Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You are listening to yaya nay nay nay. My name is Rotna rumping and for the next 50 minutes you will hear a conversation that I've recorded with composer, mystic and laughter practitioner Laraji and choreographer and performer Raoni Muso Saleh. Laraji and Raoni each have their own performance practice. Lar Aji is known for his ambient music concerts, playing piano, mabira and sitter. His musical career spans multiple decades by now and includes over 50 releases.
His music has kept me company during moments of highs and lows. It was after a concert some years ago in Amsterdam that we briefly met and he mentioned that we both have the Ra in our names, which means son Ra'oni, who also has the Ra in his name, studied at the School for new dance development in Amsterdam. His artistic practice of recent years has been mainly invested in the moan and sonic expressions of grief and mourning.
Larangi is not only active as a musician, but also is the creator and facilitator of laughter meditation workshops, sharing the seriously fun practice of heavy laughter as a transformative and ultimately healing tool for everyone.
Rauni shares his moaning practice also with others during the so called morning socialities gatherings, where people listen to each other's wailing voices in a mode of call and response.
Although the sound of laughter and the sound of grief seem to come from two very different sides of the emotional spectrum, I believe the practices of Laraji and Raoni have more in common than we would think at first sight.
Both work with non verbal vocal expression, empathic listening, and body movement, allowing others to find and release their voice.
So in June we came together, that is, online, Laraji tuning in from Harlem, New York, Rauni from Amsterdam while I was in Berlin. Our video call lasted for almost 2 hours and the sound of the recording is sometimes a bit distorted, but I do hope you get a sense of the lively intergenerational exchange that happened.
If you prefer to read the conversation instead, we also provide a transcript on our website to listen into and join the practices we discuss yourself. I suggest to listen back to the other two episodes in this series. The 17 minutes guided laughter release by Laraji and Roni's poetic contemplation gathering in a polyphonic moan safeguards solidarity.
Both audio pieces are available on our website, yayanne.com, where you can listen back anytime.
For now, let's get into the conversation before going deeper into laughter and into moaning. I first wanted to get into stillness and I asked Laraji about his relation with stillness. When and where did he find it?
[00:03:26] Speaker B: I guess thank you for the question.
What comes to mind is, at the age of seven, right after our family sustained a house fire in New Jersey and two brothers, two younger brothers and myself, we were moved around to temporary housing, Salvation army relatives. And then family decided to drive us to stay in Virginia and the rural outbacks of Virginia with my grandfolks. They didn't tell us that was the plan. They drove us there. I thought we were just visiting our grandfolks. The next day we woke up and my parents were gone.
We were left with the grandfolks. So that was their plan. And the country was like deep dish quiet in the backwards, especially in the morning when dew would be over the fields.
But that was the deepest quiet I had heard, because I been exposed to urban and town life up until then.
I learned how to walk in the country by myself, up the country roads and just the sound of your feet crackling against the ground, or the sound of a car coming down the road a mile away, or you'd hear the cows moaning out in the field. That was silence and stillness, the stillness of the countryside. And the second big one I can remember was in 1974, experimenting with meditation, marijuana, mind science, that after I had learned how to sit still for almost for 5 hours, I would go into deep stillness. And I had attracted a sound hearing experience, a cosmic orchestra, one morning.
And the sound of this orchestra is like the whole cosmos in a reunion, in the eternal present moment.
And I could feel the stillness of my world mind just totally awed by this sound immersion. And I didn't have a language to describe it properly to myself, but I was totally immersed.
I am at an awakened sense of what eternity is and how everything in the universe is going on right now. And out of that experience grew my direction from the music that I'm doing now. And I gradually learned from that experience how to bring more stillness into my music, even to the point of leaving these roaring quiet pauses in my performances. And that has been really accepted by large bodies of people who amazed that they could be in a room with so many other people and let silence exist that way for maybe a minute, sometimes at the end of a concert, leaving five minutes of pause.
So silence has become entered into my performance art, how to leave silence. And I noticed just how awkward at times it feels to initiate a silence because you just want to fill it up with something right away. But I'm pressed to learn that gathering with people that I'm playing for, accept it and breathe it and feel it. The breath of fresh air, silence as a breath of fresh air.
