Changing Lives Through Sound™ Since 1977
802-744-0432
admin@sunreed.com
982 Old Stage Rd
Chester, VT 05143
Open 9am-5pm M-F ET
Our Mission
Sunreed Instruments and The Center of Light serve the global community, providing the highest quality instruments, offering time honored techniques and studies in sound, healing, consciousness and earth wisdom. Our intentions are dedicated to authentic healing for world-wide self-realization.
Our Core Values
1. Stewardship – Unyielding Stewardship for The Global Sound Healing Community
We protect the integrity of therapeutic sound, and are dedicated to providing transformative education, quality instruments and caring service, for the purpose of global self-realization.
2. Tradition – Celebrating Time-Honored Wisdom Traditions
We witness and give thanks to our ancestors and the cultures who came before, whom offer wisdom and tools, to help us achieve our purpose in this lifetime.
3. Wholeness –Perpetuating Good to Be Long Lasting
We stay steadfast in our pursuit of right action and right relationship, within the Rhythm of Giving and Taking, in Harmony with All Life.
4. Awareness - Sustaining clear view while creating resolution through resonance
We practice awareness at each moment, taking responsibility for the quality of our experience.
Our Goals
1) Procuring high-quality effective instruments.
2) Providing essential training in sound and healing, for the purpose of global self-realization.
3) Providing world class customer service.
Experience the Sunreed difference. Read our reviews.
4) Action for our environment and giving back to our community.
Some examples include: Our solar powered facility; Using close to 100% biodegradable, recycleable or reused shipping materials; A set policy for reducing and eliminating waste in our office and warehouse; A set policy for charitable donations.
Our Team
Kay – Our dynamic business administrator/social media director grew up locally in Windsor, VT. Kay brings a fresh exciting approach to work every day with her dedication to constant improvement, objectivity, fresh ideas, and “bomb ass graphics.”
She enjoys caring for her farm animals. When time allows Kay can be found with her handmade knitted blankets, competitively gaming to league of legends, dead by day light, or laying down cool rhythms on her bass guitar. Her creative talent never ceases to amaze us all.
Jonathan - Our Spiritual Business Development Manager, guiding us with his unwavering love of family and community leadership. Jon embodies our core values and principles. As our business development manager, his contributions to our amazing light library of articles on global healing, along with his sound recording experience, comprehensive understanding of our many instruments and therapeutic applications, Jon is well suited to lead our growth professionally and personally.
A foodie, farmer, culinarian of world flavors, Jon grew up in southern California. He enjoys reading, writing philosophy, taking a step back for a philosophical perspective, contemplation, and of course a good web comic.
Max - Our dedicated lower warehouse manager, is in charge of shipping, receiving, inventory of our singing bowls, and also doubles as our sound and recording tech for our sound programs and online streaming.
Max, born in New Mexico, has traveled extensively, Chicago, Los Angeles, Tennessee to name a few. He brings a wealth of sound experience, getting his start as an assistant art director on movie sets in L.A. His love and passion for food, led him stints in restaurants in Chicago. Max enjoys rides on his motorcycle, painting and of course time with his dog Jax.
Eddie – Our upper warehouse manager, overseeing the fulfillment, shipping, receiving, and inventory of our many instruments, was born and raised in Kailua, HI. He spent many years of his life traveling as a professional Chef / Baker / Pastry Chef with National Geographic. He is a professional Chef who brings with him over 20 years of professional Food & Beverage management experience.
Eddie an avid experienced backpacker / hiker with extended adventures in the back country of a few of our National Parks: Yellowstone, Glacier, Olympic, Rocky Mountain National Park to name a few. He can be found on the many trails here in Vermont or on the local golf course enjoying a little Zen time. The Aloha spirit is alive and well in Vermont with his Ho’Omau attitude.
Dorothy Stone – Co-Owner, Assistant Director. Dorothy also doubles as one of our local artists. She is the artist behind our Sacred Feminine Hexagonal Bee Drum, as well as, many of our hand painted drums and leads our product development team.
Dorothy an avid bike rider, who loves nature, a loving mother and grandmother was born and raised in Vermont; A true “Vermonter” in every essence, she embodies kindness, compassion, understanding to us all, supports and inspires those around her, encourages us to embrace the good all around us. She is a true believer in the healing power of sound and love. Dorothy can be found in the garden, or cooking up an amazing meal for anyone who shows up. She is simply, humbly Beautiful.
Zacciah Blackburn – Owner, father, friend, life partner to Dorothy Stone, our fearless leader, guiding force of our journey through the sacred time-honored teachings of sound healing. Steward of Sunreed’s Center Of Light and all of the mystical wisdom the universe has to share.
From Dallas, Texas, a talented athlete in his college days, Zacciah has dedicated his life and studies to these principles of Love, Joy, understanding spiritual awakening, global sound healing. We are thankful grateful to call this amazing beautiful human a friend!
