A calling rarely arrives as a finished plan. More often it arrives as a question a person answers before having time to think, and that answer then shapes a life. For Peruquois, a top World Music performer in Australia, musician, composer, author and facilitator of self-development trainings for women, that question came at seventeen.
How a calling is recognized
«I feel the voice was first, because the voice was calling me. And from early childhood I wanted very much to sing,» says Peruquois. Full awareness and acceptance of that wish came only in late adolescence.
A calling has a recognizable property, and she names it separately. «You know, when you feel a calling, it is already imprinted in your soul. And no questions come up about whether this is right,» says Peruquois.
Then the mechanics start, and she describes them almost physically. «And when you begin to feel the calling, invisible threads appear connecting the soul and the body. And as soon as you start pulling those connecting threads, all the resources of the universe activate,» she says.
The woman who asked the question
At seventeen a woman came into her life, a musician and a single mother at twenty-one, with a difficult story that mirrored her own in many ways.
Hearing Peruquois sing, she said it straight: you have an extraordinary voice, you have to develop it. The answer was the one any girl gives at that age: no, no, it is just my dream.
«After the first vocal lesson I cried without stopping. My soul was pouring out, glad that I had finally heard it,» says Peruquois.
And then came the question: «If you could sing, who would you sing for? What would you sing? And to what end?»
The answer written on a piece of paper
Peruquois wrote her answer down before saying it out loud.
«If I could sing, I would sing not only to entertain, but to help people heal. Not only so they feel happiness or emotions like it, but to help them heal. I want to sing for millions of people. I want to perform music that truly goes deep,» she answered then.
«And that became my first important realization,» says Peruquois.
A seventeen-year-old formulated what she does decades later, in nearly the same words. And the question was not about a profession or an income. It was about who for and what for.
Why she went the other way anyway
Knowing the answer and living by it are two different things, and what happened next was exactly that.
She went into jazz. Jazz was loved in her family, she literally woke up to that music and listened to it constantly, and it became a way to express what she was going through at the time. Jazz was good at pulling pain out of the heart.
Talented and unsure
By twenty-three she was climbing toward the top of her city's jazz scene in Australia, becoming significant and successful. And she describes herself in that period without any indulgence: very talented, yet so visibly unsure of herself, a deeply confused young woman.
«So I created the image of an attractive, provocative, sexy, witty personality. But it had nothing at all to do with who I actually was,» says Peruquois.
The cost of holding an image
Life inside that image works like a swing, and Peruquois describes it in detail.
After a performance came recognition and the mood went up. Right behind it came the sense that she had performed badly, that she was not accepted, and the mood went down. Every day went into maintaining the image: do I look lavish enough, am I getting enough attention, will there be more shows.
At some point the whole thing collapsed. Exhaustion arrived, and nerves, and the feeling of being on the edge, and the first honest questions to herself.
The success was not making her happy, and she names the reason herself. «I think because I turned away from my soul,» she says. She did not stop singing, but she never found the answers to her original questions: how to use the voice for healing and how to sing in a way that helps people and awakens them.
The question works both ways
The story ends with a return to the answer written at seventeen. It took Peruquois several years to get back onto that same line, and everything she does today grew out of those few sentences.
That question has a property that does not depend on whether you sing or do something else entirely. It does not ask what you are good at or what you can achieve. It asks who for and what for, and the honest answer is usually already there, just living deeper than we are used to looking.
And if you want to hear that answer of your own and stop living past it, take Peruquois's course How to Hear and Follow the Voice of Your Calling, you will find it on the website under Courses.
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