By Elisa Erkelenz. Your current work deals with water, referring to the rivers where rituals of sound healing take place. I think where I'm at in my journey is really acknowledging water as a sonic space. I think about the water that is within us and in everything around us; about what fluidity does and how vibration travels in water. When you tie all of that back into sound healing and my journey specifically, I started out being someone who was very afraid of their connection to their ancestry and their own healing powers.
Stigma, and also upbringing. Things are shifting now, but for a long time, sound healing or healing work was associated with older people. Hence, I was running away from my own calling. When I was struggling psychologically and emotionally, I turned to sound and saw its healing potentials. Society has given sound healing a narrow approach.
There's just a kind of stereotypical, almost potentially bastardizing association around what sound healing is. I'm really interested in getting into the work of sound healing that is uncomfortable, painful, grimy, and guttural, and is not just going to put you to sleep or give you a brain massage. Sometimes, it's going to uproot some very hectic trauma within you and bring out some elements that you maybe aren't ready to face or confront. That feels more resonant with the ways I heal with sound and the ways I move with sound.
Again, the journey of it was quite interesting. When I was at home in Limpopo, the village that I come from originally, I would always hear people throat singing from a distance as they were herding cows. I thought it was something else. In my ethnomusicology classes at university, they told us about Tuvan throat singing in Asia. And I thought, Well, this sounds a little bit different to how I've heard it at home. This sounds more like impersonating water, the way that the throat singing is sitting.
The placement of the throat singing at home feels like it's more connected to air, to wind, and to the trees. But I was again quite disconnected from it up until growing closer into my healing journey, accepting that I have a calling.
