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Singing Our Souls:
The Power of Intuitive Sounding
© 1999 by John-Michael Dumais
High above the Peruvian Indian market town of Pisac, we walk about a mile along a hillside path with a steep vertical drop to the sacred
Pisac ruins. The rarefied energies of the ruins, against the patchwork quilt backdrop of agricultural sites and terraces on the opposite side of the valley, transport us to another time, another culture, another way
of relating to creation. Light sprinkles begin to dapple the dust around us as our small band of musicians and travelers settle into what feels like a ceremonial chamber. The ceiling of this structure, once covered
with thatch, now yawns openly into the overcast sky. The perfectly constructed stone walls seem to vibrate with the ululation of the ancient Incan ceremonies, beckoning us, daring us, to bridge the worlds. Tuning
into the ostensibly silent stones, our first few spontaneous musical evocations feel like they describe a process of gradual awakening to the light. As we near the end of our "performance" some thirty
minutes later, the sun comes streaming through the clouds, in affirmation of our intuitive knowing. It is a very magical moment.
Listen. What are you hearing right at this moment? Extend your sense of hearing beyond its usual range, opening to impressions from far and
near.... Now disidentify from the mind's typical way of labeling, such as this sound comes from the truck rolling by, this one comes from my computer fan, this one comes from the kids playing out back.
Instead, listen to the cadence, the tone, the melody or drone. Hear the pure sound, without thinking of its cause or source.... After a while, let the pure sound suggest an image, a posture, a movement. If you want,
make a sound to harmonize with the sounds you hear. Ask yourself, if this sound were a message from my superconscious self, what would it be asking me to experience or remember? Then feel the answer in your heart.
Just for one minute, playfully create an inner context that embraces the sounds you hear...
Did that short exercise reveal a sense of wonderment? Though the enlightened life is magic and mystery, the demands on our time and
attention challenge our ability to be truly present to life's beauty. We become enslaved to habits of thought and perception, rushing to our next appointment and hardly stopping to notice the flaring red maples or
the pungent smell of the autumn leaf bed or the curious shapes of the mid-afternoon cirrus clouds. Instead we skim on top of life's deeper currents while, paradoxically, we feel drowned in them by virtue of our
heavy responsibilities and obligations. Yet with just a little volition we can turn the tide in our favor. No, it doesn't require expensive mantras, exotic mudras, or an exciting mardi gras. It only requires
listening, that simple sensory function that can immediately lift us out of our stagnant tidepools and fill us again with invigorating currents of energy.
The noted French ear specialist Dr. Alfred Tomatis explains that the ear is the body's most basic way of being energized. This means that
our nervous system is fed by the frequencies we hear. For many of us all too often this means a sonically poor diet. This is due to what we pay attention to, as much as what we hear. Unlike the more primitive sense
of smell, the sounds we hear are largely mediated through our limbic and higher cognitive centers, meaning that what we perceive is based on feelings and memory. Another way of saying this is, we hear what we expect
to hear. For example, when the police siren starts blaring behind us while we're driving, do we thrill to the treat of the sonic roller coaster, or do we hear something else instead...? If what we hear is a result
of programming, could it be that "normal" hearing loss in adults is due not so much to physiological causes but to the narrowing of the perceptual process, just as slumping posture over time leads to
calcification? If ingrained habits of thinking and feeling limit our physical sensory processes, how much more do they limit our inner creative spirit?
Sound is perhaps the most powerful medium of consciousness transformation because it exists only now. Unlike images, you have to keep
creating sounds or they'll trail off into silence. Sounds therefore connect us to the immediacy of the eternal now - the unconditioned, uncontrollable unfolding of this moment of being and becoming. Attention to present-moment sounds, such as breathing or music, sibilant wind or whooshing water, can neutralize the distractedness of our rational thinking mind. Because sound also vibrates through our body, it can readily alter heart rate, brain waves, blood pressure, digestion, and immune system functioning. Listening to a nice 60 beats-per-minute classical music selection can slow down your pulse, ease high blood pressure, and flood your body with a veritable pharmacoepia of calming and pain-relieving neurochemicals. A friend listens to opera religiously; she claims it clears out her chakras and raises her vibratory level at the end of a stressful day.
