The Naked Voice

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Anandamayi

"I am conditioned as well as unconditioned. I am neither infinite nor confined within limits. I am both at the same time." Anandamayi

One of the greatest Indian woman saints of the twentieth century. Her presence and unchanging Love has sustained, inspired and shaped my understanding.

We know that Ma's presence has touched many of you deeply, and we invite you to write in and share your experiences of her impact on your work with the Naked Voice, so that we may include some of these on the page.

"To long for the cessation of want is your very nature - and to explore and penetrate to the root of whatever you perceive. It is your nature to crave for the revelation of That which is, for the Eternal, for Truth, for limitless Knowledge. This is why you do not feel satisfied with the evanescent, the untrue, with ignorance and limitation. Your true nature is to yearn for the revelation of what you ARE." Anandamayi

Supreme Woman Of Being - Anandamayi Ma

I have a feeling that
my boat has struck
Down there, in the depths,
against a great thing.

One morning in the winter of 1987, I was sitting in my bedroom, enjoying the play of the lemon sunlight upon the trees outside, when 'She' arrived. I was not expecting her, not consciously that is. Who was sending me a package from Germany? The book had been sent to me by a publisher friend who lived in Berlin.

'She' was a photographic essay of the life of Ananda Mayi Ma, one of this century's greatest Indian woman saints. I opened the book at random. Within seconds I was weeping like a helpless child, years of tears. Ananda Mayi's breathtaking beauty shone out at me from every page. It was not simply her physical image that spoke to me, but something far deeper. I felt seen and received in a way that I had never known. Who was this intimate stranger looking at me from these old photographs, images fixed onto paper years before, tracing her life from youth to old age? I did not know in that moment. All I knew was that these photographs arrested my heart, and stilled my restless senses. This woman's seeing made me feel instantly whole. She returned me to the source of myself. As my body softened, my tears subsided. I simply sat there with her for the rest of the day.

The presence of this extraordinary Being before me was the summation of everything that I had ever glimpsed or sensed of the Divine. Until that moment something had always been missing. I had never known such a direct and luminous encounter with the real in the form of a person. Was this what the Mother Abbess and others experienced when they spoke to me of encountering the 'Christ within'? Each photograph was accompanied by some words spoken by Ananda Mayi Ma. The first words that I read were:

How much more time will you spend at a wayside inn?
Don't you want to go home? How exquisite it all is....
One is, in his own Self, the wanderer, the exile,
the homecoming and the home....oneself is all that
there is...

I turned over the page, and saw myself in its reflection:

Do you want deliverance from the bonds of the world? Then weeping profusely, you will have to cry out from the bottom of your heart: Deliver me, Great Mother of the World, deliver me!.... When by the flood of your tears the inner and outer have fused into one, you will find her whom you sought with such anguish, nearer than the nearest, the very breath of life, the very core of every heart....

I am conditioned as well as unconditioned. I am neither infinite nor confined within limits. I am both at the same time....I am whatever you conceive, think or say....Why don't you take it that this body is the material embodiment of all your thoughts and ideas. You wanted it and you have it now.

It was then that I remembered my dream from the previous summer – the dream of the Great Mother. This was She! This was She! Of this there was no doubt. The face of my guardian angel was finally revealed. Ananda Mayi Ma, or 'Ma' as she was called, had left her body five years before, the year my daughter was born. However, the knowledge of her physical death seemed of little importance. Her invisible presence was undeniable. The book was called, Matri Darshan, which means 'The Grace of The Mother'. Grace it was.

From that morning on, Ma became my indispensable travelling companion. I took her everywhere with me, allowing the photographs and the text to work on me:

The destiny of every human being is to destroy the veil that hides his own Self. To realize this Self means to realize God, and to realize God is to realize one's own Self.

Before long I found myself talking to these images as if to a living person. Then I had more dreams about her. She became an integral and living presence in my life. What was, and is, this connection with someone whom I had never met in the body? My dialogues with her began to filter into my voice and sound-work, and I found myself introducing her teachings into my workshops and meditation retreats.

The previous emphasis of my work on self-actualization through a therapeutic approach to singing changed to a more direct exploration of the creative and spiritual dimension of the voice, both within performance and other artistic endeavours, such as song writing and recording. What was she calling me to now? It was at this time that the meaning of the first dream that I had had of Ma, in which Neem Karoli Baba was questioning me about my voice-teaching, began to strike a chord within me. Was my teaching yet another veil, in which I was successfully hiding my own singing development behind the wish to 'help' others? This question hovered about in my mind, while Ma continued to speak to me, patiently and simply.

Essentially there is only one inner Call, but the different religions have devised different methods to make man aware of it. Once a man awakens to it there is no more need to cry out again and again. Truly speaking it is not you who call Him but He who calls you.... when through intense and undivided devotion to Him the hunger of the sense is stilled, His call will find response from your inmost depths and reverberate through your whole being.

Her Being began to influence and inspire the lives of others who came to my workshops, and the demands for the photographic essay on Ananda Mayi Ma – Matri Darshan – increased.

It is by seeking to know oneself that the Great Mother of all can be found
(Matri Darshan Ananda Mayi Ma).

Finally I was compelled to travel to India to meet the people and places that had been transformed by her presence. It was with this visit to India that the previously irreconcilable problem of the duality of my existence came to an end.

Excerpt from 'The Naked Voice: Journey To The Source of Sound' by Chloe Goodchild (currently out of print).

See www.anandamayi.org for more information on Anandamayi Ma.

Click here to watch beautiful images of Anandamayi accompanied by 'Sri Ma' from Chloe's 'Fierce Wisdom' CD and here to see more Ma images accompanied by 'Om Anandamayi' from Chloe's new CD, 'Laughing heart'.