In recent years I’ve discovered a love for singing and listening to gospel music. For me, it creates a perfect storm of music, dance, performance, spirituality, connection, uplift and a ton of other meaningful goodies.
It touches something deep in my soul. It has a physical, emotional and spiritual impact. It excites and uplifts me. Makes me dance in the kitchen, and sing like a diva in the car. It inspires me to perform more openly and expressively than I ever felt able to as a classical musician. To lose myself in the moment. To be moved to tears, laughter, or often both.
It’s visceral stuff. The juice of life. It gives me goosebumps. It makes me tingle. I smile even thinking about it. It helps me think about things I don’t want to think about. It offers me perspectives which my non gospel music infused mind can struggle to access.
It unleashes something in me. It gives me access to a sense of freedom and abandon that I don’t find everywhere in my day to day life. It gives me permission to be more effusive than I might sometimes be. To express my inner diva. To raise my hands up in abandon. To surrender to the moment and the music.
Gospel music is my door into a whole other way of being. I have plenty of others, but in this moment, the day after a spine tingling choir rehearsal, gospel singing is front and centre of my mind.
And the great news about this? We all have these doors.
No one doesn't have one.
Not a single person out there is devoid of doors like mine.
Yours may look, sound and feel completely different. Yours may have nothing whatsoever to do with gospel music or indeed anything I’ve described here. Your external response may appear to have nothing at all in common with mine.
But the internal feeling: the uplift, the excitement, the sense of hope and perspective is something we all share.
The physical sensations that tells us we’re going through that door. The goosebumps. The surge of adrenalin. The total absorption in the moment. The feeling that tells us we’re in the right place, doing the right thing at the right time.
These moments are golden. This is the elixir of life. This is the good stuff that raises us up. Expands and evolves us. Allows us to let go, momentarily, of the stuff that doesn’t serve us. The thing that connects us with others - powerfully and meaningfully.
And if we don’t make space for these moments in our lives, we forget what it’s like to feel that good. We forget that it’s possible to feel on top of the world. We forget we can tingle with joy. We start to think that feeling this way is just for kids, or people without our heavy, adult, responsibilities.
Feeling this good becomes a faded memory of experiences that have passed, never to return.
I’m blessed to have a job that reacquaints people with this feeling. To draw their attention to the places in their lives where these feelings show up. To spend time exploring what it’s like for them as the tingle spreads through their bodies. To notice the way their eyes light up - how they stand a little taller and breathe a little deeper when they’re resonating in this way.
And what I get to witness is how connected they are, in these moments, to what really matters to them. I get to glimpse a more expanded version of who they are.
And I can tell you, the view is always magnificent.
And the more my clients remember how good it feels to feel this way, the more they notice when it shows up in their lives. And the more they notice it showing up, the better they feel.
It’s a beautiful, virtuous cycle.
It’s a beautiful, virtuous cycle that’s available to all of us. No matter our circumstance. There are absolutely times when we have to dig a little (or a lot) deeper to access these feelings - but I’m telling you, they’ve never left the building.
They’re always lying in wait, powerful and uplifting as they ever were. Waiting for you to knock on the door, and breathe life back into them.