[00:06:49] Speaker C: Yeah, I feel that sometimes your music, while I'm listening to the music, also brings me stillness, or is an introduction to it almost, or taking me there.
[00:07:03] Speaker B: Now that you said that, that gives me the response. The intention with my music is to actually not play for human beings, but play for space.
Have an image of infinite space and rap pouring with infinite space. So the listener would probably be drawn into that conversation and a dialogue and themselves take up the position of being the space I am speaking to.
[00:07:35] Speaker D: Yeah, I can relate to that. I think it's opening up another space or creating.
[00:07:42] Speaker B: Yes, thank you for that.
[00:07:45] Speaker C: And, Roni, when I mentioned inner stillness, what does it mean for you? It's something you go to. Can you find it? Do you like to find it?
[00:07:54] Speaker E: The first thing that comes to mind is that my moon is in Gemini, which means that I have a very airy sense of emotions, and there's a lot of thoughts woven into feeling. So it actually takes me a long time to find stillness and quiet in my body and in my sense of perception.
I really love what you say about Laraji, what you say about playing for space or playing for infinite space.
I've started for a while ago this meditation practice where I just sit and it's not so much to clear the mind. It's not intended to clear the mind or quiet the mind, but it is more a listening practice where I imagine that because the mind has this airy quality, that it just moves with the sound of everything around us. So a way for me to find that quietude or for that stillness is actually for me, it's about listening to the compositions that are already naturally in space around us and are made by everything around us, all forces. And when we listen, when we learn to listen to all of these compositions in the most broadest sense and at the same time also go minute towards a detail, I feel like. Then I experience quietude because I'm not busy with myself or a sense of self or a sense of ego, or what I think about the sounds, or if I'm listening even. Well, it's just this sense of broadness, listening to the totality of all sonic presence around me. And then at the same time trying to see if I can follow that little bird. This, I feel like, can give me a big sense of stillness or quiet to it. I'm not busy with task that I put on to myself, but I'm trying to be present with this sonic experience of life.
And, yeah, I love what you say about this thing for infinite space. I think for me, that is that listening to that infinite space is required.
[00:10:29] Speaker B: Sonic experience of life.
[00:10:31] Speaker F: Thank you.
[00:10:37] Speaker C: I think you already both mentioned meditation or meditating or being in a meditative state. I wouldn't think of laughter immediately. When I think of laughter, I think it's quite a big sound, big emotion. And when I think of meditation, I think of this kind of stillness. So I'm curious how the laughter arrived for you or how you made this connection with the meditative state and laughter.
[00:11:08] Speaker B: I felt like you when I first heard the term laughter meditation because I'd done comedy and writing comedy for many years. And I also practiced meditation, but I didn't know the two words belonged together until someone introduced me to Osho Rajnish. Osho, his disciples put together a book of his writings called the Orange Book of Meditations. And I was presented that book somewhere in the early eighty s. And on one of the page of the Book of Meditations was the suggestion for laughter meditation.
And the subject was supposed to lie in bed in the morning before getting out of bed with eyes closed, do some stretches and just laugh for 15 minutes and do this for seven days. And I thought, how unusual. Why did I never thought of lying down and laughing for seven days? I tried it and I was very impressed with how it beautiful day to jump start today. It allowed me to notice opportunities for laughter during the day. It opened up my speaking voice, and I began sharing it as small meditation in the context of my music healing workshops at that time. And the laughter had a life of its own, and it took off and became a second workshop all by itself.
And there was laughter meditation. And then I began making the connection between laughter, good, heavy laughter, 15 minutes a day. Laughing the entire body internally can bring the practitioner to a place that's equal to Shavasana in yoga, where the body is released, the muscles are released, the breath is released, the mind is released from nonessential thought flow. And we're in the best place to experience spontaneous meditation, a meditation that's waiting there for us.
That's how I learned how to connect laughter to meditation. Laughing to release the body, the mind, the system, from externalizing, over externalizing and being present in the meditation space.
Osho once said that you can't laugh and think at the same time. So based on his thought, his thinking, we can't really think or process full blown thought while laughing. I'm not sure that's true.
Sounds good, but it may contribute to that final stillness at the end where you can be in meditation.
