The Problem: Not Knowing What You Are Walking Into
Booking something you cannot picture is uncomfortable, and this practice is harder to picture than most.
The uncertainty tends to produce two wrong assumptions. The first is that the session is essentially a dare, a room, a board, and someone telling you to get on. The second is that it will be so unstructured and mystical that you will spend the whole time not knowing what is expected of you.
Neither is what happens. A properly run Sadhu board session has a clear architecture, and every stage exists for a reason. Knowing that architecture in advance removes most of the anxiety, and it also lets you judge whether a given practitioner is running the practice properly.
First, the Practical Details
Before the walkthrough, the basics.
Duration. 90 to 120 minutes. Only a small portion of that involves standing on the board.
Price. From $150 USD. The final price depends on location and format. There is no payment on the website. You confirm the details together and payment is arranged directly. Discounts are available on three sessions or more.
Where. In person, within Mexico City. Either at your home, where Julia brings everything needed, or at the studio in the city centre. Home sessions include transport, which is why pricing varies slightly by location.
What to bring. Nothing. Wear whatever is comfortable and allows you to move and breathe freely. Feet are bare for the standing itself.
Language. English, Spanish or Russian.
Step 1: Intention Setting and Emotional Inquiry
The session begins sitting down and talking, not standing on anything.
This is where you name what brought you. It does not need to be articulate, and it does not need to be a whole story. It might be a decision you cannot make, a fear you keep circling, a pattern you can see and cannot shift, or simply a sense that something needs to move and you do not know what.
The inquiry part matters as much as the intention. Julia asks questions to find where the live material actually is, which is not always where you thought it was when you booked.
This stage does two things. It gives the practice a direction, so that what happens on the board is about something rather than being intensity for its own sake. And it establishes the working relationship, so that when things get hard later you are not being guided by a stranger.
Nothing you say here is required. You share what you want to share.
Step 2: Grounding Preparation and Breathwork
Now the body gets prepared.
Grounding brings your attention out of the head and into physical contact with the floor, the weight of the body, and the sensation of being where you actually are. Most people arrive from a day in Mexico City carrying all of it with them. This stage is where that gets set down.
Then comes conscious breathwork. This is not a warm-up and it is not filler. The breath is the tool you will use on the board, and this is where you learn to work it: slow, low, long exhales, and the direct experience of what a long exhale does to your state.
By the end of this stage you should be able to feel the connection for yourself. Change the breath, and something changes. That discovery is what you take onto the board with you.
Step 3: Nervous System Regulation
This stage is what makes the difference between an ordeal and a practice.
The goal is that you step onto the board from a settled state rather than an activated one. An activated system is braced, tight and shallow-breathing before the board is even involved. Meeting intense sensation from there is a very different and much harder experience.
So the work here is regulation: settling the system, letting the body register that it is safe in this room with this person, and arriving at a genuine baseline of calm.
The timing is not fixed. This is one of the places where a template fails, because how long it takes depends entirely on what you walked in carrying. The session moves on when you are actually ready, not when a schedule says so.
Step 4: Fully Guided Nail Standing
Then you step on.
Not alone and not in silence. Julia guides every step of it, breath by breath and sensation by sensation. You are talked into position, talked through the descent of your weight, and kept with your breath throughout.
The first moments are the loudest. Your nervous system registers the sensation and immediately makes its case for getting off. The breath tries to go short and high. The mind starts negotiating.
This is where being guided does its work. Left alone, that first surge is where almost everyone either steps off or clamps down and starts gritting. Guided, you have a steady voice keeping you on the exhale, keeping your weight even, keeping your legs from locking, until the wave passes.
And it does pass. Not because the sensation vanishes, but because the alarm around it settles. What follows is usually described as very quiet and very clear.
You control how long you stand and when you step off. Always. There is no target and nothing to hit.
Step 5: Facilitation Through Resistance
This is the stage that most defines the practice, and it overlaps with the standing itself.
Resistance is not a problem to be eliminated. It is the material. The moment you want to leave, the story that arrives about why you cannot do this, the bargaining, the sudden anger or the sudden tears, all of that is precisely what you came to meet.
Facilitation here means staying with you at that edge. Not pushing you past it, which would just be force, and not letting you slide away from it the moment it appears, which would teach nothing. The edge is the useful place, and holding it is skilled work.
This is also where emotional material tends to surface. Shaking, heat, tears, a memory arriving from nowhere, a large exhale that has been waiting a long time. Julia's facilitation is trauma-informed. There is no forced catharsis and no pushing anyone past a boundary. Whatever comes is met, and nothing is manufactured.
Step 6: Sound Healing Integration
You step off. And then, crucially, the session is not over.
What happens next determines how much of the experience you actually keep. Integration is done through sound: Tibetan singing bowls, crystal bowls, Koshi chimes and therapeutic percussion, played around you while you lie down and stop doing anything at all.
There are good reasons this stage uses sound rather than conversation. After that kind of intensity, the system does not need more input to process. It needs to be carried down. Sound does that without asking anything of you and without requiring you to put words to something that may not have words yet.
This is where the clarity people describe tends to settle in. The insight that arrived on the board stops being a spike of intensity and becomes something quieter that you can take with you.
There is time afterwards to come back slowly, ground properly, and say anything you want to say. Nothing is rushed.
Why the Whole Structure Matters
Every stage above exists because removing it breaks something.
Without intention, the intensity has no direction. Without preparation and regulation, the board is an ordeal rather than a practice. Without guidance, resistance wins or gets overridden. Without integration, an intense experience stays an intense experience and fades within days.
The board is a tool. The structure around it is what makes the tool do anything.
Working With Julia Klykova in Mexico City
Julia Klykova is a certified transformational facilitator, sound therapist and Sadhu board practitioner in Mexico City, with over 15 years of practice in yoga, breathwork, somatic and embodiment work and more than 100 clients guided. She combines four modalities in one practice: sound healing, somatic work, Sadhu board and breathwork, where most practitioners offer one. That combination is exactly what a session like this requires.
Nothing follows a template. There is no fixed sequence and no standard playlist. The structure above is the architecture, and what happens inside it is built in real time around what is actually happening in your body.
This is somatic and sound-based facilitation. It is not therapy, and it works alongside therapy rather than replacing it.
"I was really nervous at first, but the way Julia guided us step by step made it all feel possible. Her calm presence and the sound helped me go deeper into the experience than I ever expected." Sound healing and Sadhu board session
Book a Session
If the structure above sounds like what you have been looking for, the next step is a message, not a commitment.
Message Julia on WhatsApp at +52 55 3971 9870 or email july.picture@gmail.com. Tell her what is bringing you here. A sentence is enough. You agree the format, the place and the time together, and Julia confirms every detail with you personally before anything is final.