Excerpt from the book: Prelude: The Path To The Way Of Song I stepped out onto the large stage in the ornate art deco grand ballroom of a plush downtown hotel in Boston, Massachusetts, where two thousand people were gathering for the opening plenary session of Body & Soul, a weekend conference on health and spirituality. I stood quietly for a few moments, watching the audience settling into their seats, listening to the animated musical tone of their chatter. They were unaware of my presence, the hum of lively conversation occupying their full attention. Taking a few deep breaths, I began preparing internally for the imminent moment when I would begin to sing. I moved forward toward the center of the stage and an energetic force began pouring through me. In response I raised my arms up toward the sky as my first vocal tones began pouring out. The hum in the room instantly subsided, and the focused silence of the audience became a witness to my song. Softly at first, and then with a power that celebrated the passion and creativity of the human spirit, I sang, without words, for a full ten minutes. The feeling in the room was electric. When I finished there was a momentary stillness and then, thunderous applause. Throughout the rest of the weekend, hundreds of people stopped to ask me about "that song." "What was that song you sang?" they asked. "How did you do that?" Many people said they "shifted into another reality." Others asked if my song was Native American or told me, "I know that song. It's a Hawaiian song, right?" While many people had wildly different ideas about the origins of my song, all of them agreed that it was an incredibly powerful, moving and transforming experience. On some level the audience knew that this was no ordinary piece of music but a song somehow mysteriously imbued with the power and presence of spirit. My history as a singer and musical composer, as well as my longtime love of singing, led me to be standing alone onstage that day. But it was my more recent years of developing, teaching, and performing the SpiritSong technique, a process that celebrates the human connection to spirit through song, for which the conference promoters had hired me. They wanted me to open the conference by singing my own unrehearsed and spontaneous SpiritSong, created in the moment from my own direct connection to spirit. How did I do this? Where did my song come from? And how did I come to sing in this way in front of two thousand people? The truth is that I created my SpiritSong completely in the moment. I became a vessel for the spirit of the song to move through me. Yes, I had sung it, but in reality the song had sung itself through me. While it may have seemed at first as if I was performing, my singing was not a recital in any sense. The audience was moved, not because I sang on key or have a perfectly trained operatic voice, but because they experienced an intimate and natural encounter with SpiritSong. SpiritSong is a method for using our voices as a source of healing. It doesn't matter whether we think we can sing or not, whether we were told at an early age that we couldn't sing on key or in tune, or whether we are experienced singers. There is a process that enables us to open up to our healing spirit through the vehicle of singing and let it pour through us. This process, with practice, is easily accessible to everyone. The power of voice can be used in this way for our own healing and connection to our spirituality as well as for the benefit of others.
