Remembering Our Tune

The goal of meditation, in general, is to calm the overactive mind that is a hallmark of our non-stop culture. Our habit of juggling several different thoughts at any moment is why people find it difficult to get quiet long enough to achieve the brain state associated with the benefits of meditation. One of the reasons our thoughts pull us out of a meditative state is that language is disconnected from the present moment. Our brains are amazing at associative thinking. In fact, thought and time are bound together in many ways. Let’s say I sit down outside to meditate. I hear a bird in the sky and the thought comes to me that I need to remember to pick up my sister at the airport on Tuesday. That thought reminds me that I forgot to meet my friend Jenny last week for coffee and that I need to call Elaine tomorrow, and also that I need to pick up asparagus for dinner. This tendency language has to draw us into our past regrets and future dreads makes it so difficult when you try to sit and meditate in silence. If our thoughts are continually pulling us into the past or the future, they are blocking us from really experiencing the present moment and they are creating a kind of constant anxiety in our body.

Detaching ourselves from that mind chatter is essential for a rewarding meditation practice. We are looking for a way to drop into the cracks and spaces between the words, the space between thoughts, and resting in that gap for as long as we can, allowing it to expand. We then drop into a timeless place that we can call “no-time” and “no-space”, the ever present now moment.

A new study in the Journal Nature examined the ancient religious practice of chanting and found it to be better than traditional mindfulness meditation at turning off that chatter and going into even deeper delta wave brain patterns which can alleviate specific neuropsychiatric symptoms. Traditional meditation practices have been shown to produce mainly alpha and theta brain states and only rarely have been found to induce delta waves. But chanting appears to increase this delta-band activity which is associated with a ”universal response to injury or pathology, due to its role in neural plasticity as well as for the integration of cerebral activity and homeostatic processes. That is, mental states dominated by delta-band activity are considered as evolutionarily ancient states, in which compensatory and restorative mechanisms replenish biological resources in the brain and peripheral organs, resulting in beneficial effects encompassing biological and cognitive domains.” In other words, chanting appears to have the ability to put us into a healing and restorative state of being.

Chanting is a form of meditation or prayer found in practically every ancient culture around the world.
Chanting is a way of using sound to get beyond language, beyond time, into the the infinite present moment. Most chanting is done in archaic languages, so it’s easy for us to disconnect from the meaning. Even for the cultures at the time they were created, the chants were often made of short phrases that don’t actually make sense as a complete thought, they are jumbled up just enough to keep the mind from focusing on the language. Some chanting is just done with vowel sounds and no words at all.

Jill Purce, a British voice teacher, author, and champion of chanting points out that the human body is actually a wind instrument and a beautiful resonating chamber that is perfect for chanting. She says, “There's never been a culture that didn't chant - until ours. There's been no other time in history when people did not sing as we do not sing. We not only don't sing any more, but we don't realize we don't. We've forgotten to do it, and we've forgotten that we've forgotten." She goes on to say that ancient peoples didn't chant “because they sang well; it was simply the way to achieve and maintain harmony. By singing, chanting, and intoning together in churches and temples, people tuned themselves. Our body is a kind of vibratory system with many different kinds of resonances. If we stop chanting, we no longer keep ourselves in tune".

One of the keys of chanting is listening to yourself chant while you are making the sound. You want to both produce the sound but also receive the sound. Start by just chanting different vowel sounds on a single note. Hold each note for as long as you can extend the breath. At some point you will begin to notice parts of your body vibrating, as you become this instrument. Try purposefully sending the sound to different parts of your body. If you have some aches or pains, a shoulder that has been bothering you, try humming or chanting into your left shoulder, just directing the sound there with your mind, and see what you notice. It is especially fulfilling when you can be in a resonant space, hard surfaces are great for bouncing sound around, which is why everyone loves singing in the shower. So have a bath and chant some vowels! Below are some beautiful examples of chant from various cultures: