Free Your Voice: Awaken to Life Through Singing

Free

Your

Voice

Awaken

to Life

Through

Singing

Silvia Nakkach

and Valerie Carpenter

To my music teacher Ali Akbar Khan (Khansahib)

To my mind teacher Chögyal Namkhai Norbu

To my cosmic father Pai Dary

May your love and light shine through these pages

In memory of Michael Ross Knapp and Dr. Clive Robbins

"Music is like food. When you

need it you don’t have to explain

why, because it is basic to life."

ALI AKBAR KHAN

Contents

Guided Audio Practices

Foreword by Mitchell L. Gaynor, MD

Preface by Valerie Carpenter

Introduction: A Letter from Silvia

Invocation

CHAPTER 1 Learning from the Birds

My Secret Religion

Who Is Singing?

The Yoga of the Voice

How to Use This Book

CHAPTER 2 Music as Medicine: Why It’s Good to Sing Every Day

Born to Sing

A Musical Path to Health

Fountain of Youth

Fast Track to Relax

Say Yes to NO

Multivitamin for the Brain

Take Your Ears to the Gym

Singing to Change the Brain

Transforming Emotions

Comfort in Community

Warming Heart, Melting Mind

CHAPTER 3 Permission to Sing

Cultivating Familiarity

Building a Chanting Refuge

Singing with a Drone

Dharana: The Flashlight of Attention

The Teacher Within

Your First Assignment: Banning Illegal Language

CHAPTER 4 Our Mystical Instrument

Musical Materialism

The Voice as a Musical Instrument

Care and Feeding of the Voice

Tone as a Spiritual Reality

CHAPTER 5 The Body of the Voice

The Four Corners of the Feet

The Singing Spine

Inward Singing

The Wings of the Voice

The Belly

The Chest

The Throat

The Head

The Lips

CHAPTER 6 In the Beginning, There Was Nothing but Nada

Sound: The Creator

Outer, Inner, and Secret Sound

Nada Yoga: Voice as Energy

The Unstruck Sound

Resonance of a Spiritual Kind

Sound: The Transformer

Shabda Yoga: Yoga of the Word

Bija: Planting the Seed

Voice as the Breath of God

CHAPTER 7 The Yoga of the Voice: From Breath to Chant

YOV Operating System

Read Me First!

Breath

Sound

Tone

Seed Syllables

Invocation

Vocal Meditation

Mantra

Prayer

Chant

CHAPTER 8 Music à la Mode

Sargam: A Musical Alphabet

Melody: Horizontal Music

In the Mood

The Search for Meaning

Harmony: Vertical Music

Rhythm: Measurable Music

Duration

Nature’s Pulse

Raga

Rasa

Cosmic Music: Medicine Melodies

Spiritual Melodicism

Back to the Forest

CHAPTER 9 Designing Your Practice

Staying on the Path

Points of Entry

Espressivo/Contemplativo

108 Strategies for Vocal Improvisation

Finale

Acknowledgments

Notes

Glossary

Resources

About the Authors

About Sounds True

Copyright

Guided Audio Practices

Throughout the book, you will find guided audio practices that will help deepen your experience. Visit SoundsTrue.com/FreeYourVoice to download these practices.

Foreword

As an oncologist, I use sound and music therapy as part of my medical practice on a regular basis. For my patients, seeing a cancer specialist for the first time is one of the most stressful experiences of their lives. In new-patient consultations at Gaynor Integrative Oncology, traditional modalities such as chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery are reviewed along with blood tests, scans, and nutritional factors. I then offer patients the music therapy described in my book, The Healing Power of Sound. After a session, invariably patients tell me that they feel more relaxed and peaceful than they have ever felt before. In this way, on the most stressful day of a patient’s life, he or she can also experience the greatest peace as well. How is this possible? The answer is combining sound, music, and chanting with a path of true self-discovery.

I have for years played Silvia Nakkach’s music and chanting CDs over the office sound system for the benefit of my patients. I find her book Free Your Voice to be a delightful and enthralling read. It makes a significant contribution toward revitalizing the ancient paradigm of singing as a healing practice or yoga. Drawing on her vast and extraordinarily diverse musical experience, Silvia presents the individual’s singing voice as an instrument of universal music, beyond any cultural divide and transcending notions of personal skill. She integrates a range of different cultures into one coherent and fresh musical reality.

Singing is a divine gift. Silvia emphasizes that singing is a birthright for us all—not just those people we call singers. In fact, the most transformative kind of singing happens when we are not singing like singers, but offering song, chant, or sound as medicine and devotion. Everybody is invited to sing and join the universal choir: scientists, artists, healers, and teachers.

