Reclaiming Our Voices: Healing Wisdom for the Worried
I Worried by Mary Oliver
I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall
I correct it?Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well,
hopeless.Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism,
lockjaw, dementia?Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And I gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.Since I was a young child, singing has been a natural expression of my being.
Something about singing along to songs on the radio, singing among others at concerts and in choirs, and just singing myself through my day offered solace. Singing allowed me to find my voice even when I felt silenced by the daily challenges of life.
In my thirties, I found myself engaged in seeking and reclaiming the shared tradition of wisdom, a spiritual practice of knowing that transcends the Western tendency toward intellectualization, inviting us to expand our awareness to our full selves.
In her book The Wisdom Way of Knowing; Reclaiming an Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart, noted Wisdom scholar Cynthia Bourgeault refers to this as three-centered knowing, a practice that “embraces the whole of a person’s mind, heart, and body.”
I was drawn to this work in part because my experience of traditional talk therapy had yielded limited healing. I questioned why I remained stuck despite years of deep insight and behavioral changes. I worried that there was something fundamentally wrong with me, a brokenness that even therapy could not heal. Wisdom work invited me to move out of my well-worn head space and into my heart and body through engaging my voice in chanting and singing and my body in gentle movement.
Expanding my awareness in this way revealed hidden understanding in these long-forgotten or perhaps unaccessed aspects of my being. This is the path that brought me to the threshold of trauma therapy.
Our understanding of the impact of trauma has been revolutionized by scientific evidence that trauma is stored not just in our brains, but in our bodies as well. Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma is a major contribution to this body of knowledge. He writes: “Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies.”
I now understood that my struggle to find sustained healing was not about some foundational flaw within myself, but instead limited by the widely held belief and practice that healing is solely an intellectual pursuit. At the intersection of my spiritual and therapeutic journey, I found a shared source of wisdom that offered me myriad paths of healing.
Standing there, I realized that I had instinctually sought this healing for years in soothing myself through lifting up my voice in song.
Engaging one’s voice is a powerful practice in both Wisdom and therapeutic circles. Wisdom practice incorporates chanting and singing to activate the emotional center of our hearts that connects us to our wise selves, to others, and to that which is beyond our understanding, be it divinely or earthly inspired.
Vocal psychotherapy is employed in music therapy and somatic experiencing to address dysregulation and trauma through engaging the breath and using vocal tones and sounds, singing, and improvisation. Doing so helps clients to connect to and process long-held emotions and experience safe connection with their therapist, which over time can begin to extend outward.
In her book The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind, Bourgeault states: “Wisdom isn’t knowing more. It is knowing with more of you.”
Therapeutic healing aligns with this idea of knowing ourselves more broadly and deeply. Expanding the scope of therapeutic exploration beyond the intellect into the very embodiment of who we are is at the heart of the work of trauma-informed practitioners. Often, words and ideas are not enough to fully capture the depths of human experience, nor do they tap into the stored neural networks of memories held in our mind and connected to our bodies.
Deeply embedded in those networks are responses that have helped us to survive the suffering we’ve endured, many of us unaware that we have even suffered. Void of this understanding, we feel ashamed about the way we so quickly react to things. We are told we’re dramatic. We dwell in self-loathing. Lack of engaging our full selves results in a sense of being stuck or perhaps interminably broken, much like I felt before I was enlightened by wisdom and scientific research.
When we come to understand this we can let go of the shame and guilt that block our progress, let go of the worry about how others perceive us, let go of the need to control situations to protect ourselves, and learn to live more openly, no longer tightly wound in the chambered nautilus of our minds, but set free into the full scope of human experience that invites us to take ourselves - all of ourselves - including our bodies, young and old, out into the morning, and sing out the song of healing in whatever key or sound or language we can access in the moment.
This is how we find our voices and reclaim our rightful place in the chorus of creation.
This is how we reclaim ourselves.
🧡,
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