Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Chloë Goodchild. Chloë is a teacher, composer, and performer. She’s founder of the Naked Voice Foundation, a charitable trust devoted to healing suffering and resolving conflict through sound. She has helped thousands of individuals worldwide improve their lives and surroundings through the powerful revelation of their true voices.
With Sounds True, Chloë has created two titles: Your Naked Voice and a full audio-learning course called Awakening Through Sound: The Naked Voice Program to Access Your Deepest Wisdom, which includes a DVD. Chloë teaches how to fearlessly engage with your own naked voice; to listen to yourself and others with unconditional ears; to integrate heart, mind, and body; and to release your full creativity.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Chloë and I spoke about the sound before sound, and what the sound of ether might be like. We also discussed how she met the great Indian saint, Anandamayi Ma, and the influence that this divine mother figure has had on her. Finally, we discussed her Naked Voice work, and she led us through a practice of listening for who is singing—a practice called One Breath One Voice. Here’s my conversation with the very beautiful Chloë Goodchild, who is speaking with me from Dartmore in the UK.
Chloë, I know that in your work with sound in recent years, you’ve been working to use sound in a community setting to help communities harmonize. You have a really big vision for this—a huge vision that sound could actually be used to help the world harmonize. So could you share this vision of yours?
Chloë Goodchild: [Breathes deep] If we just take a breath, that breath itself which has come through the absolute core of the individual is the uprising of a whole mass of vibrations that arise and fall from the individual every moment of that in- and out-breath process. That in- and out-breath process is going on involuntarily all over the world. Seven billion of us human beings are breathing in and out as we speak.
It’s that very breath that our work is most focused on these days, that breath which is able to really access the core of the individual consciousness and the core of the human being’s capacity to love. I say if you can breath, you can love. And if you can love, you can sing. It’s a simple as that.
I have been blessed to work in various indigenous communities, but most notably in recent years in Ireland. As we know, the Celtic soul is so profoundly rooted in sound and in awareness of the sound of the soul. Following a request I had from the Dublin City Development Board to change the resonance of Dublin City, I had the opportunity to really start exploring this.
TS: A development board actually used language like “help us change the resonance of Dublin”? That’s quite unusual.
CG: That’s quite something isn’t it? Maybe only the Irish [would do such a thing], but I’m sure that the indigenous soul would have no problem with that question. This guy literally just rang me up. He’s a friend of one of my students in Ireland. He rung up and said, “Chloë we’ve heard about your work, and we want to change the resonance of Dublin City. Can you help us?” [Laughs]
Over the last several years we’ve been exploring the question with expanding groups of people who thought themselves to be non-singers and who were up for the adventure. And it’s cooking very nicely. It’s going very well. We’re having some very exciting results there.
TS: Tell me exactly, what you’re doing to change the resonance of Dublin City?
CG: Well, I was very inspired by that wonderful, universal, scientific equation that says that if you take the square root of 1 percent of the population, if that group of people has a strong enough intention, and that intention is positive, then that positive intention is powerful enough to change the resonance. In this case, Dublin is a million in population. The square root of one percent of the population is 100. So I thought, “OK, we need a choral gathering of 100 people.”
For many years I’ve been training facilitators to embody our work. We gathered a team of experienced Naked Voice practitioners and facilitators and then put the word out. To our utter delight, 100 people responded, and they came together initially for one year to explore the possibility of changing the resonance of the city. And all I can tell you is it’s in momentum. And I think what’s being discovered is that it’s possible for this group to start developing the tools that disappear the illusion that there’s any disparity in the community. Thanks to sound that is happening.
We have been working with vocal tools and vocal practices and are taking ourselves right into the heart of Dublin. For example, we’re running concerts on a regular basis. As well as that, we’re just literally practicing what we call “practicing the presence in public.” In other words, we’ve gone beyond the idea of “singing equals performance and entertainment,” or “singing equals religious formalism,” or “singing equals political campaigning.” We’ve gone deeper than that, and we’re now exploring if it’s possible to share among equals, practicing present moment, practicing the presence in public.
We just went up to a place called The Spire, which is [a monument] right in the heart of Dublin. The Spire is this massive piece of—I don’t know quite what it’s made of, but it’s silver. It looks like an acupuncture needle that thrusts itself up into the sky several hundred feet. It’s the point where, historically, the Easter Rising [occurred]—where there was this mega-conflict between the Irish and the English. In some of the buildings [in this area], you can still see the bullet shots in the walls and so on. So this is quite a historically contentious place for us to be practicing together.
