Mr. Lopez Meets Mr. Ayers

Every night for the past two weeks I have been reading Steve Lopez's book The Soloist about Nathaniel Anthony Ayers. I have been getting to bed late due to all the pre-Christmas doings that needed to be done so I was only managing a few pages at a time. Yesterday, as part of my post-Christmas recovery program, I stayed in bed for an extra two hours reading and then took a two-hour bath and finished the book. It is the true story of a homeless man in LA suffering from schizophrenia who once had a promising career as a musician but was now living on the streets as he had been for the past 30 years. When Mr. Lopez met him, Mr. Ayers was sleeping in a tunnel by night, warding off rats with a stick and playing music by day on his violin or cello for his own personal pleasure- always in sight of a statue of Beethoven, his inspiration.

What an amazing story about the power of music to placate and inspire a mind so often plagued by demons. It is not a "cure"- Mr. Ayers is a paranoid schizophrenic who refuses medication due to bad experiences in the past but when he is playing music- or listening to it- the often tangled web of his mind becomes an open space full of inspiration, clarity and joy. I had seen the movie when it came out in 2009 but reading the book gave me a much greater insight and inspired me to follow up on the story. I searched on YouTube and this is the first video I came across. It is too good not to share. I was happy to see that there are videos of the real Mr. Ayers and not just clips from the movie and I am looking forward to watching more of them.

Brain Tuner Experiment

Commitment and practice renewed. Yesterday I sat down at my harmonium for the first time in about 6 weeks, maybe more. I moved October 1st so I spent the two weeks leading up to that point packing and the last four weeks UNpacking! So good to sit and play music, so good to sit and write, so good to sit and sing. So nice to build a fire! So wonderful to have SPACE! So fantastic to have all my sound healing equipment, art and instruments in one space. Beyond fabulous to have a place where I can have company, space for my kids and their families visit and to work. It is all good- in this case that is not a cliche!

 This is pretty cool! A couple of days ago I decided to use my brain tuners before I did my Lumosity workout (games to exercise the brain) to see if they would make a difference. I used the Beta tuners for clarity and focus. On two out of three of the exercises I scored significantly higher. The other one was pretty much the same as usual. I don't remember what the third game was for- maybe it was short term memory! Interesting experiment anyway- I will definitely play some more with the combination of tuning forks and Lumosity and see if the results hold up.





To learn more about Brain Tuners visit John Beaulieu's website: http://www.biosonics.com/Brain-Tuners-in-Velvet-Bag.html. You may also want to read through some of these blogposts for more information on use of tuning forks. The third one has a very interesting video testimonial (short!)
http://wholisticsound.blogspot.com/2012/07/tuning-mom.html
http://wholisticsound.blogspot.com/2012/11/a-slight-adjustment.html
http://wholisticsound.blogspot.com/2011/08/at-last-i-am-done-with-three-months-of.html

Wholistic Sound Has Landed! (Part One)

It has been a crazy summer. I spent the better part of June, July and August actively looking for a new place- a house- where I could stay for a while, that would feel like more than just a temporary place to land. It was very frustrating. I thought maybe something was wrong with me that I was having so much trouble finding anything that I felt would work. I hadn't felt this stuck in many years. I wanted to be in love with it- not just have it be workable, doable, functional. I had a fabulous apartment in Newport that I really did love. The down side of it was that it was on the 3rd floor of a Victorian house and I was so high up that I discovered within a couple of months that I was literally feeling like I was "up in the air" all the time. I made a list of all the things that were important to me hoping that would give a little more strength to my intention.
Here is what I wrote:
A house where I can live and do my sound healing work
A large yard
Surroundings that help me to feel connected to the outdoors
3 bedrooms so I have a guest room and a treatment room
Fireplace or wood stove
Living room area large enough to host groups for classes, workshops and meditation
Fabulous kitchen
No more than $2000 a month (which would only be doable if I could work there as well.)

And I was finding NOTHING! I couldn't believe the shoddy places they were showing me for between $1700- $2000 a month... Dirty, one which clearly had termites, not enough space, in need of paint, flooring needing to be refinished, etc., etc. I looked at everything- houses, condos, apartments. I went as far as the Berkshires. Nothing, nothing, nothing... I was ready to land, to get my sound healing equipment up from Florida and immerse myself in my work. Nothing.

I was in a funk- something I don't even really know about it. Typically I might get in a bad mood for an hour if my blood sugar gets low but that's about the extent of it. The end of July came around and it was time to think about going to Jai Uttal's kirtan camp in California. I had paid for it in January and now I didn't want to go.  I emailed Jai's wife Nubia and told her I was feeling too ungrounded and up in the air and I needed to find a place to live. My sister Miranda called me that week asking when I was coming to CA as I was going to visit her also and I told her I had cancelled. I said it was too much money- I still needed to pay airfare, lodging, and a car rental- and I needed to find a place to live.  She said, "Are you crazy?! You have to go- I have never seen you so happy and excited about anything as when you went to kirtan camp the last time. Plus it's a tax write-off for you so don't worry about the money. You just have to go."

