Spirit Singing

Familiar songs that might have been sung around the campfires of our youth.

A GUIDE TO FINDING THE POWER OF YOUR VOICE Release Stress Naturally Enhance Creativity Experience Ecstatic Self-Expression Composer and sound healer Shawna Carol has taught thousands of students SpiritSong, her unique singing method. In this practical and supportive book, she shares her wisdom and experience - illuminating a sure path to connecting with the joy and the power of singing. Whether you are new to singing, or have long experience, this book opens pathways to new dimensions of the power of song. It includes a step-by-step guide to a personal SpiritSong practice that is healing, creativity enhancing, and a practice for spiritual awakening. Ms. Carol brings her grounded, compassionate, and humorous approach to overcoming the inner critic, releasing trauma, and gifting yourself with the joy of Spirit. As a composer, whose music has been performed around the world, she shows the way to open the creative flow, remove obstacles, and bring forth the songs and the music within you. From her long experience, Ms. Carol gives you the nitty-gritty, real-world information you need to create SpiritSong circles and connect with others in extremely powerful and transformative group practice. She details the safety concerns, shows you how to avoid the potential pitfalls, and provides examples to lead you quickly and surely to success. The book is also a companion and guide, showing how these practices can lead to shamanic experiences of other dimensions for those who are so inclined. It includes helpful advice received by Ms. Carol in such journeys. Distilling a lifetime of experience and wisdom, this book is an invaluable companion to all those who walk the path of song.

First published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This work on psalm singing is one of the few complete puritan treatments of the subject. Since singing psalms is a Gospel command, Cuthbert teaches this topic very seriously, and covers important objections that are often raised against psalmody - something the Westminster Puritans taught without exception. In seven chapters Cuthbert explains both Ephesians and Colossians concerning "psalms, hymns and spiritual songs," as well as topics such as the lawfulness of Psalm Singing as an ordinance, the translation of the Psalms to be sung, the abuses of the Roman and Episcopal Church on psalm singing, how we teach and admonish one another with psalms, and important notes about how we are to sing with a mixed multitude in corporate worship. This is a valuable treatment of the subject and is well worth time and consideration on a doctrine almost completely forgotten in our day. This work is not a scan or facsimile and has been made easy to read with an active table of contents for electronic versions.

In the Upper Amazon, mestizos are the Spanish-speaking descendants of Hispanic colonizers and the indigenous peoples of the jungle. Some mestizos have migrated to Amazon towns and cities, such as Iquitos and Pucallpa; most remain in small villages. They have retained features of a folk Catholicism and traditional Hispanic medicine, and have incorporated much of the religious tradition of the Amazon, especially its healing, sorcery, shamanism, and the use of potent plant hallucinogens, including ayahuasca. The result is a uniquely eclectic shamanist culture that continues to fascinate outsiders with its brilliant visionary art. Ayahuasca shamanism is now part of global culture. Once the terrain of anthropologists, it is now the subject of novels and spiritual memoirs, while ayahuasca shamans perform their healing rituals in Ontario and Wisconsin. Singing to the Plants sets forth just what this shamanism is about--what happens at an ayahuasca healing ceremony, how the apprentice shaman forms a spiritual relationship with the healing plant spirits, how sorcerers inflict the harm that the shaman heals, and the ways that plants are used in healing, love magic, and sorcery.

Indigenous peoples throughout the globe are custodians of a unique, priceless, and increasingly imperiled legacy of oral lore. Among them the Ainu, a people native to northeastern Asia, stand out for the exceptional scope and richness of their oral performance traditions. Yet despite this cultural wealth, nothing has appeared in English on the subject in over thirty years. Sarah Strong’s Ainu Spirits Singing breaks this decades-long silence with a nuanced study and English translation of Chiri Yukie’s Ainu Shin’yoshu, the first written transcription of Ainu oral narratives by an ethnic Ainu. The thirteen narratives in Chiri’s collection belong to the genre known as kamui yukar, said to be the most ancient performance form in the vast Ainu repertoire. In it, animals (and sometimes plants or other natural phenomena)—all regarded as spiritual beings (kamui) within the animate Ainu world—assume the role of narrator and tell stories about themselves. The first-person speakers include imposing animals such as the revered orca, the Hokkaido wolf, and Blakiston’s fish owl, as well as the more “humble” Hokkaido brown frog, snowshoe hare, and pearl mussel. Each has its own story and own signature refrain. Strong provides readers with an intimate and perceptive view of this extraordinary text. Along with critical contextual information about traditional Ainu society and its cultural assumptions, she brings forward pertinent information on the geography and natural history of the coastal southwestern Hokkaido region where the stories were originally performed. The result is a rich fusion of knowledge that allows the reader to feel at home within the animistic frame of reference of the narratives. Strong’s study also offers the first extended biography of Chiri Yukie (1903-1922) in English. The story of her life, and her untimely death at age nineteen, makes clear the harsh consequences for Chiri and her fellow Ainu of the Japanese colonization of Hokkaido and the Meiji and Taisho governments’ policies of assimilation. Chiri’s receipt of the narratives in the Horobetsu dialect from her grandmother and aunt (both traditional performers) and the fact that no native speakers of that dialect survive today make her work all the more significant. The book concludes with a full, integral translation of the text.

(Berklee Guide). Connect to your authentic singing voice with this holistic guide to a healthy and expressive singing life. This collection of technical discussions, exercises, and insights will help you improve all aspects of using your voice from healthy sound production to exercises for greater vocal facility to guidance on rehearsing with your band. Interviews with Patty Austin, Ysaye Barnwell, and others lend their perspectives to singing, the mind-body connection, and a natural/wellness focused approach to musicianship. The accompanying online audio supports the practice exercises and approaches to learning new songs.

Contemporary worship music is ubiquitous in many Protestant Christian communities today. Rather than debating or decrying this post–worship-wars reality, David Lemley accepts it as a premise and examines what it means for us to be singing along with songs that aren’t so different from the pop genre. How do we cope with the consumerism embedded in the mentality that catchy is good? How do we stay committed to subverting cultural norms, as Christians are called to do, when our music is modeled after those cultural norms? How do we ensure that the way we participate in the liturgy of contemporary worship music rehearses a cruciform identity? Becoming What We Sing draws on cultural criticism, ethnomusicology, and liturgical and sacramental theology to process the deluge of the contemporary in today’s worship music. Lemley probes the thought of historical figures, such as Augustine, Hildegard of Bingen, Martin Luther, and the Wesleys, while also staying situated in the current moment by engaging with cultural philosophers such as James K. A. Smith and popular artists such as U2. The result is a thorough assessment of contemporary worship music’s cultural economy that will guide readers toward greater consciousness of who we are becoming as we sing “our way into selves, societies, and cosmic perspectives.”