[00:14:03] Speaker C: Yeah, I think you probably do know by now, because you have been laughing a lot. So I think probably do know things at the same time.
And.
But when you give these, because I think you call them also, like left play shops. Right. Or laughter workshops. Yes, play shops.
Can you. Yeah. For us who have not been there, explain a bit like how you go about it after all those years.
[00:14:34] Speaker B: At the beginning, we were calling it laughter workshops, but discovered that in guiding groups of people into laughter, if they come to a laughter workshop for the first time, there's inhibition about exposing yourself during the laughing process because you do expose your vulnerability.
So I learned that it was my role at the beginning of the workshop to get people relaxed, free, open and trusting. And the way to do that was to get them into the play zone so that we played with laughter. And during the play zone, we invite our inner child to join us and the laughter so that at the beginning of the workshop, we're playing. Playing with our toes, our body. We're getting into reciting this. One statement that we opened a workshop with is called play is the spontaneous exploration of sensation.
I start experimenting with six different laughter sizes, where we're laughing through the head, through the throat, through the thymus and the chest, the heart, the abdominal organs and the lungs. And by that time, we're into a playful mode and we play with the exercises instead of working with them.
[00:15:57] Speaker D: Yeah, I really like this idea of the plays out. I think aroni can maybe also relate.
And I think you also both work with Wolfmold different ways. But I will go a bit into your practice raw because you studied choreography work, also as a performer, as a dancer on choreographies.
And still a lot of the work that you did in recent years is related to sound health of journey. Your studies, I think specifically the sound of grief and the sound of the moan.
Can you share with us when that sound, the moan arrived for you or when you became aware, like, wait, I have to be more attentive to that sound or work with that sound.
[00:16:58] Speaker E: I went through a big transition in my life.
I went through many transitions, like we all do. But one of the other big transition during my studies was related to gender stuff, as I was kind of grieving this old self, and another self was arriving through both taking on hormones, but also playing with all kinds of different gestures of gesturing myself into the world, both sonically because my voice was changing, but also physically in terms of the way I was dancing through the world was now becoming a different kind of dance. And in that transitioning, this figure came to me called lashes, and now through lashes is a reference to my old name, which meant eyelashes. So this figure came, and I knew that she had to be wearing long pieces of hair down her cheeks, representing some kind of hairy waterfall of crying.
And somehow something about this figure said she needs to moan. And specifically, first it was this nagging moan, in a way, also, because that transition was so much like, I didn't know what to do with this old self. There was so much nagging in there. I don't know what to do. There was a lot of complaints in there other than not knowing and this nagging. As I kept on nagging, moaning, like all of this, I started hearing the grief that was present in it, the crying that is present, the waning that is present in the sound. And so I went deeper into the sound of grief that is in the moan.
And, yeah, I spent a lot of time moaning in the studio listening to this sound. I was doing a lot of research then also on grief. And one of my biggest teachers, his name is Martin Prakto. You might know of him. Laraji. I don't know. He's Martin Prakto. His name he used to be for 35 years or 25 years, he used to be shaman for the Tuzutuku people in Venezuela, and until there were bombings and he needed to flee there. But he basically speaks about grief and praise being two arms of the same body, which means that when you grieve, you're actually praising the thing that was lost.
And when you are praising something for real, when you say like, oh, I love you, my friend, I'm so happy that you're here. When you're actually praising someone, you're immediately faced with the mortality of all things. So you're actually grieving.
So in that way, it started to open up this whole world to me that, wow, grieving is not just, like, sadness. It's really about, like, when you're grieving, truly, you are praising life, you are praising the fact that you are here, being able to be present in life. So that, for me, opened the moan as a spectrum, as a sonic spectrum to all these other possibilities of joy entering into the moan. So suddenly the sensual moan started appearing into the moan, the laughter as a moaning sound started appearing.
There is a lot of singing, wailing that, for me, really attributes to or serves to praise.
