From April, my books are open for tarot-astrology readings and sound sessions on Saturdays (group or individual, Zoom or in-person for Manila folks). For inquiries and bookings, head over to my website. This month’s post was sparked by conversations with Plinky Recto, Mitch Mauricio, and Linnéa Rönnquist, for which I’m grateful.
1. Intrinsic dynamic
As I was making my way out of my healer’s clinic today, I heard her make a simple and profound observation. It was my first session with her so a lot of “stuff” came out—as expected. Yet we both knew much more was there, and was best left untouched for now. “Some healers want to fix everything now,” she remarked. “But for me, healing is a process.”
I’m always fascinated by the way we heal in layers of experience. To begin with, healing operates within tangible parameters of boundedness. A session or a treatment has a fixed duration, and it’s possible to locate the experience in specific parts of the body. Process might emerge from or eventually generate a procedure: both words come from the same Latin root of going (cedere) forward (pro) in an established sequence.
We could say that we choose to stay with an external healer or modality when they “work”—that is, when they are able to progress the process of healing. For instance: after the session, a heavy ache lingered on the outer base of my right thumb where the healer had inserted a needle, along the lung meridian. Probing the point with her touch, she reported “tamad yung energy, ayaw gumalaw (the energy is sluggish, it doesn’t want to move).” She massaged the neighboring index finger “to push it out”, advised me against directly manipulating the hurt part, and reminded me to observe what came up and how I felt for the next few days.
The instruction to observe the ensuing process—to undergo the shift from outer to inner—is the “turn” in the healing process that makes me wonder. On the one hand, we experience healing as a discernible external event that is done to us by someone else. On the other hand, what is healing but a subjectivity fully involved in the intrinsic dynamic of becoming whole? When we are wounded, we heal. The object of healing–whatever’s there that is broken or blocked—is itself the active agent of healing.
This processual self, the one that heals inside itself, cannot be so easily tracked or controlled even if it can respond to an extrinsic intervention. It moves behind and beneath our very apparatus of perception. It has its ways of shyness or defiance against our usual “I.” It is autonomous, but inseparable, from ordinary consciousness.
And then, the turn goes from inside to outside: healing is relational as much as it’s reflexive. It involves careful attendance to the movement from the unconscious to the conscious realm, and back again. I might track sensations, visions, and coincidences that call my attention following the treatment, even if it seems unremarkable or frivolous on the surface. I might share these pings with my healer and see if that draws out from her an unexpected insight or angle. I might research existing interpretations of these phenomena and cobble together a tentative frame, a narrative to hold it all together. (The fact that this persistent pain in my left forearm appeared right after I moved back to Manila, on the same arm where the open wound of my tattoo took a long time to heal, feels resonant somehow. Who knows why? I keep listening.) Hindsight and feedback become necessary structures of translation in attending to the inward process. Tracking the subtle signals of our process, reflecting on what happened from different perspectives, dialoguing with trusted external companions: all this sifts matter and meaning into intangible being.
We attend healing as a long event of coming into wholeness.
2. Neither sad nor happy
My healer asked me about my sound healing practice. We’d first met on Zoom, when she attended one of my group sessions. “Did you always sing this way?”
I grew up knowing I had some kind of depth inside me that I could only feel when I sang. My earliest memories of singing are associated with tears and trances. I remember my eyes filling up with tears as I heard the chorus of Paul McCartney’s “No More Lonely Nights” on the radio for the first time; I must’ve been around four years old. It was a feeling neither sad nor happy, just strange and large and radiant. I remember being five years old, sitting in the shade of my aunt’s garden on a searing afternoon. I was staring at the grass and humming myself into a hypnotic state: not quite there but acutely aware.
I knew that I was singing for me, that singing was for me, but I didn’t know what to do with my voice. As I grew up, I tried to pour my sound into what was proper and right for a girl who could sing. I aspired to sound good. I joined choirs, took lessons, and performed for other people. I contemplated becoming a classical singer because I was told my voice had “promise”; I toyed with the idea of becoming a jazz singer because I loved the freedom and lyricism of improvisation; I despaired not having the swagger to become a rock or soul singer because that music enthralled me. I knew that the depth I could access so easily as a kid was always just there, but wanting to sound good made it difficult for me to hear it. I had many joyful experiences of hearing others sing. But for many years I couldn’t hear myself.
In the end, it was diving into different embodiment practices and experiences that repaired sound as a part of my being. Only now, ten years later, do I understand how this silent, meandering trajectory was hearing my healing all along.
