The singing that requires courage
- the singing that generates courage
Kefas Berlin
Singing is a real boost of energy!
Singing evokes feelings!
Singing gives self-affirmation!
Singing immediately improves your body values!
Singing communicates what you don’t have words for!
But even though it's so wonderful to sing, for most people, it requires a lot of courage.
Often so much courage that they are reluctant to do it. Singing is for 9 of 10 connected with fears. But they choose to do it anyway.
For many the situation is that they "so would love to sing" but it's too scary to even give it a chance.
How would it be to have the courage that is needed?
How would it be to dare?
Courage is about moving your limits and expanding your life and living. Courage is needed to implement a decision - however small it is. Courage is always needed when something in your life needs to change.
To sing - and I mean a singing beyond the ambition to sing good, neat or as someone else - boosts your courage .
How is that possible?
In the deepest sense: sounding, toning and singing is essential to life. It's the first thing we do when we are born. We scream. And if all goes as it should , we continue to use our voice as a healing tool that has the ability to correct deficiencies and imbalances in mind and body.
But on the way through childhood and youth our voices are silenced to a large extent – from the outside and/or inside. For some people far far too much. And when I say voice, I mean the ”personal voice”. The voice that can convey who you truly are right now and here; that is able to communicate what´s really in your heart; than can contribute to health and well-being!
In what way is it be possible for the voice to regain that original and powerful state again?
The voice truly takes a special place among mental-physical phenomena. The voice causes the body to vibrate, and like a table of contents conveys, whether you like it or not, and without words, how you are – mentally and physically. The voice also conveys your life story – like a spectrogram or an intelligible cymatic pattern – readable for the unconscious.
That is why we all, more or less, feel exposed when we reveal our voice to others.
We can hide behind language and singing techniques but behind all this is the voice. The voice is the original that rises from the vibrating body and carries sound, speech and song.
But when we tone and sing is when we are most exposed.
The sounding, melodic voice is like the rising steam from a deep well. "The voice should be like rising from a deep well without touching its walls," said Edit Piaf. And the voice itself has a default setting of being "open" - even if there may be psychological or, for that matter, artistic reasons, to modify, break or color it - because it´s gift and potential is to serve your desire to reveal life.
Your life.
Understand this: Behind language, speech, tone and sound is the voice and behind the voice is You. You sing through the voice, not with it. The voice is both the instruments, the form and the filter shaped and structured by your life story and personality.
Your deepest desire is probably to express yourself from the depths through your voice and out into the world. You want this world to be told what is truly on your heart and who you truly are.
It is easy to understand that it takes courage to sing.
It is courageous to allow yourself to be exposed and naked.
Because naked you are when you sing.
In some people, cultures or families, there is a habit of singing. Almost everyone is doing it everyday, it's not significant, and each one can ride on the singing wave. In that situation, it requires no courage to sing. But in the West it has become less and less that way. That is tragic.
For when the spontaneous sounding, crying, groaning, humming, grunting, etc and singing is lost, we will miss something that is as important as food and medicine.
The sounding, melodic voice is a healing food. It nurtures, feeds and heals the soul and body.
It is clear that we dress our voice in all sorts of disguises. Different disguises for different occasions. Unintentionally we use our mothers or fathers voice, our friends or the voice of some celebrity. But beyond all those disguises is your very own voice.
But who can say how their own, personal, voice sounds? Well, you will notice for sure!
It is that voice that easily flows through the body, with which you feel that the heart is connected. It's the voice that does not face the resistance of the body.
It is the voice by which you feel that you make yourself heard - even when no words are used.
Maybe it is not surprising that people feel good when they sing. So good that after just a few moments it is also reflected in their body values.
If it is the body that becomes a nicer world for the mind or whether it is the mind that creates the biochemical / body electrical changes I do not know.
Maybe it is the bonding, the connection and the communication between mind and body that does it. What has been forced into partial disconnection and lack of internal communication now returns into the original functionality: the state of being where balance, integration and flow is. It is there at least for a moment. But sing and sound and that moment will expand to the being the normal state.
Originally human existence is to be one and whole (the people we call ”holy” that’s what they are: ”wholy”). Being whole means being one with your self but also connected and one with the world. I would say, that that is the fundamental body process that happens while you sing and sound, whether you are aware of it or not.
It’s probably easy for you to remember times in life when while singing with others you experienced exactly that – a connectedness and a sense of communication beyond words and concepts.
So called personal voice-development (or any voice teaching), as I see it, is not primarily about techniques, but about elimination (techniques comes second).
It is about dissolving and eliminating everything that disturbs the natural breathing and a relaxed voice and everything that stands in the way of the sounding, toning and singing voice being free and functioning according to my needs. Then my personal voice can emerge.
All parameters from breathing to singing are necessities of life and the blockages, tensions and mental blocks that stand in the way have their origin in what I have experienced and how I live my life.
Very very rarely, in my experience, is there a physiological barrier. Talent also only rarely has to do with it.
Once the voice starts to open, as we say, even life changes. I´ve seen that happen again and again. No wonder – when voice and life is interconnected to such a high degree.
It's not about magic but about power: About self-governance; about the power over your relationship to what life offers you; about what has been and what is. The power to change your life.
The power manifests itself in the liberated singing. In the liberated voice. Or rather: in the willingness to get there (what ever it takes), to allow it to happen, the willingness to change, a willingness to let go of what prevents me; what no longer serves me, the will to go on.
The power manifests itself in the liberated singing. In the liberated voice. Or rather: in the willingness to get there (what ever it takes), the willingness to allow it to happen, the willingness to change, the willingness to let go of everything that prevents me and no longer serves me.
After all, self-governance is about the ability to follow. In this case, to hear and to follow the inner voice.
When the singing has started, when the voice flows, one may notice that it not only required courage. The singing itself generated courage. It has launched a strong energetic circulation. A circulation that brings you deeper into singing and even deeper into life, yes,closer and closer to yourself.
It is magic after all !
*
Kefas Berlin is constantly traveling in the world of voice, singing, body and movement - investigative sources, the expressions and its healing properties.
He is born in Stockholm in 1962 and has since 1982 worked educationally, artisticly and therapeutically with children, young people and adults in the context of singing, playing, dance and physical theatre.
Since 1993 , he gives workshops in voice and singing, playfulness and Physical Theatre in Sweden and abroad.
He also leads several choirs and offers at a daily basis private sessions with Therapeutic Voice Work, Singing lessons and Sound Healing in his reception in Mölnbo outside Stockholm, Sweden.