LifeWriters Talk About LifeWriting

A high point of the Story Circle Conference was the Saturday lunch presentation by Susan Lincoln, at which she had the 100+ SCN women on our feet singing the medieval sacred music of Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th Century head of a German abbey who was an advisor to popes and a woman of deep intellectual and spiritual power.

Susan Lincoln, a professional singer and voice teacher, visited Hildegard's abbey in Germany in 1998 and had a profound, life-changing spiritual awakening. Returning to the U.S. she founded women's song circles called Hilde Girls. After the conference, Story Circle Journal talked by phone with Susan about her life and her views on why women are drawn to Hildegard's music and to circle.

Story Circle Journal: What is it about the music of Hildegard of Bingen that appeals so strongly to women who are at the stage of life of wanting to reflect on their life experiences?

Susan Lincoln: It has to do with women discovering their sense of what power really is and that power is a grounded spiritual heart. It's a beingness that says, I'm so glad to be alive and to be a human being and to be a woman, and to know that there is only the Circle. How can I share that, every minute of my life? How can I live that? How can I have a career in this? How can I share this with my friends and family? How can I wake up feeling this way? There's a clarion call inside many women's hearts, and Hildegard's music is like one of the shaman's tools for us. Hildegard's music enlivens women's sense of purpose and grounded spirituality.

SCJ: Hildegard did not write her music to be conventionally pretty or easy, but when you hear it, you know it's from the heart of someone who felt true connection to the divine.

SL: I certainly have that experience with the music more and more as I sing it. I started learning the music in 1990. It was difficult for me to sing in the beginning because I kept approaching it intellectually. I was trying to learn it, memorize it, figure it out, and it wasn't until I had that experience at the abbey that I got it that these songs were given to her as ecstatic releases. You have to get in there and sing them to really get that, which is why I love Hilde Girls so much. When we sing this music, we allow our body and spirit to vibrate through the same portal that Hildegard used.

Hildegard wasn't a rule breaker but she broke the rules. We need that. At this time, the rules are rigid and masculine. Not even a healthy masculine—it's a wounded masculine without the balance of the feminine. The world is out of balance. Women need to come forward with what we know, and in a loving way. In an irresistibly attractive way. Not pounding someone over the head with it.

Hildegard's music is encoded with wisdom. She wasn't a trained composer. She received these songs from the Living Light and they had a resonance with wisdom. It's in those notes; it's in those intervals and the relationships of notes to each other and the fact that her music is like a long, universal inhale and exhale. My experience, and what I hear all the time from women, is that when we sing her music, we remember things about spirit, about love, about what power really is—"power" meaning being in alignment with your true self, dripping with love.

SCJ: One of the obvious similarities between Hilde Girls and SCN is the idea of women coming together in a circle. What inspirations led you to create song circles for women?

SL: Women have been circling and empowering each other and singing together probably from day one. When babies were born, they sang; in the red tents they sang. I think its abnormal not to sing. It's become normalized not to, but I think its natural for women to circle and sing. So I think I'm just doing something that might even be in our DNA. It's just so completely organically natural and right.

Recently, I've looked back at my professional life up to this point and seen how directed I've been and how I've been shaped by my own choices and shaped by the irresistible draw to spirit, right up to the moment I went to the abbey and sat in the chapel of St. Hildegard and heard the nuns singing.

It's a cloistered convent so the nuns are completely out of sight. When I heard them singing, something new happened inside of me. These women sing together six to eight times a day. What could we do if we circled this consciously? What could we do if we gave ourselves permission to bond like this and not have to become nuns and not have to adhere to any religion, dogma, or particular spiritual path? What if we came together and our offering was becoming one voice and one heart.

Earlier in my teaching career, I'd had a business called Heart Song. This was taking people who'd been afraid of singing, amateur singers, and helping them shape songs with piano accompaniments and give these fabulous transformational recitals where everybody just cried the whole time. Then I had this vision of starting song circles, but what were we going to sing. Kum-by-ya? The music has to be pure. As a singer I know when a song is written as "Hey, pay attention to me" or "Aaaah—take me to that deep place."

