The Dandelion Trust

Care, Creativity & Conservation

THE LOVING HARMONY PROJECT

Polyphonic harmonies – vibrational healing in the Republic of Georgia

Madge Bray describes the extraordinary, powerful group singing that is central to the culture of Georgian people and how they have long used it to create human harmony and resolve trauma. The Loving Harmony Project will be useing such singing to help the thousands of children in orphanages there shortly due to be closed.

‘Part of the intangible heritage of humanity’ - UNESCO

In the Republic of Georgia it is said that, in the beginning, God asked the peoples of the world to choose where they wished to settle. He set a deadline and apportioned the land on that day. Unfortunately, the Georgians failed to appear, rendering themselves effectively homeless. On his return, God discovered them at a ‘Supra’, sat around the banqueting table, drinking toasts and feasting. He expressed his displeasure. The Tamada or toastmaster rose to address Him. In all humility, he was without regret. He said that the assembled company had passed its time well, honouring God and singing His praises with reverence, offering elaborate toasts and feasting on food prepared with love. At this, the Georgians began to sing in glorious harmonies. The music entered God’s heart. He was so moved by their offerings that He decided to honour them with the tiny portion of land He was saving for Himself. And so it was that the Georgians came to live in Paradise.

A guest from God
We are in Artana, in the Kakheti region of Eastern Georgia, in the foothills of the Caucasus. This is one of the few remaining, singing villages in this region where traditional, polyphonic harmonies are still central to the existence of its people as a way of life. Artana has about 600 families, although the villages are quickly depleting now. There are 34 churches - some dating back to the 5th century.

Around the Supra (sacred feast) table the women are singing Nanas, Iavnanas (lullabies), and Batonebi songs. I am a ‘stumari’, or guest, and as such, as the tradition goes, a gift from God. The table is laden with ‘tsvaadi’, skewered pork from Zemiko’s own pigs - fed on acorns; Georgian bread, cooked in Elika’s bread oven; Katchapuri, bread filled with cheese, and chicken cooked in walnut sauce. There is strawberry juice, from the kitchen garden, and copious amounts of wine or ‘gvino’. Zemiko’s marani, or wine cellar, is next door. It holds two tons of grapes. He tends his vineyard and presses his wine with great care. Even if he could afford it, he would not use chemicals on his land.

The vine has special significance here; in the 4th century St Nino of Cappadocia, after receiving a vision of the Virgin Mary, arrived in Georgia where she was welcomed as a guest. With her she carried a cross made out of vine leaves stitched together with her own hair. She also brought Christianity. Since this time, it is said, guests have enjoyed special status, not least as potential teachers. The tendrils of the vine form the basis of the written script of the Georgian language, one of the few original alphabets. Shen Xhar Venaxhi –‘You are a vineyard’, written in the 12th century by the Georgian King Demeter, is a hymn to the Blessed Virgin.

Ghja, the Tamada (toast-master) for the evening, elected by Zemico as ‘Maspindzeli’ or host, presides.

We begin with toasts to God, the angels and St George, Georgia’s patron saint. As the night wears on elaborate toasts follow, to the ancestors, to family (including mine), to peace, to sacred places where we worship, to courage, to Nature, to women… Irina translates.

After each toast a wine-glass is emptied. No negativity or denigration is allowed at a Supra. Georgians do not, it seems, lift a wine-glass, without a reverential toast. Then a song, to seal the toast: sometimes table songs, Mravaljamier – ‘Long life’, Maspindzelsa Mkiaroulsa, - ‘blessings to the host’ - whatever connects to the content of the toast.

Tonight we sing mainly women’s songs. Here in Kakheti, the women sing Nanas, songs of prayer and veneration, Iavnanas (lullabies) and Batonebi songs. The Batonebi are discarnate spirits in need of love, who inhabit a body and give it disease in the form infections such as chicken pox. Traditionally, under the guidance of a village wise woman, the women would gather round the sick person, welcome the Batonebi as honoured guests, make offerings of violets and roses and sweet things, and sing Batonebi songs. Process complete and sated with love, the Batonebi would then go on their way.