Well, when my older sister tells me something I take it seriously and she was adamant so I said I would think about it. After I got off the phone I thought, "Well, nothing is actually happening here except that I'm spending hours on the computer and driving around looking at places and I'm not finding a thing. And I'm going crazy and I'm miserable... Maybe this will help free up some energy and I'll find something when I get back."

So off I went to Harbin Hot Springs, CA for a wonderful week of joyful kirtan. That is its own story for a different post. Suffice to say I came back in a much better frame of mind. I felt hopeful and excited. The next 3 weeks went by and I was still spending hours on the computer looking at the same old stuff from here to North Carolina, driving out to Middletown, Portsmouth and Wickford, another trip up to the Berkshires and still no luck but I was in a better mood.

Blissed-out Bhaktas- 2014 Summer Kirtan Camp with Jai Uttal, Nubia Texeira and Daniel Paul

I have to throw in there at this point that there was one house in Tiverton, a log house, that kept showing up on the internet which I kept ignoring. It was a little more than I wanted to spend, although it was in the range I was considering. It had 4 bedrooms- a little bigger than what I felt I needed. It was log and I have always wanted to live in a log house. It had a big deck and a koi pond and actually looked pretty great but I kept thinking, "No... Tiverton- don't know anyone out there. Log, but it's probably not as nice as it looks. The bedrooms look small. It's probably just a winter rental" etc., etc. I had a whole lot of reasons not to bother looking at it.

Noelle, "Ming Ming" and Patience

So September rolled around and I went off to Minneapolis for my granddaughter's 5th birthday. I had a wonderful 5 days and then came back home and sat back down at the computer to look at more places.  Still in a good mood, thank God, and feeling like if I had to stay in my apartment for the winter I could live with that. But I really wanted to get my sound healing equipment up here from Florida. It had been too long. I was missing my sound table and missing my work. So I sat back down at the computer and picked up my seemingly fruitless search where I had left off.

I had one more trip planned- Salt Lake City in mid-October for my son Ben's 35th birthday. He is in his 5th year working on his PhD at the University of Utah and I had never been out there. But 3 days after I got back from MN my sister Miranda, an advanced craniosacral therapist, called me from the Bahamas and said there was a dolphin-assisted intensive therapy program beginning in just two days and some of their clients had to cancel so they were offering it on the cheap just to fill it. She said I should really seize the opportunity and fly down to the Bahamas the next day and take the program. I had the same thought as I'd had a few weeks earlier re: California. No way, I need to stay here and find a place to live. Plus it would be crazy expensive to fly to the Bahamas with less than 24 hour notice!

Nonetheless I gave it some thought- 5 hours a day of craniosacral therapy with one therapy session each day for 4 days with dolphins assisting and two more sessions with two advanced therapists during the day. As Miranda said, I could get the equivalent of a years worth of therapy over the course of the 4-day intensive. I thought about it and thought, Well, maybe I have more stuff to clear around finding a place to land and this could help me. Clearly there were more obstacles on some level that escaped me. Apparently it was meant to be because I found an unreasonably reasonable flight! That cinched the deal for me and I decided to go.

The next day I flew to the Bahamas. The program started the day after I arrived. I set as an intention to clear whatever blocks, release whatever I needed to release, to help me find a place to live. The program was amazing, a lot of openings and awarenesses- nothing earth-shattering- quite a bit of physical release and some emotional stuff, nothing that I could pinpoint in terms of any specific blocks but it was all good. At the end I had an extra day with Miranda which, as Spirit would have it, turned out to be the one year anniversary of our mother's passing. We had both been there with Mum when she died and shared something very profound at that time, so it was quite wonderful and synchronistic that we unexpectedly were together that day.

I came home the next day and there I went- back to the computer! And there was that log house in Tiverton again. This time, instead of blowing it off, I thought "Well, I've looked at everything else- I might as well check it out- and then I can eliminate it!" So I called the realtor, saw the house the next day and felt that I could easily fall in love with it. And not only that, that it would be a perfect place for me to live and work! The day after that I drove out to Tiverton one more time to look at it with my friend Lark and made the decision that yes, this was the house for me.

So here I am, in this fabulous house in Tiverton, RI- and all I can say is that I am seriously deliriously happy! Actually there is quite a bit more to say than that but I will save it for another, hopefully shorter, blogpost now that I have gotten enough stuff put away in the house to feel like I can sit down at the computer and resume writing again. Suffice to say in closing that I got everything on my list and more- some things I wouldn't have even thought of on my own- like a nice deep whirlpool jetted tub in my bathroom. Happy landings!

