Sounding…
The practice of using our voices to heal and engage goes back, well, probably as far as we do as a species.
Through Continuum, I have deepened into my understanding of how I can use sound to meet myself in more and more subtle ways.
I have also seen how this ability to explore and engage through sounding in particular has helped me to discover and know things that go well beyond this body.
So today, I thought I would share some thoughts on sounding.
We are creatures of connection, sounding is one of the ways we can do this.
It is one of the ways we touch the world, offering something of ourselves.
It is one of the ways we exchange with life inside our own living system and each other- through voice, body sounds, or vibration.
Whether we make any vocalization or not, our bodies are already sounding.
If a body is alive, that body is making sound.
Whether that is in a heart beat, through our breath, our organ sounds, our voice speaking, or our quieter whispered hopes or prayers. sound is an expression of our aliveness.
When we use our voice to communicate, we are just shaping and moving the breath intentionally to relay something, so that it and we can be known.
An interesting exploration can be to take a little time each day, over maybe say a two week time period, simply to notice the sounds of your being.
Bringing some conscious attention to notice when and how we use our voice can be enlightening.
I also think it is perhaps just as important to notice the expression of our ordinary, more intimate, internal, every day body sounds.
This is the sound that is underlying, always here, as long as we are alive.
This is the sound that we don’t have to consciously make, but happens anyway, just through our body’s choice to live.
These are the sounds of our heart beat, our breath, our organ sounds, the sighs that emerge.
When we take even a little bit of time to notice, “What is the sound of my being?”, we get to know ourselves and our life expression more intimately.
We get to know our living, breathing, changing, engaging organism.
In Continuum, we work with the idea that sound has an ability to bring consciousness or attention to where it is applied. For example, when we send an “O” sound into our bellies, that helps draw our consciousness into our belly. Sound has a way of lighting up an area with our attention so that we might explore it from a different perspective.
Sound also has an ability to actually shift the organization of the tissues of our body. This is why ultrasound, just for one example, has therapeutic uses.
Sound can help awaken areas of our bodies and create movement that lends itself to fluidity in our tissues.
There is much more I could share here, but for now, what I will say is that sound is movement and helps encourage movement in our systems. I will include a link to a cymatics video for those who are curious and want to go a little further down this wondrous rabbit hole.
In Continuum our sound comes from the inside, through our voice and/or breath. We then can apply it inside or outside depending on how we want to explore or what we want to nourish, move, or engage with.
One other wonderful benefit of sounding can be waking up our tongue. When we enliven and wake up the tongue in new ways it helps to free the spine and begins to encourage the potential for wave motion. A free and engaged tongue leads to a free and engaged spine, that alone is reason to see what sounding can do!
Finally, many in the world have trouble with expression.
Particularly but not exclusively, many female bodies, minorities, or those in challenging family situations or power dynamics, have either had a history of, or are still regularly in, situations where they are being muted or silenced.
Sounding can be a way of using and opening our voices in a safe way. When we sound, creating sound that is not assigned to or restricted by words, we are free from the limitations of what our culture regulates.
When we are simply sounding, without words, we can let our voices be curious, unrestrained, unedited, unbridled even.
We can be with the purity of our sound that is there before the restrictions of language.
In this way, sounding encourages and fosters freedom, exploration, curiosity, play, and healing for the people willing to try it.
As one of us finds new freedom in our voice and being, then on some level, and through the ripples of our shared connections, we all do.
So I sound for me, I sound for you, and I sound for our shared world.
*Photo by Dids