It's Thursday night at the Matrix Gallery in Charlemont, Massachusetts. Four of us have gathered around the seven-pointed star painted on
the floor. Behind us are seven three-sided pillars, each face is home to a different painting of the Tarot of Saqqara. The artist/creator, Donald Beaman, and his partner, sound healer Saruah Benson, hold the north
and south cardinal points in the circle. Paula Miller and I hold the portals east and west. We tune in to the vibration of these images, this place, this time, and to our own inner sounds and feelings. One at a
time, we become the vehicles that allow these richly textured sensations to find expression through sound. For her turn, Paula shares that a friend with cancer will soon be leaving this plane of existence. Though
her voice had been slight and raspy all evening, as she begins to sing, accompanied by her own graceful movements, the sounds that come through her are powerful and exquisite. She keens and moans a melodious song of
passage, filled with grieving but also acceptance for the cycles of life and death. Awed by her transformation, we are all drawn into this passion, this spiritual midwifery woven through sound and movement. To
complete the evening we sing together from the plane of pure beauty. The spontaneous melodies and harmonies are so delicious that we don't want to stop.
Where listening can take us into the present moment, deep listening can bring us into soul space. In the Buddhist teaching called the Surangarna Sutra, Avalokitesvara says, "...all of you who listen here should turn your faculty / Of hearing to hear your own nature / Which alone achieves Supreme Bodhi / That is how enlightenment is won." Deep listening is like letting go of the handholds at the edge of the river and releasing yourself into the currents out beyond thought and imagining. We call this current, the soundstream. The Hindus call it the shabd.
To release into the soundstream is to allow the Other, the Beloved - what is totally different and unknown to you - to enter into you and move you where it will. In this way your spirit embodies itself. Through
sound and movement it releases into your nervous system its higher frequencies of love, joy, wisdom, forgiveness, and power. You cannot engage at this level and fail to be transformed.
Just as Paula's music told the story of releasing a dying friend, so too do our musical attunings lead us into our own, and creation's,
deeper stories. "Do not be surprised if, at the core of such music," W. A. Mathieu, author of The Musical Life, warns us, "you find your own foggy fear, or your own loneliness... or you come up
hopelessly lost." If the march of our workaday lives obscures the deeper rhythms of heart and soul, surrendering to deep listening can reconnect us. We need only be willing to become transparent to the deeper
melodies that turn inside of our experiences of loss, change, child-rearing, working, living and dying. We need to get inside of these waveforms, and ride the roller coaster wherever it will take us. Through our
willingness to shake, moan, drum, dance, shout, purr, whistle, laugh and cry, we expand breath-life-spirit into earth-movement-body. We become more than we were, expanding the possibilities for being human.
At the end of a stressful day, you may feel that your own soul is lost in the mists beyond your schedules and to-do lists. The disquiet you
feel may therefore be your soul's light seeking an outlet through you. Can you enter into dialogue with the fatigue and with the tense shoulders and neck muscles, and shake off the day? Can you let go of controlling
yourself and let some spontaneous sounds escape? Try it, and see where it takes you.
Intuitive sounding is not just passively opening to the inner channel. On one hand you are allowing yourself to be penetrated by this Otherness,
to be impressed, carried by it. But you are also penetrating into the unknown, casting yourself among the jeweled darkness of the night sky, and with a supreme willingness jumping into the ineffable dance. Yes, this
changes you, and so also do you change the dance. This is an experience of co-creation at a very pure level.
