relief I'd felt in months, and I have not stopped since.

I hold eight qualifications across Australia, India and Thailand, including a Diploma of Kyela Sound Therapy with the Australian College of Sound Therapy, Tibetan singing bowl training in Goa, crystal singing bowls, Solfeggio frequencies and Reiki. I work one to one using energy field readings, frequency and vibration healing and fascia release, and lead group sound healing classes at the studio.
Skills: Diploma, Kyela Sound Therapy — Australian College of Sound Therapy, Perth WA

Sound Therapy & Healing Accredited Practitioner — Soul Remember

Tibetan Singing Bowl Sound Healing Course — Aithein Healing, Goa, India

• Crystal Singing Bowls, Level 1 — Rainbow Sounds, Melbourne

Crystal Singing Bowls Sound Therapy & Healing — Ali Young, Chiang Mai Holistic

Solfeggio Frequencies & Energy Centres — Think and Grow, Melbourne

Meditation & Mindset Workshop — Think and Grow, Melbourne

Reiki Level 1 — Art of Repair, Melbourne
What makes you the healer of the year?: I don't really think of myself as a healer. I think of myself as someone who creates the conditions for people to heal themselves, because that's exactly what happened to me. Nobody healed me. I was given a doorway and my own body did the rest. That's all I'm doing for the people who come and see me, guiding them into a state where their system can do what it already knows how to do.

I'm also probably not what you picture when you think of this work, and that's part of why I think it matters.

Five years ago I would have laughed at all of this. I was out every weekend, drinking, partying, chasing the next high. I had the corporate career and the social life and I believed in none of what I do now. I was also deeply reactive. Everything landed on me, everything got a response, and I had no idea what that was costing me or the people around me. I was arrested and placed on a good behaviour bond in my 20s. Deep down I was always someone who cared, and someone who was kind. I just didn't know how to show up as that person, and I didn't know any other way to react.

I'd come through a lot before any of that. I was bullied relentlessly growing up, for being queer and for being the overweight kid, and those two things fed each other. I didn't handle it by going quiet. I got reactive. Defensive, sharp, first to fire back, because that felt safer than letting any of it get to me. I didn't feel accepted at school, I didn't feel accepted by some of the closest people in my life, and I didn't feel accepted by myself. I hated how I looked. I'd catch myself in a mirror or see a photo of myself hate what I saw. That didn't stop when the bullying did. In my early twenties I had multiple plastic surgeries to try to make myself more attractive, and to try to feel okay about what I saw in the mirror. I carried a distorted picture of my own body well into my thirties, long after nobody was saying anything to me at all.

At 18 I overdosed and very nearly didn't make it. At 24 I was kidnapped while overseas and didn’t tell anyone about it because I blamed myself. A few years later I was sexually assaulted. I did what I thought most people do with things like that. I buried them, kept moving, and told everyone including myself that I was fine.

At 30 my body stopped letting me get away with it. After a trip overseas everything collapsed. Debilitating fatigue, heart palpitations, joint pain and brain fog so heavy I couldn't hold a thought. Bed-bound, unable to manage the basics of a day. Doctor after doctor, test after test, and the same answer every time. Nothing is wrong with you.

Lying in that bed I worked out two things. The system was treating my symptoms and not the cause. And if I wanted my life back, everything had to change.

Sound was the first thing that actually reached whatever was going on. In my very first session I had this weight lift, I hadn't realised I'd been carrying for years lifted off me. The anxiety eased, the pain subsided, and I knew I had to explore this deeper.

So I went all in and started learning and studying. I wanted to understand what this work was actually doing to me, because it had shifted something in a few weeks that years of therapy never touched. Therapy had me understanding my patterns better than anyone, and still living inside them. This was the first thing that shifted them.

That led me to sound therapy training in India understanding Solfeggio frequencies, learning Reiki, and completing my Diploma in Sound Therapy to be able to read and work with the energy field. It became Integrative Frequency Healing, my own approach, which works with the mind, the body and the energy field together instead of treating them like three separate problems. Somewhere in there I was also diagnosed with ADHD, which explained most of my life. Sound and energy work became how I manage it, without medication.

I'm not the person I was. I'm not reactive anymore. I don't live with the chronic illness symptoms, the anxiety or the depression I used to. I sleep. I'm actually present with the people I love. The 18-year-old me wouldn't recognise the life I've got now.

The biggest change isn't the symptoms though. Working with sound and energy, and all the shadow work that came with it, has completely changed how I look at my own life. I have forgiveness for every single thing that happened to me. I'm grateful for all of it, because it made me who I am and it's the reason I can do this work at all. I don't carry any of it as damage anymore. That's the shift I want for everyone who I work with. Not just sleeping better or hurting less, though that matters, but getting to a place where you can look back at the worst things that happened to you and feel peace with them.

That's what I bring into the room. Not someone who read about this stuff, but someone who was on the floor and found a way up. When someone comes in carrying something they've held for a decade, I'm not intimidated by it.

The transformations are why I keep going. I've had clients who've been seeing specialists for five, ten years and the only answer anyone gave them was medication. Nobody looked at what was actually driving it. They come in here having given up on getting a real answer, and within a few sessions things start moving that haven't moved in a decade. I've had people tell me nobody has ever helped them the way this work has, and they've seen a ridiculous number of people. I've had people come in who've done years of talk therapy and mind work, who understand their patterns inside out, and still feel stuck in their body. That's usually where the one to one work does something the thinking never could. I've had people who've lived in fight or flight their entire life walk out with a way to bring themselves down, and actually use it.

I don't take credit for healing them. Their body does the work. I just create the conditions and hold the space while it happens.

I then decided to open my own studio. I built Sound of Soma because this work was almost impossible to access properly. One off events where you had to bring your own mat and end up uncomfortable on the floor. Price points that made not accessible regularly. Someone hitting a few bowls at the end of a yoga class and calling it sound healing. So I built a studio where people can come every week, properly held, with everything provided. We started in borrowed rooms. Tuesday nights in a cosmetic tattooing studio, weekends at wellness studio, fifteen hours a week lugging instruments across Melbourne. Now we see around 400 people a month and over 5,000 have come through the door, most of them people who'd never heard of sound healing before they walked in.

If there's a reason to consider me, it isn't that I'm gifted. It's that I was the last person on earth who would have believed in any of this, I came through things that nearly took me out, and I've built something that gets this work to ordinary people who are quietly struggling in exactly the way I was.