Using our voices has always been the key to healing and transformation in traditional cultures, and was a major contribution to a healthy community in our own – until we stopped. Having pioneered the rediscovery of the voice in the West, I take the notion of re-enchanting literally – to make us magical again through chant.

I now see so many community choirs starting up worldwide and in this country, and the phenomenon has even become the subject of primetime television.  You only have to see the tears of love and joy in people from otherwise dysfunctional communities to realize the magic it imparts. I really feel things are beginning to change and I am wonderfully optimistic.

We have always created fields of consciousness and activated them through group chant, and my life’s work is to re-establish this through my Healing Voice and other Workshops.

A brain physiologist, who when he first started working with me said, “I see, you’re ‘vibrating the brain’, that’s what we do when we give Electric Shock Treatment – it makes people feel blissful.” As we know so little about the brain, we agreed that chanting might be a more humane, enjoyable, easier and less expensive way of making people feel ecstatic, belonging, unified, happy, cheerful and healed.

Vibrating the brain is something that is induced particularly by ‘overtone chanting’, a technique I introduced into the West from Central Asia. The sound is pushed up through the pineal and pituitary glands and into the brain itself, as well as through the point at the roof of the mouth where the Du and the Ren channels, the principal yin and yang meridians, cross over in the body.  It stimulates the glands, activates the brain, harmonizing the active and receptive sides, and all the meridians of the body.

I have seen the lives of thousands of my students change dramatically through this work. It’s impossible to feel depressed when you are chanting in this way; alleviating depression is one of its most wonderful outcomes. As well as countless emotional and psychological healings, I have had many very specific healings of otherwise incurable physical conditions.

Three examples are interesting as they have had years of follow up.  One of my students in her 50s had congenital nystagmus (involuntary, rapid, disturbing lateral eye movements since birth). After a weeklong intensive workshop with me, all of the symptoms disappeared and they have never reoccurred in the 14 years since. Another student had suffered from anosmia and ageusia (total loss of smell and taste) for 18 months; the doctors had told her it was post viral and permanent.  Yet, after doing a single weekend workshop with me 24 years ago, she regained both senses, and the condition has never returned. Another student, who had suffered lifelong tinnitus, was completely cured after working with me. All three conditions are supposedly incurable, and yet, in each case, the symptoms disappeared and have never returned.  There have been countless more! Chanting is good for mental, emotional and physical conditions – even those considered to be incurable by normal medical means.

The practice of chanting while simultaneously listening to the sound we are making is the easiest way to become present in the now. Anxiety, which is worrying about the future based on what happened in the past, is the cause of many illnesses, but it’s an impossibility if we are fully present. Simultaneous chant and integration through listening has been acclaimed by the Buddha as the fastest way to become enlightened – perhaps for this reason it is the ultimate healing.

Another aspect of my voice work is Healing the Family and Ancestors, where I work with sound and family constellations.  In this work, we activate and make conscious the ancestral field of each person and reveal the patterns of breaches that have been passed down the generations. Through this amazing work, these breaches get healed and coherence is established; the person is freed from inherited patterns that have caused pain and disturbances and blocked their life and development.

My remaining workshop for this year is this weekend (December 10 and 11) and details about that and the full programme for 2012 are now online: come and join me!

 <www.healingvoice.com>