From Lip-Synching “Om” to Leading Chants: One Yogi’s Sound Therapy Journey

Music and I have always enjoyed a pretty fraught relationship.  I have long been something of a screech owl blundering amongst a watch of nightingales, forever surrounded by the musically gifted but unable to join in their chorus without causing amusement or, more often, wincing.  It’s been my dubious fortune, as someone who literally cannot sing in key, to be a kind of magnet for people with perfect pitch (although I am, at least, consistent: my college roommate—a violist— used to stare at me in a kind of appalled awe as I sang along with the radio.  “It’s uncanny,” she’d say, “you are literally always exactly a quarter step down.”)  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people express appreciation when I sing harmony on “Happy Birthday”—I’ve learned to stop telling them that I’m trying to sing the melody.

But speaking of perfect pitch, my personal euphonic albatross: do you know what percentage of the world’s population has perfect pitch?  Less than eleven percent.  Here is a partial list of the people in my life who have (or had) perfect pitch:

·      My husband
·      My best friend
·      My college roommate
·      My late father
·      My uncle
·      My paternal grandfather
·      My paternal grandmother
·      A seemingly endless parade of my students
·      You get the picture 

Music has a bit of a complicated history in my family: my father’s father, the son of a bandleader, was a ragtime piano prodigy who was forced to tour the Orpheum Circuit with his father from the age of six.  At fourteen years old he quit the band, left home, and eventually became a surgeon and, later, a psychiatrist.  He married a woman with a stunning soprano voice in the style of Jeanette MacDonald, and together they raised four children absolutely devoted to music.  My uncle is one of the very few people in the United States who has made a living playing professional tenor saxophone over the past forty years. 

Many people my age grew up with fathers obsessed with jazz, and I would stake my late father in a jazz trivia contest against any one of them—his knowledge was beyond encyclopedic, beyond obsessive—jazz was, I think, his literal best friend.  NPR’s “The Art of Jazz” played on multiple radios throughout the house every single weekend of my childhood.  My father would often interrupt me or one my sisters from our Shrinky-Dinks or Sweet Valley High books to point at the stereo demand, “Who’s that on trombone, girls?”  It was never someone easy to recognize, like Tommy Dorsey or J.J. Johnson, it was always a hard one. “You mean to say you don’t know Miff Malone when you hear him?!”  Sorry, Dad.

There was also musical talent on my mother’s side. My maternal grandfather, who died when my mother was twenty, was a classic Irish tenor—although I never met him, I have a false memory of his beautiful rendition of Danny Boy, from hearing it lovingly referenced in so many family stories. 

It probably doesn’t help that I spent three years of piano lessons practicing on an out-of-tune piano before my teacher—a local Methodist pastor’s wife whose large family definitely had use for every spare penny—told my mother that she couldn’t, in good conscience, continue to take her money.  I joined Seattle Girls’ Choir in the fifth grade and, over the course of three years, came to tower over my fellow choristers as every girl in my training choir class was promoted to the Intermediate Choir except for me.  Eventually, the choir director echoed my piano teacher in gently suggesting to my mother that I be redirected in my interests, perhaps towards watercolors, or volleyball, or ikebana, or literally anything other than music.

All of which is to say, I am not, at this point in my life, confident about my musical abilities.  While I enjoy many kinds of music deeply, and have always found music and dancing to be a direct channel to spiritual connection, I avoid singing in front of others, and freeze up instantly when a musical instrument is put in front of me.  So you can imagine my reaction upon discovering, during the first day of my Sound Therapy training at Prema Yoga Institute, that by the end of the weekend I was expected to chant while accompanying myself on the harmonium.  Outwardly, I nodded enthusiastically.  Inwardly, I panicked.

