"I could have spent my whole life exhausting myself trying to be what I thought others wanted, instead of learning how to tend to the inner landscape where my own nature was waiting to flourish."
MEDITATING BY THE FOUNTAIN in the garden, I listen to the layers of gushing, splishing, tinkling, trickling. Gradually, I pick out tiny plops where the continually cascading water tumbles out of formation, momentarily flicked by the breeze.
I can picture the stone fountain in my mind, but I keep refreshing the canvas of my inner eye, letting go of the image my thinking has created, and making space for what the sound itself reveals.
I breathe, and as well as hearing the dribbling, babbling rush of water, I listen with my body, sensing how the sound falls through me. My mind falls silent. Instead I hear the earth speaking.
And then sound becomes light.
On the canvas of my inner eye, I see sparkles of gold, explosions of luminescence. The rigid boundaries of my thinking disappear. I realize I’m smiling.
I’VE BEEN EXPLORING THE element of sound this week, which informs the fifth module of my Dreaming with Wild Muse course. Through nature, movement and journaling, I’m finding a deeper relationship with truth, self-expression, which helps me notice where my voice is flowing freely and where old patterns still constrict it.
This is the third time I’ve journeyed through the course. Even though I wrote it, I continue to learn from it, as both mentor and student. It has become the way I accompany my own life. In conversation with the inner landscape of my body, I’ve come to feel like the gardener who has toiled and toiled, transforming a barren plot that had been over-controlled, polluted by runoff, with abandoned objects buried and forgotten in its most overgrown corners.
These days, I gaze upon an abundant rewilded space. No longer is the view taken up by swathes of neglect, but rather evidence of nature’s glorious return.
*
WHEN I FIRST BEGAN learning from the element of sound, which is associated with the energy centre at our throat, I realised the flow of my energy tended to excess here.
In chakra yoga, each energy centre can fall into excess or deficiency, depending on where we’ve learned to hold, withdraw or overcompensate. The force of life wants to flow through us like water finding its own course. Instead, I repeatedly found myself squeezing, or forcing that flow, trying so very hard to be heard, understood.
I used to work as a public speaking coach for writers in my late twenties and early thirties. If you’d asked me then whether I was comfortable expressing myself, I’d had said, Yes without hesitation. After drama school, my voice was polished, confident, effective. But it wasn’t resonant because it was shaped by ‘adaptation’ rather than my truth, or essence.
Thankfully, the outer world is an honest mirror (often unforgiving, frequently unflattering!). As much as I insisted to myself that I had no problem revealing who I was, the outer world reflected something different.
For years, I’d put my heart into my YouTube channel, working with a videographer to create high-quality content. But I was frustrated with the results. I longed for engaged subscribers, comments from people who felt moved, growth akin to the other channels I admired.
There was a mismatch between what I believed I was expressing and what was actually resonating in the world.
I kept researching content creation and social media growth, not realising that I was focusing on external solutions to an internal dissonance.
Just like in nature, growth is stunted on toxic ground, and a period of regeneration has to happen before abundance can return.
I could have spent my whole life exhausting myself trying to be what I thought others wanted, instead of learning how to tend to the inner landscape where my own nature was waiting to flourish.
SWIMMING EARLY ONE EVENING this week, I’m surrounded by swallows, circling, arrowing, sweeping down beside me to scoop beakfuls of water.
It isn’t just the lively calls I hear. I feel the texture of the birdsong. The highest notes penetrate my heart, setting it to quivering. My throat softens as the bubbling chirps undulate through me, the soundwave flowing into my shoulders, down my spine.
I hear the soft flip-flap of wings just above my head, but I also sense the strange solidity of delicate plumage and bone. There’s both exquisite fragility as well as a robust presence. As I feel the living world unfolding within me tears of joy tingle in my eyes.
Then comes a thick, dusty, blunt sensation reverberating at the outer edges of my ear, then pulsing to my brain, softening my thoughts to feathers. And off they float.
For a blissful moment I slice through the water in silence.
Awe for the world around me, and also the one within.
*
I didn’t used to hear in this way – throughout my whole inner landscape.
In fact, when I first came to what I now think of as Essence Work, I was a breeze block. Nothing could penetrate my body, echo through me. Instead of being the soft, sensing vessel we’re designed to be, allowing the force of life to flow through us, sound through us, I was an armoured form, my body held in unconscious patterns of tension.
