 I'm so happy to be here with Alex King Harris, a soul brother, and, you know, we met not too long ago, but like instantly I felt this connection, and I'm just grateful that we've been able to work together in various ways. And Alex does this magical work of helping us release, yeah, release a lot of stuff from our past, our trauma, our kind of stuckness through vocal journeys, through the voice. And I wanted Alex to talk about that, because I think it's such a powerful modality and you do beautiful work, Alex. I'm just going to stop for now, because I want you to introduce yourself and tell us about your background and your work, and then we'll get into this idea of vocal work and how that affects us. Yeah. Great. Thanks, George. Great to chat. It has been a pleasure getting to know you, so it's nice to spend a bit more time together. Yeah. So my background was with a lot of musical training. I went to university for music after having a lot of great teachers before that in private, studied jazz, classical, ethnic music, got a degree, went off and had an amazing career, but my career was really interwoven with yoga and mindfulness from the beginning. I was doing some personal healing from a really radical car accident where I had a lot of abdominal injury and yoga and breath work and music kind of found their way together pretty early for me. My first yoga teacher was kind of this sonic wizard who had a cancer therapy program and he would use music to relax people and then teach them how to breathe. And so I studied with him and it really shifted my understanding of what music was for. And at that time, I was meditating a lot, a lot of downloads were coming through about my path as a musician was not to be a performer. It was to help people feel like they were in the music with me and give them the power of their own musicality through breath and through sound. And so I had the wonderful privilege of making a lot of music for a lot of prominent yoga teachers and healing arts practitioners. I launched a company that streams music for those that group of professionals and kind of built my whole career around music and embodiment. How do you use music to get people in the body? What's the difference between music that's purely entertainment or distracting versus stuff that actually makes the breath want to go deeper and makes people want to feel themselves more deeply. And so that was my path. And yet I even myself after experiencing some success and dealing with some issues around addiction, I lost my connection to music entirely. It felt very formulaic, very repetitive. And it wasn't until I found the power of mindfulness techniques as they are now and music and got them joined back together that I experienced a complete reboot in my connection to music as a very devotional experience of presence. And that stopped me thinking about music and it turned me towards a lot of my unhealed wounds inside. And then I started sharing that work with others. And it's been a really profound journey of helping people to get beyond their own blocks or thoughts about what they think it is to be a singer and experience the joy of a choir in a very mindful, present kind of way. So that's what I do these days. Awesome. I let's let's dive into this because there's so much richness and power here and just one second here. Okay. Sorry about that way. Just we just had to change the camera for a sec. So I totally am with you on the power of, like you said, your musicality. I love that because it's it's not like music people usually think, especially singing people usually think, oh, you know, performance. But it's so much more like, like we don't have to perform to benefit from from from singing. And I don't know if I told you this, Alex. I was I was part of I think you knew about my music background. I used to lead a lead a band at church singing and like leading worship and all that. It was such a profoundly like formative and moving like for my for my growth. You know, it was it was really foundational for me. Like my my spirituality, the way I express myself today is is so much thanks to the power of devotional singing, which is what you do and help others learn all that. And and then at some point, I actually joined a black gospel choir. Yeah, no way. That's my mind. That's like a lifelong dream is to do that. Oh, my God. Like it's and it was actually it was a it was a class at at UC Berkeley, believe it or not, they had so grateful that this person, you know, this this this black pastor like worship leader came in and did this. And most of my fellow choir members were black. And but we had a very diverse diverse choir. And it was seriously, it was some of the most amazing experiences in my life, most like uplifting, truly connected, the spirit I felt like like a unit and expressing ourselves like this. Not all of us were good singers. Many of us were. But it was so. So tell us, what do you think is happening there? Yeah, wow, that's such a great, a great question. So in when I studied jazz, we actually studied the what happened to music as black people were taken from Africa and brought to North America and because of their suffering, music was the only thing they were allowed to do. One of the things was one of the only expressions of freedom. It somehow galvanized their connection to music in a way that created this