day 16

- today is the first day i missed.

this saddens me but I plan on doing twice the length tomorrow to make up for it.

today was extremely emotionally turbulent and I seem to be all consumed by that and forgot to do my meditation.

day 14 and 15

om mani padme hum - chant for self-compassion....taken from Silvia Nakkach's book "free your voice"

begin, continue...

i could chant this one every day for the rest of my life probably. this is my work...

self compassion. self love.

Day 12 and 13

both of these days were silent internal meditations. according to Silvia Nakkach, there are three kinds of sounds: inner, outer and secret. I was meditating on the secret sounds these days.

not much to report since i have fallen behind on writing these blogs and don't totally remember my experience. i do remember that for day 13, the theme of self-compassion came up pretty strong again.

this seems to be a recurring theme that is coming up. and this seems to be the area of most necessity during what has turned out to be an emotionally challenging time for me. i realize that when there is a strong foundation of self love and compassion then we no longer look to the outside, including things, substances, people, places to fill the void we are perceiving in the core of our being. agape is selfless love, love flowing from the inside out, effortlessly.

i know i am pure love and yet i forget.

i know i am pure love and yet i grieve for people who have not truly seen me. appreciated me. valued me.

there is a deep sadness that comes along with the feeling of not being seen for real. there is nothing i can do to help others see me though is there? projections and veils of illusions over the "other" are for them to dissolve, not for me to push myself into their reality. i have to keep the focus on my heart and opening to supportive loving individuals who are trusting and honor my gifts and authenticity.

Day 11 - Eureka!

tonights vocal meditation was powerful! i have been staying at my friends house and she wanted to sit with me and meditate so we lit a candle in her living room and faced her communal altar. she lit some sage and we started. i chanted ah for a long time. at some point i was tilting my head to the left and right while chanting "ah" and i noticed my jaw had completely relaxed and stopped clicking in the way that it normally does every time i open and close my jaw! i was so amazed! i got insight that there is nothing actually wrong with my jaw except i need to continue to chant and use ah and om to relax the jaw and let it go back into it's healthy and natural track. (this is a huge revelation). i have been to many healers to work on my jaw, and nothing helps it in a lasting way. of course, as my lesson that continues to reveal itself in life, the answers are indeed within. i have the ability to relax myself in a lasting way as long as I have the ability to sing. humming is another great vibrational way to actually internally massage the bones and muscles in the neck and face which i intend on using as part of this 40 day vocal med practice.

the other part that i have to write about is that last night i touched the void. this has happened to me on one other occasion in my life while under the influence of a powerful healing medicine. it's hard to explain but I will try... it's basically a direct experience that nothing is actually happening in this life. that i / we nothing actually really exists. it's the ultimate dream of all dreams. consciousness has dreamt up some grand illusion of world, universe, galaxies but nothing or time actually exists in any tangible "real" way. the only thing that anchored me the first time i experienced this was the music, or at that time the icaros being sung. this was the same last night. i was touching/experiencing the void, not sure how my hand was still pumping the shruti box, how i was still singing, it was all effortless. the only thing that was anchoring me back into this so called physical reality was the voice and the shruti. wow. i didn't expect this last night at all! it made me really happy. it put so much into perspective. no worries can hold a flame to the experience of the void. it evaporates any concerns in a way that of course isn't lasting but it's great for feeling the larger perspective of the universe or the non-universe, as the case may be. in trying to think about relationships that haven't worked in this context, none of it really seems to matter. the void is not a place of hopelessness. it's not the great nothing from the neverending story. its the greatest most beautiful liberating nothingness that one could ever imagine. there's a deep liberation in it because it's the direct sense that nothing good or bad has ever happened, that there is not time, there is no success, no failure. this is maybe what adyashanti was referring to in his book "emptiness dancing". i haven't read that one but it feels like it has a similar essence. like spirit or consciousness is dancing and playing with itself by merely creating a reflection of itself that seems very real but in fact isn't... now go pinch yourself...

