The Power of the Voice

"Enchantment literally means to be made magical through chant. So when people say they're disenchanted, I say there's only one solution...  and that's to chant!"

with Jill Purce

Jill Purce-- a pioneer in vocal healing techniques-- thinks that our world is out-of-tune. She believes that much of the disharmony on the planet today is due to humanity's lost connection to singing and chanting. This is why she has taken it upon herself to help "re-enchant the world", to "literally" make it magical through chanting. Ms. Purce teaches sacred chanting techniques-- especially Mongolian overtone chanting-- as a way of elevating consciousness, dissolving personal boundaries, and catalyzing spiritual growth.

Ms. Purce is world-renowned for the workshops that she been giving for over twenty years on ancient vocal techniques, group chant, and "the spiritual potential of the voice as a magical instrument for healing and meditation." She has also taught the English Shakespeare Company and led seminars and workshops for English National Opera. Deepak Chopra has said that her work "is of great significance. Through her techniques you can learn to peel the layers of your soul and discover the grandeur of your being."

Ms. Purce worked with German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen for two years studying the spiritual dimensions of music, and later studied in the Himalayas with the chant master of the Gyutö Tibetan Monastery and Tantric College. She has been following the Tibetan practice of Dzogchen since 1978, and has also worked with Native Americans and shamans from different traditions.

Ms. Purce is also the author of The Mystic Spiral: Journey of the Soul, a book about the evolution of consciousness in spiritual traditions, art, and psychology. As General Editor of the Thames and Hudson "Art and Imagination" series she produced over thirty books on sacred traditions, art and cosmology. She received an Honours Degree in Fine Arts, and was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in the King's College Biophysics Department, University of London. Jill Purce currently lives in England with her husband, biologist Rupert Sheldrake, and their two sons. I interviewed Jill at her home in Hampstead Heath-- one of the most beautiful parts of London-- on May 16, 1997. I had a delightful time, and found Jill to be extremely warm and thoughtful. She is a very high-energy person, with a powerful presence, and a strong sense of magic seems to surround her.

David: You've said that your interest in sound "probably began in the womb." Could you explain what you mean by this?

Jill: What I meant by that was that my mother was a concert pianist. It wasn't just my interest in sound-- it was my interest in the combination of sound and healing. Since my mother was a musician and my father was a doctor, I was brought up with music and healing, they were bred on the bone.

David: Do you think your mom's music effected you prior to birth?

Jill: Yes, while still in the womb I would have heard and felt the vibrations of my mother playing quite regularly.

David: What inspired your interest in vocal techniques as a means of psychological and spiritual transformation?

Jill: It began visually. Everything I've ever done has had its origin in vision. It started as a very young child with the interest that I've always had in patterns in nature. When I was eight or nine, I used to sit for hours by a very turbulent part of the river in Oxford, and watch the movement and vortices of water. This fascinated me all my life, and inspired me to write The Mystic Spiral. That book came directly through my interest in patterns in nature and especially in water.

A most important childhood influence, for my work with the voice, occurred in Ireland when I was a child . I had a rather eccentric family. Although we lived in England, my father was Northern Irish, and a Protestant, but we used to spend a lot of time in the south. We always used to set out on journeys and voyages when everyone else was going to bed. One time we were going to a remote island off the west coast by boat.

The only other people in the boat with us were three old women going home from the island. They were standing in the back of the boat dressed in black. As we set out, a violent storm blew up and it seemed certain that we were going to drown. Suddenly the three old women started to chant with an ancient power and deep passion. And almost immediately our fear dissolved, waves of strength surged into us, until finally we were overcome with feelings of bliss and enchantment. In moments, our terror had turned to ecstasy, into a state of blissfulness and euphoria. Then the waters calmed down and we arrived safely.

That was my first transmission of the power of the voice to quite literally transform the powers of nature -- the ocean - one of the most powerful forces of nature -- to see it switch from a violent storm to calm again and to transform emotions from one extreme to another-- from the extreme of fear and terror, to the extreme of blissfulness and ecstasy.

David: How did you actually get involved in music professionally?

Jill: The thread of the spiral continued through my life. There were three ingredients. One was seeing the patterns in matter introduced by sound-- formless, seamless films and heaps and piles of matter, which were chaotic and disordered until sound was introduced. Then suddenly, and almost miraculously, from chaos came the incredible order and pattern that you see around you in nature. I think that I received the transmission of this gestalt-- about the power of sound to create order-- during the early sixties. It was very much a visual experience of seeing the power of sound.