Ironically, I am not afraid to use my voice—I taught vocal technique for actors for years at various acting schools and studios in New York City, including the Musical Theatre studio at NYU, where I was, I think, the only non-singer in the building.  The technique I taught, developed by Kristin Linklater, teaches actors to undo the maladaptive muscular habits that prevent them releasing their sound fully and expressively while speaking.  The technique is often referred to a “freeing the natural voice,” and—especially in the beginning—“ugly” sound is not only allowed but actually encouraged.

But I had never encountered “ugly” sound in yoga.  At that point, the only sound I was really familiar with in the yoga world was kirtan: a division of bhakti yoga often involving melodic call-and-response chanting, generally led by a yogi playing a harmonium.  I had attended large kirtan sessions where my imperfect voice could be masked by blending into the wall of sound, and found them to be ecstatic experiences.  But the idea of leading a kirtan myself—of being responsible for the sound element of a yoga class—was beyond daunting: it seemed actually impossible.  How could I expect a class to echo my chanting when it would almost certainly be off-key?

Happily, Jessica Caplan’s sensitive, inclusive teaching gradually made me feel more confident in my ability to lead a class in chanting over the course of the weekend. She also offered a variety of non-vocal ways to include sound in my yoga experience, whether as a teacher or as part of my home practice.  I came away with a practical understanding of what had been, before, a nebulous idea of the concept of sound healing.  I learned about the bija mantras’ relationship the chakras, and how to use them effectively in sequencing a chakra-centered class or private session.  I learned about toning and humming, and how the body responds to vibration and frequency.  (A useful maxim from the manual: “Sound is organized vibration.  Thus, organized sound can organize matter.”)  I was introduced to a variety of simple but powerful musical and percussive instruments (such as singing bowls, hand drums, chimes, and rattles) that I could accumulate and practice with in order to provide, for example, a soothing sound element during savasana, or an invigorating percussive element to a chi dance.  I also learned about the history of Indian sacred music.

Most transformative were the two immersive sound baths I experienced in the training, one a standalone experience and one incorporated into one of Dana Slamp’s incomparable restorative yoga classes. I also had the opportunity to create one myself, in conjunction with two classmates.  I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything as simultaneously grounding and transporting as a sound bath conducted by Jessica Caplan.  The experience is hard to describe, and I would be lying if I said I left the class feeling as if I could instantly replicate what Jessica had created—she is, after all, a professional sound therapist.  But I did leave with confidence in the imperative of my curiosity to explore sound.  I have since started acquiring instruments to be able to create sound baths for my own students and clients, and have begun incorporating healing sound into my own yoga classes, and especially into my teaching of yoga nidra.  I can’t tell you how exciting it was to learn practical ways to begin including sound into my own teaching right away.

Another major takeaway for me was the incorporation of chanting and mantra in to my own meditation practice.  We learned several mantras and were each encouraged to select one that resonated with us and practice it for a week.  I was deeply moved by the Maha Mrityunjaya (“The Great Chant of Healing”) and continue to use it in my personal practice on a daily basis. Perhaps unsurprisingly, consistently chanting in my daily meditation practice has made me more confident in leading chants, and now I am more likely to begin or end a yoga class with Loka Samastah or Om Navah Shivaya, rather than my usual three Oms.  I use an app version of the droning chord created by a harmonium or shruti box (a sort of elementary version of a harmonium that I plan to add to my collection of instruments), so the students with better ears than mine have an accurate pitch to follow.  Surprisingly, though (to me, anyway), chanting nightly backed with an accurate drone has actually improved my relative pitch.

In PYI’s Sound Therapy training, I learned that sound itself can be therapeutic, not just what we conventionally think of as “music” or “singing”.  This was a major revelation for someone who has always thought of herself as musically challenged.  It is not an overstatement to say that the course opened new world of expression and devotion was opened to me through this course, both as a yoga teacher and as a practitioner. 

Prema Yoga Institute’s Sound Yoga Therapy Training runs from April 17th to April 19th.  More information can be found here.

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Molly Goforth is a yoga and meditation teacher and a student at Prema Yoga Institute. She specializes in accessibility and trauma-informed yoga teaching and practice.