Tag: spiritual

Circle Around

I’ve had more experiences than I can count of certain themes circling back around in my life, each time a little different, and I’d like to think improved in how it appears and in how I respond.  A good portion of this post was written in 2020 and saved as a draft until now that the topic has circled back around with significance at the end of 2025:

I had several voice teachers during high school and college who all had different ideas about the best practices in singing and each one would take you through warm ups of melodic lines based on his or her own training, peer influence, and personal insights.  My second voice teacher in high school approached singing from the German school of thought, valuing a round, darker quality in the voice producing a lot of resonance in the chest.  To create this sound, you can get a feeling for it by pretending you have a whole orange or a golf ball in your mouth and say a line, any line.  If you’d like to reference performances of Wagner’s works (i.e. Tristan und Isolde), you can hear more of that quality in recordings of professional singers.

Of course, my next teacher a few years down the road was not a fan of that style at all.  She preferred the Italian school of thought: Bel Canto.   With bel canto or beautiful singing, one focuses on a lighter quality with more fluid agility , pointing the sound towards the space above the hard palate, stretching up to the point between the eyebrows.  You may want to reference Bellini and possibly Cecilia Bartoli who is a well known practitioner of the style.

In my relatively long ago experience of moving from the one approach to the other, I was given the assignment of singing “like a witch” for two weeks straight.  I suppose my voice teacher thought two weeks could override two years of previous practice. Singing “like a witch” meant that I had to sing everything in my nose and record it as well as listen back over whatever that sounded like followed by journaling on the experience.  Truly, this voice teacher set me up for the spiritual reflection process that would be important to my current path.

The assignment was an over exaggeration calling me to work in the opposite direction for sound produced in the mask of the face.  It felt beyond weird and sounded worse.  However, after two weeks I was completely out of the golf ball territory causing me to almost swallow my sound under the soft palate and I could comfortably access a different internal focus, right above the hard palate of the mouth, in the nasal cavity.  If you’re not sure about those, you can feel the hard and soft palates by flattening your tongue out against the roof of your mouth behind your front teeth and sliding it back towards your throat.

So after two weeks of the one and two years give or take of the other, I could better understand how to access the space in the middle of these.  When I was asked to send my sound towards the middle of the brows, accessing a midway point felt relatively easy.  She was correct that two weeks was enough time for her desired change to take hold.  With more time dedicated to this new placement, I learned to send sound out in an arc between my eyes or up through the crown of the head. These points are also spoken about in Kundalini Yoga as triggers for awakening to your spiritual self which made it much easier to access when I found myself in those practices.

These vocal explorations led to momentary success in producing what the current teacher desired to hear. It also felt lighter and easier to sing this way.

I went on to teach public school music at the elementary level with a volunteer chorus offering in the mornings.  Early on in teaching public school, I was asked to take on private students.  I decided to only work with adults that wanted to give singing a try.  However, later I did begin to say yes to working with singers of all ages in the private studio with the understanding that we would only learn melodies that they liked together and sing to sing. I found myself refusing to train anyone in a specific way or other. If I saw a singer doing something wonky (unhealthy or stressful) in their sound production we would find ways to address that with movement and visualizations but otherwise the rule was to “let your voice be your voice” and don’t worry about sounding a certain way. Looking back on it, mostly I was encouraging better postures, relaxing muscles that were tight, and giving students visual tools that would help them get out of a self sabotaging mind. It was called a voice lesson but often times it was leaning towards a meditative practice.  Maybe I was on the tip of the iceberg I find myself on the underside of these days.

After about seven or eight years in the public system, I was done. I didn’t feel like singing anymore or pretending that I had some remarkable answers to making the best sounds. I thought, “anyone can tell someone else to drop their jaw and release tension”.  I stopped working with people on this topic and focused on my family. When I did come back to sing again, it was through mantra that was part of a yoga practice and my voice was half what it used to be when there at all. I was a mother to two young children, not sleeping well, and not singing much so that makes sense but I knew it was more than that. Some say singing is the truest expression of spirit and mine was lost it seemed. I was only interested in quieter forms of expression for a long while and I began to rely more on a home kundalini yoga practice to feel connected to myself. Thankfully, that grew into feeling connected to something more than me and with that, my sound in mantra became more steady and purposeful.

And now, I find myself a few days out from a vocal session with a former operatic singer who leads sessions in connecting to the voice for healing.  She works with anyone who is open to her work and shows the voice as the key to wellness. She incorporated the bel canto with tantric yogic practices in our session and I found myself laughing a little as I felt like a dog chasing my tail for the past 25 years — always searching for something, you know.  I haven’t been to a vocal class of any kind for at least 15 years and certainly not one focused on myself as the singer.  I attended this session not because I was actively seeking it but through yogic training with the teacher being a guest speaker.  I swear, Life always has so much fun with me and it’s a blessing to feel that way.  The more I notice meaning and synchronicity, the more they appear. The other participants in my training have not previously trained as singers and it was so beautiful to witness them engaging with singing in this non judgmental, healing, and joyful expression of connecting to the pelvic floor and root chakra while letting gentle sounds move through their vocal folds.  We were in a virtual environment and muted apart from the teacher, which in this case seemed to provide the participants ability to make sound freely though under the gentle care of this teacher, I imagine they may have felt this regardless.  I found myself in tears a few times actually, because in a flash my entire path felt connected and purposeful.  I felt a larger hand at play.  How lucky  are we who experience standing directly over our unwitting threads revealed as a more intentional tapestry?

Wahe Guru! I bow my heart and head to the Infinite Teacher.

