It's cold today, and since I don't have any heat except a space heater to stay warm I have to use it to heat my kitchen to keep my water pipes from freezing. Tonight will be even colder. The weather reports say it will get down to 21 degrees Fahrenheit (-6.111 C). That's not all that cold for people further north, but for this area where the winters are moderate, and the houses are only built to undergo moderately cold temperatures, and especially the house trailers, any temperatures at or below twenty degrees may freeze a bunch of pipes. That can cost a lot of money if you buy water from the county.
Anyway, I'm sitting here in a room that is about forty degrees warm, and my feet are starting to get cold, so I decide to walk over to my brother's green house next door and sit with the tropical plants for a while. Then, since it was so comfortable, and I needed to occupy my time, I started singing scales.
I usually start out singing "om ne padme om" for a while, because that opens my throat up and the doing of it forces me to pay attention to what needs to be done to get to the place I'm going for with my voice. Once I'm satisfied with that, I start singing the vowels, because vowels are all that can be sung.
At first I deliberately end each vowel with the sound of "om". Then, I finish the om sound by closing my mouth and humming the om for as much breath I have left. When I feel like I've got the end of the vowel chant working right I attack the beginning of each vowel with an "H". For example, I sing ha-ha-ha-ha and it emulates laughing.
Sometime I just start laughing from the pure joy of it. I'm still ending the vowel I started with an H with an om closure until I get to the vowel "u". Hu-hu-hu works good, but then I start the hoo with a you, which shapes the "u" sound more distinctly, so that I'm singing yoo-hoo, yoo-hoo, you-hoo-blue. The term "blue" carries a very distinct flavor of "oooo"
When I've gotten the "u" vowel working with some power and resonance, I go back through all the vowels placing a "y" in front of the "h". Yee-hee. yee-yee,yee-hee. Then, I start stretching the vowels out yo-hoooooo, yo-hooooo, yo-hooooo.
Believe it or not, this is a lot of fun and extremely entertaining because sometime I just enter a state of ecstasy and do it for an hour or more without re-me-ing to break the enchantment. I'm not myself for a while, and that's a distinct pleasure.
Today I started a new practice I've very excited about. I've discovered through meditation that my breathing starts from the area of the taint. A friend of mine from high school on divorced her husband and went back to college in her late forties to get her Masters degree in voice. She can be an obnoxious bitch, but I listen to her when it comes to singing. She told me that I should sing from my lower belly rather than my solar plexus. Today, I realized I should go lower than my lower belly to develop a consciousness there.
It's not like I haven't already done this simply with the breath control I put into effect when I meditate. Some cultures consider the taint the holiest spot in the human body. I have mixed feelings about choosing any one spot to single out for that description, but if it ain't the holiest spot in the body it's pretty close.
The most difficult part of this is locating that spot to use as one will. For my own practice, I create a spot there with my imagination, and after I've got that established and I'm working it like it was the real thing, the real spot shows up on it's own. Hardly ever have I been able to direct my attention to it of my own volition straight aware. YMMV. '-)
I've never tried to consciously start my voice from this spot. I'll begin immediately. I already did. This morning in the greenhouse. Surrounded by tropical plants on the coldest day of the year, and the second day after the winter solstice. Why am I always the last to know?
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