As the Supra progresses, Luba, a village singer, stands to propose a toast. Dressed in black, with a pearl brooch at her throat, hair swept back in a bun, she begins.

‘To Love. Life and Love run after each other, without love there is no sun in the sky. No wind in the air. No beauty without love and no immortality without love. We toast to our love.’

Turning to address me, she continues. ‘You come to us from far away, doing such big, hard work. We do our best to help you. We do what we do with great love!’ She raises her glass. ‘To our job together and to the music! Gaumarjos! (victory)’

I am reminded, in the moment, of a beautiful quote by Frederick Buechner: ‘Our calling is where our deepest gladness and the world’s hunger meet’. In this shared connection, through Luba’s eyes, I am perhaps recognizing something in myself.

Songs in the breast milk
I was born in Argyll in the Highlands of Scotland. Song has lived in me for as long as I can remember. My mother sang to me every day. Writing my journal, much later, I wrote, ‘On the breast, suckling, there was drinking it in, like a soft, expectant sponge, in surrender to osmosis, to its vibration within your body.’

‘The songs would cascade from her. Where did it come from, this beautiful legacy, our oral tradition? Was it from her heart? Or her lips? Was it from her breast, or the pit of her gut? Were you drinking it or sensing it or hearing it – or was it all just you and everything that is, with nothing to do except be a baby?’ Drinking in the music - songs like The Bonnie Earl O Moray and his tragic queen. Dream Angus - maker of dreams - and the Flooers o’ the Forest.

Working with abused children
As a pre-school child, a traumatic incident outside my protective, family bubble caused a ripple that was to change the course of my life and propel it into a career working professionally with the wounded psyche in the field of child abuse. In 1989 I co-founded an organization to offer therapeutic help to abused children (Sexual Abuse Child Consultancy Service; www.saccs.co.uk). It pioneered creative approaches to enabling young children to find a voice, thereby mobilizing their own healing potential, through non-directive play, toys and stories.

This work was to take me teaching and lecturing around the world and eventually to the Kaluga region of Russia, where I was able to help develop Kitezh, an eco-village of families coming together to adopt children from the Russian orphanage system. I felt an enormous resonance with the Eastern Europeans, as if I had been here before. In response to a strange, inner knowing, I spent the winter months of the turn of the 21st century in Russia where, in meditation, I envisioned my gifts being used to bridge East and West in some way yet to be revealed.

Neglected and abused children suffer soul wounds, mirroring the wounds of Christ… rejection, abandonment, denial, betrayal, abuse. Increasingly, as I worked with them, it became clear that vibrational healing had an enormous part to play in transcending such early human distress, which has such a potential to devastate young lives.

Recent developments1 in our understanding of how trauma is processed by the human organism point to vibration as a necessary completion in a cycle clearly seen in animal behaviour; this begins with an enormous arousal to stress, hyper-vigilance, fight/flight, freeze, followed by excessive trembling and body vibration. If this vibrational cleansing fails to take place, cumulative, toxic stress results which, for animals in the wild, may eventually result in death. Repeated traumatization, often encountered in the abused child, echoes this progression.

This process was dramatically reinforced for me in Bosnia, when I was asked to sing at the site of a concentration camp with war trauma victims. I eventually found myself surrounded and pulled to the ground by agonized women spontaneously clutching and moaning as I sang. It was as if the vibration of my voice subconsciously held an avenue for completion, and restoration of balance for them.

Introduction to Georgian music
Georgian music came into my life apparently by serendipity in 2004. In fact it was a misprint in a brochure advertising itself as Gregorian Chant. I attended a workshop entitled ‘Gregorian Polyphonic Sound and the Spiritual Voice’. For this I am enormously indebted to Frank Kane, who was teaching the music and thus instrumental in my exploration which was to lead to even more life-changing events.

Georgian music is sung by bringing vibration to the surface of the skin, thus creating a strong, vibrational field. Most commonly, the initial call is made by the middle voice, subsequently joined by a single, top voice and as many bottom voices as are present, creating a strong, earth resonance. The three voices are understood to represent the Trinity. The chord structures are strange to the Western ear, containing enormous, almost agonizing, dissonance, which then resolves.