Our History - Fine Instruments And Training Since 1977
For over 40 years we have specialized in the nature of sound as a healing methodology, used throughout history by most cultures. Our work is led by our teacher Zacciah Blackburn, brought to you from the green mountains of Vermont. Give us a call, and we will be happy to help you find the right instrument for your therapeutic practice, whether it be a general sound bath, or a more specific application, such as acupuncture or psychoanalysis. We understand the principles of the sound therapies gaining accreditation at this time. We are a small company and highly service-oriented. Click here to contact us.
Zacciah discusses the history and hopes of Sunreed Instruments and The Center of Light:
"I began Sunreed Instruments in the 1970’s. It was the culmination of and a journey into spiritual sanctuary. In the late 60’s I had a voice, a spirit guide, begin to speak, out loud, to me, to help me with understanding choices in life. I was not on drugs, nor had I ever taken any. This was not a voice in my head. I would turn around to see who was behind me speaking to me each time he spoke. It began what has become a lifelong pilgrimage into subtle understanding of the subtle wisdom of spiritual traditions world wide. In the midst of it, a bamboo flute was gifted to me. An untuned flute. I learned to play it, and had to trust my own ear on how to make sounds that were harmonious, and not dissonant. That has been a pattern in my life. To discover harmonious resonance as a valued path in life.
To make very long stories short, I was guided in extraordinary ways to learn to make flutes, teach others, and share them freely.
At the same time I was intuitively channeling healing information, prayers, and even sounds, to friends and acquaintances.
I came to a crossroads in my life, in which I had to choose a path of healing or flute making for livelihood. I had no mentors or guides in what I was doing in the intuitive healing realms. But, I could offer a flute easily for value, to help me thrive.
Along the way I met many musicians of other cultures. I was often invited to play with them. I played by ear, I did not have a musical repertoire. And many of them would lay a resonant field of sound that I could easily flow upon with my flute. It was a beautiful experience.
They led me to understand the spiritual traditions of their music, whether fundamentally meditative or explicitly in the healing arts.
I gathered a wide array of instruments to play with these world musicians, whether instruments of India, China, Japan, Africa, ancient Europe & Middle East, Australia, the Pacific Islands….. And all the while I was making and creating a wide variety of bamboo wind instruments, from bansurai and shakuhachi inspired flutes, to didgeridoos and Native American style flutes, eventually drums, while also working with traditional makers of those cultures. I invented the ‘bamboo saxophone’ a somewhat wild and jazzy flute with a mouthpiece on it, that gave a very saxy sound.
My teachers were many. My lessons vast. And, all the while, the inner guides remained with me. As I came closer to fundamental essence of wisdom traditions, they came forward more and more as my principal teachers.
I was anointed, initiated in several of those traditions.
I worked with a number of very high quality teachers of these traditions, but also contemporary wisdom and sound healing teachers, among them, the first woman known to even use the term ‘sound healing’ in the US, the wonderful Saruah Benson.
Over time, I created my practice, using and fusing the wisdom and methodologies of these teachers, both of the inner and outer planes.
And, the more I gathered instruments, the more my friends and their friends would want them, or want to know how to get them…..whether djembe and doumbek and mridangam, mbira, dulcimer and harp, sho, sheng, or shakuhachi.
I often would freely offer my own, knowing I could get more from my makers, if I did not make them myself. Thus grew the ‘business’ of Sunreed Instruments. I say ‘business’, for to me, it is my life work. And through the years I have grown and nurtured a team of excellent gardeners to this work, our work team, and been most fortunate with my life partner and wife, Dorothy Stone, who has done so much to contribute, vision, and nourish this work.
So, too, grew the work of therapeutic practice and teaching. The work of consciousness development, therapeutic use of sound healing instruments and methods, and developing conscious and conscientious relationship with the living energies of Earth and Sky, living temple structures of ancient and modern cultures, and more.
It was during a sabbatical during a difficult transition in my life, when I had finally become successful at moving more from making flutes, to creating a practice in therapeutic healing. I was turning toward teaching consciousness work as well, the art and practice of Self – realization, aligning with the fundamental resonant principles of Life.
During this time I had a good deal of free time, while raising two kids, to be outdoors in nature. I chose beautiful, sacred sanctuaries. Over time I was introduced to a number of ancient ceremonial sites in Vermont. First, an extraordinary canyon I was specifically guided to by a Native elder of the community.
It became my greatest teacher. As I opened to its beauty and wonder, it also opened and spoke to me. The Living Wisdom of the Living Earth came alive for me. The ancestors, and spirits of the land and place began to speak, interact, and teach me right communion with those living energies. Eventually, they also told me it was time to go back into the world to teach what I had learned.
The work has grown immensely since those days.