Other elements included working for many years with Tibetan Lamas.

David: You studied with the Gyutö monks?

Jill: Yes, I studied overtone chanting with the chant master of the Gyutö monks. My main spiritual teacher is a Dzogchen master, who also uses chant a lot, although not overtone chanting.

I was fascinated with the effect of sound on matter, and at the same time I wondered what kind of vocal sound could actually create matter and form, and also dissolve matter and form, remove negative concepts, negative accretions and redundant forms. So when I first heard the overtone chanting of the Tibetans in the sixties, I realized this was a kind of chanting which related structurally to the very nature of the material world.

This form of chanting-- which seemed to de-materialize things and re-materialize them-- seemed nearest to what Gurdjieff called objective music. It seemed to me then the nearest thing to what I was looking for, this sense of the objective in the Gurdjieffian sense. Objective art means art that actually is effective, as opposed to decorative or expressive. It actually does something in the material world, changes and transformations it.

Then I met the well-known German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. I lived in his house, and spent a number of years working with him in Germany. He'd been working with harmonics for some time. In the fifties he was part of the beginnings of electronic music. This started with people creating music by cutting up bits of tape and sticking them together. This led eventually to the invention of synthesizers.

Stockhausen had been working with the parameters of music in a very fundamental way. He was actually creating sounds themselves with their specific qualities, through creating the patterns and accretions of the harmonics. For this reason he had a unique understanding of them.

I came to chanting from the unbroken transmission of a Buddhist chant tradition. This had been broken in the West. The Gregorian chant was lost in the 17th century, or maybe even earlier. But because of Tibet's extraordinary isolation , this transmission of chant was never broken. So, on the one hand, I received this transmission of chant as a powerful force towards enlightenment and on the other, the transmission of an absolutely fundamental understanding of the structure of sound itself from one of the most influential composers of the twentieth century. At the same time I had received the gestalt of an understanding of the creativity of sound itself. These three elements came together in me and led me to re-introduce the power of chant into the modern western tradition in a new way.

David: How have chanting and other acoustic techniques effected your own personal development?

Jill: For twenty years I have been studying with my Tibetan Lama teacher-- as a student of Dzogchen, which is a very pure form of Tibetan Buddhism, almost like the Zen of Tibetan Buddhism-- a very radical form, which has always interested mystics of different cultures. So I became very involved in Tibetan Buddhism, and I saw chanting in that context as way of reclaiming my own relationship with the spirit. I saw that in the West we'd given up chanting when we gave up God. It became clear to me that we have to somehow reclaim our own relationship with the divine if we are going to survive.

We have to reclaim our own relationship with everything. We have to take responsibility again. We've come to a time when all the people that we thought were in charge aren't-- including all the professionals and experts who we'd empowered to take charge on our behalf, starting with the development of scientific humanism from the 17th century onwards.

This intense attempt to control the world by measuring, and then technology, and then the whole world of technology as we have it today-- this attempt to control the world through control-- has failed to such an extent that we've never ever been more out of control. At any moment the world could end. This leads us now to a whole new awareness that we ourselves have to take control, because there isn't anybody else out there who knows.

David: That was a great revelation for me when I realized that.

Jill: Isn't it astonishing? I think there's a dawning awareness of that all around, and that's led to a whole sense of the importance of a participatory universe. Modern alternative medicine is based on that-- people reclaiming responsibility for their own health. Rupert's work with 7 Experiments-- a do-it-yourself kind of science-- is about re-claiming and taking science back. As is my work with the voice.

A few years ago the English National Opera rang and asked if I'd give a seminar on the healing power of opera. So I said, I think possibly you've got the wrong person, because if anything I'm leading a recovery program from opera! (laughter)

David: How can the acoustic techniques that you teach be used for healing?

Jill: There is tremendous power in working in a group-- with group chants-- because one of the things that sound does is dissolves boundaries. It dissolves boundaries between people. One of the things that we've lost as a society is our connectedness. We're all isolated atoms with no sense connection, and one of the main characteristics of sound is to dissolve boundaries. So when people chant together, you create community. It's the quickest way of creating community.

