Last night someone responded to a blogpost I wrote ten years ago. Here is the link to that post: A Taste of My Own Medicine. I am bringing attention to it for a couple of reasons. One, because ten years ago Seth Godin created the Your Turn Official Challenge, a challenge to “ship”- ie, write a blog post every day for 30 days and this was written at the start of it. (I think I did it faithfully for about 90 days before I began to fade off.") And two, because it was specifically about vibroacoustic sound therapy which I have now been doing for 30 years and it caused me to think about that. I am so grateful to have work that impacts other people’s lives and that continues to grow and expand- taking me along with it!

This is feeling like a year of milestones for me. Two weeks ago I celebrated my 70th birthday. I love birthdays. I love new decades. I love forward momentum. And that is what I am feeling. For me, since my birthday is one week after New Year’s Day and exactly two weeks after Christmas, I always feel like the new year doesn’t really start for me until after my birthday. That is when I turn the page. I always love it and celebrate it and think about how I want to move onto the coming year. I often start with a post-holiday cleanse and, in recent years, I have adopted a 40-day yoga practice as well, to support the cleanse.

This year I feel like there is more happening though, that is beyond the changes I am consciously making, the behaviors I am letting go of and the intentions I am setting forth. It feels like there is a huge energetic shift. It feels like I am riding a wave of joyful momentum. Also, on some level, this birthday feels like an accomplishment. I don’t know what that’s about it but I like it and I want to continue to celebrate it.

It started off with a trip to Arizona to spend my birthday with my sister Miranda. She went out of her way to make it incredibly special for me and one of my best birthdays ever. We had so much fun and did so many wonderful things- visiting the Hubbell Trading Post, going to Twin Rivers Casino, having a series of fabulous meals, doing a walking meditation around the Amitibha Stupa in Sedona. The highlight of the trip though, was going to Canyon de Chelly. I had been there once just for the night when I was 15 and it had been one of the most impactful and profoundly spiritual experiences of my life. I had always wanted to go back. So we did that, spent two full days there in the beauty, so quiet that we could hear the whooshing of the ravens’ wings when they flew overhead. It was unquestionably as beautiful and powerful as I remembered it. I loved the sense of opening, being in that spaciousness and grandeur, and the awaareness of closure, coming full circle, at the same time.

I got home last week and found out a couple of days ago that the brilliant multi-instrumentalist and composer, Mike Oldfield, creator of Tubular Bells, the theme to the film “The Exorcist” is going to be on tour and doing several concerts in Europe in March and April, so yesterday I called my dear friends Paul and Jane in the Netherlands and told them I wanted to come visit and to see Mike Oldfield with them. They immediately bought tickets for the concert- a small venue, only 820 seats- and I bought a plane ticket! My next big birthday present to myself! So I have already done one thing I have wanted to do for over 50 years, go back to Canyon de Chelly, and in a couple of months I am going to see Mike Oldfield, one of my all-time favorite musicians- something I never expected to happen! I could not be more excited.

The above video is a sweet piece from Mike’s beautiful and timeless album, Ommadawn, which to this day remains one of my favorite pieces of music. So hey and away we go!

I feel like I am off and running and life is good!