Ayyu, soul-singing — healing through the voice across traditions

Les plantes-maîtresses, approchées par dévotion — ce qu'elles enseignent quand on les laisse être ce qu'elles sont.

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Les plantes-maîtresses, approchées par dévotion — ce qu'elles enseignent quand on les laisse être ce qu'elles sont.

— Les plantes-maîtresses, approchées par dévotion — ce qu'elles enseignent quand on les laisse être ce qu'elles sont.

What the word ayyu carries

The word ayyu comes from Andean Quechua and names the breath-soul — what circulates through the body as a subtle current, what can be lost in a shock (susto), what can be restored by ritual song. In traditional Quechua medicine, the loss of ayyu produces a set of symptoms that medical anthropologists have documented since the 1950s: unexplained fatigue, loss of appetite, insomnia, a sense of being absent from oneself, sometimes recurring fevers with no identifiable organic cause. Diagnosis is made by trained curanderos (often called paqo in the Andes). The treatment almost always passes through a song — a song that calls the ayyu home.

This notion of a circulating soul that can be lost and restored by the voice is not particular to the Quechua. It appears, with lexical variations, in traditions extraordinarily far apart geographically. The Shipibo of the Ucayali speak of jakon shinan (good thought-breath). The Mongols speak of süns (the wind-soul that can wander off). The Yoruba of Nigeria speak of orí (the head-destiny) that must be realigned through specific songs (oríkì). The Tibetans speak of la (the soul that can be called back by precise rituals during grave illness). This convergence is no accident: it points to a very ancient human intuition — the voice can reach layers of the living tissue that other forms of care do not touch.

Stephen Harrod Buhner, the American herbalist and author of The Secret Teachings of Plants (2004), articulates this intuition in a way that resonates with the INFUSE practice: the human voice is the oldest therapeutic instrument because it crosses the layers that matter keeps separate — the cellular tissue vibrates, the breath synchronizes, the autonomic nervous system settles, and something with no precise Western name (the tone of the living tissue) realigns itself. What the ancients called soul. What contemporary science is beginning to name in fragments: polyvagal regulation (Stephen Porges), cardiorespiratory entrainment, rhythmic biofeedback.

Icaros — when the plant sings through the human voice

The icaros are the ritual songs received from the master plants by Amazonian curanderos during the dieta (see our pillar The Amazonian shamanic dieta). The word comes from the Quechua ikaray, meaning to blow through song, to breathe into. Each master plant has its family of icaros — some to tend specific illnesses, others to call the animals, others to open visions, others still to draw illness out or to turn back sorcery. Don Solón Tello Lozano, one of the great onaya of the late twentieth century, who died in 2014 in Iquitos, is said to have held a repertoire of more than 800 icaros.

The icaro is a performative act in the strict sense — it does something. For the curanderos, singing the icaro of chacruna in the presence of a sick patient can draw the illness out (chupar), move it (sacar), transform it (limpiar). Stephan Beyer, in Singing to the Plants (2009), describes the protocols precisely: the curandero blows the smoke of mapacho (sacred tobacco) over the patient, sings the icaro matched to the diagnosis, and sometimes performs a symbolic suction to remove the harm. This practice has nothing to do with a therapeutic metaphor — it is a precise technical operation, transmitted through family and bodily lineages, that takes years of learning in dieta.

For the Amazonian peoples, the icaro is not invented by the curandero — it is received from the plant. This distinction is cosmologically decisive. The curandero is a channel. The plant is the agent. The human voice is the instrument of transmission. This reversal of the creative posture — the human as medium rather than author — is one of the most radical conceptual offerings that Amazonian traditions hold out to modern Western psychology, which still largely places the human at the creative center of meaning.

Sufi qawwali — the voice that opens ecstasy

Qawwali is the devotional song of the Chishti-Sufi tradition, developed across the Indian subcontinent from the thirteenth century onward. Its stylistic founder is Amir Khusrau (1253–1325), a Sufi poet of Delhi who wove the Persian vocal traditions (radif, dastgah) together with Indian ragas and the mystical devotion of Sufism. The qawwali is sung in a group (the qawwali party, six to ten singers), with a lead singer (qawwal), chorus, harmonium, tabla and hand-claps. The form rests on the incantatory repetition of a ghazal or a Sufi kalam, with a rhythmic build that can carry the assembly — and the singer himself — to the state of fanâ, ecstatic annihilation in God.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (1948–1997), held to be the greatest qawwali interpreter of the twentieth century, spoke of sama — Sufi listening — as a spiritual medicine in the literal sense. In a late conversation with Peter Gabriel (who produced several of his albums for Western audiences), he describes qawwali as a medicine of the nafs (the soul in its dimension wounded by attachments). The voice of the qawwal works to dissolve the layers of the nafs, to free the ruh (the spirit), to allow the meeting with Allah. The qawwali performance in mahfil-e-sama (the listening assembly) at the Sufi shrines of Lahore, Multan, Delhi, Ajmer, is a therapeutic event as much as an aesthetic one — the faithful come to receive a medicine of the soul.

