I’m a beginner singer/songwriter. Zero musical background or possibility, but it just sorta… happened.  One mega-huge-feeling baby step at a time.

Because…it feels good to do it. I enjoy it. And thinking about the future or purpose of it is irrelevant and not necessary.

So I’ve written a handful of songs now, that originate from whatever I’m trying to work through in my mind at the time.  And it feels like the lyrics slowly sort of themselves out like solving a riddle.

Sound heals. It can be medicine in the body.  Creating sound helps you connect with your body.  Singing or chanting, like saying ‘Ohm’ in a yoga class, activates the vagus nerve and eases the body into a parasympathetic healing state.

But I do it because it feels good to do it.  It keeps calling me.  It lights me up.

I already have my embodied movement meditation practice, koga.  It never ceases to amaze me to find more and more fidelity within my body, my fascia, and my joints and alignment.  But I’d really glossed around breath, unbeknownst to me.  Now, after reading an entire book about Breath (by James Nestor), I’ve woken back up my awareness – through koga and some Wim Hof practices – to my entire airspace and the muscles that shape it.  And from air comes sound.   It seems like such a obvious path – though it was random meandering in reality.  Baby steps. Baby discoveries. Baby challenges to the self.

This month I’ve been in a somatics course on the Voice, and as a part of the intention I set for myself and my own discovery in the class, I started with a mantra.  And, as my songs so often do, it grew into a song as I explored the energy that I was struggling with – what false thinking is blocking me from seeing and doing what is possible.

This song, called Let Your Voice Out, is on YouTube if you want to hear it, but the lyrics to the verses are:

—Let Your Voice Out—
Finding my voice, finding my way
Ready to trust 
and allowing the day
To be what it is
no more and no less
To let life be a journey
Instead of a test
—Let Your Voice Out—
Freeing my Self from the false I believe
Relaxing my guard 
and learning to live
again in this shell                        
of smell and sight and sound
Alive in our senses and 
wonders to be found
—Let Your Voice Out—
Freeing my voice, energy to air
This energy within me
that i’m ready to share
Simmer in this moment
That’s all that ever was
That everything you’re looking for is
hidden in the pause.
—Let Your Voice Out—

The words are so powerful to me, I could probably speak to the layers behind every verse – but the one calling strongest right now is

“Freeing my Self from the false I believe

Relaxing my guard 

and learning to live“

That in order to free our voice, we have to release ourselves from the false things that we believe to be true. *Especially* about our voice: about singing or just talking.  Thoughts like:

• That I need permission
• That I’m not good enough
• That it’s not safe

But we don’t actually need anyone’s permission – not in the energetic way that we are blocked by it.  We are good enough and it actually is quite safe (when it boils down to what matters and what life is about – I was just out of calibration). Fearful, and tucked inside a little comfort zone.

And the ways now that I’m bringing sound into my life surprises me.  That it is starting to become part of the fabric of who I am.  To let sound, especially non-sensical sound, out of the body feels amazingly liberating to me. 

And repeating one line over and over like a broken record qualifies as non-sensical. 😉

Those few lines above, they speak of how we must get out of our own way. Drop our false beliefs. That we have to stop requiring validation in advance, and fearing “failure” (because I had mis-defined what it meant).  We just gotta start.  Start living in the energy that we want to live in. In mundane, ordinary moments that make up the fabric of our lives.  That ‘fill’ our lives.

So, I had to clean the bathroom tonight. It was on the list.  And the way I typically go about the list is trying to do everything as fast and efficiently as possible.  Instead, for some play, today I decided to clean the bathroom as slowly as necessary, chanting this line over and over – trying to focus on and lose myself the feeling of the singing, the connection and enjoyment of the sound. And connection and embodiment in my body, the koga state.  I had to *allow* the job to take a little longer, and maybe was only 85% clean-as-it-would-have-been, but clean enough.  But it was a pleasant use of my time.  It wasn’t ‘getting a chore off my list’ and being annoyed or rushed, it was singing, and being in my body with its present moment expression.  So weird.  Who knew?  My false beliefs were that it was ‘best’ to do it quickly and efficiently.  But to what cost to enjoyment? Was that even a criteria I placed value on?  Really?  My false belief was that planning on how to do a good job was really still important for such a mundane, harmless thing like cleaning my bathroom.  I had to learn how to do it “mindlessly” (learn again, for I’m sure I knew how to do things mindlessly at some point).  Like teenagers can – and adults criticize them into conforming to that faster and more accurate is worth more than enjoying the time you spend doing it. 

But I’m starting to be in recovery from that false belief.  That finding some joy and play in washing the dishes or cleaning the bathroom far exceeds the time or quality in which they are done.  They will get done, and it will be good enough.  Relax, and let down my guard.  Even against myself, because I find I don’t *have* to defend against myself when I’m truly, truly in the present expression – judgement doesn’t exist there.

And my voice is my current way that I’m finding some of that play. After all, our voice is always right there and available for us.  I started by just connecting more from within, on the energy, and less on the external. And I’ve found baby steps of joy there.