Journeying behind the songs, for me, became a dance of exploration to the edges of giving and receiving, of expansion and contraction, of penetration and withdrawal, of separation and oneness. The song became a container for human emotion. And there was something else - an opening for Spirit.

Much later, I discovered, the great Georgian poet and writer, Ilya Chavchavadze, shared some of these sentiments. Upon hearing a concert in the 1880s he wrote:

‘Here in song and chanting, harmonious sound supports poetry and vice versa, so that a human being might fully and completely express the motion of his soul and the beating of his heart. More often than not, voice and word are separately incapable of evoking from the depths of the human heart the large and small pearls with which it is filled when grief and sorrow strike the divine chords of man’s spirituality. In this respect, song is the same tear which appears when the heart is wrung by sorrow and also when it is visited by great joy.’

For the next two years, until life took our paths in different directions, Frank Kane and I were to work together with sound and vibration and Georgian music with mixed groups of adults. We also ran workshops for trauma survivors. We found the results remarkable and wrote about them in the Journal of the Tbilisi Music Conservatoire.

Using song to release a child’s pain
I was fascinated to discover whether, within modern-day Georgia itself, the music described by UNESCO as ‘A masterpiece of the intangible heritage of humanity’ was still being used consciously to relieve human suffering. There were, of course, a number of choirs both inside and outside the country whose purpose was to perform. But this was something else. Earlier in his travels with the music, Frank told me he remembered he had heard orphan children singing at an alternative orphanage for street children called Dzegwi.

In October, 2005, we visited Georgia to meet Ghia Razmadze, its visionary founder. Speaking of the early days, Ghia told us that no one at Dzegwi had had experience of working with abused children.

At the outset, the method was simple: they would go walking in the woods with the children and spend the day singing. A simple approach maybe, but very much in keeping with Georgian values; love and appreciation of Nature and human connection expressed through words and song. But underlying that simplicity, according to Ghia, lay all the implicit and non-verbalized intelligence about how to build, maintain and repair human connection, the real essence of the work at Dzegwi and within Georgia as a whole, throughout its history.

So what songs were the children spontaneously singing? The following songs had become emblems at Dzegwi – Dachrilis Simghera: ‘Lale, Ratom ar chamoviare,tremlits bevri vghare….’: ‘Why didn’t you come? I shed many tears! I kept the lamp burning till midnight. S/he left and won’t return… Oh, that terrible night!’

And Khornabi - the song of the Raven; the final verse ends: ‘Black Grief! I’ll give your mother something to cry about! I will not be overwhelmed by you! I will recover in three days from the grief of three years!’
This line of the song, according to Ghia, the children would sing at a deafening pitch!

Sustaining national integrity
It would seem that when God granted the Georgians their paradise, He also posed them with the not inconsiderable challenge of maintaining a national integrity in the face of sustained, external threat. Strategically positioned where East meets West, its history recounts a succession of invasions from larger powers ranging from Hittites, Greeks, Persians, Mongols, Russians, to name but a few, all intent on possession. A tiny country of similar geographical size to Scotland, Georgia is astonishingly abundant: rich in biodiversity with alpine, desert and subtropical zones, steeped in history and rich in flora and fauna.

Previously the jewel in the crown of the Soviet empire and birthplace of Stalin, the modern-day Republic of Georgia now enjoys an apparently precarious political and economic freedom. Following the breakdown of the Soviet empire and civil war in 1989, when Soviet tanks turned on those protesting outside the parliament building, and economically devastated during intervening years under Gorbachev’s colleague, Edouard Shevarenadze, the ‘Rose Revolution’, a bloodless coup in November, 2003, saw the rise to power of Mikheil Saakashvili, a western-educated lawyer intent on combating corruption.

Although the capital city, Tbilisi, now booms with new shopping precincts, skyscraper blocks and westerners working on the Baku oil pipeline, its poorer citizens now slip further into chronic poverty. Civil war continues to rage in secessionist Abkhazia region. Medical treatment costs money unavailable to most. Previously unknown on the streets of Tbilisi, child beggars are appearing in numbers for the first time. As the traffic screeched to an uncertain halt at an intersection I saw a small girl, face weeping with open sores standing on tiptoe to place a trembling, outstretched arm into car windows. Inside the taxi, Irina and I stared stoically ahead. ‘People can’t afford to keep their children, so they take them to the orphanage,’ said Irina, shaking her head.

