Medicine Songs in English
Q: I experienced songs in English in an ayahuasca ceremony for the first time when I first sat with Forest Path. I had a little resistance at first because it wasn’t “traditional”, but quickly I came to deeply appreciate these songs for the ease with which I connected to their message. Can you speak to why you write/include songs in English?
When I first came across these types of songs in English, I had the same reaction. Somehow, it was always easier, more exotic, more romantic to sing in Spanish, to sing in Portuguese, to hear these Sanskrit mantras, to hear these indigenous dialects, because they spoke to a different part of me. So I turned towards that, and it felt easier to sing. I started playing the guitar and playing music to learn those types of songs, and it felt much more effortless to sing in Spanish or Sanskrit or something like this.
That's the reason I learned music, so that I could carry these songs, so that I could embody their medicine. When it came to the English songs, I thought, "Oh, now that is kind of cheesy." Then I discovered at some point, with the help of the medicine, that when I sang it and I really meant it, it really entered into the heart and it really cleared a lot of things out of the way, it really broke it open, and even though there was a part of myself that felt, "Oh, this is too cheesy," when I really meant it and I felt it, I discovered that I was made of cheese! And there I melted.
For those of us whose first language is English, there's probably going to be a part that feels cheesy with that, and more exotic and mysterious with a different language. The other side of the reality is that our own dialect hits home. It hits the heartstrings in a different way. It resonates and registers with a different part of our brain.
In Peru, I was with one of the grandmothers, learning some icaros, and her cousin, another great ayahuasquero, was also there. They would always encourage me to sing, so I would mumble along in some abstract melodic glossolalia. Because they sang in their language, they would improvise, describing what they were doing and seeing in real-time. I did my best to learn as many words as I could so I could understand and create my own freestyles. The Maestro said, “No, no, you do it in your language.” As if to say, why would you copy our language? We're singing in our language. Why don't you sing in yours?
Then there’s the Daime. Their songs are in Portuguese, the hymns—these beautiful hymns. The way they are received is in the language of the community. The way they are followed is through repetition, pulling everyone in the congregation into line, drawing the words from the participants, and leading everyone to draw near to their meaning through a direct mystical embodiment of the teaching transmitted in the hymn. For most of its life, the Daime has been a charitable vehicle that serves downtrodden minorities, many of whom were illiterate. Repeating the lines and encouraging everyone to sing was the way to illuminate and bring forth the energy of the work.
My language is English, and I found that a lot of those words really hit home. They speak to a certain place when they are carried in the air. When they're not just cognitive philosophical ramblings trying to impress somebody, and they're not songs that tickle the flights of fancy, then they really are medicine. They're carrying a tone and quality that comes from a very humble place, a very meek place. They’re carrying teachings.
There's a Sufi saying that goes, “If it comes from the heart, it will enter into the heart, but if it comes from the tongue, it will not pass beyond the ears.” Then we can truly rest in the way of medicine music and heart songs as an emergent quality in English and as a continually defining territory, which is happening through the large movement of predominantly Western English speakers moving into these worlds, these paths, these ways, and traditions.
My audience is largely English-speaking, and to speak in that language and speak directly to that audience is important. For sure, I can sing in indigenous dialects, in Spanish or Portuguese all night long, and we do sometimes. But when the English song comes on, those who do not speak those other languages know what it means. They don't have to wonder, what are they meaning, what are they saying, what are they singing? Sometimes those other dialects can put us in a less cerebral state, and there is a time for that.
I work with words, and when words hit us in the right way, they light us up and draw us toward the teaching, which essentially, is wordless.
Excerpt from Walking the Forest Path: Volume 1, available in early 2025.