Yeah. Maybe something else important to mention also, because it's obviously a conversation between the three of us, but also for a larger maybe audience that the culture that I'm from is Shia culture, which is so in Islam you have two main movements. So you have the sunit and the sheet. And I grew up as a sheet, which I don't practice anymore, that religion. But in my culture, you have this month of mourning. We call it the month of Maharam, which is a month where we basically commemorate historic battle where many, many people got killed because they were resisting against oppression of their belief of their religion. And in that month we are mourning. So it's a whole month of grief. And I remember really vividly because now I've been here in the Netherlands for 23 years, but before I lived in Pakistan, and in Pakistan you had these huge communities. You had a square full of maybe 1000 or 2000 people. And everybody is chest beating. During this month, there's a particular event where people gather and wear black and green and they beat on their chest while they do these big kind of wailing cries and reciting certain quranic verses. You have to imagine of like 2000 people beating on their chest, all these bodies becoming drums and wailing. That had such a huge impact on me that as I was thinking about choreography and thinking about choreography being also this powerful tool to gather people in space and organize bodies in space, I had this huge desire to maybe not replicate such a scenario because it's impossible, but attempt to a new form that is also maybe taking into consideration all the diasporic communities in the Netherlands that have all their own different cultures. And yeah, I felt like it was really a huge responsibility. I felt it also as a beautiful responsibility that since I was moaning and it was releasing and transforming so much inside of me and around me that I felt like it's my responsibility to transfer this knowledge to people around me.
[00:24:00] Speaker D: So you remember the first time you organized these mornings speciality coming together in a circle, right?
[00:24:07] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:24:08] Speaker D: Once of this morning sound. Was it only with a few people?
[00:24:14] Speaker E: This was actually right after the George Floyd killing and there was a huge uprising here in the Netherlands as well.
And it was also during the pandemic. So I had been already moaning for a while and I had sometimes also asked people to come join me in the studio. And then I did this big circle which was just focused on bringing maybe more people of color, black and people of color just together.
The morning sociality is also a way of socializing together. So that's why I call it also sociality. We would come, everybody would bring some food.
We would start together with an altar around a question that I had asked. People would bring objects or drawings or photos. We make an altar in the circle in the middle of the circle. And then I would propose these physical exercises and these sound exercises. And then we actually go into an hour of call and respond, a moaning call and respond. So one person calls, and then the whole group listens to that moaning call, that wailing call, and listens to the stories and the images and all the sonic, but also the psychic material and data that is in that call. And then the whole group responds from a space of affectedness to that call. And then we wait again till someone else finds the courage to do a call. And then the whole group starts to respond in a whale as well.
Yeah, that was such a.
It was a beautifully immense experience where I learned how much this also was needed and how it also really opened up people's bodies specifically for those maybe who have experienced that their voices were so suppressed for such a long time, for many different reasons. And then they started wailing. And to first just be able to be present with your own moaning sound, it's like there's so much shame and all these complex emotions that arise from the mole.
And to be able to be generous towards yourself and listen to the moaning sounds that you make, and to be able to hold a generous space and listen to the other people's wailing sounds, to see that that is possible, to see that it's really a methodology that can also be taught, was really a beautiful experience. Young.
[00:27:19] Speaker B: Look. During the laughter work, we invite the participants across the line and discover how close they are to crying and tears. And didn't play with that line.
[00:27:35] Speaker E: Exactly.
[00:27:39] Speaker B: I'm experimenting with to see how much that exercise would contribute to our. When we are engraved, to remember just how close we are to celebration.
[00:27:49] Speaker E: Exactly.
[00:27:51] Speaker B: And so the sounds. I even do that when I'm doing crying, doing laughter workshop. I haven't had much reason to cry except self imposed crying.
And I think that has to do with the depth of my inner meditation, just to know the background of an eternal balance. Fields is here while the world is unfolding. So how not to get overly caught up in the world is what my meditation practices taught me. So crying, I have to impose it.
The closest I've come to feeling deep physical is when I visited Bosnia.
And we were driving from the sound, from the codes, into Bosnia at night, and the moon was shining. And as we were getting closer to Bosnia, I could see the silhouettes of houses that were destroyed.
And I started getting the gravity of what had taken place there.
And finally getting to our hotel about 02:00 in the morning and going to bed and then waking up right away because I thought I heard somebody crying, and I thought, somebody's outside, still resonating from the war, but it actually was coming from a tower, a muslim tower. Morning call to prayer, which to me sounded like wailing, provided justified by the situation. But it's probably a sound of calling, heartful calling to come and surrender to peace of Allah.