So this is a very important ingredient when using sound. You can also use it individually, but I find the most effective way of using it is collectively, in a group-- so there's a sense of a healing of society. But at the same time you're dissolving the boundaries between heaven and earth, between our materiality and our spirituality. Tibetans talk about body, voice, and mind. The voice is that which mediates between body and mind.

David: I've heard that said of breath.

Jill: Breath and voice are related. The voice is conscious breath.

David: Why do you think these techniques were lost in the West?

Jill: In the Christian world the Gregorian chant was lost. The Gregorian chant that's around today is a Victorian invention. We have no idea what it originally sounded like because it was re-created in Victorian times based on manuscripts and a few quotations in notated music. But we've forgotten it, and haven't the faintest how it sounded. So-- quite literally-- it was lost, and we stopped doing it.

David: But why do you think that happened?

Jill: I'm working with a lot of Christian monastic communities. They've been inviting me in to help them because they're aware that the chanting they're doing-- which is a kind of Gregorian chant-- isn't always working for them. They sometimes experience it as a burden rather than as a blessing and rarely as a meditation.

I've been going and working with them to try and help them find out what's wrong, and do it in totally different ways-- so they realize how powerful chant is as a meditation. It's curious that, in the Christian tradition, the main reason for monastic communities existing is to chant the liturgy seven times a day. It's like the idea of perpetual choirs praising God. Yet as time goes on they get more and more the sense that they need to mend the roofs, and do a little bit less chanting. Then there really isn't so much time to do the chanting, because they need to mend more roofs.

So the chanting becomes increasingly marginalized instead of being the main reason for their existence. They cut down the number of offices, put two together, and make them shorter. So with what I've learned from different chant cultures I've been able to re-inspire them. That is wonderful for me too-- to try and help them rediscover how the voice is one of the purest forms of meditation and practice.

We've lost a lot in the West. I think it survived in Tibet because the country was closed for so long. It was quite literally closed, so it was one of the few places where there was still a living transmission. When Tibet was opened it was a mediaeval culture, so they would have been like Europe in the Middle Ages when there were vibrant monasteries as well as hermits and mystics living in caves all over the country, in a perpetual state of meditation.

David: Can you explain what you mean when you say that "we all have our own note"?

Jill: I mean that in a number of different ways. Our voices are as unique as our fingerprints. No two people have the same voice. Isn't that astonishing? So in that sense we have our entirely unique voice, but people tend to have no sense of what their own voice is. Women, particularly, tend (the pitch of her voice becomes higher) to speak very much like this-- because culturally it's felt to sound vulnerable, the way that women need to be. (laughter) One of the things I try to do is help people find their real pitch-- the voice that connects the whole of their body, the note which-- when they utter it-- their entire body resonates. It is tremendously powerful when you find that.

David: What is your perspective on the shamanic or mystical experiences that many young people appear to have had at musical events like Raves?

Jill: I think it's very interesting and in some ways good, but at the same time there are reasons why I think it's deficient. One of them is that it's part of the whole "observing" culture. It's passive. There's practically no participation. The professionals have put mechanical sounds into mechanized devices, which are then transmitted, damagingly deafeningly to a non-participating person who responds by dancing with themself.

And that goes against everything I feel and am trying to do. Firstly, I try to use the voice with no kind of amplification, because the magic of the voice without amplification or recording is so powerful. I think one of the principal problems of our society has come about through recorded sound-- particularly television, which is taking culture away from us. It has made us entirely passive. We're a culture who pays a lot of money to go somewhere in order not to do something. (laughter)

It's true they're participating by dancing to it, but they're not making sounds themselves, and the sounds that they're dancing and listening to are digitally-generated. Drumming is repetitive but totally magical and transforming. The repetitive beats which are created by digitalized machines are not the same, because nothing can change. There's no possibility of spontaneous creativity entering in at any moment. It's all fixed before hand. It's dead. Nothing can change, nothing new can happen, no magic can enter, no spirit can come in. So I think these are serious defects. But of course its wonderful that people are having mystical experiences. We have rave clubs here and I've given talks in them. I've introduced chanting, and we had a great time together. I just wish they'd do that more often.

David: You've used the word magic several times. Could you explain what you mean by that?

Jill: The power of spirit to enter matter, or matter to dissolve into spirit.

David: Are there any simple techniques that you can recommend to help people harmonize mind, body, and spirit?