A Life of Miracles

A few years ago, when the movie "The Secret" came out, a group of us got together at my sound healing center in Florida and watched it together and then stayed for a few hours to make vision boards. I created a vision board that I have always felt represented the essence of who I am on all levels- from the physical to the spiritual. In fact I discovered after I had completed it that it was almost like a road map- at the left hand bottom corner was "Walking the Earth Path". Moving diagonally up and toward the right, in the center of the collage was "Journeys to the Self" and continuing toward the upper right was the section entitled "Journey to the Heart of God". I also found a poem in one section as I looked at the clippings of words that I had included. This was not planned. It goes like this:

     I am the dreamer,
     Arise and shine
     Fully human, fully divine
     O thou invisible spirit!
     Awaken my world
     A life of miracles
     Beyond bliss...

That is my life. That is who I am.

Recently I found a frame for it and today I have finally hung it on the wall. Someone said to me not long ago that I could revisit who I was at the time I made it, but I truly feel that I went into my core when I made it- into my heart and my soul and that it represents the Truth of Who I AM. The reason I decided to hang it where I can see it every day is because I am now engaged in looking for the perfect place to live- a place that I can call my home and not feel like it is a temporary fix until I find THE place. 

It is time for me to have a place where I can live and do the work that I love unencumbered by lack of space and/or any other constraints that could limit my self-expression. If I have that then the only self-limiting constraint I have is me and my own mind!

Grounded in a Sound Reality

I have been practicing sound healing for about 20 years now and studying the effects of sound for considerably longer than that. Today I have been looking over past posts, writings and events I have done over the past ten years. I am as obsessed with sound as I ever was. One thing I notice is that the more I do this work, the longer I stay with it, the more grounded I get. The general perception is that it is "New Age", "woo woo" or just plain "out there" when in fact it is well-grounded in science and physics and deeply affects our physiology and bio-energy. I have people come to me sometimes who are relatively new to the field and very excited and say things like, "When we start playing they won't know what hit them!"

 Okay... I WANT YOU TO KNOW WHAT HIT YOU! That is why I practice, I write and I teach. I want you to know that this is real and much of it is replicable. It is accessible. You do not have to be a wizard, a magician or even a musician. You simply have to be sensitive to how specific tones and frequencies affect you. You learn this by listening- deeply- and observing your own response to what you are hearing; not only learning what sounds in particular make you feel "good" but also those sounds that perhaps make you squirm a little bit or bring up some level of emotional discomfort. You can learn just as much from these as the ones that make you smile, bring warmth to your heart, stimulate your left brain, bring tears to your eyes or make you feel solid and grounded.

We are frequency. All thought is frequency. Our emotions are frequencies and we can use sound to change our frequencies- to give us more energy or to slow down our nervous system. One of the most straightforward ways to do this is by using beat frequencies which affect our brainwaves. Tibetan bowls and certain combinations of tuning forks set up beat frequencies (heard as a pulse) which correlate to specific brainwaves- beta, alpha, theta and delta. Generally the Tibetan bowls will correspond to alpha (8-12 cycles per second), theta (4-8 cps) and delta (0.5-4 cps) which are optimal for learning, deep relaxation, meditation and healing. Brain Tuners, a set of 5 tuning forks, also correspond to brain waves and include a "Beta Tuner" which in combination with the fundamental tone corresponds to the Beta brainwave (13-30 cps) for heightened awareness, maximum brain power, focus and concentration.

Here is a link to an informative article on Brainwave Frequencies and some other ways to access the different brain states: http://synthesislearning.com/article/brwav.htm

Tomorrow night I will be joining my friend Peter Blum for a sound healing event at Santosha Yoga in Cranston, RI which I am really looking forward to. He has a large collection of bowls, gongs and other instruments, pictured below. I will be bringing some crystal bowls, metal bowls and flutes of my own and it should be quite wonderful. We have never worked/played together before but we definitely speak the same language and I think we will be quite in synch with each other.

Yes, we are in synch- he just called me, right after I wrote that paragraph, and said essentially the same thing on the phone as I just said here!

Link to event: http://yogaatsantosha.com/santosha_events/ceremonial-sounds-for-healing/

Five Minutes of Mindfulness (Step to the right...)

I am almost finished reading Jill Bolte Taylor's amazing book My Stroke of Insight. (Click on the title to watch her Ted Talk video.) I first saw it about 5 years ago, made a copy of it and have watched it several times. It is the story of her personal experience and simultaneous observation of herself, a Harvard-trained brain scientist, having a severe stroke as a result of a massive hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain. She observed the left brain function of her brain shutting down over a period of four hours while she drifted in and out of a state of deep peace, euphoria and oneness- which she now believes resides in the right brain and is accessible to all of us if we choose to make a conscious effort to access it.  Over an 8-year period of recovery she consciously chose what parts of her left brain activity she wanted to resurrect and those aspects of its abilities and tendencies that she wished to leave behind (nit-picking, replaying negative tape loops, holding on to anger, etc.). It is a powerful and illuminating story.