[00:29:36] Speaker E: Yeah.
What you're saying, how much celebration can be in grief, or how celebratory grieving can be, or how humorous grief can be. I feel like that to me, when I work with the moaning spectrum, I work with, one of the sounds that we work with is also indeed the crying laughter being really close to each other. So we always start with a moan that goes into a laughter, that then goes into a crying that comes again back into a moan.
And I call it the laughter crying madness, also, because there's something about that not knowing if it's tipping into sadness or crying and then tipping back into laughing. I feel like it creates this sound of madness, which I think is a beautiful sound that is unpredictable, that can move you into not knowing what your experience exactly is, but all of the complexities of both joy and deep grief, which is not sadness, which is not depression. It's just grief. The heart is breaking, and it's such a beautiful experience at the same time. I feel like that madness is really present in that crying laughter dance.
[00:31:10] Speaker B: Do you acknowledge the difference between loaning and groaning?
[00:31:18] Speaker E: I use groaning more with, like, when I do the sighing. So when I teach the moaning spectrum, I have categorized it into sighing, whimpering, which is more like this kind of sound, the whimper, and then the nagging, which is more like, yeah, there is complaints more in the nagging.
Yeah. For me, this is still all moaning. I mean, because moaning has such a wide spectrum for me.
Then we do this singing, wailing, which is more of finding your own rhythm, which for me is more like.
[00:32:11] Speaker B: Naya nay.
[00:32:24] Speaker E: And when I do this type of singing, waiting, I try to encourage people to find their own rhythm in it.
I really think that there is something about also listening to the grief or to the wailing in others, people's voices that. That also gives this sense of, I'm allowed to feel all this grief, or I'm also allowed to be in this space that is really uncomfortable, because everyone around me is also in that space of deep uncomfortability but trying to transform it.
[00:33:07] Speaker B: Do you define there is grief, different amounts of quantities of grief in different groups of people, people of color, people not of color, people of gender, liberation.
[00:33:24] Speaker E: I would say, not so much in quantity of grief, but I think it's more about, like, there's different approaches and there's different relationships. Grief. I've had sessions with all white participation. There is something about western culture, something about the inaccessibility of a space, of a home. And so there, it requires a very different kind of facilitation to do when people really don't even have also not heard even the sounds of crying around them, that it's really absent. The sound of grief is really absent.
[00:34:07] Speaker B: I'm glad to hear that you're using many synonyms for wailing and groaning and moaning. But I found out there's synonyms for laughter. That in the workshop, the play shop, when people have difficulty dealing with laughter because they have response columns to the word laughter, I suggest use other words like euphoria, celebration, ecstasy, gratitude. You can just be in gratitude while going through this. You may not have to call it laughter. You're just the joy of receiving, the joy of recognizing your blessings. So you use alternative words, grief and wailing. Wailing is not the term that I use that much. I think of the wailing wall in Jerusalem, but the idea of wailing comes up probably a mother somewhere who lost her son in the war, or connect to the imagined reality of that.
So it's healing to me in the sense that it reconnects me to the fuller spectrum, the sonic spectrum of the human experience.
[00:35:24] Speaker E: Right? Yeah. I have a question, actually. I was wondering, with your long experience to this, also a bit tapping into the crying, but this laughter sounds like, for me, I really notice a sense of madness in there. In laughter. When I say madness, I do not mean to pathologize the word madness. I think madness has a lot of play in it. So that's how I use this word. Not as a pathology, not as a sickness, but really rather as a space of being, or a state of being that is really unpredictable. And in that place of unpredictability, houses a lot of play.
So that's how I use the word madness. And, yeah, I'm just curious what your experiences are in terms of laughter and madness, or going into fits of laughing that maybe open up, maybe in your sense of being, a sense of unpredictability, or if you've experienced that.
[00:36:31] Speaker B: Well, the word madness is very astute, that the laughter play shop is primarily about laughing inwardly. So you're learning to vibrate your pituitary, your brain, with your laughter thyroid, boosting your immune system, softening your heart from trauma and massaging your internal organs and releasing stagnant or stale air. So that my ideal result of this, if someone does it, that they'll transform quality and character and personality of their laughter. So that if they're doing these exercises in public, the last thing you're going to look like is mad, where you're going to look more like somebody who's circulating, Prana, massaging and loving their body with their laughter, who are enjoy and in celebration.