uproar of reverence for what music is for them. Right. And that in a way is why the gospel movement is so powerful because you're jumping into the river of people who have really had everything taken from them. And the only thing left was their connection to music and each other through song and dance. And, you know, as Western folk who haven't been through that recently, our memory of when we used to sing and dance around the fire or in the village is quite long away. But there's some part of us that wants to belong again in a sense of communal worship, reverence, devotion, of what music does to us, which is it gives us a sense of belonging. It gives us a sense that we're OK, just the way we are. It allows us to feel and enjoy the beauty of life. It's very celebratory, right? It allows us to move emotions like grief and sadness and pain and stress into a place of praise. And that is something that we all crave, even if we've never had it before. It's something that we all need, you know. And so I think what's happened with the commodification of music is this sort of separated people, especially with the entertainer audience thing, which is great. It's nice to go see a show. It's separated people away in a similar way that that that religion has of like the people with the power are the ones on the stage and everybody else is powerless, just kind of taking it in. You know, again, mad respect to great performers, but I think at this stage, we all need to feel that power inside of ourselves and claim it and own it and be in a group of people where no matter what you believe, you can all do that together. And that's a really incredible experience as you as you as you found in that gospel choir. Holy, and you have led so many of these kinds of events over the years, right? Like like, yeah. OK, so and later, I'm going to I'm going to ask you to maybe lead us in a little bit of musical musical experience as well. So that that will come up later. But talk to us about so right now, like in our current culture, a lot of people are waking up to this idea of trauma or you might say, stored. Like pain, painful experiences stored in the body and in the psyche. And like, we're finding different ways of healing that. Do you think what role do you think music and the way, especially devotional singing and the way you're doing it and you're teaching it and guiding others on it? What role do you think that has in terms of our healing? We could talk about trauma healing we want, but particularly the healing of all the pain that we hold on to. Sure, that's great. So what I've noticed from my own exploration is that we have this amazing survival system that takes over when our when we're overwhelmed. And our brain has the capacity in a way to. Take us out of the pain through. Creating narratives around the pain that help us digest and understand what happened when we were overwhelmed. And it's amazing in what it does, but the trick is once it gets stored in the body, our brain tends to narrate about the pain and we get into this kind of stuck place where we're trying to protect ourselves from it. We want to let it go. Our brain's not sure how, you know, and it's a very potent and powerful thing to go back into some of those pains and actually feel them. And so what I've journeyed with, especially with doing really conscious, rhythmic breathing and using my voice is that I can help that part of my mind that's still in survival mode from a traumatic experience, relax and open a little bit and trust that there's a way of letting this go that it doesn't have to solve as a problem. And so it's really just giving the body and the nervous system enough cues to relax and open. And I think that the other thing that comes from the devotional part of things is when you really feel yourself held by life and you really commune with life and allow it, allow yourself to trust in life again after something really, really intense happened. Then this natural kind of unfolding of your instrument happens. And in that, you get to just experience pain and sensation, not the story that's attached to the trauma, but just the physical sensation itself. And voice is a wonderful channel for getting it out. So you can use that sensation to shape the sound that you're that you're producing. And as long as what I teach is to stay active in your listening so that your thoughts don't turn on and keep surrendering and softening the body, then inevitably this pain wants to release and come through. And then after that, we often have a, you know, a cathartic moment of healing and we feel more whole. And then our voice often changes in its sound to reflect that more attuned state with your instrument. Wow, beautiful. Wow. Thank you for that. And it also makes me just think about that idea of how the universe is is is song, right? Like universe, like it's it's there's some there's a there's like like you're talking about this in in terms of the physicality or the physiology of it. But there's also the connection and, you know, depends on one's belief, but like there's a connection to the universal source, you know, frequency, you might say, right? And doing all this. Well, and that just to complete that, that's that's perhaps a more fundamental level at which this magical way the music works is at work, where the pain and trauma that we experience in our