Jill: Yes. Without actually learning anything specific, if you just make a very gentle humming sound, and at the same time as you're humming you are present as the listening witness to yourself while you're humming. By listening I do not mean listening and thinking about the quality of the sound, or who's making the sound, or what it sounds like. You're simply present with what you're hearing for the unfolding duration of the sound. You're making a sound, and all the time that you're making that sound you're listening to the sound that you're making while you are making it, in a non-judgemental, non-critical analytical or discursive manner.

It's one of the simplest ways of being present, and being present is the goal of every meditational technique, whether or not it involves chanting. Whatever it may be, whatever culture it comes from, the ultimate aim of meditation is to be in the present-- to make us unable to regret the past, or anticipate or dread the future, and thus exclude the present. It allows us to experience the present.

So just chant in a very simple way, or simply hum, which anybody can do. But while you're humming listen to yourself humming all the time until you forget, or until you remember that you've forgotten. This is a very simple thing but it can change your life.

David: Tell me about your interest in the spiral motif, and your book The Mystic Spiral: Journey of the Soul.

Jill: When I started work on the spiral in the late sixties I was at university. I used to go to the biology professors and ask them why plants grow in a particular way, and then they'd say, we don't ask those kind of questions. So I found myself asking questions of disciplines-- which to me seemed perfectly obvious-- only to be told that these weren't the kind of questions that were being asked. I found myself becoming increasingly aware of the kinds of questions that needed to be asked, in order to perceive the interconnectedness of all things.

One of the features about the spiral is that it allowed me to cut across disciplines. In the late sixties interdisciplinary fields didn't exist, so people were astonished at what I was doing. The spiral was a way of looking at everything in relation to everything else, because it was a form which literally turns the universe-- the word universe itself means "the one turning".

It's based on the concept of revolution, of turning about our axis, which everything does-- from galaxies, down to planets within the solar systems, to ourselves. All the martial arts are based on our turning around our own axis, and re-turning to it. So this fundamental idea of revolving, of turning around ourselves, and always re-turning to the center is completely fundamental to the universe, in the sense of the one which turns. This pattern of movement then leaves its record in form itself, from the most sub-atomic to the mega-galactic, or universal.

David: What do you think happens to consciousness after the death of the body?

Jill: I don't give too much thought to that question because I find that it just doesn't lead me anywhere, except away from here, where I want to be. In terms of my practice, I'm both a practicing Tibetan Buddhist and a practicing Christian. I go to church when I'm not teaching or on retreat. The Tibetans have a very developed, sophisticated geography and philosophy of the afterlife, which is extremely interesting, whereas the Christian tradition has rather little to offer in this respect. I'm not very interested in past lives. Many people have told me about my past lives, I find it rather hard to get very excited about them.

David: Why is that?

Jill: I don't believe in it or not believe in it. If people start talking about their past lives my mind tends to glaze over. It just seems to be another way of being removed from the present moment. It's just another way of not being present.

David: What is your perspective on God?

Jill: I certainly believe in God, in a divine force. One of the things about being both Buddhist and Christian is I often wonder what kind of prayer I'll do on my death bed, and into whose arms I will shoot my consciousness-- whether into the lap of the Buddha or Jesus. (laughter) This is quite a conundrum really. One of the things I find is that Buddhism is so much more sophisticated philosophically than Christianity.

David: Do you think that your philosophy effects what happens after you die?

Jill: Where I'll shoot my consciousness. Yes, I do. The Tibetans think that everything we do effects what happens after we die. I think a lot of our lives are about how we die. How we die is very important. A lot of spiritual practice is preparation for death. To die gracefully is one of the most important things there is.

David: How has your relationship with Rupert affected your work and ideas about resonance?

Jill: We were both working on resonance independently before we met each other. When I was working on the spiral in the late sixties and early seventies I was reading a lot of books on biology, and became extremely aware that there was a big gap. I was groping towards the same sort of ideas as he was. We were both asking the same sort of questions. We were both asking how does form come about?

That, for me, was one of the most fundamental questions. How does form come into being? And that's the same question that he was asking. We were both reading Goethe on biology, and in this very curious way, at the same time, we were following a rather similar path- both examining the coming into being of form. That was fundamental in my whole study of the spiral, because the spiral is a way that growth and movement is expressed in form. It's a record in matter, of movement in time.

David: How has your relationship influenced each other?

