Yesterday was the second session of four in an ‘adventure series’ I began called “The Essential Voice Experiment,” or “EVE.” A small group of women have joined me on this adventure, brave souls embarking onto unknown waters of creative expression and voice. (And incidentally, I am just starting to use that word “adventure” in this blog entry. I like it so much I hope it sticks!)
Our small group was even smaller yesterday because the flu has hit our little corner of the world. In some ways, this worked out just fine, because we let ourselves ‘explore’ with a little more gusto. I purposely named this series an “experiment” because I wanted this: a safe space to try out new things, to take risks, to play, to venture into new territory. To prepare and set an intention for openings, and “see what happens next” (see my last blog entry, “What we call, and what calls us.”)
Much of EVE is about freeing up the voice. And so we spent lots of time yesterday simply playing. I took out my basket of rattles, and we shook, banged and coaxed them: letting our voices shake, rattle and roll. We put the big beautiful crystal singing bowl in the middle, and rang it, playing with overtones, echoes, and the play of voice and bowl. Choirs were heard in the rafters. Goddesses came to join the dance.
And then we played more. “Played” with toning our voices into our tender places, as well as our expansive places; feeling our hearts and our breath, and the calm that comes after.
What happened? It is hard to even describe it in words, because the places we traveled on our adventure yesterday were beyond words. They were places where experience is direct, and expression is spontaneous.
This morning, Rumi’s well known poem popped into my head:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense.
In EVE, we adventure into wordless places with the resonance of our voices. We play with many layers of experience that in essence bypass our cognition: we come to a level of pure vibration, and we get there through permission, play, trust, and time.
Afterwards, we attempt to put words to it; to describe it, and define it. That’s what I’m doing right now.
But when all is said and done, these words are very small and inadequate to describe our experiences. We are only left with the healing, the warmth, and the open spaces that our time together engendered.
And what a pure pleasure that is.