SCJ: So you'd already had the idea of creating these groups?

SL: This all happened in the abbey. Birthing my two kids and this experience in the abbey are up there in the same "oh, my goodness" category of numinous experience. So while I'm having this experience, my mind and my heart are going very fast. I'd learned two or three of her songs but I didn't sing that day in the abbey. I just had this vision and cried and cried and cried.

I went back down through the vineyard, and my husband Craig and I returned to our hosts' home down the Rhine and I thought I was done. But it wouldn't let me go and I had to go back the next day. This was complicated. We were on a concert tour with six other people. I didn't cancel performances but it was not easy to get away from the activities planned. But I had to go back and I had to sing. So I went back and sang and had a similar experience as the day before; that feeling when you think you're going to fly away. But I got it about the music. It had been difficult for me up to that point and all of a sudden the music was so easy. I seriously was "being sung." I got it: this is not difficult music. This is easy music if you're in your heart and on your knees to divine love. And that's what I was going to go back and share with women.

I've had two sessions of Hilde Girls a year since then. Looking back on twelve sessions of Hilde Girls and retreats and workshops around the country and in Europe, I've really been given the incredible honor of being in these circles. It really is like heart science.

I think women are the teachers and healers for our world today—the archetype of the feminine as the Teacher. Anybody choosing this archetype is going to have an irresistible draw to circle, to sing, to write, to tell their story, to hold and empower each other.

SCJ: I certainly agree with that.

SL: I know you do. Everyone in SCN agrees. It's what you're doing through the story of the self and writing. We're all doing the same thing—we're finding woman as love and power and medicine. I wasn't kidding when I said to the women at the SCN conference, I'm absolutely certain that women hold the medicine for the universe. So every time one of you in SCN claims your voice for just who you are or any woman in Hilde Girls or in any other circle claims her voice, I bet 1000 women claim their voices somewhere in the world.

I've seen so many miracles. My own personal story is such a miracle. I've come to trust love late in my life, and I get to watch on a daily basis a capacity for love in myself that I didn't even know was possible.

People talk about competition as the heart of why America is great. But I couldn't disagree more. I think competition is destructive—despite it, we're doing all right. But when we hold each other, when we contain each other—like the women of SCN or Hilde Girls do—when we hold someone's essence strongly for them, they can't help but want to become it. That's what love does. It so generously abounds.

SCJ: The absence of judgment, withholding any judgment, is crucial in any circle.

SL: Yes, sometimes withholding judgment but I would say it even more strongly—practicing non-judgment. Practicing complete and total acceptance of someone's essence. Which means you look past the human stuff, because we are all hiding the same secret: We think we're not enough.

SCJ: I have to wonder though why the guys aren't getting it. We women are working so hard.

SL: I think it's just not their time yet. My husband said something, several years ago, when he was giving the sermon at a church service and it blew my mind. He said: "Women. Do not give up on us. We need you. You are going to be our midwives. And if you don't know your own power, you will miss helping us. So you've got to do it first and we'll come with you, but we don't feel safe with you yet, because so many of you have your hand on your hip, saying: 'Well, hurry up. It's about time.'"

And now women are gaining the ability to help the men, saying: "Welcome to the land of heart. We're so glad you could join us." I see it more and more. My husband and I still do mixed gender events and I have a lot of men friends and I'm seeing so many changes, fast, deep in the heart. Those men, they're the pioneers for the other guys. It's coming, I am sure of it.

Women are just barely over the cusp of understanding that power isn't power over or power under. This is a pretty new paradigm and it's starting to become embodied by women. Women and power—those are two words that just don't go together easily. It's as if you have to put a suit on or become a woman patriarch, or play the same war paradigm games to have any power. But it's not true. These times are different and require a new understanding. It's not an easy thing to get. It's scary. The ground drops out from under you, which is a good thing but it doesn't feel like it when it's happening.

