Before Preston Klik was the Gong-whisperer, he was a Chicago rock musician whose bands kept breaking up — and every breakup broke his heart. He didn’t smoke or drink, and the smoky Saturday-night bar scene never quite fit. Then one Sunday at Unity Spiritual Center in Chicago, he asked a prayer chaplain for something specific: pray that his two loves — spirituality and sound — come together. Looking back, Preston can’t tell you if it was coincidence or synchronicity. He can tell you his life started to shift.
The shift arrived in the back room of a music shop — a dim, windowless room full of instruments he didn’t know, flutes and crystal bowls and, in the corner, gongs. The manager, Alex, trusted him with a pair of mallets and the run of the place. Preston sat down cross-legged in front of a 24-inch gong — an instrument he’d never played — with short, stubby fingers that had never cooperated with guitar or bass or hand percussion, and started to play.
Within a minute or two, his thought was: where have you been all my life?
He doesn’t know how long he played. Half an hour, maybe fifty minutes, lost in the best sense of the word — and, as he puts it, found in it. “I was dancing with the gong,” he told us. “It was dancing with me. I was leading it, and it was leading me as a partner.” He brought the sound down to silence believing his life had just changed direction.
Then he felt a presence behind him.
Coming back to normal reality, he turned and saw a pair of shoes. The shoes went to legs, and the legs went up to a tall, skinny stranger he had never seen — a man who had apparently been standing there, listening, for who knows how long. The stranger asked a question that landed like a verdict: “How long have you been playing the gong?” Preston said he had no watch, maybe half an hour. “No, no, no,” the man said. “How long have you been playing the gong?” He’d assumed Preston had years on the instrument. He told Preston he had to buy one — he hoped he’d get one that day. Then he left. Preston never saw him again and never learned who he was.
The first experience told Preston the gong worked for him. The stranger told him it might work for everybody. He got a gong, then a bigger one. Today he plays three: a decorative one, a 50-inch gong at his Chapel of Sacred Sounds in Evanston that’s too heavy to move, and the 36-inch gong that travels with him to yoga studios, churches, and people’s homes.
And does it work for everybody? Preston tells the story of a woman in Indiana — he calls her Margaret, not her real name. Two years before they met, she’d survived a bad motorcycle accident and started talk therapy for PTSD, hoping to ride again. She hadn’t ridden in two years. She came to one of Preston’s sessions — lay down on a mat, like everyone does, and let the sound do what Preston calls giving people a soundtrack to an imaginary movie that exists only in their own hearts and minds. Three months later she came back and asked to share. The Monday after that single session, she’d walked into her therapist’s office and the therapist stopped at the door: your energy is so different — what’s up with you? Margaret told her she didn’t think she needed therapy anymore. She’d let it go. And the bike? Preston asked her the same question you’re asking. Oh yeah, she said. No fear. All gone.
One session.
Preston’s goal, in his own bio, is to make the world a slightly better place every day through the power of sound — making the Mystery audible. After Sunday night, we believe the stranger in the music shop would approve.
Find him at klik.love.