I am just wrapping up five weeks and five workshops in Ireland and will be heading back to Ithaca soon. I have had a wonderful visit and met many wonderful people through the course of my travels and my chanting meditation events. I love my work, if you can call it work. It is such a joy to introduce the chant or world traditions to so many people and to help them understand the profound effect it can have on our ability to quiet ourselves and find inner peace.
There is much to write about contemporary chant practice, which I will do another time. For now I want address a concern that keeps cropping up in my chant and meditation classes and in conversations with others on the subject. Workshop after workshop I keep meeting people here in Ireland and in the States who were told when they were school children that they couldn't sing. How really terrible to stifle a child's singing voice. Singing is our most basic and essential expression. Listen to a baby coo and then babble. I am convinced that the melodious and elongated sounds we make as babies, are expression from our Souls and the forerunner to our singing. Watch the great pleasure a baby gets from cooing or babbling. Observe a toddler at play, singing away. It is like listening to an opera, they sing what they are doing or what is happening in the moment or what in their imagination. It such a natural, uninhibited, and joyous expression.
We all love to sing when we are little. So think how devastating it is for a child to be told not to sing, that they are not "good enough" a singer to be in a choir. The thought of it makes me sad and I am even sadder when adults come to my workshop and tell me the reason they are coming is to find their singing voice. They still want to sing and maybe for 40 years they have felt stifled and hurt by their early experience. It seems that the chanting helps. And I am so happy, I can't tell you. When someone comes to me at the end of workshop and tells me she has found her voice, it brings tears to my eyes.
I am convinced that we can all sing. I don't mean we are all especially gifted in singing, I just mean we can all sing and should not feel inhibited from expressing ourselves through song. Song is a big part of every culture. Our mothers' sing us lullabies and then teach us nursery rhymes and in between many of us sing our own songs or humming our own tunes. We all have our own songs to sing, even as adults.
In my workshops, I tell people that it is not about having a great singing voice, it is about finding your own voice, that which is connected to our deepest selves. As a demonstration, I suggest that if we sing in the shower and we are singing our own made-up song, it is on key! There is no one to judge and so we can be free to express yourself. An so what if you don't sing on key, what difference does it make when you are chanting or singing for the pure enjoyment of it? Chanting is an intentional spiritual expression. It comes straight from the heart. Being on key is not a pre-requisite.
So if someone told you that you can't sing, don't believe them. You may not have been selected for the secondary school choir, but you can still sing and if you love to sing, don't let anyone stop you. Find a place and a way to sing. It is such a joyful and soulful expression. Singing lifts our spirits as it reduces our blood pressure and our stress. Join a chanting circle, attend the Dances of Universal Peace. Attend a chanting workshop. Each year Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York holds an ecstatic chant weekend. Go sing among several hundred people. Sing your heart out. Sing for the pure joy of it. You will find out quickly that you indeed can sing. Everyone can.
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