A New Direction

From a young age, Koko Tajdeep Bear, Blackberry Mountain’s resident sound healer, sought out harmony. “Musicals were always on the television in our house,” says Koko, who grew up in Maryville, Tennessee. “I sang in choir, but something about performing in a group was never really my thing. I felt constricted, singing someone else’s notes.”

Koko had another passion: comedy. They dreamed of being on Saturday Night Live, making an audience laugh with both their words and the language of their body. “I love the sound of laughter,” they say. “When people are laughing together, they’re in harmony, and laughter can break even the most tense situation.” A member of the high school football team, Koko developed a pre-game ritual of performing a lip sync in the locker room, to a Linkin Park song, a way to get their teammates pumped up before storming onto the field. “It was my biggest contribution to the team, I think,” says Koko. “And that was before lip syncs were all over YouTube.”

After graduation, they swapped the band for the neighborhood, moving to Lincoln Park, Chicago, to take classes at Second City, the improv comedy institution whose alums include Chris Farley, Tina Fey and Stephen Colbert. By day, they worked at a bagel shop and FedEx, aware that improv would not pay the rent (at first, anyway). By night, they honed their craft. “I treated it like my secondary education,” says Koko. “The goal was to be truthful, to speak from the heart, to share myself purely and openly.” But after a while, they realized, “I was deflecting. I didn’t want people to look at me. My comedy wasn’t coming from a truthful place. ‘Don’t tear me down,’ is where my comedy was coming from.”

Koko felt lost. A breathwork meditation class led by Pierre DeBar helped them find themselves – and, in the process, get lost in a different way. “I like to say that class opened me up to the fact that the chakras are real,” says Koko. “I went into a trance, during breathwork,” in which they met their spirit animal, a grizzly bear, which led them to change their name. Their comedy changed, as did their dedication to making comedy a career. “I was going in one direction, and all of a sudden I was like, ‘Wait, this direction doesn’t feel good anymore,’” they recall. “It took me a while to realize, ‘Alright, let me switch things up.’”

They moved to Los Angeles, where a friend from Chicago had recently relocated, and continued to dabble in improv while deepening their meditation practice. One day, Koko went to a Kundalini yoga class. There was chanting. There was drumming. There was a command from the teacher: “Get up and dance.” There was confusion, on Koko’s part.

“The teacher came over and said, ‘Close your eyes, feel the mat with your feet, and dance.’ It was the best time of my life,” says Koko. “During savasana,” corpse pose, that bit of respite that closes a yoga session, “she played a gong. I thought I’d fallen asleep for an hour. The gong made time stand still in a way that I had never experienced. It was because I wanted more gong in savasana that I kept going to Kundalini.”

Sound, resonance and harmony: They kept Koko coming back to Kundalini and led them to get certified as an instructor. At the same time, Koko trained with Lauren Rose, a Los Angeles-based soundologist, and learned how to manipulate instruments like tuning forks and ocean drums to create a sound bath. An elevator pitch for the uninitiated: “A sound bath is the easiest meditation I’ve ever done,” says Koko. “Lie down, get comfortable, and let the sounds move through you. After that, it’s learning how to ride the wave between awake and meditation without going to sleep – learning how to stay in that transcendental place is the next level.”

By 2017, Koko had found their calling and established themselves as one of L.A.’s preeminent sound healers. One day, while meditating, Koko heard a voice: “Take sound healing to the south.”

“The whole point of meditation is to build that relationship so that when you hear your intuitive voice, you go with it,” Koko says. “I was like, ‘Nope. I’ve got a beautiful, two-bedroom duplex. Cancel.’”

The universe countered. “My landlady called a week later to say she wouldn’t be renewing my lease, her grandson would be moving in, and the only way I could stay is if I became his roommate.”

Koko packed up a U-Haul and headed to Maryville, announcing his move back home on social media.

He was on the road when he got a call asking if he’d like to audition to be a sound healer at a new wellness resort opening in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. “I didn’t own a gong, so I stopped at a famous gong shop in Memphis,” says Koko. “I had just enough cash on me to make the down payment.”

Koko’s East Tennessee roots are undeniable. “This is where I grew up, it’s the place I feel most connected to,” they say. But their willingness to get lost and find themselves in the tumult – whether in their own consciousness, or across the country – is also ever-present, a reality that they gracefully embrace. “Just because I start in one direction does not mean I’m going to finish facing the same direction,” says Koko. In other words: Don’t be afraid to get lost.