Days 9 and 10

I am combining days 9 and 10 because I did the same format for both and the results were surprisingly... very similar! I have been staying at a friends house this weekend and decided to make these nights simple. I chanted OM for about 18 minutes both nights. What happened in my body was slowed heart rate and deep relaxation. i breathed in full long breaths and then OM on the exhale on a fairly low note. at some point the "i" kind of disappeared and there was just om being chanted. very simple practice and also profound. this is what people need to do on their breaks during their 10 hour workdays to de-stress!

day 8

full moon tonight!

what does this mean for my vocal meditation? i had a lot of excess mental thought energy weaving in and out of the meditation. however, when i first sat down i felt my inner body and how extremely still it was. there was such a deep peace that i was just happy to notice this. this has become one of my "markers" of how relaxed i am and how stable my nervous system is becoming or at least gaining more of an ability to stabilize itself after the day in the crazy city of oakland.

my voice was soft tonight as its late and i didn't want to wake my roommates up. but there was a real ease with which the sounds were flowing out.

i explored mah, shanti, o and mostly just AH. there wasn't a lot of intention tonight. i started having a whole conversation about what the point of doing this 40 day vocal meditation is. would it be somehow more meaningful if I started out with some definitive intention to manifest something? to pray for a certain thing and see what transpires? should i read some more books on what the best methods of vocal meditation are to get the "results i desire"... blah blah blah, monkey mind.... blah blah blah. and then i just said, emily, all you're doing here is exploring the voice and seeing what happens each day. if you want to create a more concrete intention than you can. you only are 8 days into this thing. just chill out and honor the full moon and sing shanti. ahhh, ok simple enough.

this is my process... is what i am doing "enough"? not usually for my ego. but this is part of what might be broken through, through this process. this incessant feeling of nothing ever being enough to satisfy my ego.

so i returned back to compassion. ah, my dear friend who is becoming a closer ally everyday. i am making friends with my buddy compassion who is, what? still right there for me. after not paying attention to it for many years, compassion is starting to make its way deeper and deeper into my being in a way that is a surprise to me. yeh! i love surprises!

i am signing off now. full moon HOWL...! 

Day 7

tonights vocal med was challenging. i had a lot of resistance to just sitting down to do it. this might be especially due to the previous day's session not being in the traditional spot that i have been doing it but who knows.

the candle i lit was flickering so much it was making me dizzy and i ended up blowing it out. my senses seem to be on overdrive these days. usually i love staring at the still flame and it becomes part of the meditation but tonight it was distracting and dizzily dancing in front of me...

i arrived at chanting: om namo bhagavate vasudevaya. interesting that this is what found its way to my lips because this chant means liberation and is used as a way of attaining freedom. freedom from resistance is what I am ultimately seeking. being resistant to any experience is the root of suffering in my experience. when somewhere in the body or mind or emotional body, there is a NO to what is occurring in that moment there is suffering. there is a fighting or an opposition to directly what is actually occurring.

i also felt a lot of anger rise up in me towards the end. anger that needs to be sung out and released so that it doesn't become toxic in my body.

so i turned to compassion. more tears at the remembrance that compassion is accessible to me always. i just need to slow down and remember that it's there. a resource. an endless well upon which to drink from and nourish all the layers of my being.

i am remembering now that i love to write. i love to blog. maybe that is partially what this vocal meditation is showing me. i used to journal everyday in high school. i have saved all of my journals. there are lots... filled with a lot of the same themes, love, loss, sadness, processing relationships, etc... but this blog is giving me another vehicle to express and write and give myself permission to be human. i am human being human.

human being human.   

Day 6

I took some creative liberty with today's vocal meditation... (it was bound to happen sooner or later : )

I went to a bar called Alley Cat in Oakland. There is a piano player there named Ron Dibble who is somewhat of a legend I learned. He plays piano and knows hundreds of songs by heart. He's been playing there for 53 years! I basically ended up singing 4 songs with him playing piano. As a singer I have tended to shy away from anything that slightly resembles karaoke. I warmed up to the idea with some help from my friend who I was there with. By the end of the night, we were all sitting around Ron's grand piano which has a huge top that extends out and there is a circle of mic's where people sit and sing songs until late night. I was nervous the first song and then slowly started to surrender and give in to this laid back and very informal 'cheers' bar type setting. it was like classic karaoke in the round.