Reading this book is a joyful reminder that we are all born with a potent musical instrument: the voice. It has an organic impulse to explore and express, to refine and offer, to transcend and heal. The voice has the power to connect the body, the inner self, and the outer world. The voice can express words of power, and it has a unique potential to make music, relax the body, connect with inner peace, clear the mind—all while activating the pre-frontal part of the brain through its natural overtones and versatility.

Free Your Voice traces the power of the singing voice back to its most ancient roots as a devotional art and demonstrates its future as an integrative medicine that promotes relaxation and lessens fear and pain. It provides a deeper understanding of the musical form and structure that informs the voice, offering at the same time a therapeutic and spiritual experience. Each section of the book and the accompanying audio tracks illustrate how skillfully Silvia has assimilated the ancient wisdom teachings of sound, three decades of classical Indian singing, and a lifelong immersion in contemporary vocal improvisation. She has woven these threads of experience into an offering that is as enriching to the general reader as to the professional musician or the experienced healer.

We can now experience singing the same way that Silvia experiences her voice, as a liberating and liquid beauty. We have been invited to gather our voices in an affirmative connection to life and the joy of it. I foresee many readers coming back to these pages to re-read Silvia’s message, reaching as far into the future as this book reaches into the ancient wisdom of the past.

Mitchell L. Gaynor, MD

President of Gaynor Integrative Oncology

Assistant Professor of Medicine at Weill-Cornell Medical College

Author of The Healing Power of Sound: Recovery from Life-Threatening

Illness Using Sound, Voice, and Music

Preface by Valerie Carpenter

In the summer of 2007, a series of personal investigations led me to The Voice Loft in Emeryville, California, where I was granted my first taste of the phenomenon that is Silvia Nakkach. In retrospect, I could say the Hand of Fate plopped me down at the feet of a master, one who continues to guide the opening of my voice, my heart, my imagination, and my spirit in ways I could not have fathomed a year earlier.

It was a Thursday Night Chanting Group. About a dozen individuals—all, I was convinced, consummate singers a hair’s breadth away from a career at the Met—sat on cushions on a well-worn Persian rug, adjusting portable recording devices, stretching their supple limbs, and sipping tea. I felt I had stumbled upon a coterie of accomplished vocal artists and free-spirited spiritual adepts.

As I adjusted my own limbs in what I hoped was a good approximation of a seasoned yogi, Silvia took her place in the circle. Framed by a mane of honey-colored hair, she sat down on a makeshift throne of raised cushions draped in velvet, and faced an intriguing box-like instrument I later learned was called a harmonium. She adjusted the position of an impressive-looking microphone (into which she made those mysterious cooing sounds musicians make when they are coaxing their electronic brethren to interact with us mere mortals), and cleared her throat several times.

After instructing us to take a few long, slow breaths, moving our hands as clouds, and to adjust our boondas (short for abondanzas, or buttocks, as they say in Brazil), she began to sing.

As everyone in the room had their eyes closed, I knowingly closed mine as well and … oh! Suddenly I was in a mystical forest and before me appeared an Angel whose soft, splendid, limpid voice beckoned me to follow deeper and deeper into the trees. The Angel would sing a few notes and I had no choice but to sing them back. And although there were only two of us in that magical forest, whenever I sang my ardent reply a chorus of voices joined mine in a communal longing to come closer, to delve deeper, to become one with the sweet promise of that angelic voice.

Let me make it perfectly clear that at that point in my life, I did not sing. I would say, could not sing, but I have since learned from Silvia that those words are illegal language, and she would not permit me to say them in this preface. Nevertheless, despite a thirty-year career as a professional actress, at that time, for many reasons I could unproudly defend, I simply did not sing.

But that night, as the trodden red Persian rug transformed into a magical flying carpet and that Angel seduced my voice into pursuing her into ever more sublime realms, the Singer in me awakened.

Now, I don’t expect to be making appearances any time soon on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera or American Idol, but I discovered in Silvia’s Yoga of the Voice program a really enjoyable method for learning how to sing. In addition, I found a deeply satisfying spiritual practice through singing—a musical path to bliss.

I have since learned that the approach Silvia was using on that July night is an ancient practice known as call-and-response and that the exotic syllables we were singing back to her came from Sanskrit and various indigenous languages. The people in the room—some with musical backgrounds, others with none—came from all walks of life but shared the yearning to dwell in that sacred inner realm where Silvia and her magic voice so skillfully led us.

Over the past five years that I have had the great privilege of studying with Silvia, I have seen people of all ages, cultures, and backgrounds flock to her classes and workshops. On one occasion, as I watched her fly across a room filled with a hundred people, I saw her virtually transform into a rare exotic bird with extravagant plumage, both ageless and achingly young. She was so full of joy as the participants, mostly city clerks and firefighters, danced after her chanting a Sanskrit verse to a bossa nova beat.

