Twice in the last six months I've had conversations with Guru type people. They've asked me why I sing. 'I don't know,' I've replied. 'I'm just compelled to sing.' They've looked deep into my eyes and told me to find an answer to that question. “It will be a vulnerable journey,” said yesterday's man.
He was Richard 'Quantum Light Breath' Bock.
I'm searching for the source and community around my singing practice of singing long long notes up and down the scale and paying close and subtle attention to the nature of the breath and the source of the vibrations in the body. I was taught it 8 years ago by a woman named Kim who'd learnt it in Varanassi, India. I finally went there in February and I found some great things, but not the source and community of this practice.
I asked Richard if he knew of anything or anyone.
“No,” he said simply. His singing teacher in India had been asked to sing nothing but Sa (a single note) for a year. The teacher was an old man. They'd met him at a concert where he'd been in the audience. A 90 year old renound local singer, he'd been asked to come to the stage and sing. So he did, and he sang a single note, the Sa.
Within moments, Richard recalled, he and his partner wept.
They were speared by the experience. How can it be that a single note can touch their hearts so directly and instantly, melting the casing away? The voice wasn't perfect, he recalled, but it was human and deeply honest and raw.
Kim, my source of this practice, had been told to sing Sa for three months. Mercifully, we'd only sung Sa for half an hour in her workshops and then sung the other notes for about five minutes each. This was in 2001 and I've kept up the practice on and off ever since.
And now this is what people say about my voice. Not perfect. Not well trained. But honest, and raw, and touching. “I could listen to you sing endlessly”, said a woman at dance camp after hearing a song around the fire one night.
As I'd been singing Sa for about 8 years by the time I got to India, my two singing teachers there got me straight onto the vocal acrobatics. So I never found the people who sit together and simply sing Sa for, maybe, an hour.
I feel like I'm sniffing around the edges of a mystery.
This is a beautiful, profound practice. It has awesome effects on the voice. It is beautiful to do, particularly in a group; a profoundly calming practice. I've called it my singing meditation, though in truth when I'm alone I rarely concentrate sufficiently to get a meditative quality to it. But that happens very easily in a group, I find.
And if you buy into the Eastern ideas, it's very good for your 'energy' too. Prushant Iyengar, son of BKS Iyengar, big daddy of Iyengar yoga, says that the whole biscuit is to keep the 'chakras' well and healthy. There are seven chakras going from the base of the spine to just above the top of the head, they say. In my singing practice, you breathe into each chakra area in turn and then let the sound resonate from that area of your body. After you've done all seven in seven long breaths, you take a few breaths where you're trying to balance the resonance from all parts of your body, or each 'chakra'. Then you move on to the next note and start again.
From my point of view it's less about the chakras and more about using the full resonant capacity of your body. Usually our voices are tightly tied up in our noses, throats, shoulders and upper chest. Move the source down and up from there and the beauty and comfort of the sound and experience increases. Simple.
In the practice you focus on relaxing and letting the sound come out of your body, rather than forcing any sound onto it, so you're developing and strengthening your body's own true sound.
“Your voice is the sound of your soul,” said Tim Buckley. That might be why people find the raw honesty of the sounds that come from this practice so beautiful.
So, the idea is that Chakras are part of the energy body and deal with your psycho-spiritual wellbeing. Each chakra has a different department, like one is fear, and another is communication/expression, and so on. Exercising them energetically, like by singing in and from them, keeps them healthy.
I don't know about all this stuff. Some people take it very seriously.
All I know is that I find the practice yummy and great for the voice and leaves me feeling really good.
So it's quite strange that there's not an architecture around it the way there's an architecture around other things that are yummy and great for you and leave you feeling really good, like yoga.
I will keep searching. There must be people who share the practice.
The Nada yogis do something similar, with the difference that they focus on different chakras for different notes.
I've been wondering if that's what I should do too. I put the question to Richard. “It seems to me,” he said, “that you need all the types of resonance in each note. You need the base chakras in the high notes, otherwise they're too flighty, and vice versa.” Ha! I felt vilified. Great. I agree. I'll continue with what I'm doing.
So. I started writing this morning because I was thinking about their question of why I sing.
It's been niggling at me all year.
OK here goes.
I sing because I can't help it. I am a singer. I was singing as a small child. When I am an old woman I will be singing, and I will have the voice of someone who has been singing her whole life. While everything in my life changes, including what I am singing, this never does: I am a singer.
I love to sing in groups. I love the sound of a group of voices. It makes me feel at home wherever I am.
So, singing is a kind of an act of primal aliveness. I hear the sound of my being. It is true. I am real. I am alive. It's affirming. There's something very core about it.
Singing is the sound of that 50-50 relationship with life you've got, where you do 50% and life does 50%, give or take. I sing. I am sung. I am given a voice. I take care of it and sing with it. Sometimes life takes me back and sings me. It's great when that happens. Rare.
I don't want to do this on the computer. I want to figure it out in conversation and squiggles in my note book.
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