“In singing, playing an instrument, writing a song – any creative endeavor – we practice our scales, take lessons, explore our emotional life, and perform. But I regard singing as the core practice because it is physical. It involves breath. It is – in my view – the ultimate creative expression that requires full relaxation and liberation from ‘thinking.’ Ideally it is an act in which the body and breath simply ‘breathe’ the song, without any help from one’s traditional ‘helpers’ such as thoughts, effort, visceral tension, and ego identity.

“The ‘teaching’ is that the body knows how to sing and doesn’t need any help from our ego, from our wish to please, to be ‘good’ or ‘great’ or ‘worthy’, or our embarrassment that we’re not. This is essentially the practice of Dzogchen. I use voice because there is no escaping from the sound that a proper teacher hears when he or she points out your patterns of tension that are deeply and utterly unconscious to you. We want to ‘let’ the song sing itself through us. Any ‘helping’ only makes it worse. I am finding how difficult it is not to help!”