Tonight they opened Tucson Global Chant with a chant I haven't heard since my dear friend Joni and I spent 9 glorious days in a chanting experiential workshop with Jonathan Goldman at Sunrise Ranch (somewhere in Colorado) more than a boat-load of years ago. It went:
"Listen, Listen, Listen to my heart song, (2X)
I will never forget you, I will never forsake you."(2X)
Joni may still recall the melody. I didn't, until a half second after the hundred of us who were present started singing it and then the whole experience flooded back in.
It's hard to describe the feeling of it, but it was like being inside the songs, inside the chants for hours at a time. We'd come up for air, herbal teas, water and healthy snacks, ravenous because we'd been so actively working the sounds and working ourselves with and through the sounds, and then we'd submerge again and not come up for air until lunch time and then we'd do it again in the afternoon. We all came home hoarse from singing so much and with smiles bigger than Texas because we'd had such a tremendously glorious time.
The workshop was my first introduction to toning (singing tones, mostly vowels) with different parts of my head, as well as deep-throat singing, which I did kind-of, sort-of, manage to make one rumbly-ish sound that came from deeper in my throat than my vocal chords. Most of the folks who perfected that technique rather massacred their voices for normal toning, singing and conversation, so I didn't really need to be expert at it. The toning with different parts of my head was interesting because by vibrating different parts of my sinus, the long 'e' was best for this and at a higher pitch, I sometimes could get multiple tones (on purpose) at the same time. Something about vibrating the different resonance cavities in my face and neck, I don't pretend to understand the physics of it.
Towards the end of the workshop we had one day where the entire day was spent in silence, other than toning. It was quite a trippy high, undoubtedly endorphins were through the roof. I continued to hear/feel/experience the toning and chanting as I went to sleep that night. Reminiscent of the way the leaders end the Global Chant here, stating they will be chanting in their dreams and inviting us to join them.
The last session of the workshop, we all sang "listen to my heart song" to each other and that experience did bond us all together. I've lost touch with most of that group (there were 85 of us there that summer), but I'm still connected, in the best possible way, through our heart song.
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