Sacredness and Sound

Letter four | Moon four - Feminine and the sacred

Dear you,

The moon is dark again, it seems to prompt a hum within me, a resonance deep in my body, somewhere below thought and beneath reason.

This new moon, maybe like a doorway into the unheard, like the space before sound, the moment before breath. I wonder: How often do I truly listen? Not just to the voices around me, not even to the voices in my head, but to something older, deeper, like the vibration of the earth itself, the rhythm.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the sacredness of sound, perhaps because I can feel one trapped within me - a sound. It lingers at the centre of my chest, rising and falling like a buoy on water, reverberating, it’s as if it’s waiting to be released, waiting to be heard. It’s not just music I’m contemplating, not just words, but all of the frequencies we absorb, the vibrations that move through us. The way certain sounds open us, while others close us.

I find myself yearning for something primal, something raw. A drumbeat in the distance, a howl against the night. I want to strip sound down to its essence, to feel it in my bones, in the dark well of my lower abdomen where all things begin.

And then, there is this: Sound emerging from deep within my body, materialised through the larynx, forcing my lips to open, and out comes meaningless noise!

Is there something deeply feminine about holding sound within? The feminine and the sacred have always been intertwined with breath, voice, and vibration. We wail in grief, and moan in pleasure. Our bodies hold rhythms older than language, and yet, so often, we suppress what longs to emerge… The journey from the unseen to the seen, from the internal to the external, from the felt to the spoken, the perfume spittle of the voice.

Question: How do we sanctify what comes out?

How do we honour what emerges from us, the breath woven into words, into song, into sound? The voice is a portal, a threshold through which the sacred moves, yet we have learned to be careful with it. To measure, to moderate, to hold back.

Question: How do we listen to the sacred sounds within ourselves?

In many traditions, sound is a portal. Chanting, humming, drumming, singing, each a way of stirring the unseen, of summoning something. The body is an instrument, a vessel that vibrates with the world around it. Sometimes it’s so easy to forget that we’re porous, that we are in constant conversation with the cosmos, that the sacred is not separate from us but flowing through us, resonating and vibrating within us.

I wander how, under this new moon, I can tune in. Carve out space to hear myself and the soundscape of the world.

Question: If the sacred had a sound, what would it be?

The sacred is not logical. It’s not linear. It is not rational, nor is it always gentle. It can be raw, urgent, wild, a force moving through the body, through the land, through time itself. And yet, we often try to contain it, to make it palatable, to silence it when it doesn’t fit in the confines of the world we’ve built. When we allow ourselves to vibrate in harmony with it, to hum, to moan, to chant, to wail, to sing, we’re not just remembering, we’re also shifting time.

So I leave you with this: If you’re like me, let this new moon be one of deep listening, of trying to attune to the sound of your own sacredness, trying to remember that your body, your voice, your breath, your hum is part of something vast and ancient and alive.

Thank you for reading

Claire

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Postscript

An interesting video on the sacred sound of OM, if it’s something you’re into.