Belated greetings from Manila! This newsletter’s late, with good reason. Less than a month ago, I relocated to the Philippines from Hong Kong. Moving back home completes a professional move I’ve long been contemplating: leaving tenure-track academia to pursue an as-yet indeterminate path as an independent researcher and artist.
I’m still feeling into what this departure might mean. This voluntary unmooring is hard to explain to my many friends, peers, mentors, and family members who view an academic career as central to our shared profession of education. I say “our” because I still feel a dedication to the intellectual work of thinking deeply and clearly about things that matter, for things to matter. (As I approach midlife, I realize that my compulsion to write a paper about anything that seizes my fascination is most likely lifelong.) It’s just that, for some inchoate reason that has taken up residence in my being, I have to do that work of writing, reading, and teaching somewhere outside the institutional center of the university. Where could that be? What would it be for? For whom?
I’ve been lucky enough to find short-term practical answers to those questions, through copywriting and strategic research projects that help me pay the bills and lend some structure to my day. But the more interesting existential response comes from this practice of improvised chants. The more I sing, the more I want to think. The more I think, the more I want to sing.
In the flurry of moving these last few weeks, my sound journey sessions have slowed down to a trickle: just my regular private clients (so grateful for you!) and the monthly free offerings. At the same time, I have contributed my chants to spaces and occasions outside the ostensible boundaries of a ‘therapy’-oriented session:
a studio recording of chants, offered as a wedding gift
a video recording of chants and a reflection on my work, for a lecture-performance on overtones and sound decolonization
a performance for a feminist collective on the anniversary of their founding
Here I have to admit that I speak from a place of relative privilege. Sound healing is not my main source of income, so I have the time, space, and bandwidth for explorations that would not be feasible for my peers who do this full-time. (Another point for another post, maybe: the precarious labor economy of spiritual wellness entrepreneurship?) In any case, given my incurable appetite for research, I am now gathering materials and reviewing the last six months of this unapologetically spiritual work, trying to understand what is happening and emerging. I do this as an artist interested in the poetics of healing; as a meditator fascinated by the alchemy of art-making; and above all as a scholar determined to articulate the conditions which materialize these ordinary mysteries of human meaning and being.
Rather than hinder me, this academic inclination towards rigor and clarity holds these peregrinations together in an oddly reassuring coherence. Yes, I know there are perils to simultaneously occupying both poles of immanent subjectivity and distanciated objectivity (or the illusion of it). But it makes sense to me in the same way that a cluster of happenstance notes makes sense in the moment of sounding. The pattern of indeterminacy is as clear as day.
If you want a private sound journey, whether as an individual or a group, I have plenty of time for you! Information on scheduling and pricing here. Please note that I’m only offering sessions on Zoom these days.
The next monthly free session is on November 30, 2021 5:00-6:15 p.m. GMT+8. Registration required. RSVP here to receive log-in details.