Singing allows us to tap the very core of our being. Jan Kortie draws on the power of song in a form of therapy he calls voice liberation. Tune in to the sound of the soul.

Cut out that caterwauling,” my brother and sister used to say when I walked through the house as a kid, singing at the top of my lungs, or stood in front of a mirror pretending to be a performer. I’ve thought of myself as unable to sing ever since.

It turns out I’m not the only one. A lot of people don’t think they can sing. We’d rather criticize the contestants on The Voice from the safety of the sofa and leave the vocalizing to those who’ve been to music school or taken lessons, or at least joined a choir—the people who can carry a tune.

To Jan Kortie, that’s nonsense. The Dutchman has invented a practice he calls “voice liberation.” He firmly believes that everyone can sing, and that deep down, everyone wants to. The title of his first book, which came out in 2010, translates as Your Soul Wants to Sing. In it, he argues that singing is good for you: it opens your heart, gets you feeling warm and happy, connects you with others, heals your pain and puts you in touch with the core of your being. If all that’s true, why wouldn’t you want to sing?

At his palatial office beside an Amsterdam canal, the tall, thin, bespectacled Kortie explains his technique with infectious enthusiasm. “Singing can pretty quickly take you to the question ‘What’s my song?’  And that takes you to the question ‘Who am I, really?’ At the most essential level, you’re not language, you’re not narrative—you’re vibration, movement, energy. When you sing, you start to feel that. And more and more, you start wanting to be who you really are underneath the shell of your personality.”

Singing puts us in touch with our souls more quickly than anything else, he argues, because music lies at the core of our being. “You Are Music” is the title of his introductory workshop—and his motto. “The universe is one big harmonic, vibrating, liv-ing whole,” he writes. “It is music. This is why you and I are able to sing, and why we want to, and why it comes so effortlessly to us.”

Plenty of people are itching to make music, if the monthly sing-alongs Kortie holds in Amsterdam and other Dutch cities are any indication. Long lines routinely form outside the doors, and the venues fill with hundreds of people. Kortie accompanies the choir on the grand piano. Men—who make up about a fifth of the singers—sit together for a sonorous effect; on some songs, they and the women take turns. After a brief warm-up, the lights go down. Some people stand up. The atmosphere borders on religious; between songs, nobody speaks.

The repertoire consists of what Kortie calls mantras: simple songs from various spiritual traditions and languages, along with pieces he’s composed himself. You might call the songs monotonous. “They have a relatively large amount of breathing room in them,” he says. “Taking time for inhalation is important. The soul isn’t in a hurry.”

For Kortie, “monotonous” isn’t a bad word. On the contrary: “You can only sing one note at a time. The question is, are you completely pres-ent in that note?” Our souls favor simplicity, he believes, and the more we keep things simple, the closer we get to our essence. Silence is important, too. “Exuberant singing can only be genuine and meaningful if the opposite is also present—the courage to wait and to slow down. There has to be receptivity and emptiness. You have to open yourself to the unnameable before you can feel it and begin to express it.”

Singing is no more difficult than talking, Kortie says. “Open yourself to what’s with-in you here and now. If there’s discomfort and shyness in you, then sing that. If there’s sadness or rage, sing sadness or rage. And if there are tears rolling down your face, sing through the tears. Ultimately, you’ll sing with passion and abandon.”

In her foreword to Kortie’s book, Dutch cabaret artist Brigitte Kaandorp recalls that she used to have a low opinion of her singing ability. Then she had her first session with Kortie, and within five minutes, to her shock, she found herself crying. “I still don’t know what Jan did,” she writes. “He sat down at the piano and said, ‘Just make a sound.’ And before I knew it, I was in this vulnerable place where I couldn’t sing anymore, and I had no idea why.”

Whatever it was, it was effective. Since those sessions, Kaandorp’s been on fire, sing-ing her heart out, with no urge to say she’s no good. “I just sing how I sing. Period.”

It sounds like voice liberation. I want some of that, too. So I sign up for a three-day voice liberation workshop with Erica Nap in a renovated farmhouse near the Dutch town of Zutphen. Nap, who runs the Murali school for self-expression, learned the technique from Kortie. Our group consists of three men and seven women, aged 28 to 71. During the introductions, Nap asks us what we’re hoping to learn. She also wants us to say what our greatest fear is. Wow, I think. Right into the deep end. But it works.