although i don't intend on expanding that far out with what I call vocal meditation I think it's important to acknowledge that for me this was a practice. singing in a karaoke style setting which I have snubbed in some form my whole life. as a singer i thought i don't really want to sound "bad" like so many people do while singing others songs, but i also thought it would be too pretentious to sound too "good".

i had to let go of both sounding good or bad and just have fun with it. it felt like a breakthrough of sorts because it really allowed me to not take myself too seriously. and some of the time i think i sounded ok and some of the time it was a stretch b/c i was playing with another musician for the first time and trying to navigate his style of playing while singing songs i wasn't all that familiar with.

lesson- learning to relax and give in to something i had mental resistance to can be a healing and reparative experience!

ok- about to do today's vocal med...

Day 5

Today's practice:

- 5 seed syllables (tibetan tradition) : ah om hung ram dza
- first started praying to white tara for clarity, hope, grace, strength, compassion, dharana (single pointed focus)
"White Tārā, also known for compassion, long life, healing and serenity; also known as The Wish-fulfilling Wheel, or Cintachakra" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tara_%28Buddhism%)

last part: chanted buddha nature affirmation (see post from day 3) and three long exhaled ah's
felt like i was breathing the universe in through my whole being
feeling love from the entire universe, holy shit...

Day 4

today i waited until the house grew quiet late in the evening to do my practice. this was not intentional and probably not the smartest decision...because of this i felt self-conscious, like everyone could hear me including the 2 house guests staying in different rooms on either end of the house. i chanted with the shruti for a few minutes and then decided to explore what it would be like if I just chanted with no drone the entire duration of my practice. so i did it. i chanted the gayatri mantra for the rest of the time.  The mantra:

Oṃ bhūr bhuvaḥ svaḥ

tát savitúr váreṇ(i)yaṃ

bhárgo devásya dhīmahi

dhíyo yó naḥ pracodáyāt

 

The meaning according to http://www.sathyasai.org

We contemplate the glory of Light illuminating the three worlds: gross, subtle, and causal.

I am that vivifying power, love, radiant illumination, and divine grace of universal intelligence.

We pray for the divine light to illumine our minds.

 

 

 

The most powerful insight I got while chanting this was that at all times we can chose to not be in resistance with reality. We can approach our lives with a full yes to absolutely everything that we feel, hear, touch, taste, experience, etc. What if I were to make this my moment to moment practice, to say yes to it all? This is, after all, the true path to awakening yes? Living in the reality which is actually occurring rather than the one the I is willing to have happen but continuously gets disappointed because it's not happening it's way hardly any of the time.I practiced this the other day when I was driving and it helped me feel such a deeper state of peace and ok-ness with the decisions that other drivers were making instead of feeling like each "stupid" decision made by others was a personal assault on my being. wow, it took so much pressure and energy off of me to do anything extra than just driving. so this practice is something i intend to do more of. being in agreement with the ultimate reality that is happening and has always been happening whether I like it or not...

thank you Gayatri...

Day 3

Buddha nature pervades the whole universe
existing right here, right now
I dedicate the merit of this practice to all sentient beings
together we realize liberation...(adyashanti)
Halleluja.
noticing how much more open my voice is later in the day, after doing a workshop that i did a little toning and chanting at when singing higher notes, my jaw gets more tense
the first half of my vocal meditation practice consisted of chanting a medicine melody that i don't actually know the words to because its in another language i am not familiar with... so i just sang the sounds like i remember them. i changed my shruti box today to b flat. days 1 and 2 were to c major and g (perfect 5th). the perfect 5th created a sound spiral vortex which is the same auditory version of the spiral found almost everywhere in nature, called the golden mean, or fibonacci sequence. when we consistently play or sing the c and g together we come into more coherent resonance with our natural vibration and into alignment with right path. one of my teachers, John Beaulieu, teaches this thoroughly in his trainings. his tuning forks tuned to certain octavized notes of c and g have a profound calming affect on the nervous system and can immediately center and ground the nervous system in an immediate way. i have not experienced anything more effective than his tuning forks. http://www.biosonics.com/
He says that you can tune the body just like you can tune any instrument. when you are tuned you are living from a higher functioning vibration and from this place we can be more authentic and be able to course correct more effectively when we come up against challenges and adversity. i have also found this to be true. being soaked in the sounds of the perfect 5th i am able to hold my own frequency with more clarity of my own boundaries, feeling the sense of being a differentiated human being in relation to others that i come into contact with all day long.

