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Steven Ash
from: Steven Ash
Category: Sound Healing

BLACK SOUND

Powerful metaphors for sound healing are found in the simple actions and experiences Ihappen upon in daily life, so long as I am awake and open to seeing them. Thisunderstanding came as I clean the window of the log burner, being a cheapskate I use burntwood ash on a wet sponge as suggested by the chimney sweep. Wood ash is a wonderfuluniversal cleaner as I found out later when I went to rinse the sponge, I tried cleaning thesilver handle of a kitchen knife, “Eureka” I yelped, what a great silver cleaner. Dirty, greyand grungy wood ash is a far better polisher than chemicals in a spray bottle with fancylabels...and far cheaper. Somehow this experiment got me thinking about black light.


Grandfather Wallace Black Elk talks about black light in the Inipi sweat lodge. That withinthis black light, as shadow and as a backdrop the great power of Spirit can be heard, seenand experienced. The black light is like the soot cleaning the stove window and silver knife,the black light clears away our stuck-ness and grime. The dense blackness in the lodge is notan absence it is a presence, a force of cleansing. We have these labels for good and bad,sanitised and white are good, earthy and dark is bad, these pure white ideas have religiousconditioning at their root. What is the grime and stuck-ness? It is the touches of untruth,tiny quantum’s, units, memories and judgements that we attract to ourselves and that stick toour soul holding us back from flowing free. Like dangling barnacles on the hull of ourschooner, they create resistance to us easing forward through the oceans of our life; but thisis not the black light or sound, its something different.


Do we own this grimy stuff ? No, they are not the fabric of our being, they are just meltedonto us, welded and tattooed into the skin of our soul, and often they have been forced ontous, OK we were vulnerable and open to accepting these illusions, but that does not meanthat we have to own them. If we know how we can put our ship into dry dock and scrape offall the resistance from the previously unseen parts of our nature we can be healed. Theplace to look is in the shadow land, its in the darkness of our night, it’s in the chattering ofthe mind and this sits upon the black light and black sound, far, far behind.


Every sound, song and hum has a silence before and after itself, the sound breaks the silenceand impresses itself upon the backdrop of black light but is also followed by the presence ofblack sound. Black sound is not an absence, but like the black light it is a presence. Everythought, memory and inspiration comes and sits upon this backdrop of black sound/light.When we close our eyes we can see it. Spirit, Qi and God are all names of the samepresence. Here lets call it Spirit. Spirit is nameless, all and everything, everywhere and allknowing. Spirit is the sound as well as the backdrop for the sound. There would be no soundheard unless the backdrop and shadow were present.


The black sound is the void and near to vacuum, its the deepest point between the beats ofthe drum. In the sound healing session it is the space in time left where there is silence, asbetween the end of drumming and the beginning of rattling. Dark sound and dark light isthe descent into the underworld, the dark night of the soul. Corresponding to north in themedicine wheel, it is our aloneness, vulnerability and being emptied out. It is the dark soundof mother earth if we are sensitive to listen. It is the sound behind the chatter of the history,concepts and details that fill life.


Healing with sound is uniting this darkness with the essence of the soul, coming home, andat the right time bringing in the light. Sound we are seeking emphasises and seeks the void,the deep underworld behind and deep within the underworld of the mother of truth. Wehave to go down and dig deep and help others to look and listen there. We cannot stay orcondone being asleep in our waking state, dark sound is between the notes, between thebeats and at the bottom of the breath. Like a bed upon which we rest, all that needs to becleared away, it sits and confuses our living moment. Cold then becomes warm, and hatredthen becomes love. How deep is our pain, our shame and judgement, how much is scatteredupon our bed preventing us from having comfort? Make space for the dark light to be, lookat what sits upon its surface like plastic bottles on a dark azure sea, take away the dross andwaves of harmony without inhibition can rise and fall, happiness is its expression.

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