You sit down to work you have done a thousand times and you do it exactly as it should be done. The phrasing arrives on its own, the order of operations is known, the result will be good. No difficulty anywhere. And not one living movement inside across three hours.
That is autopilot, and it does not switch on out of laziness. It switches on out of experience. A woman who has done her work for fifteen years accumulates so many rehearsed moves that she stops being needed in the room: the hands remember, the head copes, and she herself is somewhere else.
The trouble is that autopilot spreads. First it takes the work, then conversations with the people closest to her, then weekends, then her relationship with her own body. At some point a woman notices that her whole life consists of well executed actions, not one of which she feels. Peruquois, a leading World Music performer in Australia, musician, composer, and the author and facilitator of personal development trainings for women, went through this at twenty four, at the top of her rise.
The cliffs above the ocean
By then she had broken into the Australian jazz scene, people were starting to recognize her, the concerts were good. And around the same time she began losing even her passion for what she was doing.
She drove to a place she loved, the ocean shore, high on a headland in Sydney. A primal place: waves hitting enormous stone walls, and nothing else.
She grew up by the ocean, and the ocean was like a mother to her. So she addressed it the way you address a mother when there is nobody left to ask: “Please, mother, where did I go wrong?”
The answer did not arrive in words. Wind arrived, and water, and something that belonged to that place, and it wrapped around her completely. And she began to hear melodies she had never heard there before. Her own explanation: “I began to follow these melodies, which had probably always been there, but earlier I could not hear them, because I was not sorrowful or lost enough.”
For two hours she simply followed that vibration. Then she lay down on the ground and said, “Mother, I hear you.”
Why it happened at the bottom
There is less romance in this than it seems.
Until that moment she had been busy: “I was too busy, as a musician, singing the notes I had learned. I knew the scales, I knew the songs I had learned.” A professional woman doing professional work. Her attention was entirely occupied with measuring up, and that occupation left no free channel.
Despair freed the channel. It removed the thing that had been blocking the gift: the permanent tuning to somebody else's ear. When a woman has nothing left to prove, because what she proved did not help, she hears for the first time in years what is happening around her and inside her.
That explains an oddity people often complain about, which is why serious change so rarely begins in a comfortable period. In a comfortable period every channel is occupied with holding the comfort.
What grew out of two hours
Her entire later work grew out of that afternoon on the cliffs.
She stopped being a jazz performer and started looking for a way to carry the vibration she had heard. Two weeks later a Native American medicine man was holding gatherings in Australia and she met him. He gave her no answers. He said: go, sit on the earth and find out for yourself. She left with him for New Mexico, and her life split into before and after.
After that came ceremonies where fifteen people prayed for four hours at a time, and she was invited as the singing woman. That is what she was called in that period of her life.
Between that day on the cliffs and the words “I know why I am here” lay years of patience and of giving up everything she had built while trying to become a great performer. That part is usually left out when stories like this get told.
Learned notes
It looks like a musician's story. The mechanism is universal.
Every woman has her learned notes. They are a set of reactions, phrasings and decisions that worked once and have been reproduced automatically ever since. You can live decades on them and look entirely respectable from outside. A woman runs negotiations on those notes, raises children on them, answers her husband, chooses her clothes and even rests.
Her own begins where the learned stops working. It is usually an unpleasant period: a divorce, leaving a job, grown children who no longer need her, an age that does not ask permission. In that moment a woman does not know, for the first time in a long while, how to do it correctly. And that is exactly when what was always nearby becomes audible.
The long middle
The hardest part of such a period is its length. Between “the old no longer holds” and “I know where I am going” a year can pass, and that year has to be lived somehow.
What works is to stop demanding an answer from yourself and start collecting observations. Not “who should I be,” but “which half hour of the past few days felt good.” At first the answers come back comically small: one conversation, a train ride, half an hour in the kitchen while everyone is asleep. The smallness is deceptive, because those are precisely the points where the living signal stayed.
After a few weeks of notes a direction usually shows through. It rarely looks like a beautiful mission. More often it is something like “I feel good when I make things with my hands” or “I come alive when I explain.” Everything else is built from there.
And if the familiar has stopped holding you right now, that is not a malfunction in your life. It is the state in which a woman becomes able, for the first time in years, to hear her own sound.
If you want to work with your voice seriously and give it back its freedom, Peruquois has a course called Vocal Yoga. You will find it on her website under Courses.
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