Area residents finding many ways to escape stress

Other tones follow: high and crisp, sonorous quakes, piercing chimes.

Melodies rise and fall. Crescendos build, then sounds recede like outgoing tide. Vibrations permeate like lingering thunder.

As a half-hour passes in a Newburyport studio, lighted just to twilight level, minds are focused on the reverberating gongs - directed and redirected by their consuming sound.

“The whole point is to come here and slow the mind down, slow life down, for a half-hour,’’ explained Zach Field, the gong player, of the endeavor he has dubbed the Gong Meditation Project.

The start of the 21st century has been anything but temperate - with steady unemployment, overseas uprisings, and natural disasters. Not to mention the hustle of everyday life.

So, given all that, how the heck are you supposed to relax?

Well, with unusual times come unusual measures. Local residents are increasingly turning to different methods to find inner peace and to quiet the white noise of the world.

For some, it’s laughter yoga (just what it sounds like); for others, it’s doga (a form of yoga done alongside your canine pal, bringing a whole new meaning to “downward dog’’).

Then there’s hammam therapy, modeled after the rituals of ancient bathhouses, and even “vinotherapy,’’ wherein you can literally soak in a vat of wine. And, of course, Field’s Gong Meditation Project: In sessions on most Friday nights, the Amesbury percussionist plays an array of the round, melodic discs to groups lounging on mats, stretching, or doing yoga poses.

For Jennifer Quarantiello of Newburyport, meanwhile, the method of choice is bikram yoga. For 90 minutes a few times a week, she bends and twists in a series of postures in a room heated to 105 degrees.

“It clears your mind,’’ she said before a session at Bikram Yoga Seacoast, a studio nestled in a Salisbury strip mall, describing the practice as exhausting but invigorating. “I find I’m a little more relaxed, not as short-tempered. It’s so beneficial for loosening you up and making you feel better.’’

In a method developed by Bikram Choudhury of India (and now a franchise), participants go through a regimented, 26-posture sequence meant to systematically work the body.

And why 100-plus degrees?

Mainly because heat fosters flexibility and sweating flushes out impurities, according to Bikram Yoga Seacoast studio owner and instructor Jan Allen. Heat also strengthens and lengthens muscles and tendons, she explained, and increases concentration.

“The sweat becomes your friend; after a while you’re comfortable with it,’’ she said from her seat in the lobby of her studio before a recent Friday night session. “You get used to the hot temperature and you learn to love it.’’

On a frigid mid-December night, opening the studio door releases a blast of steamy air. About two dozen men and women pose on mats, all barefoot - women in shorts and sports bras or bikini tops, men unabashedly shirtless and in tiny shorts.

Allen - a wiry woman with a blond ponytail wearing a hot-pink sports bra and black pants - leads the group with constant, rapid-fire directions accented with claps.

“Take that deep breath. Use it.’’

“Build that strength, build that endurance, that perseverance. You can do it.’’

In one pose, the group collectively hinges forward, pushing foreheads to shins, arms behind backs, fingers tucked under heels.

In another, they each balance on their right leg, pulling their left straight out in front of them, attempting to hold it parallel with the floor. (All exercises are repeated on opposite sides.) And then there’s this one: Poised on right legs, right arms pointed out parallel to the floor, they delicately lift their left legs backward, as far as they can, toward their heads.

Moving through the postures, some are impossibly nimble and flexible; others are stiff, occasionally losing their balance.

The heat quickly penetrates, absorbing everything, sweat glistening on foreheads, beading on shoulders, dripping off chins.

Uncomfortable as it might sound, those who quite literally sweat it out call it a transformative and consuming experience.

“You’re able to shut off the whole outside world and just stay there for 90 minutes,’’ said Allen, a mother of six (ranging in age from 14 to 24) whose studio caters to about 75 students a day. “This is the only thing I’ve ever done in my life where I don’t think of anything else but the breath.’’

Field’s goal, meanwhile, is to have people think about nothing but the gongs. Which, he and participants noted, is almost impossible not to do.

Just sitting quietly with your own thoughts can be a difficult exercise, he said; one’s mind tends to wander, and inevitably comes back around to the worries and the to-do list.

But with the gongs, “the vibrations do something to you,’’ Field, who runs Zach Field Drum Studios, said before a recent Friday night session in Newburyport’s Tannery building. “It’s a total redirection all the time.’’

From a spot on the floor nearby, Kristine Steinberg of Newburyport agreed that “the vibrations keep you focused. It’s a way of staying totally present.’’

Present yet, at the same time, “checked out of the chaos,’’ added Jeaniene Donovan of Newburyport, getting comfortable on her mat.

And she thinks it does something deeper, as well. “The nervous system is electricity,’’ she said, “and I feel like the gongs reset that.’’

Minutes later, more than two dozen gather in the dimly lighted studio space. Many lie with heads propped on pillows, some are seated cross-legged, others are in chairs against the wall.

Field - with a scruffy beard, spiky hair, tattoo enveloping his right elbow - situates himself beside his gong array: five small discs suspended over two larger ones on a PVC-pipe stand.

He begins to play: Improvising melodies with mallets in each hand, he taps this one, then that one, up and down the array - letting notes hang in the air, vibrating until they’re a dull din, accentuating high-pitched tones with deeper, cacophonous crashes.

Finally, the last notes resonate until they lower, dim, then disappear. The room is whisper-quiet (except for someone lightly snoring - you don’t get more relaxed than that). Field rings a bell three times; people sit up, stretch, shake off the somnolence, then begin to filter back out into the cold night air.

Ultimately, Field says, it’s a simple exercise. “I’m just playing gongs in a musical way that creates a distraction from life.’’

Taryn Plumb can be reached at tarynplumb1@gmail.com.