Using Your Voice to Transform Pain and Suffering.
Welcome to Day 8,
Sounding Versus Singing.
This course is called Using Your Voice to Transform Pain and Suffering.
I knew that in naming this course many people would see that they would have to use their own voice and likely turn away and head for the hills.
I didn't want to exclude people who were drawn by the need for tools to work with their pain and suffering.
So if you are here,
Congratulations!
I'm aware of how much courage that takes and I'm here to encourage you to embrace your own naked voice as a path,
A portal,
And practice of profound self-love.
Our own human voice so capable of revealing all of our prickly stubborn edges,
Imbalances,
Hang-ups,
Deficiencies,
Excesses,
And whatever more that we might try to hide,
Stuff away,
Cover up,
Or feel more secure by controlling.
In my own life it has come out as straining,
Straining to make my voice sound a certain way.
In terms of transforming pain and suffering,
Transformation comes,
Yes,
Sometimes overnight,
But in my experience over time through the continual embracing and practice of profound self-acceptance.
This is an antidote for the more common experience of wishing things to always be different about ourselves.
The Goli Wall practice,
Gratitude,
Honoring,
Appreciation,
Love,
And wonder from a few days ago will really help you in being able to work with the depth,
The breadth,
And the subtle nuances of your feelings.
And in no time soon you'll be successful in exploring and sounding them freely.
Learning to listen to your voice without judgment is actually a skill that is not a prerequisite to working with the sounding tools shared here.
I had felt compared to shared as part of my own journey,
Some of the landscape that I've covered and where I'm heading,
The self realization from the years of exploring my own voice,
And the power of sound to heal.
I've mentioned singing a lot in this last module and I want you to know that this is not the focus of this course.
Yes,
Related,
A natural progression,
But not the focus.
Though for some of you as your confidence and understanding grows,
Naturally you'll find yourself wanting to sing more.
First,
I'd like to make a distinction between sounding and singing.
In the world of therapeutic sound making,
The name sounding is preferred to singing because it gives permission to not have to be musical.
Notice for yourself when I say,
Okay start singing,
If you feel a pressure now that those sounds have to be musical sounding,
Pleasing,
In tune,
Or have a melody,
Because we all carry some baggage about whether we believe we're musical or not.
I want you to let all of that go for now and that what we will now use the term sounding.
Singing might happen as a result when sounding,
But sounding is the expression from letting our intention facilitate the breath,
The body,
And the voice working together to elicit all kinds of sounds.
Sounding could be wheezing,
Grunting,
Groaning,
Coughing,
Yelling,
Whimpering,
Whispering,
Murmuring,
Squelching,
Bumbling,
And so on.
Kind of get the idea?
If singing comes naturally,
So be it.
But sounding offers us a way to explore everything other than singing with our voice,
A much more vast and rich landscape than just singing.
