It was the most divine music he’d ever heard — not the shaman’s “bone-chilling” icaros, or healing songs, but the harmony dancing in its wake deep in the Peruvian jungle, the vibrations still eddying about the hut long after the old man had laid down his cigarette and his bundle of leaves. “Within seconds I realized there was no music, no radio, no musicians,” Matt Omo (ECE’96) writes in his book Love Your Vibe: Using the Power of Sound to Take Command of Your Life. “I was listening to the sound of life or creation, resonating through the screens of the hut. … I believe it was in that moment that my inner ear actually opened, and I woke from that ceremony hearing life in a new way.”

In 2011, Omo launched his own practice, Omo Sound Journeys, and is now a leader in the sound-healing movement in Australia. Working with clients in both one-on-one sessions and larger corporate retreats, Omo employs what he calls soul vibing, a four-step process that incorporates sound and breathwork to release endorphins and induce an expanded state of consciousness. In doing so, he says, clients can develop a new interpretation of their reality. “It’s called soul vibing because you go to a place of resonating with the vibration within your soul,” he says. “That might sound a bit airy-fairy and woo-woo, but that’s the best way I can articulate it.”

Omo’s personal journey to enlightenment didn’t come easy. Born in Valparaiso, Indiana, he studied computer engineering at Purdue — or rather, he majored in it. Studying came second to his social life until his senior year, when his mother suddenly died under tragic circumstances. “I felt I needed to grow up quickly and make something out of my life to honor the short-lived life of my mom,” he says.

With his degree finally in hand, Omo moved to Los Angeles and worked diligently as a computer engineer until he was laid off during a downturn in the tech industry. He didn’t mind. Since moving to LA, he’d slowly begun to reconnect with the kid he used to be. He rekindled old hobbies and started acting and playing in bands. He learned to surf, started practicing kundalini yoga, became a massage therapist, and even earned a master’s degree in spiritual psychology at the University of Santa Monica. And in the process, he began to finally unpack all the grief he’d been carrying since his mother’s death.

But after several years managing the largest day spa in LA, he burnt out. “I felt this hunger to give something back to the world other than pampering privileged Californians with too much money to spend,” he says. “So I walked away from it all and started a world tour of volunteer work.”

And thus he found himself one night deep in the Peruvian jungle, miles from modern conveniences, mind drifting, the air humid and thick with the shaman’s mapacho, absorbing an entire orchestra of silence. “At that moment, I knew and experienced firsthand this divine harmony playing through all of life, as if the vibration of creation was whispering the secret of life into my ear,” he writes.

For so long, Omo says, he was restless. But after leaving the hut that night, after the divine music ceased, his mind focused “in a way that had eluded me for a long time in my life.” He now shares those vibes with the world.