The fear of singing the flesh onto my bones 🦴

By Lian Brook-Tyler

This weekend in the woods, two people at different times told me my singing was beautiful. Hearing them say that felt healing beyond words, so much so, I couldn’t express it to either of them at the time. But it wasn’t healing because I needed reassurance about my voice itself, it was because it meant I had finally been able to move beyond my fear of singing fully and freely in front of others.

It was only when I was contemplating it when I got home, that it dawned on me that my fear about singing was the exact same fear I had when it came to public speaking and martial arts (with magical timing, I wrote the post below on this subject two years ago today): It was a fear of being seen.

The irony… Not heard but seen!

I spent my childhood singing, it was a rare evening that my father’s guitar, our voices and the spirits of song didn’t come out to play.

I was so happy to sing that I even used to sing the songs I’d written the night before to my friends in the playground… Which of course, is inadvisable for reasons to do with surviving school but my autistic teen self didn’t know that yet.

And then one day, which in hindsight was almost certainly was a result of a series of excruciating school experiences which well and truly taught me to fold the wings of my joyous butterfly expression into small brown squares, my singing ground to a mortifying halt.

I’d gone to a jazz workshop, and had spent the day singing like a bird, until the moment it came for me to stand at the front of the room and sing solo… My body froze and my voice came out in a strangled whisper.

Let’s now fast forward to a few years ago when I began hearing the call to devote more fully to the shamanic path, I had so much resistance to it that required every last ounce of my sovereignty to move through it and submit to Divine Will, strangely though the fact that shamanism required singing didn’t hit me until I was sitting around the sacred fire of the first ceremony and asked to sing.

From then on, ceremony after ceremony, I’ve come face to face with this fear.

Even when undergoing the most gruelling initiations that few people would consider entering if they had a choice, it’s often been the fear of singing solo that’s been the most challenging part of the whole experience for me.

Until this weekend, when I realised that I was finally ready to sing like my soul depends on it.

Because it does.

Of course, for me singing isn’t just singing, it’s me unfolding my wild soul’s myth, giving my gifts in deep service to my community, in complete devotion to Spirit.

If you’re reading this and are realising that you too have a fear you’re ready to meet and move beyond, come join us in Wild Sovereign… Jonathan and I will be teaching the practices and principles of Sovereignty, which is what allows us to hold ourselves through the challenging choices needed to live from soul.

“So, let us push on now, and remember ourselves back to the wild soul. Let us sing her flesh back onto our bones.”
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

All my love,
Lian 💖

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