Sound & Silence

Were you told you couldn’t sing? Were you discouraged from expressing yourself in words or sound? There are many ways in which our inner truth is silenced in this crazy world. If this is true for you, then working with your voice, whether with sound or words, may be exactly what you need. Bear in mind that if you can speak, there is no such thing as not being able to sound.

I have worked with sound all my life, probably attracted to sorting out my own experience of silencing. Initially, I trained as a composer, studying at York University, and then I moved into performance, touring the world as a violinist with Baroque chamber orchestras and ensembles. I reached a ceiling in my own performance, determined by my level of relaxation, which was lacking. This, along with a curiosity to find out about the unseen spiritual world, prompted my journey into healing.

Bringing together healing, sound, and words has helped me to grow as a human being and gives me great pleasure. I love to share this with others. There are many ways to approach sound and healing.

Getting in touch with your voice can be enormous fun. When you drop the critical mind and let go of wanting to sound in any particular way, then you can start to play, and you may be surprised by what happens. Breathing and qi gong/dao yin exercises are very useful to help get this flowing.

Voice is the sound that we all have within us. It is your most important instrument, and it is unique to you. With the voice we can speak, we can sing, and we can aspirate. Then we can think a sound in silence, and we can even let go of that thought. All of these stages are useful and beautiful.

In our gatherings, we work together to develop not only our own sound, but also our ability to listen and our understanding that the one who sounds and the one who witnesses are not separate from each other. This approach gives us a safe space to work in that is held by all of us.

You may be more comfortable with speaking than with sounding. In our gatherings, I may encourage you to take a favourite poem by any author you love and just see what happens when you speak it out.

Poetry, for me, is a way of speaking in music. If you recite a poem or section of prose that you love, you may come to a place that opens deeper meaning for you. This work is about going more deeply into that place and finding out what is beyond. Finding out by feeling it, witnessed in a safe space. Sometimes it is precisely the place where we forget the words that is the key to this deep place.

In exactly the same way, a song or a chant can become the jumping off place to get to that place of deep knowing, or perhaps to a place where we come up against our tension or inner holding. As with Dao Yin, chanting is a way to prepare the body for meditation, to smooth out those crooked nooks so that the breath can flow smoothly and the meditation can go beyond.

Chanting can also be a devotional practice in its own right. I sometimes use Sanskrit chants, as well as some of Chloe Goodchild’s Naked Voice chants. I also encourage people to bring their own songs if that is their preferred way.

Sometimes, what is needed is to simply allow whatever sound is there to express itself. This is a wonderful experience, as there is nothing in the way, and all is pure arising.

However, if you were told you couldn’t sing as a child (as many of us were), or if you were discouraged from expressing yourself in the past (which is often the case), then making sound in this way can be quite daunting. At the same time, if this is true for you, then it may well be that improvising sound is exactly what you need.

In this work, it is not possible to do it wrong. To help you come to this realisation, we use simple exercises to prepare the way, and no one is required to do anything that they are not comfortable with. Just to reiterate, nothing you can do is wrong.

The six healing sounds of the Daoist tradition correspond to different organ systems, and each has a movement associated with it. In the Dragon Gate lineage, the sound is aspirated and combined with a specific daoyin movement. They are part of the meditation skillset and can be used to focus attention in a particular way, or to free up the body in a specific area. They are known to have a beneficial healing effect.

There are other sounds that also have a healing effect on the body. These three come from the Indian tradition. Om is the sound of man. It is pronounced A U M, with equal length on each sound. Sometimes a guttural N is used instead of M. It is possible to sound the om through your entire body, which can be a transcendental experience. How the sound vibrates the spaces in the head is very important.

The sa, re, ga is the Indian scale, much like doh, re, mi in the West. Chloe Goodchild and Masashi Minegawa have developed movements to go with these sounds, and using them, it is possible to move the sound up and down the body via the chakras.

The lam, vam, ram is also a way of sounding the chakras, but it seems more internal than the sa, re, ga. This is a method I particularly enjoy using to get the centres buzzing and balanced. It is often possible to identify an out-of-balance centre by the way these sounds resonate.

I also work with instruments such as handpans, drums, rattles, flutes and bells. Each sound has a different vibration and can be felt uniquely in the body. For example, handpans, like gongs, can open us up, but have the added rhythmic impulse which takes us somewhere else. Drums are the beat of the heart, and can be used for dancing or for altering consciousness to help the shaman descend into the underworld or unconscious realms. Rattles can also alter consciousness and have a way of cutting through and cleansing. Flutes and bells can be transcendental and tend to take us upwards.