When we are in emotional turmoil, we can feel stuck, or even imprisoned, within our own suffering. It can feel as though there is something within us that is heavy, rotten, aching, or excruciating.

The word catharsis originates from the Greek word “kathairein”, meaning to cleanse or to purge, especially that which lies in the bowels, the literal underbelly of a human being ("Definition of catharsis," n.d.). Healing, when seen through this lens, can be seen as the purging of that which is festering within, bringing motion to that which has been dammed up in the recesses of the mind and heart, transmuting that which prevents us from feeling whole and being ourselves. There are many methods for initiating this process. One such healing method, and the method that will be the focus of this writing, is the open expression of the singing voice.

Each person is an amalgamation of multiple facets. There is the body, the mind, the emotions, the sexuality, and the soul. When I refer to the self, I am referring to all of these components of the human being. When one aspect of a person is affected, it simultaneously affects all other aspects of that person. These dimensions of the human being are not intrinsically separate. A person’s whole being comprises all of these facets. Affecting any aspect affects the whole.

For this project, I spoke with a few people, each of whom uses the voice in their own way: Inès Maricle is a singer and performer who uses the voice in a healing modality she calls Intuitive Vibrational Healing, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico; Young Joo Lee is an artist, songwriter, and performer, based in Jejudo, South Korea, whose ceremonial performances I was powerfully moved by when I first met her in Seoul; and Sarah Clark (a pseudonym of someone who prefers to remain anonymous), a facilitator of Ayahuasca healing ceremonies.

I asked each of them about their views and experiences of the healing process, as well as how the voice can be used to augment healing work.

Wounds, blockages, & addiction

When we talk about healing, what is it that is being healed?

We are talking about healing wounds, wounds of the body, mind, emotions, sexuality, and soul. Any wound can impact a person on each of these levels. A broken limb can weigh on the mind and the heart. A blow to the emotions can manifest physically. Some wounds naturally repair themselves or fade away. Other wounds, particularly those that cause the most disturbance, persist.

When the self retains an inner wound, the self holds onto the pain that comes with it. Part of the pain comes from the impact of the initial inflictive event (a rejection, a loss, a trauma). Additional pain can come from our response to the pain and our relation to it, dynamics that often occur unconsciously.

When a pattern of pain repeats within the self, it creates a pattern of contraction. Maricle describes contraction as “something that becomes a blockage after it contracts over and over” (Maricle, personal communication, 2020). As mentioned before, a blockage that occurs in any one facet of the self (body, mind, emotions, sexuality, or spirit) also affects the other facets. A blockage represents a withdrawal, ambivalence, or defensive strategy to cope with adversity. Some aspect of our life force shuts down. “Blockages are basically places where there is no movement” (Maricle, personal communication, 2020). The life force that is meant to flow, breathe, and move becomes stuck, frozen, heavy.

If an inner wound does not mend itself and is not sufficiently addressed, the hurt continues to live inside of us. The parts of the self to which the pain is attached become disconnected, barricaded, or buried. Those parts are not actually separated from us. Everything is still present, but there can be a lost sense of wholeness, an experience of defragmentation that manifests as loss and suffering. These sequestered facets of our life force become stuck and restrained. These dismembered fragments are relegated to the shadows of the self, shoved under the rug, tossed into the basement.

This process of seeming disconnection is not necessarily “bad” or “good”. These protective blockages create a barrier between the pain and our conscious awareness. It can even be a necessary survival mechanism that occurs when one does not yet have the ability, knowledge, will, or resources needed to address the wound (for instance, if they are a child). While these methods of psychic buffering can enable one to survive, the pain of the wound will remain. A pain that persists and goes untended is apt to grow over time, much like a flesh wound that is never bandaged.

When one is unable to tend to or coexist with a persisting pain, addictive patterns may be adopted in an attempt to mitigate that difficulty. Addictive patterns can serve the purpose of: avoiding or numbing pain; controlling or changing the pain, especially through a substance or process that alters the neurochemistry; or in some way attempting to make pain more manageable.

Addiction can take many forms, be it alcohol, drug use, shopping, sex, or eating, just to name a few. The addiction is not necessarily about the chosen process or substance itself. The issue is one’s relation to the process or substance. Do the negative effects outweigh the benefits? Is it disrupting their lives? Are they unable to stop or control the use, despite a desire to do so?

Just as the aforementioned process of disconnecting from painful emotions can be a necessary protective measure, so, too, can an addictive pattern serve the same purpose. Although it may be useful for some time, an adverse addictive pattern does not directly address the internal root that prolongs the suffering.

The wound festers.

The pain grows.

The measures required to buffer the pain increase.