The musical structure of qawwali has been the subject of serious ethnomusicological analysis. Regula Qureshi, in Sufi Music of India and Pakistan (1986), documents the typical progression: a slow, meditative opening (alap), a gradual rhythmic rise, an ecstatic climax (where the singer may enter trance), a gentle descent. This architecture of sound bears a striking resemblance to the curve documented by Helen Bonny in her GIM method (see below): an induction phase, an experiential climax, integration. Two traditions separated by continents and centuries, converging on the same therapeutic topology of voice-as-music.

African-American gospel — the voice born in slavery

African-American gospel is one of the most profound vocal traditions of the twentieth century — and one of the most misread in its therapeutic dimension. Born in the plantations of the American South in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, under slavery, gospel weaves together Yoruba musical elements (rhythm, polyphony, call-and-response), Akan (melody), Kongo (the body), with the Methodist and Baptist Protestant hymns. Bernice Johnson Reagon, the African-American ethnomusicologist and founder of the group Sweet Honey in the Rock, spent her life documenting this genealogy. Her book If You Don't Go, Don't Hinder Me (2001) shows how gospel song was, quite literally, a tool of survival for the enslaved — a space where the soul could breathe while the body was possessed.

Mahalia Jackson (1911–1972), born in New Orleans into a poor family, became in the 1940s–60s one of the most powerful voices in gospel. Her rendition of Take My Hand, Precious Lord (a song written by Thomas A. Dorsey after his wife died in childbirth in 1932) is regarded as the archetype of the song that carries pain all the way through to release. Bessie Jones, of the Georgia Sea Islands, passed on in the second half of the twentieth century the Gullah ring shouts — circular songs inherited directly from West African traditions, where song and circular movement worked a collective transformation of suffering.

Bernice Johnson Reagon, in her work on the civil rights movement (where she was a singer with the SNCC Freedom Singers in the 1960s), articulates a crucial thesis: collective gospel song is not an emotional accompaniment to the movement — it is the very infrastructure that lets the movement exist. You cannot face police violence without the voice that holds the body. You cannot carry fear without the voice that turns fear into presence. This is a political therapeutics that reaches far beyond the frame of individual clinical psychology.

Tibetan mantras — the vibration that shapes attention

In Tibetan vajrayāna Buddhism, the mantra (Sanskrit man-tra, the instrument of the mind) is a sound-formula held to accomplish a subtle action within the consciousness and the energetic tissue of the practitioner. Om Mani Padme Hum, the mantra of Chenrezig (Avalokiteshvara), is probably the most universally widespread — recited by Tibetan practitioners with a mala of 108 beads, engraved on prayer wheels (mani chos khor), inscribed on rocks and prayer flags. Its literal translation (the Jewel in the lotus) matters less than its vibratory structure: six syllables that correspond to the six realms of existence, working to clear them.

The practice of mantra in the Tibetan tradition is not a passive devotion — it is a precise training of attention. Lama Anagarika Govinda, in Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism (1959), describes the process: the repetition of the mantra slows the breath, synchronizes the cardiorespiratory functions, draws attention toward a single vibration, and gradually dissolves the boundary between the one who recites and the formula recited. That dissolution is precisely the aim. Joachim-Ernst Berendt, in Nada Brahma (1983), sets this practice in resonance with contemporary research in sacred acoustics — Hans Jenny and cymatics (the visualization of vibratory structures), Alfred Tomatis and selective listening, Hans Cousto and the planetary frequencies.

Contemporary science confirms this intuition in part. Neuroscience studies on mantra recitation (Bernardi et al., 2001, British Medical Journal) show that rhythmic recitation synchronizes the respiratory rate to roughly six cycles per minute, which corresponds to the frequency of optimal heart-rate variability (baroreflex resonance). This synchronization produces a measurable parasympathetic regulation — exactly what one would expect of a therapeutic practice. The vibration of the voice shapes attention, and attention shapes the living tissue.