We were in the middle of this dual carriageway—so there were cars and buses roaring past on both sides, but there was a big, wide pedestrian space in the middle. [That’s where] 70 of us were practicing what we call The Seven Sounds of Love, which is like embodied sound. We were moving through the different musical chakras and so on. Nóirín Ní Riain, one of the great voices of Ireland, was with us. She’s a great mate and loves our work and loves coming to join us.
So we were just there; it was quite relaxed. Everyone was practicing, and the movements had a kind of t’ai chi look to them. They’re actually energetic movements—there’s a movement that represents each note of the scale, each musical chakra from the root right up to the sky. The aim of these movements is to embody the sound, is to strengthen the body to sing on all levels of consciousness from the earth to the sky.
We were practicing together, all 70 of us, and we were doing the movements silently. Sometimes we were singing; sometimes we were just practicing the movements. Into the middle of this experience comes a major dignitary from the cathedral in Dublin, who happens to know Nóirín really well. Nóirín sees him coming toward us, and he just happens to be crossing the road at that moment, and he sees Nóirín. And she goes, “Oh Chloë. Oh, my God.” She’s slightly nervous as to how he’s going to respond to what’s going on.
By this point, the whole group is singing with the accompanying movements. They’re singing “How I Love You,” coming down the scale. This religious dignitary comes over, sees Nóirín, and he says, “Hey Nóirín!” By that point she has to acknowledge him, so she gave him, “Well, hi! How are you?” He looks at her a little bit dismayed and says, “What are you doing here? What’s going on?”
So Nóirín turns his attention to the group and says, “Well, just listen. Listen.” He [was with] the incredible organist who plays at the cathedral, and they both turn around, and they listen. Nóirín is a little apprehensive as to how he’s going to respond. He looks completely—his face is reddened—and he is quite affected by the energy of what’s going on. He turns back and he looks at her and he says, “My God, this is—this is prayer. This is the voice of God. We should be doing this in church!” [Laughs] By that point, Nóirín is really quite relaxed and pleased that he has been so touched by this gathering and by this movement.
We then continue our practice and he disappears. Later that evening, I tell this story at the more formalized concert we had that evening. I tell how we were practicing together at The Spire and how this dean of the cathedral (or whoever he was) came, and what a delight it was that he was so responsive and that he really enjoyed it and that he even went so far as to say that we should be doing [practices] like this in our churches.
At the end of the concert, this guy from the audience rushed up to me and took me by the hand. He said, “You don’t realize what actually happened. That was not the end of the story. I was in church with him later that day.” The man told us he actually was trying to do the same practices in church. He’d stopped the entire service and was practicing these “How I Love You” movements with the entire congregation in the cathedral. [Laughs]
So it was just a lovely moment [showing] how the simple presence can have such a magnetic and positive impact. Just in such an ordinary, but quite extraordinary, way.
TS: Now Chloë, you used this interesting phrase for this work that you are doing. You said that it’s forming a “singing field.” That’s a very curious phrase to me—a singing field. Can you explain that?
CG: Well, the word “field” is used increasingly in terms of describing fields of energy, interconnected fields of energy, and so on. So this is simply a singing field where that experience of oneness and all-inclusiveness that arises from shared sound and shared presence prior to sound, is what’s going on there.
I used to tour quite a lot with Coleman Barks, the [translator of] Rumi poetry. There is that wonderful Rumi poem, “Out beyond ideas of right and wrong doing there is a field.” His original is actually, “Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” Coleman used to recite, and I used to sing with him, and eventually I found myself actually on Whidbey Island singing that poem. And it turned into this song, “Out beyond ideas of right and wrong doing.” [Begins to sing: ] Out beyond ideas of right and wrongdoing, there is our field, a singing field. I’ll meet you there. I’ll meet you there. I’ll meet you there. [Singing ends]
So that sort of just came, and the song and everything came with it. I wrote to Coleman Barks and said, “Would it be okay if I just slightly edit the words and adapt that poem so that it has more specific significance to the work we are doing—as in a field of energy, of shared presence, that is generated and inspired by shared sound.” So that’s how the term “singing field” got coined.
TS: In the beginning of our conversation, Chloë, you mentioned that if someone can breath they can love, and if they can love they can sing. I have to say I was totally with you in terms of breathing and loving. That made sense to me. But when we moved from loving to singing, I had a moment and I thought, “Well look, I can love but I don’t know if I can sing.”
