Almost everybody sings, and almost nobody makes a sound they have not decided on first. Even humming to yourself is a tune somebody wrote. The voice is one of the most tightly supervised things a person owns, and the supervision is so constant that it goes unnoticed.
This practice removes it, deliberately, for a few minutes, immediately after an hour of going through the body part by part. There are no guidelines, and that is stated as the instruction rather than as an apology. So the question is worth asking as an experiment. What happens if you stop controlling the sound?
Placement matters here, because this is not a standalone exercise. This practice follows on directly from the previous procedure, after having toned and tuned the body.1
The transition is one small change. Keep on taking deep breaths, and then, instead of humming, open your mouth and begin to sing and chant spontaneously.1
So the machinery is already running. The breathing is established, the body has been contacted part by part, and all that happens is that a closed mouth opens. Nothing new gets introduced. A constraint gets removed.
The instruction is mostly a list of permissions. Do not be concerned about any specific song you think you should be singing. Simply let the voice move freely to produce a spontaneous tune using any sound.1
Three examples are given and none of them is musical. Croak or groan or chant tones. Anything will do.1 Croaking comes first in the list, which rules out the reading in which this is about beautiful singing.
And then the point is made explicitly, because people will look for a rule. There are simply no guidelines when it comes to expressing yourself freely in this manner vocally.1 The absence is the design.
The duration is short and the attention has a direction. Continue with this for a few minutes, listening and allowing yourself to feel what is happening inside you.1
Note that you are both parties. You make the sound, and you listen to it. So the practice is a loop rather than a performance: the sound arrives back at you, something responds to it, and that response is what you are attending to.
Two things are anticipated and both get the same instruction. Should any emotional response rise in the body, do not try to suppress it, but simply let it express itself.1
And the physical one. If the body should sway and move, let it express itself without any interference on your part.1 The body moving is not a distraction from the exercise. It is one of the things the exercise is for.
Then what you do while that happens. Simply observe what is happening, and do not analyse or attempt to interpret the process.1 Watching is permitted. Explaining is not, and the two feel almost identical from inside.
The prohibition gets a name, and it is the same name used for the obstacle everywhere else in the practical syllabus. Keep the analytical mind, the cage of logic, out of the process altogether.1
Which is followed by the least technical sentence in the whole practical half. Just enjoy and let be what will be.1
And then a line worth the whole page. It is perfectly alright to go crazy, or to lose your reason while keeping your mind.1 The distinction in the second half is doing real work. Reason is what argues, orders and explains, and the mind is what remains when it stops. Losing one while keeping the other is exactly what is being asked for.
Three results are claimed and none of them is spiritual. Constant practice of this exercise increases creativity and great freedom of expression.1
The second is about removal. It breaks down inhibiting thoughts and feelings, which fits a practice whose entire content is the removal of a constraint.1
And the third is the plainest. Besides, you would have used the creative side of your psyche, which is enormously satisfying.1 Not that it achieves anything. That it feels good, offered as a sufficient reason, and consistent with the earlier premise that pleasurable experience should be increased.
You want to try this, and the difficulty is entirely in the first ten seconds. After that it runs itself.
Start immediately after the body practice rather than on its own. The breathing is already deep and the body is already contacted, which is what makes an unguarded sound possible at all. Attempted cold, most people produce something self-conscious and stop.
Then open your mouth and make the worst sound available. Croak is the first example given, and starting ugly is the shortest route past the part of you that wants the sound to be good. Anything you would be embarrassed to be heard making is closer to the exercise than anything you would not.
Then let the body do what it does and keep your hands off it. Swaying, movement, laughing, crying — all of it is anticipated, and the instruction for every one is the same. Let it express itself without any interference on your part.
And do not interpret it afterwards. The prohibition on analysis is stated during the practice, and the temptation arrives when it ends — what was that about, what does it mean, what came up. The cage of logic reassembles itself the moment you start answering that, which is worth knowing before you finish.
The practice is fully specified, costs nothing, and the claims made for it are modest. Creativity, freedom of expression, the breaking down of inhibition, enjoyment. None of that requires any doctrine to be true, and all of it is the sort of thing anybody could check on themselves in a fortnight.
The strongest content is the instruction rather than the theory. Do not analyse or attempt to interpret is unusual, and it rules out the move most people would reach for automatically once something surfaces.
Tension left open. It is perfectly alright to go crazy is offered as reassurance, with the distinction between losing your reason and keeping your mind doing all the work. Nothing anywhere says how a practitioner would tell the difference from inside, or what it would look like if the second half stopped holding.
🚩 PRACTITIONER SOURCE. 🚩 No duration is given beyond a few minutes, and no frequency. 🚩 It is perfectly alright to go crazy is stated without qualification, and nothing addresses anybody for whom uncontrolled emotional release might not be safe alone. 🚩 The claimed results are asserted with no case attached.
The prohibition on analysis sits against a great deal of what this body of work asks for elsewhere. Eight essays about yourself. A programme to counter the falsehoods and pretences you live with. A demand that you become aware of the smallest detail of your personal behaviour, down to the way you sit.
That is a project of relentless self-examination, and here examination is explicitly forbidden while the practice runs.
Both hold if the analysis has a time and a place rather than being always right. Write the essays; keep the cage of logic out of the singing. What is never said is what happens to the material afterwards. Something surfaces, interpretation is forbidden, and nothing anywhere describes a later moment when it becomes allowed.
Drum-Rhythm and Possession Mechanism — african-spirituality.
The African traditions do something that looks similar from outside and is built completely differently. Specific drum rhythms invoke specific deities. Fiery ones come to fast, robust patterns; watery ones to slow, flowing rhythms. The dance follows the same correspondence — jumping and spinning for the fiery, gliding for the watery — and the whole configuration is operational invocation rather than expression. Drum and dance the right pattern, and the deity comes down.
Set that beside spontaneous song and the surface is nearly identical. Uncontrolled vocalisation, a body swaying without direction, emotion arriving unbidden, and an explicit instruction not to interfere.
But everything that makes the African version work is infrastructure, and this practice has none of it. There are drummers. There are people who know which rhythm is being played and what should arrive to it. There are others present who have seen it before, who can tell an ordinary possession from one going wrong, and who bring the person back at the end.
Which names what is actually missing here rather than criticising the practice. Swaying and crying alone in a room after an hour of body work is not dangerous. It is also unheld. Nobody is watching, nothing is calibrated, and the instruction not to interpret leaves the material with nowhere to go. A tradition that takes uncontrolled expression seriously always supplies a container, and the container is not decoration. It is what makes the letting-go survivable at scale, and what turns an interesting few minutes into something a person can do repeatedly and deeply.
Sharpest implication. The permission is not to lose control of your body or your feelings. It is to lose your reason while keeping your mind. That treats reason as one faculty among several rather than as the person, and implies somebody is still present when the arguing stops.
Generative questions.