To Silvia Nakkach, breath is fuel and fire. When she works with her voice students on the intricacies of devotional chant, she focuses on the power and necessity of the breathing process — in terms of maintaining life, making sounds and achieving self-realization.

Her many-faceted approach is simply anchored in one of our most basic human acts — about the only thing more elementary than breath is heartbeat — and simultaneously explores physiology, intention, acoustics and spirituality.

"I tell my students, it's like mother and baby," Nakkach said in a phone interview from her birth city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she was teaching. "There is devotion there. The baby is impossible, but the mother loves the baby anyway.

"It's the same with the voice. Sometimes it is difficult or hard to tame, or it is out of tune. You just keep working devotionally until you get what you want."

Nakkach comes to Santa Fe this weekend for an introductory discussion of her Yoga of the Voice program, followed by a two-day workshop. She has studied raga singing and North Indian classical music with Ali Akbar Khan since 1982, and she holds several formal music degrees.

Those include bachelor's degrees in piano and voice from the National Conservatory of Buenos Aires, master's degrees in music therapy and psychology from the National University of Buenos Aires, and a master's in composition from Mills College in Oakland, Calif. She is the founder of the Vox Mundi Project (voxmundiproject.com), which is devoted to the study and preservation of sacred vocal arts from all cultures.

"I've been doing this work for years," said Nakkach, a longtime resident of the San Francisco Bay Area. "I've been loving my teachers for more than 30 years. I have studied with Ali Akbar Khan for 27 years, and he probably told me something was good like twice in those 27 years."

The concept and title for Yoga of the Voice came to her, she said, when she realized that the breathing and chanting exercises that accompany meditation and some physical yoga could be seen as a separate, constantly evolving study. "That means, as much as you do the same thing, you are doing it deeper and better, and the results are more beneficial.

"This is the way, in ancient times, they were approaching any kind of spiritual discipline. In a way, it becomes a devotional art. You are doing the same thing every day, but with a deeper sense of commitment with the practice."

"This is the way, in ancient times, they were approaching any kind of spiritual discipline. In a way, it becomes a devotional art. You are doing the same thing every day, but with a deeper sense of commitment with the practice."

As Nakkach knows from her piano and voice training, that sort of approach is not always followed in Western musical traditions. Practice is vital, and a pianist or trumpeter or singer omits his daily scales and exercises at his peril; but the emphasis is also on constantly moving ahead — learning to do more difficult or unusual things, and lots of them. In the process, basics can be slurred over.

"You don't have to do different things to evolve," Nakkach said. "You have to do the same thing, over and over, to reach the place where you want to be. We don't reach the levels of mastery until we find happiness in daily practice. That is very important. It's why the amazing masters get so much juice and power. They have done it for so long."

Yoga of the Voice is definitely a meditation practice, Nakkach said. But unlike what we might call classic meditation, which aims at removing all distractions until the mind floats free, this practice has a specific focus: producing tone, which is one step beyond producing mere sound.

"Sound is the beginning of all manifestation," Nakkach said. "There is nothing without vibration and sound. But tone is when we are aware of the sound we want to intone. The moment we connect with tone, we are learning (how to experience) consciousness. It is a departure and an integration at the same time.

"In the West, mostly the work and technique is based on the idea that we sing with our body. We learn very precise and useful techniques of how to breathe, and how to move a specific part of the body, and how to put some intention on the directions of leaps (in pitch), and how we move our mouth when we sing.

"But this is only one dimension of who we are. If I bring my attention to breath and I am already working with tone, my breath will be much more relaxed. The tone will be already very refreshing, very relaxing, very complete in terms of bringing all the parts of the body together."

That may sound esoteric, but it really isn't. We all know what it's like when our bodies respond to a loud, deep bass tone or our ears ring with a sudden high piercing noise. And whenever we hum, whistle or even speak, we can be aware of where the sound is resonating as we produce it — in our head cavities, in our chests, in our throats, in our nasal sinuses. Control of such placement is the goal both in Western singing and in Nakkach's work.

"Breath support is the result of how we orchestrate those three aspects of producing tone: sound, breath and muscle. Support is not the cause, it is the effect. Breath becomes prana, and prana becomes art," she said, referring to the Vedantic concept of the vital energy that suffuses every living thing. "Then, a beautiful architecture of consideration becomes sound."

Even with eager students, Nakkach often has to break down preconceptions about their own ability to produce sound. Many people have been told from an early age that they can't sing or make an agreeable noise, and they've come to believe that to the point that they're completely inhibited.

"You want open sound, free sound," she pointed out. "All exercises are intended to release sound, even when you make funny sounds and things like that. When people feel more comfortable about sounding and not feel so funny (about doing it), we start using the muscles of the belly to link to the muscles around the spine, and all the parts of the body that are involved in the production of sound. We do it playfully, with very specific postures and exercises that come from yoga and from tai chi as well as from the West."

IF YOU GO

What: Workshop with Silvia Nakkach: devotional chant and raga singing

Information: E-mail madisato@gmail.com or call 471-5676 or 660-2526 for registration and directions

INTRODUCTORY SESSION

When: 7-9 p.m. Friday

Where: Santa Fe Soul, Health, and Healing Center; 2905 Rodeo Park Drive East, Building 3; 474-8555

Cost: $25 advance, $35 at the door

FORMAL WORKSHOP

When: 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Saturday and 10:30 a.m.-1 p.m. Sunday

Where: Santa Fe Sound Sanctuary, 28 Coyote Springs Road

Cost: $200, includes introductory session