In 2012 in Manila, I did four one-on-one innerdance sessions which served as a catalyst for the practice of wordless vocal improvisation on which I base much of my current work. Doing those sessions helped me access my early experiences of singing for myself. For three years after that, while writing my dissertation in a constant state of self-doubt, I created a practice of self-daring: I would lock myself in my bathroom, turn on the phone recorder, and chant. I placed four parameters on this practice:
to sing what I had never heard before
to sing until I brought myself to tears
to do so for as long as I could, and
to listen to the recording and work with whatever came up.
In the beginning, I could only sing for less than a minute. I cringed so hard at the sound of my voice that it became a source of puzzlement: even here, with no one around, I can’t bear to hear myself? Slowly, I began to endure the embarrassment better, enough to sing longer, enough to sing more steadily through tears. I freed myself from the neurotic urge to figure out why these tears came. It was enough that I could touch them gently with sound. I began sharing excerpts of these raw recordings with a handful of friends whose listening I treasured: poets, musicians, kindred spirits. Little by little, a minute of sounding stretched to five minutes, then ten. (These days, my improvisations fill up about 30-45 minutes of a sound session.)
In 2015, I enrolled in a yoga teacher training program and was introduced to the practice of brahmari pranayama. This made me wonder whether there was a way to integrate what I was doing for myself in private with a communal format of guided breathwork meditation. Chanting mantras, hymns, and psalms was undoubtedly powerful, but something in me wanted to keep exploring the absence of explicit structure as a guiding parameter for touching the unconscious through emergent vocal sounding. Participating in an ayahuasca ceremony a few years later, I experienced a clear contrast between the raw sounding of a heart broken open and the sounding of an anxious ego trying to sound good. (I’ll never forget how one of the shamanic facilitators padded over to me and hissed, don’t channel shit!) In this way I came to accept that what is genuinely authentic to inner experience will eventually find its way out into the world’s listening—because that is where it belongs. But this is not a given: this outward turn requires courage, honesty, and work. It’s a process.
I learned that my solitary practice, when undertaken with the requisite courage and honesty, could be a bridge to collective soundings with other voices, opening up different spaces and contexts of listening: I remember a funny incident from a few years ago when my then-band and I, improbably, found ourselves doing our usual live improvisation at a folk-rock bar in Manila. The beer-drinking audience was a far cry from the placid yogis I was used to singing for, and I remember it being an especially cacophonous improv. Yet a few of them approached me afterwards to say that the sound felt so soothing to them that they wished they’d had a pillow to rest their head on.
A few months ago, a friend burst into unexpected tears during a casual improv jam. “Loko ka, napahagulgol mo ako, hindi naman ako malungkot o masaya (damn it, you made me sob, but I don’t feel sad or happy)!”, he said, laughing in disbelief. It made me remember something one of my participants said last year, after my first group session: she said she cried tears “that were neither sad nor happy.” To my surprise, more than 30 years after that first chant in my aunt’s garden, I could hear the softest part of myself in another person’s listening.
After I went public with my practice in late 2015, I unwittingly became dependent on bandmates to dull a deep fear about singing alone in front of others (“the naked voice,” a poet-friend once described it). I was a “singer”, not a “musician”, and I didn’t have the usual technical skills expected of musicians to be identified as such. For a few years, my healing-through-singing again took a back seat as I ended old collaborations and occupied myself with my day job as a full-time academic. It wasn’t until last year, provoked by a turbulent transition out of my old job and life in Hong Kong, that I got over myself and offered what I had, just as it was. I thought: I need to heal myself so badly that I might as well enlarge the space for anyone else who needs it. One year later, creating the sound alone is now my main practice.
I am still healing. Part of the process is figuring out how this might exist in the world and inside me at the same time, how I can hold space for this inquiry, staying honest to myself yet also anticipating others who might be wondering about these same things:
Why does this sound seek new auditory spaces that break easy assumptions about where healing “should” take place and what it “should” sound like?
What kind of connective and integrative infrastructures does healing-work need, at a fragmented time when the old structures that used to scaffold healing (e.g. religious cultures of community and practices of interiority) no longer work the way they used to?
How can we stay with this shy, strange, sly process that keeps evading our own contradictory attempts to escape and control it?
Why does this softness speak through tears and rise through song?
If I knew what to make of all this, I would write it here and tell you, but I don’t. This is the part of my healing where I feel it best to just keep listening. Sometimes I say that these tears of healing, neither sad nor happy, are cosmic tears. The deeper you go inside yourself, the more vast the world becomes.