Orphanages to close
Inside Tbilisi’s rank and fetid orphanages nothing much seems to have changed since Soviet times. There are about 5,000 orphanage children, officially, with a further 2,500 living on the streets. In a shelter I visited for street children outside the city, the children are housed in a compound, while an armed guard at the door keeps away trafficking gangs.
In another, two adults have the overnight care of 70 children. Nutsa tells me she volunteers here to augment the staffing and dispense what human contact she can. By day she is an archeologist working at the museum.

Nobody knows much about these children; there is no mechanism for the collection of such data. Institutionalized, sometimes forever, forgotten children forget who they are. In a country where family is everything, in the face of economic challenges ordinary families are preoccupied using their resourcefulness just to get by. Previously, it seems, the community took care of its own. Now, with the breakdown of kinship networks, mechanisms for children, whose families cannot or do not care for them, are not developed. Discussions in the office of Georgia’s Ombudsman revealed that child protection legislation did not yet exist - an interesting anomaly in a country that holds human connection so close to its enormous heart.

The Saakashvili Government has stated that it intends to close the orphanages by 2008; quite how this will be achieved remains to be seen!

Dilemma after Dzegwi
Back in Artana, with the village elders, Ghia discusses what can be done. He explains his decision, before we met, to leave his life’s work at Dzegwi, after irreconcilable differences with the Orthodox Church infrastructure meant he could no longer be true to himself and do what he believed to be right for the children.

Ghia is surely one of the finest men I have ever met. He exudes warmth and emotional safety. His earthy, street-wise presence commands respect. When his Dzegwi girls were afraid to sleep for fear of molestation, it was Ghia and his burly friend, Dato (a specialist in 9th century, monastic, cave paintings), who slept on the threshold of the girls’ bedrooms. When, in Soviet times, Russian soldiers were ransacking the David Gareja monastery, it was Ghia who took up residence there to protect the sacred relics. And in 1989, when tanks entered Tbilisi, he joined the other men, Georgian flag in hand, and sang harmonies down the barrels of the Soviet guns. People don’t forget these things.

Energy restored and stronger than ever, he now wants to begin again to create an alternative eco-village resource for Georgia’s dispossessed children, with vibrational healing at its core and with the help of the many volunteers and previous Dzegwi children who are inspired to continue the work. Irina, a young teacher, feels called to devote her life to this, as does caveman Dato.

They will call it ‘Mamatsi Guli’ (Heart of the Brave) in memory of Malkhaz, a young, street boy, well loved at Dzegwi, who, unable to swim himself, lost his own life at the age of 15 when he dived into a swollen river to save the life of a drowning mother and her baby.

This time around, Ghia explains, I will help them create a resource where Georgian polyphony and folklore can find its place in current day application, to relieve the suffering of its most vulnerable children and offer a central resource for new explorations in healing through sound and vibration - Georgian style! I have approached a British charity, the Dandelion Trust, he explains, who are willing to work with us. Initially, Ghia realizes that Mamatsi Guli will have to function out of goodwill and donations.

Resonating with the song masters
The following day, outside, beside the blazing ashes of the bread oven, Zeliko is making bread. We are joined by Andro Simashvili; now well into his eighties, Andro is a song master. Traditionally, Georgia’s song masters, steeped in the mysteries of the sound, hold a place of reverence as spiritual teachers.

‘We have to bring this message to future generations,’ he says, ‘without song Georgia is nothing. A song is for sweetening the soul.’ As a boy, on his way to the fields, Andro would sing. Tilling the soil, gathering the harvest, the whole village would sing. Village harmony and prayer life were inextricably linked.

Leah Katkachsvili, song mistress, who leads the women, talks about singing with children. ‘First, you have to look inside a child and see what the problem is and choose a song for them. When you sing, you must think about God and the angels. You can see inside a child’s soul - look to see what the pain is. We have songs to help overcome fear.’