Jill: We were both looking at these questions, and we both came up with ideas based on resonance. In my own case, resonance itself. And in his case, resonance as a metaphor. His resonance is based on the metaphor from sound, whereas I'm working with the sound itself. The parallel is astonishing. Our work is very complimentary.

David: What are some of the things you're trying to accomplish in your workshops?

Jill: As a society we've become disenchanted. Enchantment literally means to be made magical through chant. So when people say they're disenchanted, I say there's only one solution to that, and that's to chant! That's really what I'm doing-- trying to bring enchantment back into people's lives.

Deep inside all of us is a longing to praise God. Even if we're not aware of God, or even if we think we don't believe in God, there's a profoundly human quality to want to praise some indescribable force in nature. I think it's part of being human. And that's always been expressed through chant. I think that's what chant is really about-- it's praising wondrous nature, this magical place, this divine being, whatever it is. Praising it with gratitude.

We lost sight of that through mechanization and scientific humanism. All that went, and we lost the sense of, and therefore how to relate to, anything beyond ourselves. The two were eroded at the same time both God and chant- chant as a means of relating to God.

So many have lost their spiritual roots, that it seemed to me that chant was a way for people to re-connect with the divine in their lives, without having to become a card-carrying Buddhist or Christian, or having to join any cult or strange religion. Chant allows us to experience the connectivity of ourselves with something beyond ourselves, which we've lost. It's this connectivity which is so tangible when you chant together with other people, and when you chant together in relation to something beyond the group or yourselves.

This is so completely tangible and powerful that once you do it your life is changed forever. I suppose its a real initiation. An initiation in this sense is the transmission of a different state, even for a moment, so that the person who's had the transmission knows. They've experienced it, so they know what its like. And so once you know what it's like, life is never the same again.

I think that my aim has been to enchant, and make people realize that this enchantment and ability to enchant was something that we all had. One of the problems I found with singing and chanting in the Christian tradition is an obsession with words. When I've been working in monastic communities, you have to say the liturgy, and to get through all the psalms once a week, or once a fort-night. So you have to get the words said. But since the whole point of chanting and spiritual practice is to go beyond the discursive mind, it's no good to be constantly saying words that you have to engage with.

For this reason I think getting rid of Latin might have been a mistake in the Catholic church. Many mantric traditions use archaic languages repetitively just in order to relieve the burden of having to engage the mind to think - to think about the meaning. The repetition of words as sounds enables you to transcend meaning. While the meaning may also exist on another level- or in the other language, it does not need to be mentally engaged with; it does not need to separate you from the presence, it must not separate you from the presence.

Repetitive mantric chanting takes you beyond the discursive mind into something beyond it by the very act of repetition -- by the very fact that it doesn't necessarily make sense in a discursive way. At the same time it occupies the mind. It gives all the bits that want to think, something else to do, so it is possible be present. That's why driving can be a good place to meditate, once you are reasonably competent, the various operations required to get you to your destination safely occupy the surface chattering mind and allow you to descend to a place of deep calm.

So in my search for a kind of chanting which didn't involve words, I discovered Tibetan and the Mongolian overtone chanting, chanting on one note and modulating the resonant cavities so that you amplify the sounds that are within and constitute the sound that you're singing. So that within the one sound you hear a multiplicity of sounds instead of the sequentiality of pitches of Western music, which is played out in time. Here it's a unitive experience. But within the unity is the multiplicity. It's like Egyptian mathematics, where you divide instead of add or multiply. All is both contained within, and revealed from the one. When chanting harmonics you don't have to use words, and yet played out of the harmonics is infinity and the totality of all possibility.

The reasons for chanting in this way are numerous. Because you are chanting on one note, even people who have been told they can't sing, match a pitch, or hold a tune, feel unthreatened since matching a pitch depends on at least two notes! So this immediately helps all the people who have been told to stand at the back and mouth it -just one of the problems of disempowerment caused through the passivity of our society. This is one of the forms of chanting that I teach in my workshops. For people who have never sung before it's astonishing, and in the same manner, for opera singers, professional musicians and singers. In one group I quite often have people who have been told to stand at the back and mouth it because they can't match a note, and professional opera singers from Covent Garden. It's wonderful, that would never happen normally.

