Waldorf News

Singing as a Practice for Building the New Michael Culture of the Future

By Shannon Boyce

It’s cricket song season here in New York state and even as I write this article, I can hear them playing their violins outside my window connecting to the archetypal cosmic universal sound or you could say “The Music of the Spheres”.  All sounds made in nature connect to this sounding naturally.

An attempt to perceive this is to take the cricket song and slow it down.  It sounds like humans singing or chanting; it’s almost angelic.  If you click here you can listen to a 50 second clip of slowed down cricket song to see for yourself.

We humans often struggle to connect to this cosmic sound because we are living such busy overscheduled lives just trying to survive and keep up with what is pulling on us from the outside, often feeling stressed out and overwhelmed by everything on our task lists.  We may from time to time slow down, take a walk, meditate or do something to nurture our insides but the minute we go back into activity we often lose all the peacefulness we were trying to cultivate in nurturing our insides.

So, what is this archetypal cosmic sound?

It’s not the study of sound based in scientific laws.  If we think like Goethe, it is the primal original thought living behind the sound.  In other words, it is the sound we cannot hear in the physical world but that cosmically surrounds us all the time.  And we can connect to it if we just take the time to slow down and listen.  People who have come back from near death experiences have often described how they were surrounded by worlds of sound and tone.

And why should we connect to this archetypal cosmic sound?

Because as human beings we still live in a time of divided consciousness. It is difficult to “perceive a process of the world and, at the same time, a process of ourselves”.  “We have, through our head organization, an incomplete nature conception, that which we call the external world; and we have through our inner organization an incomplete knowledge of ourselves”, Rudolf Steiner describes this in GA194 lecture 6 The Ancient Yoga Culture and the New Yoga Will. The Michael Culture of the Future.

When we focus our attention on outer activities we are often disconnected from our bodies and ourselves.  Or we over concentrate focusing so much on ourselves we become self-absorbed and egotistical and can often lose perception and perspective of what is going on in the world around us.  Or we go through our day in a sleep-walking kind of way.  It’s an either-or situation.  When we can learn to be in activity in the outer world and be aware of our inner higher thinking self, filled with inner activity of will at the same time, then we find balance and inner and outer life can work seamlessly as a whole.

It is imperative that each of us find something which allows us to hold something within ourselves and, at the same time, recognize it as a process of the outer world.  As Steiner mentions in his lecture, we cannot attain this by going back to ancient practices.  This takes practice in our times and a great amount of patience.

One such practice is awakening our inner ear to connect to the cosmic archetypal sound through singing.  Now one could go to a studio and take a sound bath with singing bowls and gongs being played all around you, but imagine if you could create those sounds for yourself through your own human instrument, your voice.

You have probably heard the expression, “The eyes are the window of the soul”.  Well, you could also say, “The voice is the vibration of the soul”.  Rudolf Steiner said that “man has in his breathing a faculty capable of the highest possible development through the transmutation of his breathing process into song.  And if he works at it, there are infinite possibilities for his development.”

This type of singing practice is developing the practice of the New Yoga for the future that will create the Michael Culture that Steiner speaks of in the lecture referenced above.  The challenge is that most people do not know how to truly listen and they do not have the freedom in their own voices to achieve this or they are too frightened or shy to use their voice especially in singing.

That is because we live in the age of materialism.  We think of our voices materialistically as if we are a machine that can just produce the tone, and when it doesn’t go as we would like, we or someone else judges us, and then intellectually we decide we just can’t sing.  Or we just don’t care and we sing with all our might causing damage to our instrument.

With the exercises from “The School of Uncovering the Voice” developed by Swedish Opera Singer, Valborg Werbeck-Svärdström supported by her 11-year relationship with Rudolf Steiner, we can learn to embody our breath, enliven our tone, ensoul our word for the consciousness of our times, and find freedom, suppleness and grace with our voice.  Allowing our voice to connect to the heart of those we communicate with. Then the tone actually sings us and we then take a step forward in our spiritual development.

A new online cohort is forming this fall with Foundational Course #1, “Embodying the Breath with the Exercises to Forget the Breathing”.  There are several opportunities to try a free lesson.

• Join a live online sample class this month or in October.  Click here to register
• Click Here to Sign up to receive a free mini course that you can watch at your leisure.  The mini course will be delivered to your inbox over 4 days.  Be sure to check your spam/junk folder in case it doesn’t come to your inbox.
• Or if you are ready to learn how to connect to your voice and the archetypal sound visit www.theschoolofuncoveringthevoice.com  for more information about the new cohort that will begin October 3rd.

Shannon Boyce teaches how to Reveal Your Supple Voice through the study and practices of The School of Uncovering the Voice, the singing school endorsed by Rudolf Steiner as an Anthroposophical approach to singing.