Chanting to liberate the mind

I want to sing and offer healing vocal chants for anyone open to receiving. I want to create community where we come together to share our voices, stories, experiences, and through it all, we work to find our way to collective liberation, healing, and joy.

I sing because it brings me joy. There is no experience like it, not even writing. Singing and chanting are their own magical treasures. There is a magnitude of freedom of expression in chanting, in allowing your voice to let it guide you to a realm you’ve yet to discover. Chanting is allowing your voice to take you on a journey of self revelation and discovery. It’s a journey of discovering your highs, your lows, deep within your belly, within your breath, within your heart and soul.

I love bringing people together. Nothing compares to this unique joy of experiencing the energy that we can create when we are in the same room, listening to each other, hearing each other. It’s energizing being in collective unison.

It is for these reasons that I am propelled forward with my creative vocation, in pursuit of creating space for coming together, offering healing chants and sounds, inviting people to join me, and to be curious in discovering the power of their sounds and voices.

I want to make this offering accessible to everyone, whether they are being treated and healing from an illness or living their daily life and looking for respite, for a place to quiet their minds from the chaos of the day-to-day chores, the day-to-day noises.

Curiosity can open minds and hearts. Curiosity can allow us to see things in a different light, to have the ability to change our frame of minds, and break from archaic frames of thinking that only stifle our imagination. Chanting is a journey of exploring one’s curiosity. Chanting is an invitation to be vulnerable, to allow yourself to dream, and wander into unknown territory. What will you discover? What old wounds might you uncover? What part of you is asking for forgiveness, for love? What part of you have you neglected?

Chanting has allowed me to fully grieve, but to also fully embrace life and experience uncensored joy. Chanting allows me to grieve unabashedly, through heavy tears and sobs but also through laughter and smiles. Chanting reminds me that I am allowed to experience both feelings at once, that I can laugh wholeheartedly and also grieve deeply. The two can and will coexist. Chanting comes from my whole being; it’s a full body experience. It’s energizing and also draining.

I have no answers for the world’s cruelty but I can chant and sing through it, to remind us that we can and must live on and fight for what we believe in, a better, kinder world, one of equality and justice.

I am not interested in fame but to be able to share my chants with all people of different cultures and belief systems. I want them to hear something different, to experience different emotions, to become curious and more reflective, to hear something they can’t just imitate because you can’t imitate improvised sounds. I want people to feel inspired by this new sound and to be curious about themselves, about their belief systems. I want them to question what they believe to be true. I want them to question why they believe what they believe, and why they behave the way they do. I want them to learn to listen without expectation, without expecting what the next word or lyric or melody will be. I want them to be surprised, to be overcome with deep emotion, to wander and wonder, to be in awe of their own power of listening.

I want to travel worldwide to discover people and places, to see what happens when the drone sound of my Shruti box echoes in vast fields or in someone’s backyard or in a church or an empty, abandoned building. I want to travel worldwide and discover different sounds and to listen to my surroundings, and to listen to people’s untold stories, and to then tell those stories through chants, sounds, songs, and stories.

I refuse to be bound by societal expectations and norms. I want the freedom to continue to grow past my comfort zone, to learn new things about the world and myself. I want the freedom to create without being told what creativity means and should be. I want to create my own melodies without following a set of musical rules and theories. I want to deviate from the norm. I want to break the rules, the norms, the expectations. I don’t want a promotion in a made-up career. I want to elevate beyond, to be a fuller, more capable human, to open my heart wide, and to inhale and exhale as much love as possible, without the expectation for its return. To be filled with love, and pain and sorrow and joy and fear, and to face the fear. To be braver than yesterday, to be freer than yesterday.