Now there is the lunatic and the maniacal form of laughter that can happen if someone hasn't given an energation to the laughter.
Your description of Madness is pretty cool, that to be laughing with losing constraints, you don't have a sense of control. To lose control can look pretty threatening in public if you're just sitting in a hairport terminal and bust out with laughter. But if you're doing the playful meditation laughter, it may look like you're.
You shouldn't look too threatening.
Yeah, it'd be an infectious laughter, too, that draws someone into feeling the inner therapeutic value of their own laughter.
[00:38:18] Speaker D: Because in your practice, Laraji, you sometimes, I think, I also saw the video where you were explaining the different laughters to someone else. And then you think at some point about laughter to the heart, and what laughter does the heart need? And then the laughter goes very soft, sourly, right?
[00:38:41] Speaker B: Yes, the soothing. I usually ask participants, how do you like your heart being treated? And one will have their own answer. Playful, peaceful, lovingly, tenderly. I'll suggest, well, put that intention on the tone of your voice. Know that your voice vibrates your chest and feel that tone vibrating your chest. Create a tone that embodies that intention, a peaceful tone. Feel your voice massaging your heart, and let that same tone create a laughter, a heart specific laughter, with that same intention.
[00:39:26] Speaker E: Oh.
[00:39:29] Speaker B: All the time the hand is over the heart. So that you're validating that you're feeling the physical presence of your voice, treating your heart with a tone that you like your heart being treated.
So that's the internal work with the voice and laughter on the heart.
[00:39:53] Speaker F: I admit that I've sustained a lot of bumps and hiccups in my life. To the heart, you call them whether jolts, traumas, disappointments, and to likely give attention to the heart.
Yes. Everything's okay now.
I'm here. I know you're here, too.
Speaking to the body part through our laughter.
It was during my time in Virginia, living with my grandfolks, that I learned how to access the higher register of my voice during laughter. Because of my grandfather, he would laugh in the higher registers of his voice, and it would just send it out over the countryside.
And there's, I guess, that gave me permission to use a full range of my voice in laughter.
And at times, I'm wondering if I'm allowing, let's say, the feminine aspect of myself to be included in this experience of laughter release to access the full range of my lower voice and the higher voice.
[00:41:20] Speaker D: I like the word permission that you mentioned, hearing the laughter of your grandfather, and then you thought, permission. I can also go. And I think you both, in the work you do, do something that gives others permission to also sound or release.
[00:41:43] Speaker E: Yeah. And I also really love in this story that now your grandfather, as a sonic, as one of the sonic expressions of your grandfather, is alive within you, or, like, that, feel like this is the beauty of call and response is that with each call in this high register of laughter, is also a response or an honoring of this sound that came before you. Right.
Yeah. I think it's really beautiful how our voices and our sounds are not just us as singular beings. They are containing so much registers, literally like polyphonic registers, that are not just about us, but also about who came before and who taught what.
I find incredibly beautiful how much storytelling also is in these sounds. Yeah.
[00:42:49] Speaker F: Polysonic register.
I'm getting some groovy words from you.
[00:42:58] Speaker E: Oh, my.
[00:43:04] Speaker F: Do you find yourself into spontaneous crying or moaning or grieving as a result of your.
[00:43:11] Speaker E: Absolutely. This resonated so strongly with me when I heard you speak in that YouTube video about how you can, because of the laughter that you have now, so much space to be present with other people's laughter when you encounter it in your daily life. I was like, this is exactly the same experience that I feel with the moaning, that sometimes when I'm just listening to the howling of the wind, I feel like my heart is like, crying just because I'm listening to the howling of the wind. And I can imagine that I'm hearing something in the howling of the wind, and then I notice that my tears are flowing down my cheeks. Or when people, sometimes they groan a little bit and I lean in a little bit closer, I notice that I'm much more perceptive to the pain that people also carry, which makes it really a very sympathetic way of being in relation with each other. Yeah.
[00:44:27] Speaker B: At some point, do you feel that you'll get done with wailing and boning, that you will have cleansed the entire.
