Fear of Singing?

I sing to my clients. I sing to call in guides and angels, or to connect with their higher selves. I sing because it seems more powerful to me than just speaking the words. And my clients tell me it makes what I do seem so mystic, so special, so magical, so holy.

But when I ask them to sing with me, most of them don’t do it. Some are too shy. Okay, I can kind of understand that. I’m a professional singer, I have chops. But this is not about that. Some are afraid to look foolish. What, in front of me? Are you kidding? I’m sitting here singing, do I look foolish?

But I think for many, the idea of singing with someone in a kind of healing communion is terrifying, because it opens them up to the possibility that their carefully maintained emotional levee might not hold.

It is impossible to know when humans first started to sing. Did we croon to our babies even before we had language? Did we imitate animal sounds and play with the noises we could make in a rhythmic way? Did we make up melodies before we could construct sentences? I’m betting we did. Singing is old magic, and I’ll also betcha drumming either came right before or right after.

I don’t know of any esoteric traditions that don’t use some kind of chanting, singing or “intoning” that uses a particular pitch, rhythm or stress on the voice to make change happen in the mind, or in the world. Most of the major religions rely on music to enhance or create a specific emotional state in their congregants. Music is a powerful trigger for the limbic system, which is what causes our hair to stand on end, gooseflesh to cover our arms or legs, and a lump to rise in our throats.

Oh, yes, music, tears and snot are a powerful combination.

I can’t tell you how many times I have clenched my teeth, squeezed my butt cheeks, bit my tongue or chewed on a lip to keep from bursting into hysterically euphoric tears when sitting in a concert hall listening to the holy sounds of genius well-lubricated with inspiration. (Squeezing the butt cheeks seems to work the best, fyi.)

So maybe we fear singing because we fear our emotions. We also fear the euphoria that music brings because – gulp – we don’t want to have to come back down and drive home and go to bed and set the alarm clock and get up tomorrow and go to work and deal with the bills and take the trash out . . . because all that mundane shit harshes our buzz so hard.

You can’t live at that peak all the time, though. You’d fry all your circuits in a few months.

I have a guitar student from the Congo. It seems so very strange to him that in America we don’t sing to each other. We sing along with the radio maybe, or we sing in the shower, or we sing in church, but that’s all . . . very safe and unemotional. In the Congo they sing when a baby is born, because they want the first sound the baby hears to be singing. They sing when someone is dying, because they want the last sound a person hears to be singing. They sing at every gathering, for every occasion. School days start with singing. He calls his parents on the phone and they sing. Music is their blood, the life-stream itself. It is what keeps them strong, and makes them a community.

Singing does cause sensations to percolate through our bodies in ways we may not be able to control. It’s so very intimate. People get confused, they start feelin’ stuff they can’t label. Singing together is a peculiar kind of mind-meld, and it does stir things up. Singing with intention is a kind of turn-on, and because many  of us are out of practice feeling that specific flavor of turn-on it can be extremely confusing. How am I supposed to act? What am I supposed to do with this energy? I need this to be over so I can get out of here!

It’s okay. Here’s what you do. Breathe. Relax. You are safe. Everything is more than fine. What you are feeling is love, Universal and Divine. So seldom do we, particularly us career centric Westerners, genuinely connect with the Divine that we wouldn’t recognize it if it came up and clocked us on the gob. You are feeling the effervescence of your own body as it rejoices in remembrance of the Divine Connection to the Audible Life Stream from Source.

This is nothing that anyone has done to you. This is what your body does when you allow it to go home.

So what do you do with this energy? Again, being a little out of practice in the whole “turn-on” business, we frequently mistake this kind of excitement for the other kind of turn-on, that begs for release. This is not that kind of turn-on. What you do with this energy is you send it to your energetic bodies. You send it to your Heart Chakra to distribute through your chakra system. You store it in your power center. You channel it into your meridians and cycle it through your whole body. You send it to your broken bits to heal them. You use it to craft the strongest intention you can imagine and you put that intention out to the Universe and you hold on to the end of it like a kite for dear life and you do whatever it takes to turn that intention into your life.

Here’s what I want you to do, sometime today, in the privacy of your own home, in your car, or someplace where nobody can hear you. I want you to allow yourself three satisfying breaths. Don’t think about anything in particular, just breathe. Relax. And on the fourth breath, allowing your throat to be as relaxed as possible, I just want you to sing “ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh” when you breathe out. Just a nice long “ahhhh,” on a pitch that allows your vocal cords to be completely at rest. On the next exhale, sing “ahhhhh-ohhhhh-oommmmm,” and then inhale and sing it again. Three times. Then go back to whatever you were doing and just notice how you feel. Do it tomorrow, maybe five times, and maybe again tomorrow night. Then the next day do it seven times, morning and night, and continue for a few days. If the “ahhhh” is too much, just hum at first, and see if you can open up.

After that becomes comfortable, I want you to sing a prayer of gratitude to whatever you pray to. If you don’t pray, then send your song into the Cosmos, or just make something up. Point is, sing your prayer instead of thinking it or whispering it. Sing it, morning and night, after the Oms. And notice how you feel.

Because the Universe is made of vibrating strands of energy, singing to it is highly appropriate. You will get its attention. See if you have more to be grateful for the more you sing to it. I’d love to know, so be sure and come back to leave a comment below.