In 2006 I had a head injury, a severe blow to my right temple. I am grateful to be reminded of what I learned during that time. The primary lesson for me was that I had a choice about how I thought and what I thought about. I did not have the mental energy to step out of the present for several weeks if not longer, and it was an incredible gift. My head hurt so badly in the beginning and it literally was too exhausting for my brain to think so my mind became very quiet- the deepest quiet and strongest experience of presence that I can remember having in this lifetime.  The defining moment that stayed with me was a little over two weeks after the initial injury. I was receiving an Ayurvedic treatment called shirodhara. I lay on a massage table with warm herbal-infused oil streaming onto my forehead and I had a thought. Up to that point my mind had been silent for some time- not unaware, in fact very present, but very quiet. So in this moment, as I observed myself having a thought, I saw in my mind's eye a water strider on the surface of a pool of water. The water strider represented my thought and I knew in that moment that I could follow it as it skittered across the surface of the water (the pool of my mind) or I could dive beneath the surface to where it was completely quiet and peaceful.


That awareness stayed with me for a long time and in fact became a practice as my left brain began to reengage more and more. I could either follow a thought and engage in it to whatever level was comfortable or, if it was uncomfortable on any level, I had the option to simply dive beneath the surface and let it go. As time has gone by, although I always remember this, I would say that I have become to some extent lazy in engaging the ability to make a conscious choice on how I expend my mental energy and I am so grateful to be reminded of the possibility- adn as Jill Bolte Taylor puts it, the I can "step to the right and bring my thoughts back to the present moment." It is a conscious choice.

It makes me think of how many times I have heard myself and others say, "I can't stop thinking about..." blah, blah, blah- whatever it is. Yes, in fact I can. It is a conscious choice and it requires a certain amount of exercise. 

Which takes me to the next point. Yesterday I heard a great interview on NPR with Dan Harris, author of 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head... Basically he is a proponent of a simple meditation technique: 5 minutes... sitting... bringing the attention to the breath... and every time you notice the mind wandering, bringing it back to the breath... again and again and again. And, as he puts it, every time you do this "it's a bicep curl for the brain"- which I love! Between listening to his talk and reading My Stroke of Insight I have decided to turn to a practice of 5 minutes of mindfulness at least twice a day and preferably more. We'll see how that goes. I already know from past experience (years when I did a lot of meditation) that meditation on the breath is one of the most powerful meditation techniques there is because the breath is always available to us and every time we notice the breath in that moment we are present.

In Jill Bolte Tayor's book she talks about how she changes her mind if her left brain activity is not being cooperative (that voice that is like a petulant child who sometimes just refuses to be quiet!)...
1) remembering something that she finds fascinating that she would like to ponder more deeply
2) thinking about something that brings her great joy
3) thinking about something she would like to do

I would add to this list "listening to music." Music immediately engages the right brain and pulls us back (or forward!) into the present. It can drop us into a state of peace, joy, motivation with no effort on our part- all we need is to remember that we have a choice

The bottom line is- we have the power to change our minds, to choose what we engage in. We simply need the willingness and the discipline.

True learning is constant, and so vital in its power for change that a Son of God can recognize his power in one instant and change the world in the next. That is because, by changing his mind, he has changed the most powerful device that was ever given him for change.
                                 ~A Course in Miracles, Text: Chapter 7, Section 5 (Paragraph 7)~

Norah Jones - Rosie's Lullaby

Yes, this is definitely my lullaby.



My good friend Will told me a few weeks ago that I had to listen to this song. I found this video of it that same day and soon began sobbing- heartfelt, gut-wrenching tears. The video itself is exquisite.

For me, the song touches such a deep place that I have no words for it.  I listened to it over and over that first day, singing with it and weeping. I don't know if it brought up some grief over my mother's death that I was unaware was sitting quietly in a space in my heart waiting to be released- or if it was something much older, deeper, the longing for Home. I only know that this song is one of a very few that I feel has really tapped into the deepest part of my Self.

I immediately ordered the CD and the studio version is so rich, full and poignant. I typically listen to it at least once a day and most of the time it still makes me weep. I figure they are tears of a grief and a longing that need to be released so I have been letting them go. The funny thing is, I don't feel sad- more just a pulling on my heart.



I am posting this one- a live version- rather than the studio version because the imagery is so beautiful. Whoever put together the visuals did a beautiful job.