[00:44:35] Speaker E: Yeah, I think at some point, I hope to move on to somewhere else, but I hope that someone else picks up the stick and is like, I'm going to do some new things with this moaning, like that someone else gets really inspired and other practices start with that. And that they feel really the urgency. Okay. This whole thing is opening up this for me. I need to give this a life. And then it means that I can slowly retrieve into something else. But until then, it's a big pleasure and a big pleasurable responsibility to carry this practice with me and share it with people.
[00:45:22] Speaker B: I'm imagining that your moaning, groaning, wailing is contributing to your bright laughter and your bright smile.
[00:45:34] Speaker E: It does. There's such a humor also with all of these, when you're like this, like theatrical.
There's a lot of humor in it as well. When we allow ourselves to have that inner child.
[00:45:51] Speaker B: I just want, and I really.
[00:45:57] Speaker E: There's a lot of ridiculousness in there that is really delicious to be in.
[00:46:05] Speaker B: The difference between tragedy and comedy is timing.
[00:46:09] Speaker E: Timing, work timing.
[00:46:11] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:46:13] Speaker D: I'm thinking about something I wrote down for today, but I didn't ask a question about it yet. But it's a term I saw somewhere in an older interview with Laraji, speaking about impersonal love.
[00:46:26] Speaker B: Are you saying impersonal love?
[00:46:30] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:46:32] Speaker B: Yes. Meaning loving without being in a state of lovingness, without respect to any one person, receiving more of it than another person, just moving, being out in public, or to carry this sense of embracing. To me, love is oneness. And the perception I have through meditation is that we are all. There's a oneness that they say is bigger than the sum of the parts.
And that when I can mindfully focus inside of this oneness and then move about the world that I'm in this state of impersonal lovingness, that I don't have to see somebody in China, I don't have to see somebody in Australia. That the love is just automatic. It's not any particular individual just radiating. That probably happens when we do our workshops and our concerts. That just impersonal love on the sidewalks of New York, performing.
That whether seeming houseless person or vagrant person, is lying down, enjoying the music. The same as a business exec who just stopped to listen to the music. That I don't differentiate one listener from another. It's all being absorbed by space.
So the impersonal I'm feeling, it's healthier for me. And impersonal love. Personal love is a responsibility, and we all know personal love.
There's something yummy about it, but then there's anxiety. It could lose or become attached to the welfare of that person and that they're not taking care of themselves, we start to suffer. So an impersonal love is to just radiate. For me to radiate this oneness, which I contact through meditation, contemplation and mindful being.
Could it replace personal love?
I think it could. If I get so good at it that everybody gets the whole current of love all the time, then no one is special. But everyone is special.
[00:49:19] Speaker F: Thanks for tying this together. Moaning, boning, laughing, singing?
[00:49:28] Speaker E: Yeah, very.
I'm. I'm incredibly inspired. I have a pages full of things to think about.
[00:49:39] Speaker F: There's something you mentioned that is akin to what I'm experimenting with. At a certain point of meditation. I'm realizing that I have a body, but I'm not the body. I am infinite space. And that when I attempt to laugh the body from that place, I'm laughing. Everything in the universe, and the idea of sending laughter waves through everything. Alpha Centauri, the constellations, is quite an interesting experiment. And I'm wondering if moaning and groaning or if moaning and groaning belongs to the rest of the universe. Maybe it's just an earth thing.
[00:50:22] Speaker E: It could be sending laughter out into the universe. I love it.
[00:50:29] Speaker F: Yeah, that would be in personal moaning. Or that including everything in the now, so impersonally, nobody gets a front row seat, nobody gets an orchestra seat. Everybody gets the same seat.
[00:50:46] Speaker E: Right.
[00:50:48] Speaker B: All right.
[00:50:49] Speaker F: Beaming wonders goodbye for now. But hello forever.
[00:50:59] Speaker E: Hello.
[00:51:01] Speaker C: Yeah, thank you. Hello forever, then.
[00:51:04] Speaker F: Yes.
[00:51:06] Speaker E: Thank you so much. Both of you.
[00:51:09] Speaker F: Happy.
[00:51:10] Speaker E: Ciao. Have a great day. Ciao.
[00:51:23] Speaker C: Dun dun.