lives is somehow, again, through personal experience, we're somehow predestined to go through a breaking of sorts and then learn how to come back into harmony and unity. And the universe to me has this this way of reminding us why we went through the experiences we did and bringing us back into wholeness when we tune into it. And music has a lovely metaphor for that of you're wanting to restore harmony and balance. And as you start to listen to the universe again and open up and work with that harmonizing effect, something happens that kind of brings you back to your original state and you would get to learn from all of the moments of pain and suffering so that you can be of service to others. And I think that's really a big part of our destiny as humans is to go through that. Yeah, I'm going to listen to this again because I think this I think part of what you're saying, yes, but also just your way of presenting it is this healing. I like that. So I want to do a couple of things. We the time is already coming to a close. It's it's very fast, but I want to do a couple of things. One is I want you to describe a little bit of what you do when you lead a vocal journey. Like what what should we expect? What what should we understand? You know, like as we come into one of your vocal journeys, OK, and then number two, maybe you can lead us a little bit in that experience. And then at the end, we could talk about how people can actually, you know, sign up an experience of an hour long journey with you. So go ahead and share. Right. Excellent. Thanks so much. So the first invitation is just to come as you are. There's no need to prepare. You don't need any skill. You need don't need any training. And I like to create a container where everybody feels really safe, included, welcome and that there's an awareness of the tendency to feel really vulnerable as we express our voice to create a capacity to be kind to that part of ourselves and be very self accepting for whatever comes out. Now, I do that through mindfulness techniques. And the first thing that I'll teach is how to relax and open your ears so that you're not straining or stressing the the input of frequency that's going on around you. You're then learning to notice as your thoughts are active to just simply practice listening to life as you notice that you're thinking and that does a really beautiful thing. And then it makes you receptive to the music of the universe. And then what I'll do is have you scan your body and start noticing where you're holding tension. Generally, as as people preparing to sing, we start to get nervous. And so we hold tension in the jaw, in the tongue, in the throat, behind the eyes, across the forehead, down the back of the neck. Depending on our emotional state, we want to have tension in the heart and the belly and the hips. And so we kind of do like what I call an instrument scan, where we bring softness and space into the instrument. And then we start breathing in a very connective and almost devotional way. And the breath becomes the central access through which we access music. And anytime we're efforting and trying to be musical, we come back to these awareness tools. And essentially, there's the things that ground you back into the intelligence of music itself. The other thing that I'll have people do is something called a vocal sigh, which is really just like a nervous system, let go, reset, get some freedom going on, stop trying to sing, just let it out, that kind of thing. And then we make some simple sounds together. And when we sing, it'll just be melodies with usually with no lyrics. And that, again, creates a very inclusive reverence space where people don't have to learn anything about the lyrics themselves. And so that part of their active mind can take a back seat and relax more. And then we sing our way into stillness and meditate for a while and just go back and forth along that path. That's beautiful. And when you do this, first of all, I know you've done lots of these things in person, but you've also done lots of these things virtually. Yeah. And right. And it's like so, so are people are people revealing their own voice, like in terms of the virtual? Like, are they or they not right? They're not. They're muted. And because I was kind of nervous about that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what's really interesting is in that situation where you're in a regular kind of zoom environment, you get this feeling of collectiveness, but you have a very personal relationship with your voice in that particular container. It's very different than doing it as a group where the resonance of all the other voices can help you open and it can be a really interesting experience. And then when you're private, you just have me in your headphones and you get to be completely free and both have value I found in doing both. People often get way more playful. Sometimes they'll turn off their cameras and rock out and just like, you know, go for it. And that's a very different behavior than what they do if they were sitting in a group of people. It's a different medicine. So it's really good. Well, if you're willing to give us, you know, a couple of minutes of just a little sample so we can have a sense of what this is kind of like. Let's do it. OK. So it seems like you're sitting comfortably. So I'll just get you to close your eyes and I'll mute my mic. Yeah. Mute yourself. OK. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. So just close your eyes and just turn your gaze inward and notice how it feels in your body. This instrument, this beautiful gift from life. And as you're noticing, you can just let your jaw begin to soften and let the muscles around your ears start to relax and open and let your tongue soften and let the backs of your eyes melt. And as you become aware of your breath, just notice the sensation of breath moving in and out of the body, staying relaxed, inviting some space, on the inhale and on the exhale, just softening the body a little bit more. And so stay with the breath and allow it to deepen a little bit into the chest, into the belly, feeling down into your hips, letting your hips soften and open and just feeling again, the exquisiteness of this instrument that you have and noticing if there's anywhere inside that needs attunement, perhaps part of your body where you might not feel any sensation or it might be tight and using your listening and your breath to allow for spaciousness to open up. And then on the exhale, just softening your whole being, letting whatever sounds are around you and inside you just be there. And then starting to allow your breath to become an active devotion. That you're taking in this amazing energy of life, accepting it into your being and then giving it back, acceptance and surrender, feeling the connection with life through your breath, sipping on the breath like it's a nectar. We're going to bring our voices into this beautiful instrument just with the simple act of sighing, so you're going to take a nice deep breath in. Ah, just sigh your voice out and feel the texture of your voice as it touches your heart. Keep inhale, sigh on the exhale, keeping the jaw soft and open, relaxing the body. Ah, another nice sigh. And then we're just going to make some really simple sounds together. You can just repeat after me. Yele, yele, yele, yele, yele, yele, yele, yele, feeling your instrument. Yele, yele, yele, nice deep breaths. Yele, hearing wide open. Yele, the soft part. Yele, yele, yele, yele, yele, yele, yele, yele, yele, yele, yele, yele, yele, yele, yele, yele, yele, yele, yele, yele. Take a deep breath. Last one all the way in. Hold your breath in at the top. Draw the roots of your pelvis up and exhale with one last big sigh. Let's just shake it up. That was awesome. Thank you so much for that gift. You're welcome. I noticed you were using an egg shaker, right? Yeah. Unfortunately with the zoom settings, probably on my side or something, I couldn't hear it. So, but I bet in your journeys, you'll set something up. Yeah. I have a different setup in my journeys. I have a really high quality mic and interface and the shaker is really clear and it's balanced with my voice. I think what happens to is the mic on the laptop gets a little overloaded if I don't have the right zoom settings. Yeah. Yeah. Tell us about how we could have more of this. Yeah. Great. So you can go to alexkingharris.com. I offer a periodic free one hour journeys. They're usually around once a month. But it's just an opportunity for people to come in at no charge. Beautiful. Yeah. That was one I just did with Unify. It was a world vocal journey for peace. Wow. And then once you try that, if you like it and you want to go deeper, I have a six week deep dive course coming up in late May where we go really deep into this practice. And it's a really beautiful opportunity. And who's this person here? That's me. With a beer. With a beer. Awesome. I'm really, really great. So grateful for you to, and you've got the podcast now. Yeah. Just launched the podcast, the first, first episodes coming out later this week with Jayu tall, who's one of the most amazing devotional singers I've ever met. And he and I are really great friends. It was an amazing interview to learn about his life story and how he got to where he got. It's a wonderful story to hear. So that'll be coming out later this week. Who else, who else are you going to have on the podcast? Yeah. So we'll have Dave Stringer, who's a wonderful devotional artist, David per mall. I just interviewed this really great breath work music producer named Toak. We're going to have DJ Taz Rashid coming up later in the summer. Hopefully synonym car later this summer as well. The cool thing about Yogi tunes is I have this amazing network of, I mean, we literally have most of the greatest devotional music on the planet on that service. And it's all through personal relationships. So this podcast is going to reflect a lot of those friendships that I have. Yeah. So those of you who are able to see the video on screen, you'll see that this is as of this moment, but I'm sure you have additional offerings coming up. The dive sessions are coming up to and have our voice and breath journeys. Amazing. People go really deep in those and it's powerful. Awesome. Thank you so much for the work that you do. Yeah, you're welcome, George. Thanks for shining your light in the world too. I really appreciate you. Please folks comment below. If you like, how was that experience for you? Do you have any questions for Alex? And just any other reflections on this idea of music as a healing and opening experience. Thanks all. Thanks Alex. Yeah, you bet, George.