Sounding Practice

So, to sing, we're going to sing songs with specific words, but what I find very helpful to do before we do that is to just invite the voice to open little and just a sound, some simple sounds together. And this in itself is a very cleansing and nourishing practice. And so, in this first section, I'll make a sound and just join in with that sound. And I'm standing up. If you're sitting down, it's nice to sit towards the edge of the seat so that your lungs can be nice and open, just not nice to have, it's nice that the knees are not up higher than the hips, so that the lungs got plenty of space.

You can also kneel, whatever's comfortable for you. So I'll make a sound and just join in with that sound. Okay, so just some simple vowel sounds to start moving different parts of the mouth and the tongue. And what I'd invite you to do now is to basically add a little bit of movement to the sounds and give yourself permission to not care what it looks like. So I will make some movements.

I'd invite you to kind of follow along and use similar movements. And one benefit of this is it encourages different parts of the body to relax so that the vocal chords have got more space. Um. brain, mouth, right, alright. All right, come on.

come on I'm doing it on camera so you can do it so now we'll I'll make a sound and we'll repeat together in oh ah Umm Umm Umm Umm Umm Umm So those are a few examples of just simple things you can do. And of course you can improvise and make up variations of these. But sticking the tongue out, moving the head, all these things they just kind of open up, warm up and relax. All these muscles that can get in the way of letting the vocal cords do their thing. And just coming together and letting that sound resonate through the whole body.

So when we do a kirtan, and if you'd like to work with the videos all together as a kirtan practice, one thing that I often really like to do when I'm doing a live kirtan is at the beginning we just sound together. And let that sound kind of start to open things up. So feel free to build on this with your own improvisations. Thank you.