Sixteen people sit in a circle making the sound of "fire." No other instructions are given. I tell them to pay attention to how
and where the sound moves in their bodies. Veronica says she just can't seem to make the sound, her body just won't allow it. Tuning in to her body feelings, she locates a memory of starting a bush fire when she was
a child, and being filled with fear and fascination. She got in trouble for that, shamed. Unable to "be fiery" Veronica can't stand up for herself, can't ask for what she wants, can't say no without
feeling guilty. "Can you make the sound of a small candle flame?" I ask. She nods and tones. "Let yourself become the small flame." She leaps up as the flame tip would, unable to get near the hot
blue center. With encouragement she gradually becomes the flame and lets the energy come into her body through toning and dance. Her face flushes as she releases the stored energy and finds her fiery nature once
again.
Our inner nature is a powerful and deeply causative dimension for our daily lives. Yet so often if feels invisible or inaccessible.
Depending on which system you are studying, you can become aware of your elemental energies, your planetary qualities, your chakras, your meridians, your organ systems, your subtle bodies, your archetypes, your
enneagram types, your Meyers-Briggs qualities. Yet how does one bypass these mental models and enter directly into these dimensions and affect them? The soundstream gives you ready access to any of these through
your faculty of deep listening. If there's stuck energy anywhere inside of you, you can try vocal sighing, from a very high pitch sliding to a very low one, then go from low to high. Repeat this several times,
noticing the quality of the frequencies as they pass through the various parts of your body. Where there is a block, the sound will become duller, it will have less "ring" or "resonance." (This
can also be done passing a Tibetan bell or bowl over the body.) The large proportion of people who have unresolved voice issues will usually experience a break as the sound passes from the head to the heart. Often
the block will be obvious without the need to do any toning, such as a weight on the chest, a knot in the stomach, a tightening around the throat.
From here you can enter the soundstream by hearing, feeling, and breathing into the sense of the blocked energy. Notice the color, shape,
and tone of the energy. Is it heavy or light, hot or cold, hard or soft? How does it move or pulse? Without thinking, let the energy produce the sound, as if you were "channeling" it, allowing it to use
your vocal cords freely. Let your body move spontaneously also. Does the energy make you want to slump down? Jump around? Wave your arms? Move fluidly? Get inside the feeling, let it become you, expressing
uninhibitedly through you. You might feel a story coming through, with or without words, that makes use of minor intervals, or staccato percussive sounds, or lilting ethereal melodies. Don't think about what it
"should" sound like. Don't plan the refrain or the next verse. There are no rules. This has never happened before. Encourage your ego to move aside and simply witness the event. You'll be amazed. "The
whole stream of your life, already musical," intones Mathieu, "is simply waiting for you to hear it."
Sounding is a great way to summon energetic or archetypal qualities. Veronica, in the above story, summoned the elemental energy of fire to
heal, or bring wholeness, to her inner life. Archetypal energies such as courage, joy, love, hope, compassion, strength, forgiveness, wisdom, universality, or innocence, can be called up from the soundstream by the
same process described above. Tune into what love or strength feel like, move your body, make a sound, and let the symphony roll. As images and words come to mind, incorporate them improvisationally. Let yourself become the archetypal energy. If you feel blocked from expressing the energy, work with the block itself. The block is nothing more than the energy you want to express, folded up inside an experience or memory. Working with the block releases precisely the energy you are trying to connect with. All pathways lead home.
Naomi lies on the treatment table, complaining of head pains. Over the past few months she has experienced incredible transformations,
releasing chronic sinusitis and clearing old grief. Now, each night she receives encouraging messages from her angels, including precognitions that are later confirmed. Her life is falling into place without
struggle. But opening up her third eye and crown chakra is creating headaches. Scanning reveals several long energy spikes protruding from her aura around her head; my intuition tells me it's "information
backlog" from the higher dimensions. Together we tune into and make the "sound" of each one of these spikes. They have an alien, otherworldly tonal structure. The sound chirps as the frequency
modulates rapidly up and down by as much as a whole step. A couple of times we laugh, sure we are stuck in the sound track to Tales From the Dark Side. But as we tone, the spikes release. With some additional
practice in overtone chanting to open up the cranial glands and bones, the pain in Naomi's head evaporates.
