Invoking the Sacred: Voice, Ritual and Reciprocity in Bali

The sun is out in Bali, and Lilou Mace is standing in it with a camera, greeting her viewers as "my delicious go-creators" from the Bali Spirit Festival, where she has just watched Suzanne Sterling perform on the first night. The conversation that follows, recorded on April 1 and published by Mace's channel in May 2016, is a loose, funny and often searching hour of talk about a question most spiritual seekers eventually ask: how do you stop waiting for permission and start invoking the sacred yourself? Sterling, an ecstatic vocalist, composer and ritual teacher who has spent roughly thirty years in ritual arts, answers without a formula. She talks about spiritual authority, about the word "priestess" and why she uses it anyway, about giving back to the cultures you learn from, and about how language and the human voice are not decoration on sacred life but its doorway.

Mace opens by naming the territory. She wants to know "how can we invoke the sacred in our life," and she is careful to say that Sterling "haven't always been there," that the place where a person can share the sacred is something arrived at, not simply inherited. It is a useful framing, and it sets up the interview's central tension. The sacred, in Sterling's telling, is not located in a single temple, lineage or teacher. It has to be claimed, practiced and handed on, and the rest of the conversation is largely a map of how she came to that understanding.

What does it mean to be your own spiritual authority?

Sterling's first answer is the one everything else grows from. "I believe that in this moment in time it's important for all of us to be our own spiritual authority," she says, and she is quick to add that she means it "in the best sense of the word," not as a dismissal of what came before. Her argument is about the present moment. She describes a global culture "rising up with a certain spirit of awakening" that is non-denominational, not attached to any one tradition, and she frames it as a shared project: people are being asked to help build a global spiritual culture, along with global economic, political and artistic cultures.

The inheritance, for Sterling, is enormous and valuable. "We're so privileged to have access to it," she says of the traditions that came before. Her prescription is to "drink up" what has been handed down, integrate it into the now, and evolve it forward. That is a different posture from either rejecting old forms or simply copying them. It asks a practitioner to know the sources deeply enough to carry them into a new context without turning them into costume.

She also describes her own method, which is a kind of disciplined eclecticism. She has studied many traditions over a long period without affiliating with any one of them. She says this has helped her "extract, hopefully, what works" from different rituals and ceremonies, "with full respect," and then offer what she finds as "universal truths" to the generation that follows. The distinction she is drawing, between extracting principles and taking surface forms, is the hinge of the whole talk, and it returns when she discusses reciprocity.

Why call yourself a priestess when the word is so limiting?

Mace raises the labels directly. Sterling has been called a "musical priestess," and the culture around her includes many other titles: shaman, avatar, goddess, mystic. Her response is blunt. "I would never call myself a shaman nor would I ever call myself a goddess," she says, and when Mace pushes back with a laugh, Sterling concedes the point about the larger potential in everyone but keeps her own boundaries.

Her reason for accepting "priestess" is practical rather than mystical. She says she is "actually trained in ritual arts," that she has worked with several strong traditions for thirty years, and that she is an elder in one of them and trains people in it. Her interest, she says, is in "the divine feminine rising up and women stepping into positions of spiritual leadership," and she admits there is "no great word for that." "Priestess is very limiting," she says, "and yet it's the only one I found that actually sort of says it." It is a candid remark about language running out, and it foreshadows her later argument that words are never neutral.

Her actual job, as she describes it, is larger than any title. She creates public ritual for large groups and teaches people to find their voice. "We're hardwired for self-expression in community," she tells Mace, and she believes many cultures have "civilized ourselves away from self-expression." The task is to normalize it again. Self-expression alone in a private room is one thing. Learning to "re-sacralize" through voice, body, movement, sound and ritual, together, inside a shared container, is what she says "changes everything."

How do you borrow from ancient traditions without taking from them?

