A graceful moment came just a few days after I arrived in California. Sage and his daughter, Gaia, were going on a field trip for school and were away for about five days. I was staying at Sage's mother's house with his daughter, Tyenia, who was attending a healing circle and asked me if I would like to go with her. The group of about 8 or 9 men and women sat on the floor in a circle. In the middle was a crystal singing bowl. After an opening exercise of breathing, we began to tone to the crystal singing bowl. I was astonished at the sounds that came out of me. They were angelic and other worldly. Until this time I hadn't been able to tone. I was used to singing from a musical score, so to allow myself to sing something that wasn't written down (especially in front of others) was very uncomfortable for me. During this toning session, I had an incredible feeling of warmth and a sense of healing that filled my body and soul. After that evening, I began toning every day in some way or other. I still was uncertain of myself and a little uncomfortable, but I just knew somehow that the toning was helping me.
One of the books I read during this time was Singing Lessons: A Memoir, of Love, Loss, Hope and Healing by Judy Collins. This is a poignant autobiography of her struggle with alcohol addiction, and the tragic suicide of her only son, Clark. The book includes a CD with the title song of the same name. I must have played that song 200 times during the time I was reading the book. I found myself relating to her pain and feeling my own pain very deeply.
God of the rivers and the waterfalls.
God of thunder and lightening.
God of the plains and mountains, of rainbows and prairies.
God of birth and death
Of love and hope.
God of sun and moon.
God of ocean tides.
You drive the stars.
You of perfect light.
Teach me how to sing.
And it came to pass on a cloudy night,
That I found myself lost in the dark.
And the wind drew cold, and I was afraid.
And if love were lost how would I lead.
You were gone like mist, in the fading light.
And my broken dreams wept in the night.
Where is all the love we had known before
In the sea of tears, would I reach the shore.
God of sun and moon.
God of ocean tides.
You drive the stars.
You of perfect light.
Teach me how to sing.
I was on my knees. I was at the end.
There was nothing left. I would never mend.
When I heard a song, In the waves that tossed.
Death is not the end, There is nothing lost.
God of sun and moon.
God of ocean tides.
You drive the stars.
You of perfect light.
Teach me how to sing.
Music of the spheres, through eternity
Say that through your tears, you will always see
Say the more you loose that the more you own
And the more you love that the more you have grown
Say the thing you feel, opens up your heart.
Where the swallows flew, there was once a choir
Now the sun was bright, and the river smiled
And I heard you say, "Death is just a dream
Wake your songs again, You must always sing."
God of sun and moon
God of ocean tides
You drive the stars
You of perfect light
Teach me how to sing.
God of everything
Teach me how to sing.
I knew there was a message for me in this song. It wasn’t just the emotion of the song, but the request for trust to open up to singing from the soul. I had sung soulfully many times before, and had experienced ecstatic moments in music when I felt a deep connection to the divine. But I was singing someone else’s song. My song was longing to be given voice. I immediately ordered some tapes about toning, freeing my voice, and silencing the inner critic that had held me back from expressing. Sage continued to encourage me at every opportunity. We began toning together. Toning allowed us to tap into the intelligence within, and communicate with our spirit essence as well as the essence of all sentient beings. Since the universe is made up of vibrations, it is a way of communicating with all that is. Astronomers have told us that even pulsars make sounds.
Barbara Max Hubbard, a contemporary philosopher, says, "I believe that music, sound, and auditory vibration make up a critical factor in the graceful path to the next stage of revolution." I became a "walker between the worlds", as Caitlin Matthews defines the shaman in her book Singing the Soul Back Home: Shamanism in Daily Life. Sage and I started working with sound and breath to travel to other levels of consciousness such as trance and ecstasy. We utilized the sounds of the didgeridoo, the drum and our voices to move into these other states of consciousness. I had undergone out-of-body experiences during meditation before as well as near-death experiences after traumatic physical injury, but these experiences were different. There was a more profound sense of freedom and safety that I hadn't known before. Sometimes there was a great release of emotion just before I moved into the altered state. I wondered at times if I was reverting back to a behavior I had learned in my childhood of disassociating. Maybe in a clinical sense, I was, but I was able to come back at will (and with the help of Sage) when we felt the process was complete. At all times our intention was to work with love and to evoke a greater sense of healing within us both.