Dr. Tomatis asserts that we cannot make a sound that our ears have not heard. My work with Naomi intuitively suggested to me that those
exotic sounds were coding and expanding her nervous system to accept and translate higher frequencies of information, so that she could express them in her life and in her relations to others (Naomi has begun to
demonstrate conscious channeling). The ultra-high mathematically perfect frequency series of overtone chanting (a.k.a. Jacob's Ladder) has long been known to activate the pineal and pituitary glands. The pituitary
gland sits atop the sphenoid bone in our skulls, which extends from the temples deep inside the cranial cavity and all the way back to the occipital bone (shaped like a satellite dish!). Sound healer John Beaulieu
asserts that our ability to vibrate the entire spectrum of sound and energy realigns the cranial bones, activates the glands, and makes us tuned receptors of universal wisdom.
In Peru our roving band tuned into the energy of each structure at the sacred sites, from Cusco to Machu Picchu, and brought forth soul
sounding that, two years later, still stirs powerful energies for all of us. Like many others who trek to these sacred sites, we experienced a sense of being called to witness, or perhaps remember - and then to
communicate to others - something extraordinary.
Sites such as Machu Picchu were designed to be "eternal cities," created to survive many earthquakes. The Inca even had a system
of aqueducts through the city, and filtered their wastewater as it made its way back to the Urubamba River fifteen hundred feet below. The Inca worshipped and lived in harmony with nature, and wouldn't think of
despoiling their own land since they were planning to live there forever. They realized and celebrated their interdependence with Sun and Moon, Thunder and Rain, Puma, Snake and Condor.
Tapping into this dimension of harmony and reverence at this critical time for the destiny of Earth, we brought forth song after song, many
with spontaneous lyrics. We felt the heart of the Earth Mother, Pacha Mama, beating beneath the Andes, reaching down into our bodies to pluck our harp strings so we could bring forth her message. Floating up
around ten thousand feet on a wave after wave of sound, we felt ecstatic, blessed, and deeply grateful from beginning to end. After we returned, many in our group experienced deep transformative ripples in their
personal lives (not all of which were easy, mind you). Personally I felt the trip to be one of those "dates with destiny." It has set the pattern for my life, a deep pattern of surrender to the soundstream
and to the divine blueprint for my life. The following song came through in the Temple of the Stars in the Coricancha temple complex in Cusco:
We sing to the stars
Pearls of the night
We sing to the stars, our guiding light
Of the dreamtime
Sing to the stars, guiding us home,
guiding us home
We sing to the stars
What stories have you to teach us,
about where we come from?
What stories will we encounter
coming over the horizon?
Oh, lighten our dreams
Oh, shine through our nights
Tie us to the spiral of creation
Oh, tie us to spiral of the galaxy
It's impossible to convey how this felt, but the words flow, ecstasy,unity, beauty, and gratitude come to mind. We were indeed singing our souls, bringing forth the truths encoded in the stones and in ourselves. As one of our last improvised songs attested, "Once you touch the sky / Once you breathe the air / Once you feel the mountains - You can never go home again." Indeed, none of us returned to the same lives, but were inescapably transformed by the deep currents of sound and memory and creativity we experienced in Peru.
"My experience shows me that those who do not know how to sing and dance will never reach God." These words of Bapuji (Swami
Kripalvanadaji) serve to remind us that music is an act of creation, a way of bypassing the rational mind and plugging in directly to the pulse of life. The famous Sufi Hazrat Inayat Khan states it this way:
"...[to] find our own place is to tune our instrument to the keynote of the chord to which we belong." In my experience as a musician and healing facilitator, I've found that music is the fastest route to
balance, healing, and inner peace. And of all forms of music, intuitive sound-making comes closest to the direct expression our souls. It is a joyful, playful way of turning lead into gold and finding the chord to
which we belong. But just as Lao Tzu said of the Tao, the soundstream that can be heard and spoken of is not the eternal soundstream. You've got to go there yourself and let it move you.
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