How to recognise your Dharma without going looking for it

 

Many people I meet in my work are looking for their purpose.

They have taken this course or that course. Filled in the assessments and got the certificates. Travelled to far-off places looking for something they couldn’t name. Sat in ceremony. Followed teachers. Explored ancient traditions. Sat with the question for years, sometimes even decades.

And still, something is missing.

What they find is often either nothing they can name, or something that sounds right until they try to live it.

I totally understand the searching. I have searched a big part of my life too.

But I have come to think that the search itself is built on a misunderstanding.

It might even be the trap.

We treat our Dharma as though it were somewhere out there. Something to be discovered, like a beautiful place we have not yet visited. So we look outward. We try things. We gather experiences. We ask other people what they see in us. We look for the teacher who will tell us, the journey that will reveal it, the experience that will finally make it clear.

But what if there is nothing to find?

What if what we call Dharma is not something waiting to be discovered, but something already alive within us that we gradually mature into?

Like a seed, it carries something of its nature from the beginning. But it still needs time. It needs tending. It needs the right conditions. It needs space to ripen and refine itself through the living of our life.

Perhaps the work is not to find your Dharma, but to become quiet enough to recognise what is already growing, and patient enough to let it become what it is.

And the whole time, it was never out there at all.

The relationship is already inside you

The relationship with God, with the divine, with Source — whatever word sits well in your mouth — is not something to be established or built.

It is already there. Inherent. It came with you. We just have to put our life force and attention into meeting it there within us.

There is no action to take outside yourself to discover it. There is nothing to acquire, no qualification to earn, no place to travel to. There is only meeting it. Going down into the depth of your own nature, into your heart, into the centre where that connection already lives.

And from that centre, something begins to move. We start to bring it fully to life.

What comes through when you stop pushing

When I surrender there, something expresses itself through me.

Not something I generate. Something that moves through me when I get out of the way. Something that has been ripening through my life, becoming clearer and more refined, until it is ready to be given.

My part is not to decide what it should be. My part is to become available. To listen. To give it space. To keep the instrument tended and in a state where what wants to come through can find its way.

That is what I mean by Dharma.

Not a plan. Not a career. Not a thing you decide and then execute.

Your Dharma gradually reveals itself when you are in contact with Source and no longer resist what wants to live through you.

It is already there, but it is not necessarily finished. It matures with you. It refines itself through the life you live. That is the real embodiment of Dharma.

And then, sometimes, something moves through you that you could never have planned for. You can’t even name it or grasp it. You can only recognise it by how it feels as it moves.

And this is where I leave it to the mystery.

There is no need to understand it. Some things cannot be expressed in words. They can only be experienced.

This is where Voice Alchemy begins for me: the voice becoming the direct sound of something moving through me, the workings of Dharma made audible.

I am not writing this as a theory I find appealing. This actually describes my working life. Everything I offer comes out of this: the one-to-one sessions, the circles, the ceremonies, the sound journeys.

In each of them, I make myself available. I tend the instrument. I listen. And then something larger than me moves through me.

This is where I have come to understand that the giving and the receiving are one.

I am not giving something away from a private reserve. I am not drawing from myself until there is nothing left. When I am truly giving from Source, the giving does not deplete me. It fills me.

I know this because it happens every time I work.

Tuning the instrument

There is something I have come to know through direct experience.

Nature is a symphony.

I did not come up with this as an idea. I met it.

I met it in the streaming water, in the birds whistling to one another, in the wind moving through the trees, in the endless sounds of the living world around me. There were moments when I was so immersed in it that I stopped feeling like I was listening to nature and felt as though nature was inviting me into its music.

I was mesmerised by it. Almost bewitched.

There was such beauty in it, and such love, that I found myself falling into it rather than simply observing it. The symphony seemed to be calling me in.

And somewhere in that falling, my voice answered.

That is where my understanding of the voice began to change. I no longer experienced singing as something I was doing to nature, or even something I was doing by myself. I was answering something that was already sounding.

I think of us as instruments in this symphony of nature.

Every part of nature has its own way of moving and expressing itself, and so do we. The wind through the trees, the water over stone, the birds answering each other before dawn — all of it is sounding, all the time, and we are part of that, whether or not we are listening.

Once I understood this, my life became remarkably simple. There are only two things to do.

Tune yourself to the symphony.

Take care of the instrument.

For me, that is the ego’s only job: to be in service to what moves through us.

That is the whole practice. Everything else follows from those two.

I sing every day. I keep my body in a state where sound can move through it. I stay in relationship with silence, with nature, with what is larger. And then, when it is time to play, I don’t have to go looking for the music. I have prepared the instrument to receive what wants to come through.

The sounding between us

This is how I have come to recognise the quality of Dharma: in the giving itself.

Notice where the giving fills you rather than empties you.

When I sound in a ceremony or a transmission, I am not spending myself. I am bathing in love, being filled by it as it moves through me. The expression is the receiving. They are not two things happening in sequence. They are one motion.

It is physical as well. Sound has pressure. When I sing, the vibration moves through my own body at the same moment it moves through the room. It touches me while I am giving it. The instrument is played by what passes through it.