Letter 9

As we move into the last two days of 2023, we offer for your consideration the final two letters from Thich Nhat Hahn’s Ten Love Letters to the Earth:

IX

Homo Conscius

Dear Mother Earth,

We have given ourselves the name homo sapiens. The precursors of our species began to appear only a few million years ago, in the form of apes such as orrorin tugenensis who could stand, leaving their hands free to do many things. As they learned to use tools and communicate, their brains grew and developed, and over six million years they gradually evolved into homo sapiens. As agriculture and societies emerged, we acquired new capacities unique to our species. We became self-aware and began to question our place in the cosmos. Yet we also developed traits in discord with our true nature. Because of our ignorance and suffering, we have acted with cruelty, meanness, and violence. But we also have the ability, with spiritual practice, to be compassionate and help-ful toward not only our own species but also other species—to become buddhas, saints, and bodhisattvas. All humans, without exception, have this potential to become awakened beings able to protect you, our Mother, and preserve your beauty.

Whether we’re human, animal, plant, or mineral, each of us has the nature of awakening because we are all your offspring. Yet we humans are often proud of our mind consciousness. We are proud of our powerful telescopes and ability to observe distant galaxies. But few of us realize that our consciousness is your own; you are deepening your understanding of the cosmos through us. Proud of our capacity to be aware of ourselves and the cosmos, we overlook the fact that our mind consciousness is limited by our habitual tendency to discriminate and conceptualize. We differentiate between birth and death, being and nonbeing, inside and outside, individual and collective. Nonetheless, there are humans who have looked deeply, cultivated their mind of awareness, and overcome these habitual tendencies, to attain the wisdom of nondiscrimination. They have been able to touch the ultimate dimension within them and around them. They have been able to continue you on the path of evolution, guiding others toward the insight of nonduality, transforming all separation, discrimination, fear, hatred, and despair.

Dear Mother, thanks to the precious gift of awareness, we can recognize our own presence and realize our true place in you and in the cosmos. We humans are no longer naive in thinking ourselves the masters of the universe. We know that in terms of the universe we are tiny and insignificant, and yet our minds are capable of encompassing numberless worlds. We know that our beautiful planet Earth is not the center of the universe, and yet we can still see it as one of the universe’s many wondrous manifestations. We have developed science and technology, and discovered reality’s true nature of no-birth and no-death, of neither being nor nonbeing, neither increasing nor decreasing, neither the same nor different. We realize that the one contains the all, that the greatest is contained within the smallest, and that each particle of dust contains the whole cosmos. We are learning to love you and our Father more, and to love one another in the light of this insight of interbeing. We know that this nondualistic way of seeing things can help us to transcend all discrimination, fear, jealousy, hatred, and despair.

Shakyamuni Buddha was a child of yours who attained full awakening at the foot of the Bodhi tree. After his long journey of seeking, he realized that the Earth is our true and only home, and that heaven, the whole cosmos, and the ultimate dimension can be touched right here with you. Dear Mother, we promise to remain with you throughout countless lifetimes, offering you our talent, strength, and health so that many more bodhisattvas can continue to rise up from your soil.

Letter 8

VIII

Father Sun, My Heart

Dear Father Sun,

Your infinite light is the nourishing source of all species. You are our sun, our source of limitless light and life. Your light shines upon Mother Earth offering us warmth and beauty, helping Mother Earth to nourish us and make life possible for all species. Looking deeply into Mother Earth, I see you in Mother Earth. You aren’t only in the sky but you are also ever-present in Mother Earth and in me.

Every morning, you manifest from the East, a glorious rosy orb shining radiantly in the ten directions. You are the kindest of fathers with a great ability to understand and be compassionate, and yet at the same time you are incredibly bold and courageous. The light particles you radiate travel over 150 million kilometers from your immensely hot crown to reach us here on Earth in just over eight minutes. Every second you offer a small portion of yourself to the Earth in the form of light energy. You are present in every leaf, every flower, and every living cell. But day by day, your great physical mass of fusing plasma, 330,000 times the size of our Earth, is slowly diminishing. Within the next ten billion years most of it will transform into energy, radiating throughout the cosmos, and even though you will no longer be visible in your present form, you will be continued in every photon you have emitted. Nothing will be lost, only transformed.

Dear Father, your creative synergy with Mother Earth makes life possible. Mother’s slight tilt in her orbit offers us the four extraordinary seasons. Her miracle of photosynthesis harnesses your energy and creates oxygen for the atmosphere to protect us from your blazing ultraviolet radiation. Over the eons, Mother has skillfully harvested and stored your sunlight to sustain her children and enhance her beauty. Birds can enjoy soaring through the sky and deer can enjoy darting through the woods because of your creative harmony with Mother Earth. Each species can delight in its element thanks to your nourishing light and the miraculous canopy of the atmosphere embracing, protecting, and nurturing us all.

There is a heart inside of each and every one of us. If our heart were to stop beating, then we would die instantly. But when we look up toward the sky, we know that you, Father Sun, are also our heart. You aren’t just outside of this tiny body of ours, you are within every cell of our body, and the body of Mother Earth.

Dear Father, you are an integral part of the whole cosmos and our solar system. If you were to disappear, then our life, as well as that of Mother Earth, would also end. I aspire to look deeply to see you, Father Sun, as my heart, and to see the interrelationship, the interbeing nature between Father Sun, Mother Earth, myself, and all beings. I aspire to practice to love Mother Earth, Father Sun, and for human beings to love one another with the radiant insight of nonduality and interbeing in order to help us transcend all kinds of discrimination, fear, jealousy, resentment, hatred, and despair.

From Ten Love Letters to the Earth

by Thich Nhat Hahn