One of these experiences that came to me during a session was about the trauma I had endured during the mastectomy and reconstruction surgery in 1997. I had read in some well-meaning journal that, "Some women elect to have the procedure done immediately after the mastectomy so that they never feel the loss of the breast." I was brought to tears. How could someone have been so unfeeling, clinical, and disconnected as to believe that just because a woman's shape had not drastically changed, that she would not experience a tremendous sense of loss connected to losing a breast? During this healing session, I touched the profound sense of grief and loss that I never dealt with before. A part of my body that was connected with nurturing and womanliness had been cut off, and thrown away. It hurt, and it hurt deeply. I was able to release much of the pain and trauma through sounds, and finally mourn my loss.
I believe that the level of love and trust that Sage and I were able to attain during these sessions opened up new realms of experience for us. We have had the experience of feeling the deep connection with each other's souls and surrendering and merging our beings into something greater. I have heard this experience referred to as the "crack between the worlds". Annie Dillard in her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek says:, "The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clifts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icey narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk to gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn and unlock--more than a maple--a universe."
I am learning that shamanic healing is an unknown journey. It asks me to step out of my habitual roles, my conventional scripts, and improvise my life. Gabrielle Roth talks about this in her book Maps to Ecstasy: Teachings of an Urban Shaman. She says, "We have to live on the edge, between the lines, somewhere between matter and spirit, masculine and feminine, darkness and light, leader and follower, stillness and motion. We venture like tightrope walkers over the abyss of the unknown." Healing on a soul level involves instincts and intuition, trust and courage. There is no textbook that defines a protocol for this type of healing. "Shamans transmit to their people in sign, song, and dance the nature of the cosmic geography that has been revealed to them in the process of initiation trances and soul journeys, " says Joan Halifax in Shaman: The Wounded Healer.
After working with sound and energy through breath work and tantric practice for two months, I returned to Hawaii. In August I went back to Queens Medical Center on Oahu for the surgery. Sage had composed and recorded music for me to use as part of my healing regimen. I listened to it almost constantly for two days before the surgery was scheduled. The morning of the surgery I woke up early and prayed and meditated for about an hour. Some of my requests that morning were that just the right person would be at the hospital to do healing touch with me before the surgery, that the surgeon and all the support people be blessed, and that if it were the best for me, that the surgery wouldn't even be necessary. I felt a great sense of peace and serenity that day.
As I arrived at the hospital in the early morning, the same wonderful Hawaiian woman who had done healing touch with me before my surgery two years earlier was the nurse who took me to my room. We recognized each other immediately. I burst into tears and told her that I had prayed for the right person to do healing touch with me before surgery, never believing that it might be the very same person. Her eyes filled with tears, and she said, "I can't do healing touch with you today. The nurses say that I take too much time with people." I was upset and asked her if she would have her supervisor come to talk with me. When the head nurse came in, I explained all that had been happening and asked if the other nurse could please work with me for a few minutes. She said she would see what she could do, and a few minutes later the other nurse came in. We had a very tearful, tender, and short prayer together.
Shortly after that the orderly came in to take me to the x-ray area to perform an ultrasound on the breast so that they could mark the areas where the tumors were with wires. This makes it easier for the surgeon to actually see where the tumors are. I was still in a very calm and serene state. I remember sitting in the hallway outside of the x-ray area, and as people passed by me they looked at me. I wonder if my aura was glowing, or maybe I just looked strange sitting in the lotus position in a wheelchair all wrapped up in blankets with earphones on. Lots of people along the way asked me what I was listening to. I told them that my partner had composed music for me to listen to during my surgery, and that I believed it was helping to heal me.
Soon I was taken into the ultrasound area. The technician prepped me and started the procedure. After a few minutes, she had a puzzled look on her face. I asked her what was wrong, and she said, "Wait just a minute. I'm going to go and get the radiologist to help me." I wasn't sure what was happening, but I had an idea. The radiologist came in and also asked me about the headphones and what I was listening to. He thought it was interesting, but wasn't really curious. He worked for a few minutes, and then walked across the room to look at the films that had been done two months before. Several times he attempted by using a different angle of the ultrasound, but could not find the tumors in my breast! They had disappeared. I was overjoyed, amazed, and extremely grateful for the healing that had taken place. The radiologist said, "Whatever it is you are doing there [pointing to the headphones], keep doing it." He went up to surgery to speak to my surgeon, tell her what he had determined, and show her the films. When he returned he said, "She said to tell you congratulations, you can go home now." When I arrived back at the floor where my room was, and the orderly wheeled me around the corner in my wheelchair, the nurses were all lined up across the hall giving me a standing ovation. Obviously, the news of my miracle had traveled through the hospital that day.
Music without words means leaving behind the mind. And leaving behind the mind is meditation.
Meditation returns you to the source. And the source of all is sound. — Kabir
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