Self-expression depends on sensation. Without being able to feel life flowing through me, there was nothing for my voice to faithfully express. It was like striking a triangle while gripping it tightly. Instead of ringing freely, the sound was immediately dampened. As much as I wanted it to, the sound of my true nature could not move through me. In its place, I spoke from thought, rather than giving voice to my whole being.
The trouble was, thinking is a man-made place. The mind is a storehouse of everything we’ve been taught to believe about ourselves, what’s acceptable, what earns love.
Here I was, longing to be heard but, although I could speak eloquently, my voice was disconnected from my truth. Because my essence had never been fully appreciated, I gradually stopped letting it resonate outwards. Rather than expressing the truth moving through me, I gave voice to a version of myself I believed would be accepted.
For a while it worked.
Kind of…
But as my creative dreams grew, the outer world began to reflect the limits of my unconscious patterns of tension. It mirrored the gap between the life I longed to create and what was actually happening.
My man-made mind only knew one response: try harder.
The more desperate I became, the more I squeezed my voice through the narrowed channel of my conditioning.
That thinking demanded a totally unsustainable way of living. It polluted the landscape of my body.
My denial was akin to the big corporations claiming their factories have nothing to do with higher-than-normal rates of illness among the local inhabitants.
I kept pushing on, promising my craving for peace, one of the last vestiges of my essence I could still feel, that we’d get there soon. Just a few more months of over-farming.
*
Working with the element of sound teaches us to listen to nature out there and also in here. As we do, we notice the difference between the natural sound of our essence and the constructed voice of our conditioning. We see the unconscious ways we’ve shaped ourselves into a form we hope will be accepted, and how often we’re sounding from a man-made place rather than a living one.
Imagine striking a gong and listening to the jangle reverberate, sound waves flowing from a central point, spreading out.
Our dreams move in the same way. They begin at a central point within us, first resonating through our body before vibrating into the outer world.
When we’re ‘in tune’, the note of our desire rings crisply within us, and the outer world responds to that resonance. We’re heard. What we wish for gradually grows around us.
I’d forgotten my sound. I wasn’t resonating from that living place. For years, I broadcast the constricted version of myself, and that wounded sound determined the results I created.
But our dreams don’t emerge from our thoughts, our conditioned mind, they emerge from our true resonance. No matter how much effort we apply, a deadened sound can only create more of the world it came from. In my case, it kept recreating the rejection I was trying so hard to escape.
I SPEND HOURS WATCHING birds, listening to their song, watching their beaks opening, the pink red of their throat.
I feel the pump of their belly in my own, sensing this bellow-like movement, pulsing air into sound. The thrust comes from the sacred place of desire, the sacrum, voicing that desire into the world.
The more I’ve sat in nature, sensing the rhythm of its true aliveness, the more I’ve felt the many micro-constrictions in my body, how I forced my sound, how that sound was a lie.
At first, I found that word challenging. Training in a chakra yoga module, learning that lies were the demon of the energy centre at our throat, I felt resistance.
I know now this was denial, a form of lie where we can’t bear to acknowledge the truth to ourselves.
But because nature never shamed me, gradually I’ve learned to hold myself in leafy, loving arms.
Sweet is the compassion that sees, in order to stay connected, I abandoned the parts of me no one valued. I gave voice to what people wanted, and then I forgot.
Slowly, I began to recognise that the world wasn’t rejecting my essence, it was faithfully reflecting the sound I was making.
I needed to shed the unconscious ways I made myself other.
Through working with sound, I learned to sing the song of my desire to offer myself to the world.
Freed from the husk of, Nobody wants what I am, this desire could finally germinate, and I could celebrate my fascination with transformation, creative energy, truth, self-expression, love.
Sound has given me a pathway through that breeze block. It hasn’t shattered it in a single dramatic moment. It has simply kept reverberating through it, gently, patiently, until tiny spaces began to appear. Through those openings I caught glimpses of something I had almost forgotten existed: the subtle movements of my own essence. Life-giving flutters and tickles.
When we finally feel these movements, it also becomes much easier to look with love at the places that aren’t yet free.
Gone is the desperation to go viral or gather millions of followers. Something far more miraculous has happened. Sitting in my car, recording the first draft of this post into a voice note, I suddenly want to laugh. I want to sing. These words are rising through me, and for perhaps the first time in my life, I realise I don’t need anyone else to hear them in order to know they’re true.
As always, wishing you creative contentment.
Gabriela, Tree Goddess
Thank you for reading and spending this time with me here. If something touched you, responding in a small way, a few words or a heart, helps this piece reach others who may need it today, and keeps this space relational rather than one-sided.
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