Singing is not therapy

Yatharth:

You said something during the retreat, that shocked me: “Singing is not therapy.”

Marisa:

Mmm...What shocked you about it?

Yatharth:

It was blasphemous! You’re not supposed to say that. Singing these days, and dancing, and yoga and everything is supposed to be about healing the individual. The customer is always right, you know. What you said felt like drawing outside that line.

It stuck with me, you know. I keep thinking about it.

Marisa:

Interesting. What’s thinking about it like for you?

Yatharth:

Liberating! It’s like someone said the truth. Singing is bigger than me. It’s not just about me. It’s big, and beautiful, an expression of intimacy, a visceral need, the song of the forests, the song of me. Singing can be therapeutic, but it is not therapy.

It let me relate to singing on its own terms, as its own art form. A proper other. Bigger than any project of self-improvement or self-healing I may be on. Therapeutic, but not therapy.

I’m curious what it means to you, and why you say it.

Marisa:

Okay, here's a bit of...a story, I suppose. As a composer, performer, creator artist person for my entire life, I've gone through a number of explorations of what it means to be an artist.

I remember that when I was a very young and (disembodied and traumatized) teenager, I only understood music and plays and paintings through my mind and through narrative - what is the story they are telling? What is the author trying to say? Is it a “good” thesis? Do I agree or not? I literally remember sitting listening to Beethoven in the concert hall once and trying to keep myself interested by making up stories in my mind about what he was “trying to say.”

Now, I'm not mad at myself for that way of listening, and I'm not saying that lens is wrong.

But what I noticed as I evolved over many years and especially once I began my profoundly devotional journey into embodiment, was that there were different languages other than the language of story and narrative. There were perceptual languages, for example - languages of sensing and hearing.

Through my work with Libero Canto (along with my tantric studies over years, meditation, and studies in anthroposophy), I learned how to listen through my body. Part of what that developed within me was a completely new relationship with my emotions. I realized emotions were not always related to my story about something that was happening. They lived in my body as expressions in and of themselves.

Now, how does this related to singing and music and being an artist? Well, I gradually understood what it meant that music could be an expression in and of itself. Not for the purpose of communicating something specific. The music itself was the expression. ​Not everything is a means to an end. Some things just ARE.​ And in their essence, their very Being-ness, alchemy is occurring. Because transformation and ever-emergent aliveness just ARE.

We can sing for its own sake because singing is beauty incarnate, life incarnate, expression incarnate. When our default lens through which we see the world believes everything is for the purpose of something else, we can end up objectifying our very bodies - seeing ourselves as machines - rather than realizing we are already right here, unfolding ourselves in every moment as art.

So, you see, singing is indeed therapeutic. In fact, exploring “free singing” through the particular Libero Canto lens that my teacher Deborah Carmichael offered, was hands down the most sustaining therapeutic practice in my life. But part of why it was therapeutic, is because there was a more profound vision, an artistic vision at the center. This is how I've come to interpret that vision:

Singing is life-giving in and of itself. Learning to be with your body, to feel your feelings and to express your emotions - this is life-giving in and of itself.

Vocal De-Armoring is not therapy because the primary stated goal is not therapy. We alchemize what’s inside the body, what’s stuck in the system, not only to release it or move it out of us so that we “heal,” but because WE EXIST and Aliveness is our birthright. Intimate connection and communication with our bodies and with life itself - this is our birthright.

Often with traditional therapies (which, by the way have been changing a TON in the last few years - adding embodiment practices, and psychedelics) there’s an implicit or explicit goal to heal. As in to get better and to alleviate symptoms. (As far as I'm aware, this is not the case with Jung's work - which is much more about getting to know yourself and life itself for the sake of knowing yourself and life itself.) Alleviating debilitating symptoms is ALSO important, by the way. What I'm talking about here is what happens when getting better and fixing and changing and alleviating becomes its own prison of “out there in the future” and “when I'm better and perfect.”

When there is an end goal of being healed, we can relate to ourselves as a constant work in progress. We can then get stuck in a hamster wheel of constant self-improvement. We can forget there is life beyond what ails us now - and we can touch it right now, and right now again.  Returning and returning to the body. Aliveness is found in the present moment in the body. (I'm not leaving out the mind, the mind is in the body.)

Also - real healing means being in communication with Life, attending to what you enjoy, to what brings you pleasure, to something beyond you. Music can be that. Singing can be that. When we sing, we bring our own body to meet something beyond our own body - the music. That can call us out of ourselves towards something Alive, bringing us alive. Why? Because when we sing music, attending to the music with our minds and hearts - pouring our attention on something so beautiful, that we love, and that we hear and that we yearn to bring alive and share with others as an expression, we are sharing both our expression and the expression that lives in the music. The music becomes our teacher. Our healing becomes part of the world's healing.

We aren't, then, stuck in a loop of Self, but That meeting point between my body (voice) and my imagination (what I hear, listen for, invent and sing!).

If there is an end goal of arriving somewhere fixed, I don’t want it.