“I want to learn to relax more,” I say. “To not always feel like I’m trying so hard to be accepted. And my biggest fear is…” Well—what? “The usual fear I think everyone has. The fear of rejection.”

And it does turn out to be universal. The others in the group reveal similar goals: to be able to express themselves, to accept themselves. They identify similar anxieties, too: that they’re not good enough, they don’t fit in, they aren’t heard. The exercise is a liber-ating experience in itself. We’re a diverse group of people with wide-ranging backgrounds (one, we find out during a lunchtime chat, was severely abused as a girl; another was an only child who got placed on a pedestal), and yet we struggle with the same fears and harbor the same desires.

Then we’re invited to give voice to our feelings. It goes like this.

We stand in a circle, and Erica Nap dem-onstrates, letting out a deep sigh. Her exhalation becomes half sigh, half sound. Then it’s all sound—a drawn-out note.

She coaches each of us in turn. “Where are you feeling it?”

I’ve got a chest cramp.

“Good. Let’s hear it.”

The pain around my heart intensifies.

“What word goes with that?”

Love.

“What sentence starting with ‘I’?”

Before I know it, the tears are flow-ing as I sing-sob that I’ve always loved them—my family, the people I grew up with, the people who had so little time and attention for me. As I look around, all I see on the others’ faces is warmth, encouragement, compassion. And as they sing out their feelings in turn, I love that they’re daring to make themselves heard. Even the out-and-out screaming is great, because it’s real and vulnerable.

Nobody fails to shed a tear at some point during the three days. That includes the men. One finds the small boy inside him who wished his mother would look at him; anoth-er realizes he’s always longed for his father’s approval.

Over the course of the workshop, we trav-el an emotional path that can be summed up in five words. It starts with “Oooohhh…” Then we sing, “Heeeelllp,” requesting aid from whatever, whoever, wherever. Next, we give voice to our deepest pain. “Sing ‘Ow,’ ” Nap says, and we sing it, yell it, roar it, sob it. On the morning of the third day, we learn to sing “Noooo!” And finally, that afternoon, each of us in turn gives a joyful shout: “Yeeaahhh!”

In the closing session, Nap invites us to share what we’ve learned, starting with the words “I’ve succeeded in…” I say I’ve succeeded in expressing my vulnerability and feeling accepted by the group. I feel happy.

“People open up to each other more, because you’re communicating in a way that isn’t about words,” Kortie explains later. “You can transcend the level of words. You’re using words, but it’s not the words that do it—it’s the vibration, the sound of the voice, that does it.”

Voice liberation is connected with spirituality. I experience this fact firsthand listening to the third of Kortie’s CDs, recorded with a mantra-singing crowd. It’s a winter evening, and I’m driving down the Afsluitdijk, a 20-mile causeway linking Friesland and North Holland. I’m singing along loudly with the CD, because it helps keep fear at bay. I’m driving through the dark in a rainy, windy storm, and it’s awful being out here all alone in this tiny car. Tensely, I clutch the steering wheel, hands clammy, shoulders hunched. The causeway is endless. Now and then, a big truck comes toward me and splashes water across my windshield so I can’t see.

Then the song “Nada Brahma”—its title means “Everything is vibration”—comes out of the speakers. And I think of the biblical passage in which God asks Job, “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? … while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?” Is all of creation one endless joyful cry?

Suddenly, it’s as if I’m hearing the truth, or having it explained to me, clear as day: The whole of existence is nothing but continuous rejoicing. All the fear and pain can’t take away the joy of having been created.

It arrives through my ears, this knowl-edge, and I can’t say I understand it in a rational way (rejoicing? What about all that misery?), and yet it has an immediate, notice-able physical effect. I relax completely at the steering wheel. It’s still dark, raining and stormy, but the tension has left my body. I arrive at my destination radiant and relaxed.

Ever since, I’ve felt as if I’ve discovered something: the mysterious, inscrutable fact that existence is made up of sounds of joy. I heard it myself, there on the Afsluitdijk.

“What you’re describing dovetails perfectly with the message I’m trying to get across,” Kortie says when I tell him what happened. “That’s what music can do—release us from the person we think we are and bring us to the spirit that we truly are.”

