Sound and Synchronicity

It was a wild and busy week last week.  Tuesday I did a workshop at Child & Family Services for some oncology patients from Women & Infants Hospital.  I really only expected about 3 people but instead there were 11 and they all loved it.  It was an introductory program for the purpose of bringing awareness to sound healing sessions being offered at the Integrative Wellness Program. However, since it was so well received I am going to offer it on a monthly basis for the community along with the individual sessions. I happen to have a very soft spot for CFS because when I was in recovery for substance abuse in the late 80's that is where my children and I went for counseling.  I feel like I really got a lot from them and am grateful to be giving something back.

I'm also giving an old friend a series of Tibetan bowl sessions which is wonderful because I hadn't done any since I got up here- only for groups.  So that is a pleasure along with the fact that I am reconnecting with a dear friend who I've known since I was a teenager which makes it even more fun! I give her a session and then we yak yak yak, catching up on all kinds of stuff after being pretty much out of touch for the better part of 20 years! Here is a picture from her last session.

There was actually a ton of synchronicity around this. I was in the health food store a little over a week ago , when I heard a voice say, "Rosie?!" I turned around and it was my old friend Alix.  She said, "I can't believe you're here! I just dreamt about you this morning- I saw a picture of you giving someone a session with all those bowls around them and I dreamt you were giving me one- and just now as I was driving over the bridge I was thinking to myself that I have to get your number and call you as soon as I get home! And here you are!"

That on top of the fact that I had just started reading a wonderful book- "Healing With Tibetan Singing Bowls" by Suren Shrestha- so the sudden arrival of someone wanting to have a series of sessions was especially timely. Suren teaches techniques that have been passed down from healers and shamans in his village in Nepal for centuries. It is a short simple book with some very useful information in it.  I am so grateful to have found a book that actually has the teachings from an authentic lineage.

Up until now I had been able to find very little information about the use of singing bowls as a healing tool. It was my intuition and common sense that told me they must have been because they have such a powerful effect on consciousness, but pretty much everything up to that point had been hearsay, or flat out denial that they were ever used for healing- the much repeated phrase being that the history of the bowls has been shrouded in secrecy"- which I love! What Shrestha says is that the teaching has been passed down orally.

So the last session I gave Alix I used a series of chakras bowls and placed them in the order of the cycle of 5ths starting with F for the root chakra. That is also how Fabien Maman teaches the placement of crystal bowls so I was very familiar with the protocol before but had never used it with Tibetan bowls.  In fact it was the first time I even checked the frequency of the bowls before using them.  Usually I simply walk through the room and pick up whatever bowls call to me and then place them around the body as I am guided.  This time I was very thorough in tuning the bowls first.  Which is not to say that one way or the other was better- but this was good in this case and I would definitely do it again, just as I would do it totally intuitively again. I do not want to get attached to one way of working with them.  There are too many wonderful possibilities and his book opened me up to quite a bit more.

A lot of other really exciting stuff has opened up as well.  I have been invited to play the crystal bowls in a salt cave in Ridgefield, CT in June which I am very excited about! I'm so crazy about that Himalayan pink salt- I can't even believe that I am going to get to sit in a cave of it and play my bowls- too freaking cool!  Then someone called and offered their space for me to do another two day workshop while I'm in Florida in May, so that whole scene is shifting. A few days ago I was panicking that only two people had signed up for the one workshop I was offering and now I am teaching actually two more- one day on tuning forks and one day on healing with Tibetan singing bowls.  Also the place where I just saw Shyamji in Newburyport has invited me to do a Healing Sound Journey there, which is great because it means there is a network opening up near my mother which is wonderful.

Lots of great stuff coming up- my first weekend of the Expressive Arts Therapy Program next weekend and at the end of next month a 4-day workshop with John Beaulieu and Sylvia Nakkach which should be pretty amazing.

Oh.... AND my Facebook webpage has reached over 5000 people in the last 6 days! Woohoo!!!

Perfect Vision

Last night I led a kirtan at my friend Karen Kuzminsky's house in Middletown, RI.  What a wonderful evening!  I have to say before I go any further how grateful I am to Jai Uttal for all the wonderful kirtans and workshops of his that I have attended in the last 8 or so years- but especially for the weeklong summer kirtan camp that I was at two years ago in California.  What a blessing. The greatest gift that I got from it was COURAGE- knowing that it didn't matter if I didn't have a fabulous voice, if I wasn't a virtuoso on some instrument or another- if I could just lead a simple chant and sing from my heart, that was good enough.

As it turned out I was sort of put to the test.  I brought my instruments- guitar, harmonium and tamboura- and was just about ready to go when I realized I had forgotten my music! Since I am a beginner on the harmonium I wasn't too thrilled about that.  But I figured that I knew enough chants on the guitar and at least one chant that I could do with the harmonium that it was probably okay- and it was. We had about 20 people and a few kids which really added so much.  Karen's 6 year old son  was so fascinated by the harmonium he practically had his head in it!

But the best part was connecting with a number of people I hadn't seen in 20 years or more.  I knew that the daughter of an old friend of mine was planning to come who was best friends with my oldest son when they were very little.  Now she's a beautiful woman in her late 30's with a daughter of her own. Her mother used to live next door to my ex-husband and me and little Amy would come to the window every morning and call for Sparky.  They lived on the third floor and we were on the second of the house next door.  I have such a strong memory of her precious voice and seeing her face in the window of their 3rd floor apartment looking down to see if Sparky was out on our porch so they could play together.

She hadn't arrived yet when I began. I sang a couple of opening prayers in Sanskrit and was deep into the first chant when I looked up and there was beautiful Amy smiling at me!  I felt such a welling up of emotion that I was quite overcome and tears began to come- I suspect people thought it was because I was so moved by the chant but really I was just so knocked out to see Amy there smiling at me! I actually thought about stopping right then and getting up and giving her a hug but instead I closed my eyes and went really deep and was able to drop into a place beyond that level of emotion to carry on with the music and just let it flow. We saved our hugs and shared our tears after the kirtan and that was such an incredible blessing.  I don't even know yet what it means, what it was for or what it is leading to.  I just know it was, and is, profound.

The grace of the kirtan was that it allowed me to go deeper and deeper- and maybe also that emotion was a catalyst that really somehow carried the kirtan to another level as well. Who knows? It was what it was. The next one will be different.

Every moment is an expression of perfection- every note, every breath. If it isn't perfect, it is our vision that needs correction- not what we're seeing or experiencing, but how we're seeing and experiencing.

Thank you Jai!!!