Learning to Sing
I have always had a deep love of music.
There are few things that bring me as much joy as music. Listening to music is a rapturous, ecstatic experience for me. I really lose myself in it. But throughout my life I‘ve had a lot of difficulty making music.
My body was apt for playing the violin but when it came to singing or whistling it seemed like the capability just wasn’t there. Like I was missing nerve connections or neural processes or something that allow people to do those things. And I did have some physical issues with my jaw and neck that made it much more difficult. But I don’t believe that was what was really keeping me from being able to sing. I believe it was a deep mental block.
I remember trying to learn how to whistle when I was a child on several occasions and the feelings of incompetence and confusion when I just couldn’t do it. It seriously challenged my ego. I was very proud of my physical abilities and most things came very naturally to me. But not whistling.
It wasn’t until I was in my early twenties that I learned how to whistle. I was introduced to a musical artist named Andrew Bird and he whistled a lot in his music and it was very beautiful. His music really spoke to me because he was also a violin player and we share similar intellectual interests. So I listened to his albums over and over trying to sing and whistle along. And one day it just clicked. I was whistling and I learned to control it and whistle along to his beautiful melodies. But I still couldn’t even begin to sing. And I mean that. I had absolutely zero vocal control. I couldn’t control the pitch or volume or timber of my voice at all. Whether speaking or trying to sing. It just seemed entirely impossible to me.
It wasn’t until I had surrendered completely and given up at being able to sing that the path would open for me. Then, one day I was in a really good mood because I had just gotten back from a business trip that had gone well. My girlfriend was out of town so I had the house to myself. I decided that it was a perfect opportunity to take some LSD and have a really personal spiritual experience. The set and setting were just perfect.
So I took a dose and went about my business. At one point, a couple hours in, I felt like listening to music so I put some on. What happened next was one of those spiritual experiences that are so profound and overwhelming that describing them accurately is a nearly impossible task. Nevertheless, that is what I am attempting to do with this story so bear with me if it seems outlandish. That is often the case with such things.
It was as if I was drawn into the music. My consciousness was drawn out of my head and into the vibrations of the music. I could see the sound waves bouncing around me. I surrendered to the experience completely and let my ego dissolve away. And the music overtook me.
I could feel and see the vibrations and felt myself being urged to join them. All of a sudden I was singing! But I wasn’t even consciously trying to. It was just happening. My consciousness was now entirely focused on my throat and the vibrations emanating from it. I could visualize the anatomy of my throat, my vocal chords, larynx, etc., and could concentrate the entirety of my awareness on that. I could feel and see the vibrations going through it. I could see the sound waves coming out of my mouth and clashing or synchronizing with those from the music.
But something even deeper happened. I then became conscious of the normally subconscious synchrony that occurs whenever we listen to music or speech. The effect brought me out of time and space, out of my body and mind even further and into the physical and emotional experience of the original singer. I could feel all of their joy or pain. I was experiencing heights and depths of emotional states far removed from those of my own life. I laughed, I cried, and I exclaimed in joy.
After some time, my consciousness expanded even further and I was completely overwhelmed with the deepest joy and bliss. I was singing! I was really singing!
The satisfaction of conquering an obstacle that I had been struggling with for decades washed over me. I entered a state of mystical ecstasy and for hours I sang and sang until I had absolutely no energy left. And that was how I learned how to sing.
Turning an Experience into a Practice
But, as with any other profound mystical experience, if I didn’t find some way to carry that experience forward into my life it would slowly fade into irrelevance and have little lasting impact. This is where I see a lot of people go astray on the plant medicine and psychedelic path. People become experience junkies always looking for the next peak experience fix to come from external sources. That doesn’t lead to the kind of growth and expansion that I want for myself. As the great Alan Watts said:
“If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen.”
The psychedelic experience had unlocked something deep within me and had opened up a whole new realm of pleasure and joy that had been closed to me before. I could actually sing! But I was still terrible at it. Most of my vocal range had never even been used. I had never developed the muscles around my throat, chest, and diaphragm that are used in singing. But it brought me so much joy that I didn’t care how difficult it was. I wanted to keep trying and I knew, eventually, that I would get better.
So I started singing along to music everyday, whenever I could, and it became the most joyous and beautiful and motivating part of my entire day. That’s when I decided to turn it into a real spiritual practice. I realized that I was quickly and reliably getting into a flow state and I was having powerful experiences that were completely psychedelic without any substances. I was experiencing peak states of bliss and absorption, having kaleidoscopic visions, and absolutely buzzing with energy.
And the best part was that I could experience that kind of rapturous bliss every single day! With no crash, no side effects, and no legality issues! In fact, by this time I had been experimenting with different spiritual practices for several years and this was, by far, the most powerful, reliable, and invigorating out of anything I had ever tried.
Song and Spirituality
It really blew my mind. But then I did a little digging and found that singing, and chanting, is actually one of the most common spiritual practices around the world. Christian religious services almost always include singing, Jewish communities come together and sing for various occasions, Sufi’s have several practices that involve group chanting and ecstatic singing, Sikhs and Hindus practice kirtan which is a religious practice that involves call-and-response style singing and chanting, and even ancient shamans, healers, and medicine men would sing, dance, and drum themselves into trances.
But I had grown up singing Christian worship music at least once a week and never had any profound spiritual experiences while doing so. And I don’t know any other Christians who did either. But when I talk to people from these other spiritual traditions it seemed rather common, and was often intentional. So it really made me wonder, what’s the difference? Why do these other singing and chanting practices reliably produce transcendent states while Christian worship services do not?