In Silvia’s artistry, you will encounter a unique blend of the ancient and the modern, the contemplative and the expressive, the East and the West. Raised in several countries as the daughter of a diplomat, I have heard her say that she is the only person she knows who speaks five different languages—each with an accent foreign to the land in which she learned it.

When we first spoke about writing this book together, I was a bit taken aback by my own presumption. After all, as well as being a consummate musician, Silvia is also an impressive scholar and trained psychologist who has expertly written articles in publications around the globe. We soon discovered, however, that the teaching voice, which flows so naturally and exuberantly as Silvia works with groups of all kinds, is different from the voice of the academic. It is the voice of the dynamic teacher, the gentle guide, and the powerful master that we hope to capture in this book.

It became my job to be the conduit for the voice of the teacher to reach the ears of you, the reader. It is a challenge at times to simultaneously contain and convey the vitality and abundance that characterizes Silvia’s expression and so profoundly inspires her students. Her ideas often spiral into great galaxies of inspiration and imagination that ultimately synthesize into a meaningful whole. And how can the written word transmit the resonance of the rich pan-global accent that rings in my ears as I am writing? Then there is her humor, which always seems to stem from the joy bubbling up inside her, until it spills into her down-to-earth pragmatism and love for simple things like shopping. So when you find yourself soaring on a sentence rich with metaphors and sublime inspiration only to find yourself plopped down with a grin squarely on your boondas, that is all Silvia.

I humbly offer this effort in the hopes that your journey with the Yoga of the Voice will yield as many bountiful rewards for you as they have for me. And try to see Silvia in person when you can. It’s an experience of a lifetime.

Silvia, my most sincere thanks to you for helping me to reveal my authentic voice … as I hope to faithfully render yours into words that will reach the hearts of the readers of these pages.

Valerie Carpenter

Introduction

A LETTER FROM SILVIA

After working for countless years with an approach to the voice that is as innovative as it is ancient—an approach cultivated from direct experience; from the heart; from the birds in the sky; from my deep background in classical music; from my teachers who gave me the best training in the world; from the South, North, East, and West—I am so happy to share this experience with you, dear reader, in these pages.

This is not a book about how to sing—although if you choose to follow the path, your voice will naturally open in beauty, power, and freedom of expression. This book is a guide for discovering the potential of your own voice to unlock and cultivate creative and spiritual energy. It’s about building the bank account that will preserve the most precious capital you have: your emotional well-being.

I call the systematic approach to this discovery The Yoga of the Voice. Yoga is an integrative path toward our experience of liberation and bliss—just as yogic practices of breathing, meditation, or body postures (called asanas in Sanskrit) can bring freedom from a mundane, ego-centered state to an experience of divine inspired energy. A patient, disciplined practice of releasing your voice can lead you to a higher spiritual dimension where creativity, connectedness, and communion abound.

Singing is a joyful, natural activity. Making music can be like flying—a liberating practice that frees us from conditioning, from ego, from karmic traces, from anything that tightens us up. So many people have the false idea that before they can engage in this joyful birthright, they need to learn how to read music or have musical training or be a real singer. When we listen to and do practices from the ancient cultures—the indigenous and shamanic cultures—we begin to understand that this idea is nonsense, a form of musical materialism in our culture that tells us we must consume more information, more training, more books, more CDs and gadgets before we are free to use our own natural voice.

It is much easier than that. The most important piece is to commit to the path of personal devotion—and then to sing. I intend to demystify the process of singing for you, as I have done for my students (some of them trained singers, others with little or no musical background, and many in between) for more than thirty years. From this demystification, I intend to lead you to engage with the subtle qualities of the voice, the true mysticism of music, breath, and sound.

These ideas are very ancient. If we go back to the origin of the word singing, it means to make an incantation, to enchant, to make magic. Making magic means inviting fantasy. When you become familiar with fantasy, with the way you use your imagination and intuition to engage higher states of being (where the materialistic realities do not lead), you are truly learning to sing. You are tuned to your own Discovery Channel … it’s fantastic.

We all have the capacity to connect with energy that liberates us and with energy that constrains us. We are made of vibration, and we have an unconditional potential inside of us to resonate with all kinds of vibrational fields. We are all born as pure beings, pure beauty. We just have to reconnect and reawaken that purity, that space of no limitations where boundaries dissolve and spiritual freedom flourishes.

My way is through the voice, and the path is carefully designed with yoga-based practices that integrate subtle movements of breath, tone, music, and mind. I tell my students that the best way to free their voices from their bodies is to give them as an offering. In that spirit, I offer you this book. May it assist you in realizing your dreams of bliss and ecstatic union.

Silvia Nakkach

Invocation

In a bowl filled with sacred frequencies

Precious chants dance

Energy moves slowly boundlessly

The spirit finds dwelling

Abiding in sacred inwardness

Fearlessly

Embracing

The nature of music

As sound in time

Easy vitality

Greets