Kirtan — the call-and-response song that loosens the knots

Kirtan is the practice of call-and-response song in the Hindu vaishnava-bhakti tradition, brought into wide currency in the sixteenth century by Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (1486–1534) in Bengal. The form is simple: a lead singer voices a short mantra (Hare Krishna Hare Krishna / Krishna Krishna Hare Hare / Hare Rama Hare Rama / Rama Rama Hare Hare being the best known), the assembly answers, the tempo gradually quickens, the emotional intensity rises. The aim is the opening of the heart (hridaya), the release of held emotions, and the devotional meeting with the deity (Krishna, chiefly, in vaishnavism).

In the twentieth century, kirtan was carried out of India by several notable masters: A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (1896–1977), founder of ISKCON in 1966, who brought the Hare Krishna chant to the West. Neem Karoli Baba (1900?–1973), a bhakti master whose teaching shaped Ram Dass, Krishna Das, Bhagavan Das, Larry Brilliant. Krishna Das (Jeffrey Kagel, b. 1947), a student of Neem Karoli Baba, who brought kirtan into Western yoga studios from the 1990s onward and still leads collective singing sessions today. Snatam Kaur (b. 1972), a student of Yogi Bhajan, who brought kundalini kirtan (Sikh-yogic chants) into the contemporary Western yoga community.

What these transmissions beyond India reveal is that the practice of collective call-and-response song — whatever its confessional origin — produces a shared experiential shift in practitioners: emotional regulation, a sense of community, the release of bodily blockages, an opening of the breath. INFUSE does not run kirtan. But we recognize in this practice one of the most universally available grammars of the healing voice.

The Western science of singing — Densmore, Bonny, Porges

Frances Densmore (1867–1957), an American ethnomusicologist, devoted her life to recording and transcribing the songs of Native American peoples. Between 1907 and 1957 she documented more than 3,500 songs for the Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution — among the Chippewa (Ojibwe), the Sioux, the Yuma, the Pawnee, the Mandan, the Hidatsa, and many other nations. Her work stands today as an archive without equal. Densmore noticed very early that the therapeutic function of the songs could not be explained by the melody alone, but by the whole ritual context — who sings, in what state, at what hour of the day, in whose presence, after what preparation. Her ethnographic notes are as precious as her recordings.

Helen Lindquist Bonny (1921–2010), an American music therapist, founded the GIM method — Guided Imagery and Music — in 1973. The protocol combines a relaxation induction, the sustained listening to a carefully composed sequence of classical music (typically 30 to 60 minutes), and a post-session dialogue to integrate the images, emotions and memories that surface. GIM is now recognized by the American Music Therapy Association (AMTA), taught in several American universities (Temple University, Atlantic University), and used in particular in end-of-life care, in the accompaniment of complex trauma (PTSD-C), and with treatment-resistant depression. Bonny's work is one of the only systematic attempts by modern Western psychology to articulate scientifically what shamanic traditions have always known: that music shifts states of consciousness in a way that is measurable and therapeutically usable.

Stephen Porges, a neurophysiologist at the University of Indiana and author of The Polyvagal Theory (2011), brought a precise scientific frame for understanding why the human voice — the one we hear, and above all the one we produce ourselves — regulates the autonomic nervous system. The ventral vagus, an evolutionarily recent branch of the vagus nerve (cranial X), is anatomically linked to the muscles of the larynx, the face, and the middle ear. When we sing, we activate this circuit directly. This is why a song can settle what no reasoning can settle — the voice bypasses the cortex and works directly on visceral regulation. This contemporary science confirms the ancient intuition: the voice tends to us by a road that is not the road of thought.

Gems & legends — voices that changed the world

Gem 1 — Frances Densmore and the 3,500 songs. Frances Densmore began recording in 1907, with an Edison cylinder, the songs of the Chippewa of Minnesota. She continued for 50 years, crossing the United States with her equipment, sleeping in the homes of tribal families, transcribing through whole nights. Her archive — deposited at the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives — holds more than 3,500 recordings and stands today as one of the most precious primary sources for the Indigenous communities seeking to recover their lost vocal traditions.

Gem 2 — Nusrat at Bath in 1985. At a 1985 concert in Bath produced by Peter Gabriel, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan sang for three hours without a break. Several in the audience later spoke of experiences of ecstasy they could not describe — uncontrollable weeping, a sense of the physical presence of other beings, a temporary loss of spatial bearings. Peter Gabriel said that this concert changed his own relationship to the human voice. Qawwali has a documented effect that runs past the aesthetic.

Gem 3 — Mahalia Jackson on August 28, 1963. At the March on Washington of August 28, 1963, Mahalia Jackson sang How I Got Over before Martin Luther King's speech. During the speech, as King hesitated over where to go next, it was she who called out from the platform behind him: 'Tell them about the dream, Martin!' — setting off the improvisation that became I Have a Dream. The voice behind the voice of history.

