Chanting to Find your Voice
Once upon a time I was going to be a professional singer. My father was an opera singer and professor of vocal pedagogy (college voice teacher in layman's terms), my mother was a music education professor and I was raised with every expectation that I would follow suit and make music my career. I was accepted into the vocal performance program at the University of Minnesota School of Music, and began studying in earnest. As each semester came and went, I found it progressively more difficult to sing. The end of my sophomore year I performed terribly during juries (a sort of final exam for performance majors), and only received a C as my grade. I was dejected, and made the choice to switch majors because the struggle was too great to continue. For many years my voice was quiet. Sure, I sang lullabies to my baby and I sang along with the radio, but there was an underlying tension in my voice that kept it strained and restrained.
In 2008, six years after I abandoned my pursuits as a voice major, I took my first yoga class. I had never moved my body with purpose and intention before yoga, I had never actively connected to my breath outside of the context of singing. Yoga was new, different, and subtly began to release a sort of gripping within myself that I didn't even know was there. I did not realize it at the time, but that gripping was me holding on to grief. My mother passed away when I was 19 years old, two months before my freshman year of college began. At the time, I had no capacity to process this loss, no way to truly grieve. I didn’t have the self-awareness or emotional maturity to understand that without being felt, my grief would become lodged within my body.
The loosening I experienced in those first few classes, created space for me to receive what is now my favorite aspect of yoga–– chanting. One evening in class, my first teacher led us in a simple chant of om śanti śanti śantiḥ, a chant for peace. My throat opened, sound came rushing out, and there was no going back. Though it took almost a decade to come to fruition, this moment planted the seed that led me back to making music again. Now, I am blessed to sing with a professional symphonic chorus in addition to my ongoing studies of Vedic chanting.
When I work with people one on one, I frequently hear them say that they would like to learn to use their voice, that they would like to better be able to express themselves, to be heard. A yoga practice can help us come back to and be grounded in ourselves. When chanting is a part of that practice, we gain confidence in using our voice. Each time we practice making sound, it becomes more natural and we find more ease in speaking up for ourselves or others.
Like all techniques of yoga, chanting should be applied in a way that is steady and comfortable. There is a wide variety of was to incorporate sound into practice. For some its a hum or wordless tone, for others it is short sanskrit mantras. I have also had students bring chants or lines of song from their personal faith traditions. Chanting can be used to start practice, as a part of seated meditation, or even during āsana (yoga postures). How ever it is integrated, it will be in the right way for you.
If you are intrigued, I’d love to spend time chanting with you. Look for one on one chanting lessons coming in the near future!