I've talked to a lot of men and they all tell me they want women to be strong and sure of themselves. But if we try to use the masculine model of power, we get conniving, manipulative, and bitchy. When real feminine power happens, the power of the heart, the men see: "Oh, women have a different system and definition of power. They become more loving and our whole family works better." This kind of shifting takes time, patience, and partnership.

SCJ: You started a new Hilde Girls group this week. How did it go?

SL: It was wonderful. It seems like every session, women are deepening their ability to support each other and they come in almost where the last one left off. Even the new people. And the women who have been doing this for a while are so good at containing that the new ones just walk into this love fest. It's delicious. My daughter is in this session for the first time. It's really fun for me. She's 25 and she's in her second year of law school. So here's this opportunity to share and strengthen our love in the circle.

SCJ: Why do you think it is that this Hilde Girls group is further along on the journey than the group before?

SL: The invisible power of the circle is working more strongly and the matrix builds power. When I end the spring Hilde Girls, I know the fall one is coming, so the circle's not done. The spiral continues to spin. The portal's still open, the very first Tuesday we meet. The women are willing to go into a deep trusting bond with each other. It's exciting. The little scientist in me is thrilled. I'm jumping up and down in my lab coat because I love watching the evolving of goodness. People are changing fast and it's very rewarding. Myself too. I'm just getting more and more playful and outrageously, irresistibly joyful. I'm not that way all the time but when I am, it's big.

SCJ: We could see that at the conference!

SL: Yeah. It's fun. Everyone wants to feel happy and alive.

I'd like to add something about people who have influenced me. Besides Hildegard and the nuns, there is one specific person in my life who has been very important and that's Amma. She's a Mahatma, a realized being, from India who embodies the divine mother and, when I experienced the quality of love I felt in her presence, then I knew what to take out as a reference and offer to women. So she's very important to me and continues to be.

She comes to the US and offers free programs in Dallas. She's called "the hugging saint." Her website is Amma.org. Her works of self-less service and charity in India will blow your mind. Go see her and get in her arms when she comes, around the 4th of July. All you have to do is walk in and get a number and, when it's your time, you go to the front of the room and they put you in her arms and she whispers something in your ear. I've sat for days in the room just watching her love people so I could get what unconditional love looks like: whoever is in her arms is the most important child of God. Now I understand what unconditional love looks and feels like.

When Hilde Girls started out, I thought it was about Hildegard and her music. And it's so hilarious to me now. Because really it's about women redefining power as the embodiment of love. I can hardly wait to see what it is going to be in another several years.

SCJ: Connecting to the music of Hildegard on your visit to the Abbey in Germany was a powerful, spirit-expanding, turning point for you. What can any of us do to seek that turning point in our own lives?

SL: It's what Joseph Campbell talked about: follow your bliss. Don't settle for anything less than "kriya"—that's a Sanskrit word meaning "the shudder of the soul." Aim for that all the time. Hold it up as your gold standard. Really figure out for yourself, what are the activities, the people, the places that satisfy my spirit and make me want to open up like a flower. Do those. Pick those kinds of people for your friends. Don't spend time judging the ones who aren't that, just move towards the ones that are, and do it fast.

Be filled with loving kindness towards yourself. See every single little miracle as the biggest miracle. Keep a passionate sense of inquiry. Be in a constant quest for love and goodness. Sniff it out and snoop it out everywhere, and grace will pave the way. You might be fortunate and have one of those dropping-to-your-knees numinous experiences, or you might be fortunate and have a life with daily ordinary miracles.

—Phone interview conducted and edited by Jane Ross

Susan Lincoln's recent CD's include "Mother Heart" and "Openings". Her website is www.susanlincoln.com. For more on Hilde Girls, visit www.hildegirls.com.

Last updated: 03/04/06