Gem 4 — Bessie Jones and the Gullah ring shouts. Bessie Jones (1902–1984), from the Georgia Sea Islands, was one of the last keepers of the Gullah ring shouts — circular songs inherited directly from West African traditions, where the rhythm of feet striking the ground and the antiphonal singing worked a collective transformation, documented by Alan Lomax as early as the 1930s. The practice nearly died out. It was preserved by a few island families and is carried on again today by the McIntosh County Shouters.

Gem 5 — The Tibetan overtone chants. The monks of the Gyütö and Gyümé schools of Tibetan Buddhism (the Gelug lineage) practice an overtone chant unlike any other in the world — able to produce three notes at once by modulating the mouth cavity and the larynx. This practice, handed down since the fourteenth century, has no known cultural equivalent. It was first recorded in the West by David Lewiston in 1976. Its function is cosmological: the overtone chant is said to let the monk embody several aspects of the tantric deity at once.

Gem 6 — Krishna Das and the way out of addiction. Jeffrey Kagel, who became Krishna Das, recounts in Chants of a Lifetime (2010) that it was kirtan that brought him out of a severe heroin addiction in the early 1980s. Not a cure, not a conventional therapy — the collective Hare Krishna chant repeated over months. His testimony joins that of other bhakti practitioners (Larry Brilliant, Krishna Murti) who have described vocal practice as a first-line form of support.

Gem 7 — The Corsican polyphony listed by UNESCO. The cantu in paghjella — the a cappella polyphony of Corsican shepherds, passed from generation to generation in the villages of Cap Corse and the Castagniccia — was added in 2009 to the UNESCO list of intangible heritage in need of urgent safeguarding. This tradition is one of the last living traditional polyphonies of Europe. It is sung in specific contexts: confraternity, traditional masses, mournings, festivals. INFUSE supports the transmission initiatives carried by Corsican associations (Voce, A Filetta).

Gem 8 — Sheila Chandra and the voice that withdraws. Sheila Chandra, a British singer of Indian origin, was at the height of her art in the early 2000s — founder of Monsoon, then solo with Real World Records, a voice held to be one of the purest in contemporary overtone-drone singing. In 2010 she developed a laryngeal spasmodic dystonia that kept her from singing again. Her public reflection on that loss — Reaching for the Light: My Lifelong Encounter with the Voice (2024) — is a text without equal on what the loss of the voice means for someone who has lived by it. Read it to understand what we too easily call 'having a voice'.

Primary sources

• Densmore, F. (1907–1957). Collection of Native American Songs (3500+ recordings). Smithsonian Institution National Anthropological Archives & Library of Congress.
• Bonny, H. L. (2002). Music and Consciousness: The Evolution of Guided Imagery and Music. Gilsum NH: Barcelona Publishers.
• Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. New York: W.W. Norton.
• Beyer, S. V. (2009). Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. (Icaros section, pp. 230–280)
• Qureshi, R. B. (1986). Sufi Music of India and Pakistan: Sound, Context and Meaning in Qawwali. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Reagon, B. J. (2001). If You Don't Go, Don't Hinder Me: The African American Sacred Song Tradition. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
• Berendt, J. E. (1983). Nada Brahma — The World is Sound: Music and the Landscape of Consciousness. Rochester: Destiny Books.
• Buhner, S. H. (2004). The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature. Rochester: Bear & Co.
• Bernardi, L., Sleight, P., Bandinelli, G. et al. (2001). Effect of rosary prayer and yoga mantras on autonomic cardiovascular rhythms. British Medical Journal, 323, 1446–1449.
• Govinda, Lama Anagarika (1959). Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism. London: Rider & Co.
• Schimmel, A. (1975). Mystical Dimensions of Islam. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
• Krishna Das (2010). Chants of a Lifetime: Searching for a Heart of Gold. Carlsbad: Hay House.

Secondary sources

• Lomax, A. (1968). Folk Song Style and Culture. Washington: American Association for the Advancement of Science.
• Tomatis, A. (1991). The Conscious Ear: My Life of Transformation through Listening. New York: Station Hill Press.
• Purce, J. (1974, rev. 2005). The Mystic Spiral: Journey of the Soul. London: Thames & Hudson.
• Chandra, S. (2024). Reaching for the Light: My Lifelong Encounter with the Voice. London: Quartet Books.
• Gaynor, M. (2002). The Healing Power of Sound. Boulder: Shambhala. (To be read critically as to the commercial sound-healing dimension)
• Charing, H. G. & Cloudsley, P. (2008). Plant Spirit Shamanism: Traditional Techniques for Healing the Soul. Rochester: Destiny Books.