Not a Poster Child by Francine Falk-Allen

Author:Francine Falk-Allen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 2018-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

21

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wake up, little sufi

In the middle of all this, I more or less got religion. That first summer after Bob and I split up, in 1975, I went up to Ukiah, in Mendocino County, to stay with our good friends, Lani and Al Krauss. Lani was twelve years my senior and was both a mentor and a very entertaining and close, loving friend to me. She and Al had a piece of property on the McNab Ranch, a lovely, big old house that Bob had helped repair and remodel, and acreage with a barn.

One day during my visit, Lani and I took either LSD or psilocybin together, and I took a short hike by myself, hoping to clear my head of my divorce.

I found a shady place in the foothills to sit for a while. I thought I would try doing some chanting—“Om”—which I had learned was best done as three sounds: “ahhhh—uuuu—mmmm.” The “ah” was supposed to open the heart chakra, the center of love and openness; the “u” the throat, the center of communication; and the “m” was said to reside in the third eye to stimulate intuition or intelligence. I found that I had good breath control and could hold these syllables for an extended amount of time. I was also pleased to discover that on the “uuu” sound, there were two or more harmonious notes, like a chord, emitting from my throat.

After practicing my new experience for perhaps a half-hour, I thought, I don’t know what effect this might be having, and holding my breath for so long, even though on the exhale, might be dangerous . . . I felt like there was the possibility of breaking a blood vessel in my head, or worse. I didn’t think of passing out, though that was probably a more real danger.

I hiked with my maple sapling walking stick back down the hill to the house. Lani studied esoteric things like astrology and bioenergetics, so I suspected she’d know something about chanting, too.

She greeted me with a fond, “Hi! Did you have a nice walk?”

“Yes, ‘high’ is right,” I said, chuckling. “But I was up there chanting ‘Om,’ and I heard these overtones in the notes, like on a guitar—like harmony with myself. I can kind of control it and make the sound go up and down the scale. But I was holding my breath a long time and I began to be afraid I was going to break a blood vessel in my head or something. Do you know anyone who knows about this kind of stuff?”

She laughed. “I don’t think you would break a blood vessel . . . but, oh, yes, I do know people who know ‘about this stuff’!”

She put on an album she thought I’d like, by The Sufi Choir, called “Stone in the Sky.” There were songs like, “It’s Coming Back to Me,” about remembering one’s spiritual self. One of the singers, a man named Vasheest Davenport, had a perfect tenor voice.

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