In many traditions, he says, people sing the primal syllable om. It’s believed to be the universal, generative sound out of which the universe arose. The first line of the Gospel of John is “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Likewise, many esoteric traditions contain the idea that creation is made up of vibration or sound.

“I like to translate ‘Nada Brahma’ as ‘Everything is music,’ ” Kortie says. “You are music! That’s good news, because it means there’s harmony by definition. Two different initial sounds might be dissonant with each other, but one initial sound can’t be dissonant with itself. So we don’t have to be
afraid, because harmony is always greater than disharmony. All of us are tiny elements in one big cosmic concert. All I have to do is let out the part of the music that’s available to me, and the rest will take care of itself.”

Do people really change after a few days spent liberating their voices in a farmhouse? Kortie assures me they do. “Even a one-time experience has an effect, because you’ll never forget that that relaxation, trust and vulnerability are possible. You understand that it’s real, it exists. But if it’s going to lead to true transformation, it does usually take more time, or more getting used to. When we have people with us a bit longer—like when they’re training to become voice liberators—we do see a distinct change. They become more them-selves, more who they really are.”

It all sounds—if you’ll forgive me—pretty vague. If I hadn’t sung and cried my heart out along with the group, I’d be raising an eyebrow. As it is, though, I can only nod in understanding. Yes, if you can give voice to your vulnerability without fear of others’ judgment, you will become more yourself.

Singing changed Jan Kortie. He started out as a high school economics teacher, and he “wasn’t entirely happy,” he says. He couldn’t see himself doing that work until he retired. One day, in a therapy group, the lead-er asked him what his childhood dream had been. He remembered imagining lead-ing a big group of people in the final chorus of Beethoven’s Ninth: “Alle Menschen werden Brüder”—“All men become brothers.”

“I hadn’t been to music school,” Kortie recalls, “so I started teaching myself. I was doing various forms of therapy at the time, and I realized how much of it was applicable to singing. Now I’m glad I didn’t go to
music school, because they would’ve taught me how you were supposed to do things. This way, I was able to find out for myself what worked for me and what didn’t, and how to help people free their voices.”

And what did it mean for him personally?

“When I’m improvising on the piano or singing, I experience precious moments when I don’t have to try so hard,” he says. “I don’t have to worry about how you’re supposed to do it or what’s expected of me. I know what it’s like not to be allowed to participate. When I was a kid, I wasn’t part of the group of cool, popular guys. So I devel-oped a radar for what I needed to do to belong. That’s a deep-seated pattern I’ll never be free of. But music allows me to let go of that. At the best moments, I think: This is my music, this is me, this is what I have to give. It’s effortless. Because I have it inside me.”

Kortie also coaches professional musi-cians, mostly classical performers who’ve gotten mired in fear of failure and performance anxiety. “Their work can place them under enormous pressure,” he says. “Often, as children, they got a lot of recognition for their talent, but then they get to the conservatory and find themselves in an atmosphere of competition and evaluation. Not everyone can handle it. I’ve talked to so many people who went to the conservatory full of passion and left thinking they probably weren’t good enough. And it cramps their playing.”

The art is to help them unlearn what they’ve learned. “There are a lot of musi-cians who can play existing music brilliantly but barely dare to improvise,” he says. “So I do it with them. It can be hard to bring them back to true simplicity, because they’re so used to complexity, and they encourage it in each other. But the soul is focused on simplicity. The soul only wants one thing at a time—just this one note, right here, right now. Can you connect with that, or are you going to allow yourself to be distract-ed by what others think?” In fact, then, Kortie is practicing a kind of musical mindfulness. “It comes naturally,” he says. “It comes from the self. The abundance of the deepest self.”

He invites me to sing along while he plays the piano. And whether it’s because of everything I’ve done or because I’m stand-ing here with the master himself or because he has a mysterious quality I can’t describe, before long a sound comes out of me, and I know: I didn’t invent this. It’s coming naturally. It isn’t lovely, more of an awkward roar.

“Yes,” Kortie says, “when it starts flow-ing, everything that was forbidden comes out first.” Accompanied by his enthusiastic playing, though, it sounds okay. And later I realize that at those amaz-ing moments when it came completely naturally, my head was empty. I wasn’t thinking, just singing.

It was Zen singing. And at those moments, I was totally free.