A small habit that previously caused only negligible detriment can become an uncontrollable, destructive addiction. If this happens, and if the individual wants to make a change, a different approach is needed.

Healing

Healing will look different for every person. There is no magic pill or “one way” to heal. Sarah Clark describes healing as “the acceptance and integration of all of the parts of who we are”, including the aspects of oneself that one does not like. This means entering those pockets of frozen pain, observing what is there, opening up to it, listening, feeling, and helping it move, helping it live again. It is the work of going into that dark and dreary basement of the psyche, and reestablishing a relationship with the parts of ourselves that we have fought to avoid.

As you might imagine, this can be an uncomfortable, even excruciating process! If one is to effectively reintegrate the fragmented limbs of the psyche, it is necessary to have adequate resources, support, and safety in order to do so without exacerbating the preexisting pain. The work of healing can, at times, be beautiful, inspiring, and playful. At other times, it can feel unbearable and life-threatening, and that is worth bearing in mind. It is ill-advised to go into the ocean without a life jacket.

The work of healing can involve returning movement to the frozen, stuck areas within. It can mean bringing incrementally increasing amounts of awareness to unconscious contents, like letting sunlight trickle into unseen corners of an old, forgotten house. When we heal, emotions and sensations that have been numbed or subdued may once again be felt.

Lee proffers that “there is no end goal of healing. It is an ongoing process” (Lee, personal communication, 2020). There is no final destination at which we arrive to find that all of our healing is finished, all pain forever gone--even though one might often wish there was. Healing does not always mean that the wound disappears. Healing can mean that we learn how to be with the pain, how to hear its needs, how to care for it, and how to take care of ourselves.

Pain is part of life and, because of that, so is healing. Part of healing is nurturing a relationship with pain that allows us to coexist with it, to hear and meet its needs, rather than fight it or avoid it, thereby worsening it.

All of this healing work is not a process of perfection--and it does not need to be! As Lee mentioned, it is ongoing. It can feel messy and nonlinear, aptly described by the phrase, “two steps forward, one step back”, or even several steps back with some stumbling into muddy puddles and stubborn walls. It can look different each day for each person. Some days, it might feel exultant and liberating. Other days, we might just count it a success that we made it through the day and can safely tumble into our bed.

The Voice

When healing occurs, awareness returns to the hidden, contracted parts of oneself. Vocalization can give those parts a way to depart from their frozen state and return to movement. When we sing, we may do so with reservation. We might be self-conscious, disengaged, and afraid to fully express ourselves. Conversely, we can also sing freely, abandoning inhibition, allowing ourselves to dive into the song and belt it out. For me, such moments occur when my roommates are gone or when I am alone in the car.

When I talk about the healing voice, I am referring to the latter practice. There may still be a modicum of reservation but, for the most part, the voice is expressing itself with considerable freedom. When this state of relatively uninhibited vocalization is accessed, it induces a felt quality of openness. The voice opens. Since the voice is physical, this openness ripples throughout the body. And because the body is interwoven with all other aspects of the self (mind, emotions, sexuality, spirit), that same openness can ripple throughout those inner dimensions, too.

Why is this openness a source of healing?

The places where pain has frozen within us have become closed. This experience of vocally-induced openness can find its way into those shutdown areas, helping the stuck to become unstuck, looser, lighter, and more free to move. In other words, openness creates freedom. Even if the voice is expressing pain or ugliness, this sense of openness somehow permits it to be done with a feeling of liberation. The pain may still be present, but we are not imprisoned by it as we once were.

In addition to openness, vocalization can also be used to activate a state of surrender. We can let go of how we want things to be, how we think we are supposed to be. When we surrender through the voice, we simply allow whatever sound wants to be uttered to come out. We let the sound, and the feelings it invokes, move inside of us and through us. Surrendering to the sounds roiling from the belly and streaming from the mouth means that we are also surrendering to whatever contents they carry, be it mental, emotional, spiritual, sexual, or otherwise.

A significant component of addiction is resistance to, or avoidance of, what is present. Surrender can be an antidote to this resistance and avoidance that empowers us to meet the pain as it is, hear it, feel it, and possibly give it what it needs so that we can feel more whole.

Maricle shared that “we shapeshift with the sound of our voice” (Maricle, personal communication, 2020). When approached this way, vocal expression can be seen as a tool to shift one’s state. We can find new ways to coexist with the seemingly disparate parts of the self, using the voice to let those parts move and sing. Also, when the voice is expressed with open surrender, there is potential for new qualities to enter our consciousness, or be activated within our being. The fluidity catalyzed by vocalization can make it easier to adopt new qualities of being that may have felt less attainable when we were stuck, frozen, or weighed down.