Leah leads the women in all-night prayer rituals where they sing to Nana. ‘Nana - Mother of Creation, Queen of the Lord.’

We stand round the bread oven, eating freshly baked bread and cheese. Our host provides more gvino. Suddenly, out of the blue, Andro begins to sing. He makes the call for the Love song, Tsintsgaro: ‘Tsintsgaro, Chamoviare, Tsintsgaro.’

Such craftmanship is irresistible. I join him on the top line, while Leah sings base. In the space of seconds an alchemy based on respect and natural flow is released. Our voices touch, caress and move away - the gentlest of all touching. Without mental preconception, we are being sung. Infinite freedom, safely contained within the ancient, ancestral framework of the music. I have never sung harmonies like this. Then silence, while the sound lands in other dimensions.

Andro raises his head, beams and winks. ‘He says he wants to marry you,’ says Irina.

After living such a profound experience, I am pondering how, for me, this mirrors early, infant, bonding behaviour.2 The child feels arousal and makes the call, the caregiver is aroused and together a modulation occurs, at the end of which both parties find a new state of well-being. I am also reminded of recent Japanese research3 into Georgian music, which postulates that a frequency exists within it that is inaudible to the ear and absorbed by the surface of the skin, directly affecting the ‘feel-good‘ receptors in the brain.

We lift a glass. ‘It is for the body of Sakartvelo,’ says Leah. ‘For our country. Gaumarjos! For your country, Scotland! For our children’s future! Gaumarjos! For our work together for our country! Gaumarjos!’

Andro nods. ‘We must do this song work together before I die.’
‘Gaumarjos’, Andro! ‘Mravaljamier!’ Long life!

References
1. Levine, P. Waking the Tiger,.North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, Calif, 1997.
2. Cohen,D. How the Child’s Mind Develops, Routledge, New York, .2002.
3 . Nishina, E et al, Biological Mechanism of Perception of Inaudible High- Frequency Component Included in Musical Sounds. Synopsis published in the Handbook of the Third International Symposium of Traditional Polyphony, Tbilisi Conservatory, 2006.

Heart of the Brave Children’s Project
‘Mamatsi Guli’, Heart of the Brave Children’s Project is now a legally constituted Georgian charity, formed in February, 2007. It is funded with help from the Dandelion Trust (charity no. 328159,) where we have set up a special project, The Loving Harmony Initiative.
This aims to promote the welfare of Georgia’s dispossessed children, to promote the exploration of its harmony sound as a tool for human transformation, to work in harmony with the environment, and to foster links with Scotland, the other corner of Europe.

In its infancy, the project welcomes practical, voluntary help. It is also in need of financial help and donations are very welcome. Any cheques should be payable to ‘Dandelion Trust Loving Harmony Initiative - 0207 5385633.

For further details, including information on future Mamatsi Guli Georgian harmony workshops in Georgia, email margerybray@btinternet.com

There is a brokenness
out of which comes the unbroken
a shatteredness
out of which blooms the unshatterable.
 
There is a sorrow beyond all grief
which leads to joy
and a fragility
out of whose depths emerges strength.
 
There is a hollow space,
too vast for words
through which we pass with each loss
out of whose darkness we are sanctioned into being.
 
There is a cry
deeper than sound
whose serrated edges cut the heart
as we break open
to the place inside
which is unbreakable and whole
while learning to sing.
 
Rashani, 13th century Sufi mystic

Madge Bray co-founded S.A.C.C.S. (Sexual Abuse, Child Consultancy Service) in 1987, which culminated in Poppies on the Rubbish Heap - Sexual Abuse, the Child’s Voice (Jessica Kingsley, London, 1991). She is a recipient of the Meering Award, for excellence in Child Care Practice. In 2001 she received a nomination as ‘European Woman of the Year’ for her work in Eastern Europe. 

The Dandelion Trust
41, The Limehouse Cut, 46 Morris Road, London E14 6NQ
Telephone: 020 7538 5633     Fax: 020 7537 7099     Email: mail@dandeliontrust.org
Registered charity number 328159