E007 - Releasing voices and healing blocks

Hey Lovely Folk

So this is going to be another episode of unplanned, unscripted communication.

Watch the video, or read about it in the blog, posted below:

As you can see I'm sitting on a tropical island, it’s been raining a little bit, kind of windy and here we are.

I wanted to share with you a little bit about what it's like doing the work releasing voices, making music on this island; I'm down in the southeast at a place called The Sanctuary Thailand. A beautiful retreat venue. So, people come here to heal and detox - and sometimes retox - but really what I come here to do is run a workshop, which I'll be doing tomorrow for three days with my wonderful colleague Fiona Soma but I'm also doing one-on-ones and leading meditations and leading music evenings and it's pretty awesome. There's a lot of barefoot walking down sandy paths with Indian minor birds chirruping in there in the trees and then there's just the work really, and just to share what it's like, I'd love to share, for example, Sunday night - Fiona and I work together, we put together just a really simple plan for a two-hour session, we were working in a hall called Buddha Hall surrounded by mosquito netting in the jungle at night 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. In the dark, the insects going wild outside us, giant crickets the size of horses!

And so, we filled the venue, we had to turn a few people away - it was humming, if you'll excuse the pun but what we did is, Fiona took people through TRE for an hour and TRE is Trauma and Tension releasing exercises, where the body relearns to shake and that got everyone into a really deep and grounded state and then I led the second session which was really around voice, of course.

What we did is we got everyone into four or five groups, each with an affirmation. We decided to work with the idea of a mantra and really the backstory to this is that mantras are really interesting - the idea that I spoke about was that every day we tell ourselves the awful mantras “I don't have enough money, I'm super scared, I'm really anxious, I'm overwhelmed, I'm not skinny enough, I'm not young enough,” whatever the mantras are, we just keep telling ourselves the same stories all day long in our heads, day after day, year after year.  This idea with the mantra is to sing something that illuminates, heals or provides a positive viewpoint and keep singing that, keep singing that until we replace that negative condition.

So we just took some very simple English phrases, four or five of them and gave them to different parts of our crowd, grouped into four or five people and I was playing guitar and then one group of four would come up with a melody and they would just sing that particular mantra and then another group would sing another one and so all four, in fact it was five, groups of people were each singing completely different melodies to these chords and the notes and the words all around the room, we're just kind of tumbling and falling all over each other and there was this incredible carpet of sound of human beings singing together, melodies that they'd never heard before, no idea really what they were doing and I'd say 60 to 80 percent of the people who joined us that evening were scared to sing but all of a sudden everyone was just singing and it was just a spontaneous creative choir of clueless, joyful, willing people and it was just beautiful.  It was kind of one level of kind of holy, you could almost say. Without going into my head, all the neurology and the studies say that singing in choirs and group singing and mantra singing is unbelievably good for us, for our stress levels, heart rate variability and so on.

 The living effect of that, where you have human beings all facing each other, kind of connecting, becoming vulnerable is really beautiful. You know people just light up, they become less defended. So that was really beautiful, that's just one microcosm of people singing, words tumbling over each other and you know, that without sounding like a Hallmark card, one thing happens in those sessions and actually that's spontaneous, real, naked joy, the elusive feeling that we all want to feel more of, it just comes, it just comes.

I've been doing a bunch of one-on-ones, which are really beautiful. Those are private sessions with people who want to work through their blocks and those are really tender and beautiful. You know, I present on Sundays, we all present, all the people who work here, to all the new people who have arrived to do some healing and when I speak about releasing voices and the potential there I can always see there are people in the audience whose eyes open like saucers because when I talk to the idea that some of them might have had blocked voices for their whole lives, the ones who have it, they know and they really want to work and it's really tender…

Anyway, maybe that's it for today - it's pretty beautiful and awesome being out here.

Thanks for watching. I’d love you to leave a comment on this video, if you find anything interesting or that attracts you in any particular way. And right about now, you'll see some other videos that you could be watching that connect to how to liberate your voice, like this humming video.

With love,

Jeremy