About 17 years ago, I started a new and very challenging job helping the Anglican Church promote healing and reconciliation for the damage done in residential schools for Aboriginal people. At the same time, my colleague and very good friend, Shirley, was diagnosed with cancer. Within weeks of starting work, I was totally stressed. I remember someone commenting that my upper back and neck were as hard as cement.
One day, driving down a country road in the privacy of my pick-up truck, I was feeling so stressed I opened my mouth and let rip a deep-throated roar of frustration and anxiety.
Immediately I felt release. I tried it again, and again, and each time there was more release.
Perhaps because I’d just been at events with Aboriginal drummers and singers, I found my unfocused scream turning into a chant, just a little bit similar in style to some of the falsetto-type singing I’d been hearing.
I went with it, repeating the chant again and again, letting it evolve and change shape, adding rhythmic emphasis by banging on the dashboard.
What a healing experience.
It became a regular practice for me over several years. Late at night I would go out in the woods behind our house, along a path that was familiar enough to walk in the dark. In the remote centre of this small woods, there was a clearing with one, small tree I would dance around while chanting.
That dancing chant became a form of prayer that eventually developed words of thanksgiving. It included all those elements of music and spirituality that I talk about in the book.
1) Rhythm and metre. I found my chant matching the intensity of my feeling and expression, speeding up or slowing down, getting louder or quieter.
2) A melody of sorts, simple and repetitive, but still there.
3) Singing — and because I repeated it many times over many nights — under many moons — I began experimenting with the sounds and the ways they would make my whole body vibrate.
The higher pitched sounds resonated in my forehead and nasal passages. Others buzzed right in my throat, and still others rumbled deep in my chest. I found myself breathing more deeply, expanding my lungs to enlarge the resonance cavity, and feeling that vibration move up and down my spine, releasing muscular tissue as well as mind and soul.
4) Dance. I stamped my feet, hopped up and down, shook my hips, and swung my arms in time to my prayer song. It all helped me shed anxiety, loosen up my body, and become more grounded in my physical self.
5) Lyrics. Well, at first they were non-lyrics (I believe ethnomusicologists call them vocables; Van Morrison calls them the inarticulate cries of the heart). The real words came later as statements of thanksgiving addressed to my Creator for my healing — and for all the gifts of my life.
As I sang, I felt myself held and borne up by the Creator, and that I could deal with whatever came my way, because of that connection.
As my singing-teacher friend Sue Smith explained to me (it's in the book), when you sing words, you inhabit them longer and in a different way than when you just speak them. You stretch out syllables, emphasize beginnings and endings differently, and change pitch, so the meanings evolve and deepen. And you repeat phrases that would normally go by just once in conversation, writing, or even in prayer.
Singing, dancing, and playing music are also practices that can help ground you in the moment, which Eckhardt Tolle calls “the eternal now.”
At a karate school I once saw a saying on the wall: “The master makes a ceremony of every action.” That’s what music is, a ceremony. Whether you are singing, playing an instrument, dancing, or just listening, it’s a ceremony, a ritual that brings you into the sacred space and time of the eternal now. And it heals you.
That healing chant that was given to me as a gift from the cosmos and its Creator changed my life. It brought physical healing to the back pain I had developed from my tension. It brought me tremendous relief from mental anxiety, much better than any counselling or tranquilizer. And it deepened my prayer life and my connection with my Creator.
I still carry the echoes of those experiences with me today.
Blessings all,
John
Saturday, April 4, 2009
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