CG: [Laughs heartily] Well, I just heard you singing right there, actually. I mean, you were apparently speaking, but what was really interesting was what happened to the energy of your voice when you very authentically and sincerely asked that question more emphatically. Your voice—you know the phrase, if you were to sing that—it rose and fell in this really quite impassioned way. Now that to me is singing. Singing doesn’t mean this “la, la, la” thing that we do in a performance sense. It can be just as you spoke just now. That for me is a kind of singing.
It’s really about the expression of feeling. The feelings are the soul. That’s really what singing is about for us. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to be [Sings] “la, la, la, da, la-da, la-da.” You know? But it can be. I heard you singing.
TS: Yes. I think you’re redefining singing for me, which is quite interesting.
CG: That essentially is what I would say our work is about: to redefine what singing truly means, which is to express the vibration of the soul. That is why poetry, I would imagine, has been so unbelievably loved—particularly the kind of ecstatic love poetry that is coming from [authors] Rumi and Hafiz. It’s so appealing to people because it’s like a bridge between the ordinary, everyday, habitual speaking voice, which has dominated our communication—where speaking is more dominated by the personality, the habitual mind, a sense of separateness. Probably what accompanies that are a lot of stories [about] how in childhood someone once told us we couldn’t sing.
It saddens me that this thing called singing has been so separated from what essentially is everyone’s birthright—which is soul communication, the communication of the soul. And in the bardic traditions [and in] the indigenous world, there’s no separation between speaking and singing. It’s a seamless communication.
TS: You said something else that I found very intriguing; you were emphasizing the importance of the presence and the quality of presence that there is before the voice even comes to birth and how that part of the singing field is bringing people together in that state of presence even before sound is made. I wonder if you could speak more about that.
CG: Ah yes, absolutely. For me, the root and the source of this work is about falling in love with silence. It’s about falling in love with our pre-verbal sound, with who we are before sound is even uttered. The whole question, “Who am I?” so easily spills out on the habitual mind: I’m so and so, I’m a plumber, I’m a something, I’m a very important person, I’m a very unhappy person, I’m a very joyous person, I’m very successful, I’m a very lonely person. Prior to that—prior to the way we separate ourselves from our true nature—is this connection with what’s very deeply referred to in the Eastern and ancient traditions as the inner sound. The nada brahma, the sound before sound.
I am really fascinated that the Mayan elders have come out with a message recently about how that inner sound—and our connection to that inner sound—is going to be one of the most essential tools for humanity as we progress from this Kali Yuga era into a whole new era that they’re referring to as The Fifth Sun.
What really interests me is [the Mayans are] speaking about how essential this inner sound is, and they talk about it as the sound of ether, the one element that we tend to leave in outer space, so to speak. We think of ether as being out there in space, but in the mystical traditions, the etheric sound, or the sound of ether—the inner sound, the nada brahma—is practiced by mystics and by people like ourselves who are fascinated by this exploration of who is singing, who is sounding, and “who am I anyway?”
Inayat Khan says: “The sound of ether is the one element for which the human body is the musical instrument.” I just love that. Our connection with silence—that inner sound, the sound before sound—is going to be absolutely critical in terms of how we navigate the increasing challenges we face in the world. I’ve made a bit of a leap there in terms of the conversation we’re having but—
TS: What you’re saying is very, very beautiful to me. If I was to pick it apart a little bit, I think of the question, “Who is singing?” or “Who is speaking, who is making the sound?” That’s a question you work with quite a lot in your work, and it does seem quite mysterious. “Who is this?” But now this other thing that you are saying about the sound of ether: is that a sound that has no audible quality to it?
CG: That’s right. It’s not audible in the ordinary sense of listening like [Sings] “La!” Not like that. It’s a sound that the human body basically is the vibrational sounding board for. It’s the “receiver of.” And for example, there’s a practice that you can do when you wake up in the morning. For some reason it’s a very good time to practice this, when you wake up in the morning. You may well be familiar with this. You listen to that inaudible sound. To put it crudely, it’s like a very high pitch, like the kind of sound you might listen to if you put a shell to your ear.
TS: OK. When I put a shell to my ear, I hear something like the ocean.
CG: Yes, and I’m speaking about it as if it’s a little denser than it actually is, but that’s the kind of key. That sound that you hear, which is like this really high-pitched sound, it’s inaudible as in you’re hearing it inside yourself. The ears are the initial location for it, but with practice the whole surface area of the body becomes a location for it. And your whole body starts to become aware of itself as a vibrational field of silence. Does that help?