So when I sound for someone whose nervous system is braced, and something in them begins to settle, I often feel a settling in myself too. When I sound for someone who has lost contact with themselves, and a part of them that was stuck begins to be felt again, I can feel something move in me as well.

I don’t need to know exactly what is happening on the other side of the sound to know that I am participating in it. Something is moving through the room, through the body, through the relationship between us, and I am an instrument in that movement too.

The one giving the sound is also being sounded.

That is what it feels like to work from Source. I am not drawing from a private reserve. I am participating in something that is moving through me. What I offer is also what fills me.

I can sing for hours and come away with more than I began with.

When I sing, I adore what is coming through me, as something bigger than myself.

There is no pride in it. Adoration. And even that adoration does not feel like something I am producing. It feels as though I am allowing myself to fall in love with what is moving through me.

The sound becomes something to celebrate. And the more deeply I celebrate it, the more freely it moves. The love opens the sound, the sound deepens the love, and the two become one movement.

For me, this adoration is one of the deepest intentions we can attune ourselves to. Not because we are trying to make something happen, but because when we meet sound with love, something in us begins to remember its own harmony.

The body listens on a deeper level. Something in us recognises the vibration of life.

The Sufi mystics speak of a love in which the distinction between the lover and the beloved begins to disappear. Rumi returns to this again and again in his poetry. I did not fully understand it, because it was never something to understand. It is something to be felt deeply, over and over again, until you become anchored in this love.

The lover and the beloved are one.

In the moment of sounding, there are not two things. Not a giver and a receiver, not a lover and a thing loved. There is one movement, and I happen to be standing inside it.

And this is the sign.

Where giving and receiving become the same motion, you are touching the quality of your Dharma.

Not because someone or something confirmed it. Nor because it fits a description you read somewhere. But because the resistance falls away, and you are met by the very thing you are offering.

What Dharma asks of you

Less than you think, and more.

Less, because there is nothing to find. The relationship is already in you, and Dharma is what flows from it. You are not missing a piece.

More, because it asks you to actually go there. To become quiet enough, present enough, honest enough that you can feel the centre rather than think about it. And then to keep the instrument tended, day after day, so that what wants to come through has somewhere to move.

The search is inward. The practice is embodied.

You are not standing outside Source, trying to reach it.

You are standing in it. Working in it.

And it is working through you.

This is the gift of being alive. Being human. Being an instrument in a symphony that has been playing since long before us.

And I do not know how it works

People often ask me to explain it. What is it you are singing? Where does the sound come from? What happens in there?

I do not know. And I leave it there.

Before we call it vibration, energy, emotion, trauma, consciousness or spirit, there is simply this sound, this body, this breath.

The experience comes first. The name comes later.

And perhaps this is also why, in Voice Alchemy, I sing without language.

There is no explanation built into the sound. No words telling you what to feel, what it means, or what is supposed to happen.

There is simply the sound, and the experience of it.

You are free to meet it before you name it. To feel before you interpret. To listen before you decide what it is.

For me, this is part of the mystery of the voice: it can reach places that words cannot. It can be experienced before it is understood.

I have described what I can in this piece, and all of it is true as far as it goes. But at the centre of the work there is something I have never been able to account for, and I have stopped trying.

What I have noticed is that the not knowing does not weaken it.

It is stronger for being unexplained. I realised that the moment I try to master it, to turn it into a method I understand and can reproduce, something goes out of it. When I surrender to the mystery instead, more comes through than I could ever have arranged.

So this is part of the practice too.

Not understanding. Not needing to know.

Staying available to something that does not require my comprehension in order to move.

Why I am writing this at all

I'm not writing this to explain my work. I'm writing because I have watched too many people spend years searching for something that was never lost.

That searching costs a great deal. Not only time, though it takes years. It can also cost people the trust that they carry anything worth giving. They keep looking outside for a permission that may already be theirs, and while they look, the gift stays folded.

I do not want anyone to spend their life that way.

And I do not think this is a private matter either. The world needs what people are holding back. Every gift that stays folded is a tone missing from the symphony, and we are living in a time that cannot afford the silence.

So this is a call as much as a description. Not to find your Dharma. To stop looking outward, go inward, and let what is already there come through.

We remember faster together than alone.

A line comes through me often, and I will leave it here.

Life is a gift. And when we truly live it, we become part of the gift we have been given.

Of course, people might say: But how can life be a gift when we look at war, suffering, violence, and everything else happening in the world?

I don’t mean that everything that happens is good. The gift is not that life is always easy, or that suffering should be accepted without resistance.

The gift is that we have been given this life.
This breath.
This body.
This consciousness.
The capacity to love,
to experience,
and to meet what is here.

Even in the midst of what is difficult, we can still embrace the gift by feeling the gift we have been given: to live this life, to experience this life, to be here for it. And it is our free will whether we choose to participate fully in it or not.

And yet, so much of what we see in the world stems from our resistance to surrendering to love. We separate ourselves from one another, from nature, from the sacredness of life, and from the deeper movement that seeks to live through us.

Surrendering to love does not mean that nothing difficult will happen. It means becoming available to life as it is, and allowing love to be the way we meet it.

By life I do not mean only our own. I mean all that is alive. The trees, the water, the animals, the people we will never meet. All of it fully living.

To live your Dharma is to hand the gift on by the way you are here.

Maurice Spees