Smiles after a 2019 Christmas Concert Where Everything Came Together (Photo by Betty Poleet)
Joyful attunement is to be expected when choir friends sing music together that they know and love. But, as I learned, it is also possible for strangers who have just spent several days intentionally not speaking with each other.
Toward the end of a 7-day silent retreat I attended, the hundred or so of us in the hall were taught a lovely evening chant. That something out of the ordinary was going on was evident in the sound. The teacher asked us to repeat the chant and it happened again.
As Linn Nagata found in her research on somatic mindfulness, “The ability to resonate or attune to another person somatically can provide a type of communication even when language differences preclude verbal communication (p. 97, Kossak, M. , Attunement in Expressive Arts Therapy).
Perhaps we had been subtly attuning via body language without knowing it, even as we avoided eye contact. Or our kind and wise retreat teachers’ influence and support was enough to get us all on the same wavelength. I could also see how a few talented individuals with unusual musical sensitivity might have acted as catalysts for the effortless attunement that had a great deal of freedom to it – like a flock of birds wheeling out patterns in the evening sky.
That this kind of group-level intuitive heartfelt intelligence is still possible provides me with hope for our troubled world.
Radiant Refuge 