TS: It does. It’s very beautiful. Thank you Chloë.
CG: It’s like a flowing wave. And the sound leads us back to our molecular structure, if you like. It leads us back to that awareness that is not this heavy, dense body but nevertheless it obviously acknowledges that. I mean it needs the body in order to be conscious of itself. So the human body at that point becomes a sacred temple of sound. It becomes its own consciousness. It becomes aware of its own consciousness through this sound. That might be a better way to say it.
TS: There’s one other thing that you’ve mentioned that I think would be good to make explicit: this connection between loving and this inaudible and then the audible sound that we have the opportunity to make. How is love part of this?
CG: Well, love—hmm—there are no words for love. Love is the unifier. It is this wondrous power that exists before the mind. And it offers the soul an opportunity to express itself. Love is like the tuning fork between the inner and the outer sound. And it leads us from a state of unmanifest being into manifestation.
TS: Beautiful.
CG: There’s a beautiful poem that goes: “The flute of interior time is played, whether we hear it or not. What we mean by love is its sound coming in. When love hits the farthest edge of excess, it reaches a wisdom, and oh the fragrance of that knowledge. It penetrates our thick bodies. It goes through walls. It has a structure as if a million suns were arranged inside it. This sound has truth in it. Where else have you heard a sound like this?” It’s something like that. “Where else have you heard a sound like this? The sound of love coming into the body and that bring us into…
TS: Chloë—
CG: Yes, go on.
TS: No, go ahead please.
CG: I was going to say that brings us really into the whole territory of the power of sound and singing as a vehicle of intimacy—essentially with ourselves, but then of course in terms of developing conscious human relationships. That’s another very important dimension of what we’re speaking about, and obviously in our work that’s what’s going on.
What I love about singing is that it doesn’t require an outer object of love. I mean obviously it’s beautiful to sing in whatever relationship: with one’s children, one’s elders, one’s lovers, one’s colleagues. We’ve just started working in the corporate world and that’s really exciting. But, the beauty of singing is that it offers the experience of self-containment where you can just express love for its own joy. You know the soul is here for its own joy, says [poet] Robert Bly. That for me is one of its most essential gifts: it offers each of us the opportunity to really engage with our aloneness, without the need for an outer object of longing or belonging. It just has a life of its own.
TS: [I’d like to] pick up on this idea of a song that can create intimacy. Chloë, you and I spent time together about seven years ago. There was one song that I heard from you at that time that has stuck with me through all these years.
CG: Wow!
TS: So even though we haven’t been in touch, this song that I heard from you has stayed with me and continues to play inside my being. And it’s the chant to Anandamayi Ma. I want to play that for our listeners, but before we do, I was wondering if you could introduce both your relationship to Anandamayi Ma and this chant?
CG: Oh, I’d be so happy to do that. Thank you. She is Anandamayi Ma, which means “the blissful mother.” She was one of the great luminaries of 20th-century India. She was a wild, ecstatic saint. She had 24 ashrams in India. She played a very significant role in terms of the evolution of the sacred feminine. She was the counselor to the whole Nehru dynasty and to Mahatma Gandhi himself. She was a great light in India in the 20th century. And she was my transforming spiritual mentor, you could say.
My life and my work, which is primarily dedicated to the sacred feminine is inspired by the mighty mother of being that she mirrored to me.
TS: Now, she’s a mentor figure for you, but you never met her person, in the flesh?
CG: This was true. And it’s one of the great mysteries. I’m told that it’s quite an auspicious thing to not have met her in this lifetime. She was confined [in solitude], she had no guru, she self-initiated herself. She was a very unusual spiritual figure, and she’s a highly beautiful woman in India. And I think traditional, ashramic India, the orthodox world, really didn’t know what to do with her because she was so unique and so unbounded, unfettered.
So they created these really quite strong orthodox, ashramic communities around her as a means of protecting her at one level, I think. For Westerners, this created quite a difficult relationship with her because Westerners were not seen as being as worthy of her attention as were the immediate India community. So I encountered [Anandamayi Ma] in dreams. There are many, many, stories of people who encountered her in dreams as I did.
I think she clearly is an archetypal presence—as are other great feminine archetypal presences in our time, and very significantly so given the state of the planet. She has been, if you like, the embodiment of Mother Earth and of the Fierce Mother, the Fierce and Gentle Mother, and of the Blissful Mother.