And I continued to be blessed with the gifts of living, embodied teachers, but also those in the subtle worlds, who came more and more directly to guide and teach me. They would often wake me in the middle of the night spending hours with me, learning explicit wisdom and practice of awakening and aligning with subtle consciousness and the subtle energy body, spiritual aspects of the human form, or around which the human body forms…..
So, these pages are not just about world instruments or tools used in therapeutic sound healing. They include direct insight from these decades of experience, interacting with gifted teachers of both worlds. And, through the years, they have ‘advised’ me also to clearly claim my own knowing that I bring with me into this world. It is something each of us need consider.
Who are we truly? And why have we come here? Why have we embodied in this time and place? In this life? Why have we made the choices we make?
These are all important questions, understood by most wisdom traditions as essential to our path of enlightenment and spiritual evolution.
To me, they are part of the work. Perhaps the most important.
On these pages you see the many instruments and tools we offer to provide an excellent platform for sound healing therapies, whether for personal use, integration into an existing professional modality, or to create a stand alone practice.
Sound has become an incredible tool in the holistic and healing professions.
Why? Because it works.
Medicine and Science are researching why and how.
I think of current MIT research on lab mice induced with Alzheimers disease. They discovered by exposing them to a 40 hrz (gamma) beat frequency of light, that it appeared to improve their memory and learning skills. It also increased the production of a protein in the brain that eats plaque. This is a causative factor in Alzheimer’s, so they are investigating if that 40 hz light stimulation can help humans with Alzheimer’s. Then they exposed the mice to a 40 beat/gamma stimulation of sound. It appears to improve these 3 factors even more than light stimulation – memory, learning, production of that protein. Then they exposed the mice to a combined stimulation of sound and light. And it appears to increase these 3 factors even more than either sound or light alone.
This is just one of a multitude of growing scientific/medical research studies going on. Drums and rhythmical stimulation, the pure tones of crystal singing bowls, tuning forks, Tibetan bowls, gongs, and other instruments, all have shown great assistance in health and wellness practices.
It turns out these are the foundation of my own work and collections, and have become some of the most popular tools, or instruments used in therapeutic sound practices.
And it turns out sound has become an incredibly popular vehicle for meditative and wellness practices in the holistic community, from enhancing yoga to body centered therapies, to psychology, and yes, medicine. We, for instance, have been involved in providing training and instruments to VA hospitals, who are finding the use of these instruments in wellness practices can tremendously help their veterans with PTSD, mood disorders, etc.
There is so much more to explore.
And, we do this, not as a business, but as a service, based in my decades of love and passion for these instruments and practices based in world music, spiritual, and healing traditions.
It just turns out, that, I, a simple flutemaker, have learned and journeyed in such a way, that I am part of this movement in the healing arts, to discover and explore these magnificent tools of wellness and consciousness development.
I want to say, I am your humble servant.
But it is not that I have not stumbled upon my path.
I just happen to be here today in a position of guidance and influence to the global community of wellness therapists and sound practitioners, whether someone just interested in their extraordinary experience in ‘sound bath’s with crystal bowls, who want to learn how to use them, or professionals wanting to integrate methodology into their existing work.
I am grateful for my part in this. And seek to provide the best service, education, and quality instruments to help others achieve their goal.
I have written newsletters and articles for decades, and our “Light Library” here will reflect that. Given interviews and conducted them in our world healing service through our non-profits at worldsoundhealing.org and allonenow.org. Those non-profit services have been in a sleeping pattern for some time. But we hope to revive them. In the meanwhile, I have decided to create this blog, to provide a platform for you to get to know us.
But more so, to provide insight and wellness practices that might help you in your own evolutionary journey into a more radiant and fulfilling life.
This is not an advertising platform. But I felt it important to give some background into my own journey and intentions in this work we call ‘Sunreed Instruments’ and ‘The Center of Light.’
Let us know how we can be of service to you.
We have excellent staff to assist you, no matter your questions, no matter your level of skill or knowledge.
Because of this background of decades of work and service in the fields of sound healing and world music, we bring a depth of knowledge to assist you.
We are grateful to have the opportunity.
If you feel akin to the path of awakening and engagement of spirit I have spoken about, you might also want to view our programs in sound, healing, and consciousness. We hope to offer in person programs sometime next year, and hopefully also return offering in person programs on Earth Wisdom and the Mysteries of the Living Earth. Something our ancestors have known and practiced throughout time, no matter what your cultural/ancestral lineage may be.
And, as I say that, remember, you have been here before.
This is not your first time on Earth.
You carry in your soul, and embedded in your cellular fabric, wisdom and belief beyond your normal consciousness or expectation.
THAT is the path we are upon.
To rediscover and rekindle that relationship with our authentic Self.
Blessings in all that you do.
Zacciah Blackburn
September 22, 2023
Ah, the day before the turning of the sun to fall, the day of Equal Day and Night.
A mystery resides in that itself.
Many blessings.
Zacciah Blackburn"