There's no area which is more invidious in terms of comparison than singing. If you have somebody who can sing really well, and they're together with somebody who sings better, the first won't sing because there's a sense of inadequacy. Singing is in some way an expression of worth. The more that you feel that your tuning ability is inadequate, the more you feel worthless. This relationship between tuning and worth is linked to our experience of ourselves. It has something to do with the resonant nature of the soul. We feel that if we're out of tune, our soul is in some way inadequate.

Rupert's morphic fields are resonant, and the angels are resonant. Angels come in choirs-- not flocks or herds. And the soul of the person has in some way something to do with resonance. The soul is a resonant template of our possibility, so that when we heal ourselves we heal ourselves to this resonant possibility of what we could be. If we're told we can't sing, the sense is that what comes out of our mouth is unacceptable. And what comes out of our mouth is in some way our soul. Our soul is unacceptable.

I had a violinist in one of my workshops who played with one of the principal London orchestras. He was telling me that when you're working with an orchestra, the conductor can criticize the musicians on tempo, or on this, that or the other-- but if you actually imply, or in any way impute any lack of ability in terms of tuning, of being in tune, you'll have a fist fight. Being in tune is so profoundly connected with your sense of worth, and people who have been told they can't sing in tune can be damaged psychologically for the rest of their lives.

One of the other things that happened in the 17th century was that we re-tuned our musical scale, because of the popularity of pianos. The notes are fixed in a piano, you can't modulate up or down as you can with the voice or a violin which has no fixed bridge. If you press the key, the damper will be released off the note and it sounds, so you can't change it, as you can with a violin bow.

So because of this, if you play a song or a piece of music, and you want to change the note the melody starts on and transpose it into a different key on the piano, it sounds horrible later on in the scale. This had long been an insoluble musical problem. So what people did in the 17th century was to re-tune our music into the well-tempered scale. They took the scale and they made all the notes equal, which they're not. So since the 17th century all of our music's been out of tune.

So if somebody comes to tune your piano, they don't come to tune it in tune, they come to tune it out of tune. What it's out of tune with are the harmonics. When you do the overtone chanting your body suddenly realizes- and relaxes for the first time because the intervals of the harmonics are what the body tunes with, what tuning is about. So when you hear the harmonics there's an immediate response of the body, of a kind of recognition in the real sense of the word-- meaning to re-know, to re-cognize, to know again, to re-sonate -literally, re-sound.

We can only know something again if we knew it before. And we knew it before because we are it. We're hearing what we are-- the sound of our own geometry made audible. To work with sounds which are in tune for the first time is profoundly healing to both the body and the psyche. There's a real intuitive sense of recognition when you hear them, and in this way it's profoundly healing. At the same time it brings you into the present.

This use of sound-- making sound and listening to yourself making sound while you're making it-- brings you into the present moment and also heals. The harmonics work on the subtle body in a very powerful way. We get sick through the disturbance of our energy, which in turn comes about through reacting to everyday life and events, people and emotions. This disturbs the energy first, and it pathologizes later. So to really heal, you need to modulate the energy before it pathologizes, You can do that with sound.

David: How has it effected people's lives?

Jill: Oh dramatically. People's lives are changed out of all recognition. Very profound healings occur on physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual levels, and as a result of that, often the circumstances of people's lives suddenly change for the better.

Our whole body is based on resonance, on the regularities and the periodices of movements-- as are all physicalities. If you ever see a film of human fertilization, the first thing that happens is that the zygote-- the fertilized egg-- starts to blip. It starts to beat. The whole egg pulsates in a regular manner, and that's what becomes the heart. The beat becomes the heart. That beat never stops until we die.

The rhythm starts, and everything about life is rhythmic. Every organ has its own rhythm. Even our walking is rhythmic, it's the oscillation of our limbs in a spiral manner. Everything we do is rhythmic -- our breathing, our heartbeat, our brain rhythms, our proteins, all the organs have their own rhythm.

Everything is sound and resonance. And if you don't make sound then you get out of tune. The only way we can actually put sound back inside us is by making it ourselves, playing our own instrument. We have this extraordinary ability to make sound, but if we don't do it, we become unsound, out of tune, highly strung. To be sound in mind and body means to be healthy and true.

For information about Jill Purce's workshops worldwide, as well as her audio cassettes contact:
Healing Voice
20 Willow Road
London, NW3 1TJ
England

info@healingvoice.com
www.healingvoice.com