I cannot teach you any incantations to dispel fear because I don’t know any. For me, singing doesn’t reliably banish fear. Usually it creates it.
I love Tibetan bowls and harmoniums and ting-shes and my homegirl Hildegard of Bingen and chants in sacred Indian languages and holding our hearts and imagining swirling blue flowers in our throat chakras. I love all those things and we are here to make beautiful things together but I want so much more from this relationship. I am so hungry for other things.
Fear eats the soul and singing scares me.
What would happen if the soul ate fear instead? What if the soul opens its big mouth and discovers a row of sharp teeth, and all it needs to do is just turn around, change the direction of the story, and feast on fear?
Turn around, soul. Turn away from the love and light, the song of the trees, the lullabies, from constipated obligations to beauty. Fuck sound healing with the ascended masters. Fuck the pitch corrected, perfect vocal line that is a combination of one hundred takes in the studio. Open your mouth, make the worst sound you can possibly make and don’t stop making it.
Invite your ugliness on a walk in the middle of the night into the most dangerous section of Central Park and make out with it, hard, on a park bench. Hand yourself over to the ghost that follows you.
Stand in front of me. Sing off all your clothes. Sing off the dumb face that you make when you’re taking a selfie. I hate that face. Contort your mouth into strange twisted shapes and desecrate your poses, your spiritual postures, your mantras, your mudras. Smash my singing bowls, pee on my shruti box, gulp in the stench of your own shit, and with that breath sing straight down into the depth of your deficiency, into the inconsolable void of your emptiness and into your sick filth which, deep down, you don’t believe will ever heal. Put yourself on repeat for as long as you need, commit to it, submit to it, sing to me fully, sound it all out, spare nothing.
I will not stop listening until you are done. Sing me out of believing that I’m the only one who has ever feared myself this much. This is how you I need you to feed me.
Be very very very afraid and then open your mouth and allow your voice to quake, loudly, violently, for yourself and everyone else to hear.
This is the food of your soul.
Let us feast.