It comes down to what I called “absorption” above. I have to use the word absorption in English because we don’t have a proper word to describe mystical states of ecstasy. But in India they do. It’s called samadhi and it’s been talked about and cultivated in India for thousands of years. It turns out that it is much easier to hit a target if you know what that target is. But Christianity went down a very different path, one which persecuted those who sought and cultivated mystical and ecstatic states, because they offered direct access to divinity which the Church believed it had the divine right to a monopoly on. And things got even worse in the United States. The Puritanical suppression of pleasure invaded our culture so deeply that people, to this day, feel guilty for any desire for pleasure or pursuit of pleasure. And, of course, if we aren’t even allowed to desire pleasure, let alone experience it, then we can’t go anywhere near ecstasy or absorption.
This suppression of pleasure was further entrenched by the industrialists who decided that pleasure was only for the wealthy, the poor were meant to be productive cogs in the machine while those at the top lived lives more lavish and debaucherous than Roman emperors. We even had the incredibly stupid idea to make alcohol illegal. This eventually resulted in the massive cultural upheaval of the hippie revolution. Someone had to finally stand up and say, “Enough is enough! Pleasure is not a bad thing!” I don’t think it’s a coincidence that that revolution was based around emerging techniques, technologies, and substances which afforded not just pleasure but ecstasy and absorption. That revolution made some significant progress in bringing pleasure and absorption back to the chronically repressed Christian American masses, but it devolved into a chaotic mess and the cultural pendulum swings hard.
The backlash was brutal and intense. It was even called a “war”. But the supposed “war on drugs” was really a war on pleasure. HIV/AIDS and the free loving hippies were convenient excuses for people to demonize sexual pleasure, one of the other reliable routes to absorption and ecstasy, and Nixon’s drug scheduling was a targeted campaign to disrupt his political opponents by criminalizing their pleasure. By the time I was born in the late 1980’s America was an absolute mess. It turns out that criminalizing pleasure results in a huge increase in actual, harmful crime. It happened during prohibition and again in the war on drugs. Both eras saw a huge increase in violent crime. Because it turns out that experiencing pleasure without shame and guilt actually motivates people to be more productive, more compassionate, and just better people all around. And experiencing ecstasy or absorption can produce saints, sages, and prophets. It radically transforms people. But because of the cultural backlash anything associated with hippies or the New Age Movement was demonized and suppressed, mocked and ridiculed. This included everything from meditation to vegetarianism to psychedelics. All of which are making a huge comeback today, except within Christianity.
So it’s no surprise that the highly conservative and Christian culture I was raised in had no vocabulary for ecstatic states or mystical experiences because it didn’t value those things. It was still demonizing them and clinging to Puritanical misbeliefs. That’s why I never experienced ecstasy or absorption in Christian worship even though I worshiped with thousands of Christians at hundreds of events over the course of several decades. No one taught us about being present, surrendering to the moment, getting into flow state, or letting our ego dissolve. Not because those things are bad or immoral according to Christian doctrine, but simply because they were things that hippies talked about. I became heavily disillusioned with Christianity because it seemed like they were so focused on what they were against that they lost all sight of what they actually stood for.
But it turns out that those moments of ego dissolution, of flow, or present moment awareness are actually the most inspiring, motivating, and transformative experiences of people’s lives and they can reliably shift people’s behavior to be objectively better. And today there is an overwhelming amount of data to support that. If Christians had been cultivating those experiences for the last two thousand years instead of suppressing them, maybe Christianity wouldn’t be viewed as negatively as it is today. We’ll never know, but if it wants to stand any chance of being relevant in the future it certainly needs to change course.
Which brings me back to my point. I was getting so much out of my singing practice that it ended up being one of the most important of my spiritual practices and I am remiss that I didn’t write about it sooner. I tried a few times but couldn’t get it quite right. Because it’s not just about singing along to music. You have to completely surrender to it. Be totally present, totally absorbed, and, until very recently, techniques and technologies for absorption were taboo. Thankfully, things are changing quite rapidly. Meditation, breathwork, yoga and other techniques have soared in popularity and even psychedelics are making a comeback; this time under the careful guidance of doctors, scientists, and therapists rather than messianic gurus. And I love all of those things and they all have their uses, but none of those produce such powerful, ecstatic, and rapturous experiences as reliably as this simple singing practice.
Ecstatic Singing Practice
Here’s how it goes:
- Create a short playlist of songs you love, know well, and can sing along to, 10-15 minutes is enough
- Make sure you have some time and space to yourself
- Stand in the middle of the room, play the music, close your eyes, and sing and dance along
- If you find yourself getting caught up in your head just gently bring your focus back to your singing and remind yourself that pleasure is a good thing, no one is judging you, and you’re doing what you need to do to be your best self
That’s it! Just keep singing and dancing until the music ends. Sometimes I don’t even need a full 10 minutes. After a bit of practice, your body gets used to it and you can enter that ecstatic state very quickly. If you’ve ever felt the “natural high” from running or breathwork or something like that you have an idea of what to shoot for.
That’s because you enter a flow state, in fact, this practice is designed with the exact parameters in mind to reliably induce flow states. And as renowned cognitive scientist John Vervaeke stated:
“The flow state is even more rewarding than pleasure. So much so that asking people how frequently they get into the flow state is a good predictor of their sense of well-being.”
If you don’t have a practice to regularly get into the flow state, try this out. It dramatically improved my own sense of well-being and I’m sure it can do the same for you.
Love,
Justin
❤️🙏☀️