As Clark describes the soulful restorations and transformations of an ayahuasca ceremony, she says “a lot of the healing is about cleaning, liberating, untying, and releasing” (Clark, personal communication, 2020). Every instance of healing in every individual will have its own shape and tone. The form healing takes depends on the person and the symptoms to which it is responding. It can be beautiful and awe-inducing, excruciating and gut-wrenching, a combination of those elements, or anything else. It can mean tuning into the wound and saying, as Lee expressed, “I am ready to let this go. I don’t need it to affect me anymore” (Lee, personal communication, 2020). Or it can mean that the wound remains open, but we relearn how to coexist with it and be its caretaker, rather than its opponent. Healing is an amorphous process that is always happening and never ends, so far as I can tell, and so long as the world and life continue their cosmic wiggling.

References

Clark, S. (2020, November 8). Personal interview [Personal interview].
Definition of catharsis. (n.d.). Dictionary by Merriam-Webster: America's most-trusted online dictionary. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/catharsis
Lee, Y. (2020, November 1). Personal interview [Personal interview].
Maricle, I. (2020, October 23). Personal interview [Personal interview].

On my blog, you can find more writings on art and alchemical thinking, interviews about creativity, psychologically-oriented reflections on tarot, and more. You can check out past posts in the categorized list below.

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Art
- Jul 2, 2018 About the Folks Who Think You Stink (Notes on Performance and Life)
- Jun 22, 2018 The Freedom and Fear of Being Yourself (Notes on Performance and Life)
- Apr 3, 2018 Public Alchemy: Notes on Street Performance
- Dec 1, 2017 Why the Tutu?
- Sep 14, 2017 Art is a Portal
- Aug 17, 2017 Put the Potatoes on Your Face
- Dec 28, 2016 How to Make Magical Oranges
- Dec 19, 2016 Wakey Wakey, Inner Kiddo
Interviews
- Jul 18, 2018 Artist Interview: Kayle Karbowski
- Jun 4, 2018 Artist Interview: Sally Nicholson
- Apr 23, 2018 Interview: Yogi Ron Katwijk
- Mar 1, 2018 Artist Interview: Lawrence Blackman
- Feb 21, 2018 Artist Interview: Samantha Blumenfeld
Magical Thinking
- Jun 21, 2023 Magick for Reshaping Life and Transmuting Trauma
- May 18, 2023 Magick is a Sentient Entity: Using the Imagination to Co-Create with Magick
- Dec 4, 2020 The Healing Voice: Wounds, Addiction, and Purgation
- Aug 5, 2019 Celebrating Your Misery
- Jun 21, 2019 White Peacocks, Constipation, and Emotional Liberation
- Aug 23, 2018 Melting a Snowball of Misery
- Jul 2, 2018 About the Folks Who Think You Stink (Notes on Performance and Life)
- Jun 22, 2018 The Freedom and Fear of Being Yourself (Notes on Performance and Life)
- Apr 16, 2018 Questions for Limitations
- Apr 3, 2018 Public Alchemy: Notes on Street Performance
- Jan 5, 2018 Chaos' Playground: Finding Gold in the Shitstorm
- Dec 1, 2017 Why the Tutu?
- Sep 14, 2017 Art is a Portal
- Aug 7, 2017 Three Reasons to Destroy Yourself (Or Not)
- Jul 6, 2017 Nerves and Tutus
- Feb 19, 2017 Why Does Heartache Happen?
- Jan 15, 2017 Following Fear
- Dec 28, 2016 How to Make Magical Oranges
Tarot
- Oct 24, 2019 TAROT QUESTION #5: Why does my skin crawl with wonder and fascination as such important relationships in my life are connected by the eyes?
- Oct 11, 2019 TAROT QUESTION #4: How long will it be until I have a new job?
- Sep 25, 2019 TAROT QUESTION #3: Why can't I find more hours in a day?
- Sep 3, 2019 TAROT QUESTION #2: Do abusers know they're being abusive, or is that just their sense of reality?
- Aug 25, 2019 TAROT QUESTION #1: Why is the Present Moment So Much All the Time?
- Aug 18, 2019 Today's Tarot: Shifting Pain by Surrendering to It
- Aug 13, 2019 Today's Tarot: The Golden Devils Inside You
- Aug 12, 2019 Today's Tarot: The Moon of Self-Loathing
- Jun 27, 2019 Today's Tarot: Snot, Beauty, and Tea for Pain
- Feb 28, 2018 Today's Tarot: The World is in the Seed
- Aug 26, 2017 Tarot as a Tool for Reality Construction