This is the part of the interview that most readers will want to sit with, because it names a problem the wider spiritual scene has been slow to face. Sterling's answer is reciprocity. "Any culture that we incorporate into our daily lives," she says, "we also must, as sacred activists, give back." She is explicit that extraction without return is what separates real practice from appropriation. "There's a lot of appropriation," she says of the new age world. "There's a lot of stuff that doesn't necessarily go deep and is just kind of taking without giving back."

Her reference point is the Bali Spirit Festival itself, which she praises because it is "deeply entrenched in the community," offering service projects and taking part in "the sustainability of the local culture." For her, a gathering that borrows from a place should also be accountable to it. The principle is simple to state and demanding to live. If you draw on a tradition's depth, you owe something back to the people who hold it, whether that is time, resources, or participation in what sustains them.

Sterling is careful to say that what she does is not the same as taking a tradition's depth. She is "extracting universal truths," she says, and offering them forward. The line she is walking is between learning the principles that recur across many practices and lifting the outward forms of a living culture out of context. It is not a line that can be drawn once and forgotten; it has to be checked again and again through relationship.

Can language itself invoke the sacred?

Mace asks whether there are specific mantras or prayers that listeners could adopt to reclaim this power. Sterling declines to hand out a formula. "I wouldn't hesitate to say this mantra," she says, "that's not really what I do." What she offers instead is an orientation: notice the sacred everywhere, and give it voice. She wants to remind English speakers that their language is sacred too, and she asks how the words people love can be used to invoke.

Her principle is compact and worth quoting in full. "There's this great saying: language creates the world; it describes." Speaking one language, she suggests, describes a different world than speaking another. If that is true, then the question becomes whether we can "let the beauty and the grace of the world move through us and become spoken by us." When we speak that beauty, she says, "we are invokers of the sacred. We're literally calling it forth." The claim is not that words conjure magic on their own. It is that attention, once spoken aloud, shapes what a person notices and what a community comes to expect.

That raises a practical problem: how do you get out of your head long enough for speech like that to arrive? Sterling's answer runs through the body and the voice.

How does singing quiet the monkey mind?

"Singing is key," Sterling says, and she is precise about where to start. Not with words, necessarily, and not with a finished song. She begins "with rhythm and pulse," and with "allowing sounds to move out." She describes a yoga class where people are simply making sounds and exploring their own voice. To her, "the human body is a profound instrument," and most people have never been taught to listen to it or to practice with it.

The sequence she describes is a kind of reclamation. First you let the body make sound. Then you allow yourself to "reclaim our voice as artists, as singers, not just the professionals but all of us." She is emphatic that the capacity is inherent. "We have the inherent yearning to sing to express," she says. Once a person lets that happen, she says, "incredible beauty happens," and the mind's constant commentary tends to fall away. "The monkey mind shuts down," she observes, and she frames this as the reason voice-based practice works: it occupies attention so fully that the chatter has no room.

For readers who have never sung in front of anyone, this is the most accessible teaching in the interview. You do not need a trained instrument to begin. You need rhythm, a willingness to make sound, and a group or a space where the sound can be heard without judgment. Sterling's work with large public rituals, and with the trainings and curricula she has created for communities, is built on that premise.

Where to go from here

Sterling never presents her ideas as a finished doctrine, and the best way to read this conversation is as a set of working questions. Who is your spiritual authority, and what are you willing to take responsibility for when you claim it? Which traditions have shaped you, and what have you given back to them? Which words do you use every day, and what world do they describe? And where in your body is the sound that has been waiting to move?

If the talk leaves you wanting more, watch the full recording on Lilou Mace's channel, which carries Sterling's own description of her work: a teacher, ritual creator and co-creator of the Off the Mat, Into the World programs, who lives in community in both Los Angeles and San Francisco. Then start small, the way she suggests. Make a sound. Find a pulse. Let the first word come out before the commentary arrives. The invocation she describes does not begin with a grand gesture. It begins when a person stops waiting for permission and starts to speak.