If you’re interested in booking a session with me, you’ll find all the information for that here. I’m available for sessions on Zoom from October to December. In-person sessions are available for Manila in October, and Berlin from November to December.
Photo: iAcademy
Here we are: just past the Autumn Equinox, straight into a new school term. For now I am neither in the northern hemisphere nor within an academic institution, but all the same I heed the call to cross a threshold. What do we leave behind and what do we bring with us as we submit to the inevitable change of season?
Earlier this month I received an invitation from the Department of Psychology at Miriam College to talk about sonic meditation on occasion of their Alternative Class Week. And two days ago I did a sound performance for the students and faculty of iAcademy, as part of the art exhibition “Metamorphosis” for their annual School of Arts and Design Week. In both events, I had the opportunity to share my practice with a massive (for me) audience of students and faculty: over 200 in Miriam, and more than 100 in iAcademy.
Photo: Ronnie Motilla
I like to preface my work by saying that I’m essentially doing the same thing anywhere I am called or invited to go: to offer chant improvisation as a way to collectively practice a different way of listening. It’s in the framing of this thing, according to the logistics and logics of the specific auditory space, where a lot of learning happens. At Miriam College, there was a specific request to discuss and demonstrate sound as a meditation technique for mental health, while at iAcademy there was the exhibition theme to hew to (metamorphosis and complex transition).
These two events feel special, not only because they allowed me to bring together different modalities of my work (meditation training, sound performance, and critical thinking), but also because their dimensions of sounding were larger and more unpredictable. More weighted somehow. They were experiments in public solitude: constructing a temporary sonic space in which the possibility of shared and autonomous interiority could be explored.
Wrangling a class’s attention is par for the course for any teacher getting through an hour’s worth of slides, but shepherding a captive student audience through a momentary trance state in the middle of the day is a whole other animal. Unlike my private sessions and performances, the audience didn’t really choose to be there of their own volition. It was a class requirement for many of them; reaction papers were waiting to be written.
Nor did they really know what it was about. Only a handful of students were meditation practitioners, and nearly all of them were unfamiliar with sound art and music improvisation. I was reminded of the tough predicament faced by the Filipino hotel and cruise ship musicians I’d interviewed for my PhD research. Their audiences are usually not there for them, per se. The point of the job is to compel these accidental listeners to stay. It’s nothing less than the work of sensorial and affective conversion: turning customers into guests.
It also made me think about the tenuousness of sonic authority held by performers and teachers. That privilege of being heard is circumscribed by the humbling recognition that an audience’s outward guise of submission often conceals an internal stance of subversion or refusal. (I’m saying this as a former student who over the years has perfected the appearance of docility during tedious or unpleasant lectures to hide my mind’s escape.)
It was a challenging place to be. During one performance, I walked off the stage to sing around the space, and came across a few students in the far end of the gallery, hunched over phones cradled in their laps, playing video games. In the other, I heard the faint, distinct sound of whispers and giggles from a group of students who had cocooned themselves over their crossed arms on the table, covering their faces, trying to stifle their laughter.
I knew their behavior wasn’t personal or especially reprehensible in any way. Let’s face it, I’ve behaved similarly in the past, how could I be self-righteous? None of this knowledge helped me deal with the uncomfortable there-ness of it: a burning, heart-pounding constriction in my chest. My thoughts simultaneously dissolving into an unfocused haze and hardening to a sharp spiteful edge. My knee joints locked rigid in place. It became difficult to move my legs. I tried to regain my usual stance of indifference and contain the unwelcome flood of irritation, but I knew even then that to check out would only disconnect me from the place where I needed to be—right in the thick of this.
If the teacher in me was triggered, the Buddhist meditator in me was thrilled: here we go, it’s practice time! But it was the performer in me, the trickster, who improvised a way through. I crouched beside the source of my discord, and I sang into their ears.
As I sang my instinctive aggression shifted, unexpectedly, into sadness. All those times I didn’t feel heard. All those times I willfully refused to hear a loved one’s voice. I don’t want to be here. How lonely we all are. Tears crowded my eyes. I stood up and walked away to cast my voice to the edges of the space. I felt my heart soften and slowly spin itself open. Maybe they didn’t choose to be here. Maybe they didn’t respond the way I’d hoped or expected. But here they were anyway. Their presence was still a gift. What would I choose to give in return?
I plugged back into practice: flow into the changing moment. Draw the voice from the unchanging source of all longing and belonging. End when it’s time to end.
There was a sense of precious rarity in the opportunity to speak and sing to a particular listening; to teach and be taught by this listening. My friend Jaya reminds me that a professor professes. Maybe the fruit of my own profession, from this unlikely place of teaching, is the humility of knowing that I have no power over another’s listening. Whatever power is there resides in the gap that arises between us, with its uncanny presence. It’s to that gap that I profess and offer my own presence.
Photo: iAcademy
I work with an element of channeling in my performances, tuning into the energy of the listener and using whatever resources I have in that moment (psychic, aesthetic, physical, technorational, etc.) to express and address it. Airy-fairy as this sounds, my purpose is pragmatic: between myself and the audience, and within each listening consciousness, there is an unknowable abyss. Any shred of information I can get, however imprecise, helps the continual decision-making process of what to sing, how to sing, what knob to turn, what to switch off and turn on, when to stop—all in the singular effort to lean into this abyss with keener awareness. (This is where improvisation and sound art become a place of refuge for me. It doesn’t have to cohere, it only has to matter.)
This stream of information gains shape against a larger horizon of intention. What do I want us to feel? What do I want to transmit from this precarious place I occupy: outside you yet with you, inside yet beyond myself?
I’ve done this enough times to know that the pure mechanics of an immersive sonic setting will guarantee at least minimal contact with a heightened state of consciousness. Still, I was surprised that some listeners were able to go deep and far, even with all the distractions. I was even more surprised by the willingness of many students to take the mic to articulate their insights and observations.
Some students said they managed to doze off (always a good sign). Others slipped into active imagination, traveling through outer space, underwater, ephemeral fields of color. I was moved by the candor of a few students who spoke of their mental health conditions: ADHD, anxiety, depression. Some were fascinated by the vivid, contrasting sensations in their body: heaviness, lightness, immobility, warmth, a sudden chill. I felt like I was asleep, but awake. Still others confessed an exhausting struggle to control their thoughts and respond to the stress that arose as they listened. (This is why I don’t promise relaxation during sessions. Meditation, and healing for that matter, isn’t always relaxing!)
In both events, a few individuals patiently waited for the room to empty out so they could tell me, in private, how they felt a sense of deep love inside themselves during the chant. I looked into their eyes and saw it there: tears of astonished wonder.
There is nothing to say when these narratives emerge. The moment when I am allowed to listen to listening is the moment when the work completes itself. I wish I could tell you how it feels to receive this gift, to witness consciousness coming home.
As I concluded the sessions, I reminded my generous audience of simple things. Drink water. Sound is powerful; treat it with respect. Move gently through the transitions of your day and your life. Treasure your mind and your body. You carry solitude for yourself and for us all.