For a singer to maximize the potential of the songs of Life, he needs to build an extraordinarily intimate and deep relationship with the inner workings of the emotional system.  This doesn’t just happen.  It’s something the singer has to learn how to be a part of as he gains the ability to do something called seeing.

Unfortunately, seeing is much like the songs of Life in that I can explain what it is and how it works, but it still won’t really make sense to most readers because it’s so foreign to how people in this culture experience things.  With that said, seeing is a process that allows one to experience the world in a visceral, direct way that works off of a completely different type of knowledge than the intellectually based knowledge we know and love in this culture. 

Have you ever been doing something, and then all of a sudden you turn around to find someone staring at you from behind?  How did you know they were staring at you?  My understanding is that you felt the person’s gaze weighing down on an energetic side of who you are that you never usually notice.  Wild animals know this experience well.  When you learn to bow hunt, which means you’re trying to get within 20 yards of a deer without it knowing you’re there, you quickly learn to never tunnel in with your vision on your target.  If you do, the deer will inevitably feel the pressure of your gaze and key in on you. 

Seeing and gazing are similar in that they both establish an energetically based connection between two living creatures using the eyes.  Beyond that, the two experiences are quite different, but at least gazing gives you a feel for a way of engaging that gets beyond the norm of using the five senses and your intellect to experience the world. 

I gained the ability to see by practicing an active type of meditation for years to quiet my thinking mind.  In time, this led to being able to generate short periods where I was able to stop my thoughts.  The duration and depth of the inner silence then built from there with further practice.  Once I started to create some success with quieting my mind, the dormant ability to see started to organically wake up and express itself.

At first, gaining the ability to see feels a bit like a child learning to walk.  The tools are there, but you need some practice to figure out how it all works.  With some work, your ability to see starts to crystalize, allowing you to have a direct and unfiltered experience of the energetic side of living things.  Because I was so involved with emotional healing as this process unfolded, I turned my young ability to see towards my and other’s emotional systems.  I soon found merging the use of song with seeing helped me explore the inner workings of the emotional system because it allowed me to establish a direct experience with a functional system that song then brought to life.  This served as the ideal way to learn how the emotional system was built and how it functioned.

I spent years exploring the inner workings of the emotional software that makes up the emotional system so I could figure out how it defined itself when it was healthy and whole, what occurred when it got torn up, and what the mechanics were that went into it being able to heal.  These explorations showed me that we have normalized a state of core debilitation in this culture that’s grounded in the way we’ve—usually unwittingly—learned to neglect a handful of the system’s needs.  Taking this journey didn’t just allow me to become a much more skilled singer.  It also allowed me to shape and hone an approach to core healing that was effective. 

Some try to link seeing up with being intuitive.  I’d say seeing is in the same ballpark, but barely.  Getting intuitive hits is like being able to randomly have one word on a page define itself.  Seeing allows you to become proficient enough to read the whole book.  Both give you a direct, what I would call a silent knowledge of something.  But seeing is way more advanced and honed than just being intuitive, and so it’s much more reliable and useful.

Trying to explain what seeing is is basically impossible because it demands that you have a certain type of experience to reference that only seeing gives you.  It’s called seeing because it uses the eyes to connect with whatever you’re engaging with, but seeing isn’t a visual experience.  When I connect to my client’s emotional systems, seeing gives me multiple perspectives.  I can feel my client’s feelings directly, and I can see into what I call the energetic mechanics of their systems as well.  Being on the phone and therefore at a distance changes how seeing is performed and makes it more challenging to practice, but I’ve learned to use it skillfully in this situation as well.

What confuses most people about seeing is that it’s a pathway to knowledge that doesn’t depend on the intellect.  Most people find that statement both counterintuitive and fantastical because they only equate knowledge with thinking.  Quieting the mind doesn’t lead one into ignorance.  Instead, it allows you to balance the tool of your intellect with another tool that’s much more effective at meeting and understanding the world in certain circumstances.  Not only has this allowed me to become a very skilled practitioner.  It has also allowed me to come to know both myself and Life in ways I never could have if I simply would have met them with my mind and senses.

When I received the songs of Life three decades ago and began my journey with it, I had no idea what it would entail.  The songs gave me a chance to help myself and others heal, but it was only when I coupled them with seeing that I was eventually able to become an emotional whisperer. 

The reader will never really understand what it means to see, but that doesn’t mean addressing it is fruitless.  Coupling seeing with song is what, in the end, has allowed me to take the healing journey that this blog shares to the depths that I have.   You might not understand how this all works, but my hope is that introducing seeing and song helped you understand how this journey demanded more than just belting out songs and hoping for the best.  It took decades of focused, hard work and struggle that created the strength and skill I needed to take it.