So the words of this chant anandamayi ma mean “praise to the blissful mother,” chaitanya mayi means “praise to the enlightened or awakened mother,” satya mayi, “mother of true being,” parameshwari, “the mother beyond all form.” And it’s to that one that I bow.
TS: We’re going to hear the chant in just one moment, but before we do, I want to underscore how unusual and how important it is to show the strength of what kind of mentorship can happen through the dream state.
CG: Absolutely. My goodness! I had no knowledge of this before I encountered her in a dream. My first dream of her was during my late 30s when I was sleeping on the seashore on the island of Crete, which is a sacred place for the sacred feminine. It’s very much honored as an island of the sacred feminine, so perhaps it’s not surprising that she first appeared there. Our dear friend Ram Dass, whom we used to bring to Europe, showed a slideshow of the great saints of the 20th century at one of our retreats. Anandamayi was one of the slides, and when I saw her image, I just disintegrated, and life has never been the same again.
TS: OK, let’s listen to this chant. It’s from Awakening Through Sound, which is a five-session audio learning course through Sounds True that Chloë created. As part of it, there’s an introduction to several different mantras that are sung and several different chants, including this universal mother chant to “Anandamayi Ma.”
[Music]
TS: It’s interesting, Chloë, what it was like when you saw Anandamaya Ma’s picture. You said you “disintegrated.” I wonder what it might be like when people hear certain sounds. The impact that can have on them—like a photo.
CG: Yes.
TS: What do you think about that?
CG: Yes, I really like that. I think you’re onto the absolute core conversation because certainly our relationship between the audible and the visible, listening with seeing, sound, movement, that is, if you like, the finest vibration. Color and sound, that we can really access our essential nature through. I remember once listening to the great flautist Hariprasad Chaurasia. After hearing his flute, I just couldn’t sleep for three nights. It was so powerful as a real catalyst for a more awakened consciousness. There was another wonderful Pakistani Sufi singer, Siddique Khawan [ph] and all he was doing was singing six notes over and over and over again—and it was like drilling into the center of my chest.
Yes, sound I would say as much, if not more so. I must say in those days—it’s now over 20 years ago—Ram Dass had the German publishers send me a wonderful photographic essay of Anandamayi. When I saw these images of her—or the other ones like the photographic stills of her life from young womanhood into eldership—[Sighs ecstatically]. I just had [photos of her] everywhere in my house.
When I eventually went to India to meet all the devotees who had been with [Anandamayi] for decades, I said, “Do you think if I just keep staring at these images that my mind will be dissolved in her presence?” And you know, there was strong support for that. By the grace of God, there was. That grace was given for a temporary period of time—two or three months. My mind actually disappeared.
TS: What do you mean by that, Chloë? That your mind disappeared for two or three months? You were still going to the grocery store and stuff, yes?
CG: [Laughs heartily.] Absolutely. What is fascinating about it was that the ordinary mind disappeared. This sense of Chloë as the personal doer, as the controller of her reality, disappeared. Whereas there was this intelligence prior to the personality of Chloë, who thought she was Chloë. There was this intelligence behind that which was able to move the body around, pay the bills, run the workshops, bring up my daughter—and that was very interesting to me. That was where I first really discovered what “witness consciousness” means. And that was quite a blessing.
TS: How would you say the witness consciousness plays a role in the Naked Voice work that you teach?
CG: It’s absolutely central to it. There’s no question in my mind that sound—either poetic or sung sound, as in free unstructured sound—is one of the most effective and fastest ways of accessing this faculty of attention call “the witness.” And it does not seem to be something that we are born with; it seems to be something that we have to remember and relearn throughout our lives if there is enough hunger for it and enough self-determination to find it.
And so, in the work that I do with Naked Voice, I’m certainly very aware that you can have many amazing experiences of your voice—you know, to talk about at dinner parties and in social conversations about how dramatic you were, how impressive you were, how inspiring you were. But unless you can make the connection between who is singing and that silence that comes when the singing stops, you’ve missed something very essential. What interests me is how singing is really the excuse to rediscover “witness,” that part of ourselves that can observe oneself and another without judging.
It comes quite naturally to [each] and every human being. One of our practices, for example, is to sing One Breath One Voice. If you sing “one breath” and you just let that sound go on for as long as you like, you get to the end of it, and most people are not very familiar with doing something like that. When you get to the end of that sound, there’s such a thunderous silence. And what naturally comes—the first question that comes out of the body—is “Who was that?”