Day 2 Vocal Meditation

throat chakra was blocked tonight and it took me a while to be able to make a sound...today my ass got kicked by the universe. testing my resiliency, my ability to stand in the face of stressful news and adversity. tears came before sound. i started chanting home over and over again. where is home? where is my home spirit? with hand on heart, more tears continue to fall. praying through song, for clarity, peace, and then ended up singing "it's all gonna be ok" until some part of me really believed that. i am right here love. come and find me. open arms, open heart. where is my home? it's all gonna be ok. making minor notes, i noticed that there was a distinct vibrato quality that was happening between my voice and the shruti box. because I was holding a note that wasn't in resonance with the tones from the shruti, there was some sort of dissonance and dischord happening in my throat. when i stopped after about 23 minutes my hearing had heightened significantly and i could hear with a new sensitivity that wasn't there before. it's all gonna be ok. i pray for clarity. i pray for abundance. i pray for clarity. i put my hand on my heart, tears fall. we all could stand to have more compassion for ourselves every moment of every day. i want to feel more compassion for myself. i am just spirit in form wanting to realize itself so i can go back to spirit without form...but for now, i am flesh and blood and bones and tears and teeth and muscle and fingers and toes. i am heart and soul and i am innocent and i am guilty of not feeling enough compassion for myself. i pledge to remember that this gift is always available to me, from me. compassion. hand on heart. open arms. open eyes. i sing you into being and you find me...ready to leap.

Day 1 of 40 days of Vocal Meditation practice

Today I started what is the beginning of a 40 day vocal meditation practice that I will be blogging about daily, documenting the transformation that occurs from a daily practice. Initially there was no set intention or goal for this other than to be an open and receptive channel to messages, visions, insights and transformations that come through a consistent practice of opening the voice. I am using a shruti box as the drone for my voice. The shruti lays a steady foundation in which the voice can play and weave in and out of. Explorations in mantras, affirmations, prayers, words, made up languages, and ultimately losing the sense of any permanent "I" is part of what I will be looking at throughout this process. Establishing this practice is a way to become more connected with the shruti box as it's own magical instrument, and a vehicle to feel more deeply connected with my voice and inner experiences while singing and chanting.  I am holding the potential of global and individual healing as the foundation for doing this practice.
I am also in the beginning stages of finding a producer to work with on reconstructing my songs into an electronic/folk hybrid album. The daily vocal meditation practice is a means to singing/expressing to the universe that I intend to keep singing on the front burner for the rest of my life. The form that this takes will change daily and I am meaning to make peace with it looking however it looks for me, acknowledging that my way is unique, and starting to remove the comparison trap that has caused me to not move forward in any significant way for many years. I am giving myself the PERMISSION. Permission to sing, permission to authentically express my truths, and ultimately permission to share anything of value to anyone else who wants to listen and is interested in honesty, humor, creative expression and truth.

I will be blogging daily to share what happened during the meditation.

Notes from my 1st day:

- Spirit of my Granny Jones (my mom's mom's mom) unexpectedly appeared and was sitting on my bed behind me (whoa, don't think I have ever had a visit from her spirit!)
- I could feel the lineage of woman and my ancestors in a row behind me
- the sound "ah" opens the heart
- the sound "om" seals and grounds
So chanting ah - om is a way of opening and then sealing the energy in a way
- chanting and singing the pain of woman who have come before me
- started singing in "someone else's" voice, my facial position and jaw placement changed and I was making some form of crooked opening with my mouth. felt like it was relieving pain and tmj issues I have had for over 3 years in my jaw...

Ok - more tomorrow : )

Love, Light & Play