One Sunday morning last spring, surrounded by several hundred strangers on a secluded ranch in Texas Hill Country, I switched on a powerful instrument for clearing ancient emotional detritus and restoring well-being that I didn’t know I possessed: my voice.
After years as a meditator who drops into silence to shift my inner state, this was rather strange. Here I was, swaying on my feet, making all kinds of primal sounds—waaaah, raaah, booooo, yaaaa—at the top of my lungs, not singing, exactly, but following a melody set by several musicians on a hayloft turned stage. All around me, an all-ages tribe—my fellow attendees at a semiprivate retreat held on a regenerative farm called Sovereignty Ranch—were doing the same. Some sang tentatively; others, like me, belted out the tones, waving our arms and grinning as if we were 5-year-old children gloriously free from adults telling us to shush. As each subsequent song—or “tone-ic,” as the creators of this somatic healing system call it—unleashed a different vocal expression, from fierceness to fearlessness to passion to tenderness, layers of grief, fear and powerlessness seemed to dissolve from my being. Instead of silently transcending into peace, like in solitary meditation, this exuberant vocal ruckus was making me feel embodied, pulsing with aliveness and brimming with the hard-to-find, full-body sensation of joy.
The paradigm-changing experience, called Sing the Body Electric, is the brainchild of “electric health” pioneer Eileen McKusick in collaboration with brothers Thorald and Isaac Koren, a duo who gave up rock ’n’ roll success to guide individuals to unlock their voices and find their unique song. McKusick is the creator of Biofield Tuning, a healing system that uses tuning forks to clear interference in the body and restore electrical flow, dissolve stagnation and reinstate coherence, with, she says, downstream benefits to sleep, mood, pain relief, mental clarity and energy. When she sought out the Brothers Koren several years ago hoping to resolve her “irrational terror” of singing, performing an actual song felt like too much of a stretch at first. So the three began exploring how certain vocal tones resonate in certain parts of the body, vibrating the crown of the head, or the liver, or the fascia, chest or back. Soon, they were exploring how stringing the tones together in certain sequences “tuned up” the instrument of the body, releasing patterns of tension that, in McKusick’s view, can lead to dysfunction or disease, or unhappiness, stagnation and disconnection. They began to put the sequences to the Korens’ music—from sweet lullabies to “sacred rage” anthems—and recorded them on albums, and developed teaching curricula. In the process, McKusick found her liberated and fearless singing voice.
After my own vocal rebirth on the farm, I made a habit of uninhibitedly belting out the trio’s latest album, Vital Awakenings: Sonic Alchemy, any time I felt low or out of sorts (dog walks through empty landscapes are an ideal setting for this). The sound “waaaah” vibrates from pelvis to legs, making me feel steadier and safe. “Yaaah” expands the heart, freeing up locked-in emotion and often eliciting tears. Singing the tone-ics over and over again, the living memory of singing with others back in Texas resonates joyously, as if it’s all still present tense—it’s not just my vibrating vocal cords doing the healing.
I asked McKusick why the simple practice of singing “baby sounds”—the vowels and consonants of our earliest language—in this structured but imperfect way (no need to hit perfect pitch) had such a powerful effect on changing my state.“Moving emotions is serious business, but this is playful and lighthearted,” McKusick says, and when a tone-ic is sung with gusto, especially in community, it liberates incredible amounts of energy that have been blocking off feelings or keeping internal conflicts tucked away. “What we humans suffer from more than anything is stuckness,” she says, “but we don’t know how to get unstuck.” Even consistent practices like meditation are sometimes not enough to unwind the accumulated load. They can also be too quiet. “We’re like blocked-up pipe organs, conditioned since childhood to swallow our emotions, use our inside voices, don’t get angry, be nice. We end up in patterns of not-good-enough and holding-it-in and making ourselves small and retreating into fear that suppress our natural ebullience—the delight and love of life we knew so freely as a child. But it’s still there, underneath.” The movement of the voice through the body, through its bioelectrical systems and through the invisible aether that connects us to others, she says, returns us to coherence, and is a lost key to becoming unstuck.
Learning this ancient-modern practice is easy—and wildly fun. McKusick and the Brothers Koren teach it at retreat centers like Kripalu and Esalen, through online courses, or in bespoke ways at events and concerts, and their downloadable album comes with a thorough guidebook to start exploring your own “sonic anatomy.” The goal, though, is to make the methodology an “open source” somatic healing practice; you learn it, you love it, you let your voice roar and then—playfully, unpolished and utterly free—you share it with others, wherever a willing group of humans may sing. singthebodyelectric.com; biofieldtuning.com
Explore more in Mindfulness at The Purist
Never miss an issue—join The Purist community