And that for me, is a great indicator of the first stage of waking up. Or it’s a diagnostic that you are waking up when that question comes in. “Who was that?” Whereas you can just say, “Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?” in a kind of mental way—in a conventional meditative sense. That also is another route, but there’s something about the singing voice that really accesses that question very fast—and it’s interesting.
TS: Clearly a big part of the Naked Voice work has to do with listening. What I’m curious about is if you were to help somebody increase their ability to listen—whether it’s listening for who is singing, whether it’s listening to another—how would you do that? How can [our audience] become a better listener right now?
CG: I would encourage every single person who is listening and engaging in this conversation with us to simply engage in this One Breath One Voice utterance.
TS: Can you actually take us through it, Chloë? Can we do the practice of One Breath One Voice together?
CG: Sure. So all you do is just take one big breath and you can [choose] a vowel, like the “ah” or the “A,” “E,” “O,” “Um.” Any vowel at all [is fine], but “ah” is good because it’s a manifestation sound.
You take a breath and imagine this is the last breath of your life or the first breath of your life. So [let’s] do it all together now: take a big breath in and just sound out. When you get to the end of [the breath], what’s really important almost before you breathe in again is to be absolutely present to the silence that’s there at the end. And then as you breathe in again, just ask yourself, “Who is singing?” You can just ask that internally. Would you like to try it?
TS: As long as I don’t have to make a sound out loud, I’m willing to try it, yes.
CG: [Laughs heartily.] That’s heavy. Even that is a question. Who is stopping that sound from pouring out of your mouth?
TS: Okay, let’s try it Chloë. Let’s try it. Let’s do it.
[Both sing]
CG: That was beautiful. How are you?
TS: I feel quite good, thank you. I like the space after the sound.
I want to ask you one final question. We started by talking about your community work and its potential impact. I know this is so important to you, and I’d really like for you to share how you think this might grow. Do you think this is the kind of thing that’s going to become a movement across the world, or do you think that’s a pie-in-the-sky idea? What’s your real vision here?
CG: At one level, it doesn’t matter. It actually doesn’t matter because the world is singing anyway. The earth itself is just one huge, vibrating song. If human beings can get conscious of this reality that the world is one huge, vibrating song, that will assist the earth to—it’s a way of healing and assisting humanity to wake up to this new consciousness. I don’t know quite so well what’s going on in America, but there’s absolutely no question that in the United Kingdom and Ireland and across Europe that there is a critical mass of sound and singing going on. I’m very aware that this is really building in the UK.
I don’t know if you’ve heard of this work [and a British TV series] called The Choir. An extraordinary being named Gareth Malone has been teaching the most unlikely people to sing just regular songs. This has really caught fire, and people are joining choirs all over the [United Kingdom]. I think the whole intervention of world music and the increasing richness of music that is assailing us from all sides as our communities more and more multi-culturally involved with each other—this is contributing to the process of participative sound and singing.
There’s no question that it offers an economic and effective way to significantly reduce the number of work days missed. In the UK alone, people take something like 13 million days off work just due to increasing levels of stress, isolation, and fear in the face of redundancy and the economic crisis and so on.
So there’s no question that sound and song is a very supportive antidote—a homeopathic response to the sheer levels of increasing collective stress. But at a deeper level, it’s more to do with developing the tools of remembering that “I am the world,” “My body is a mirror of the world.” So even if I do nothing else but find my voice and keep investigating the question, “Who is singing?” that itself is going to transform the world as we know it.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Chloë Goodchild, who has created with Sounds True a program called Awakening Through Sound. It has five audio sessions and then a DVD session of sound practices that incorporate body movements from a martial arts tradition called Shintaido. Chloë has also created with Sounds True a two-session audio learning program called Your Naked Voice, which takes people through the process of The Seven Sounds of Love, working with sound and movement up and down through the chakra system.
Chloë is also a contributor to a Sounds True musical collection called Songs of Tara. I thought that now at the very end of our conversation, we would play Chloë’s contribution to this collection. This is a song that’s simply called “Tara.” Chloë, do you have anything you want to say about this before we hear it?
CG: Well, Tara is another great archetypal feminine presence who is really inspiring people all around the world, regardless of their religious disposition. I’ve just been with her at a Tara monastery. It’s very interesting to me how Tara, the Goddess of Compassion, is clearly a force that is supporting and generating more compassionate energy in the world.
TS: And it’s a beautiful way to end. SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey. Here’s “Tara,” from Songs of Tara.
