Demo with tuning fork after a sound journey at Women & Infants Hospital
Besides giving treatments at Integrative Care and doing Sound Journeys at the hospital I have been crazy busy getting ready for trip to FL- compiling instruments, going through paperwork, feeling inspired and full of new tools and ideas to bring to the workshops.
I also want to include here the link for the Providence Journal article which finally ran in last Sunday's paper and again, the link to the video.
I have also gotten another shipment of amazing singing bowls and a 30" gong which is quite extraordinary. Unfortunately I haven't uploaded the pictures onto my computer yet but I will soon. Have been doing lots of reorganizing, opening space in my healing room as well as the rest of my house. Feel like I'm shifting some energy for greater clarity and openness as I step into this new year.
Setting the stage for a Healing Sound Journey last week at the Yoga Center of Newburyport
To all my beautiful sound loving and healing friends- I am sorry my posts have been sparse lately. Fortunately, the reason is because I have been really busy doing lots of healing work!
I have spent the last 6 hours sending out information and making calls to people who are interested in hosting either sound journeys or workshops. I am about to call it quits for the night but I wanted to at least do a short blog post.
Today I ran across two wonderfully inspiring videos- one by my friend, the beautiful troubadour JP Jones, and the other by a sound healer who I have been hearing a great deal about over the last couple of years- Alexandre Tannous. It is a video of a really good TEDTalk he gave on Sound Meditation. Some of it gets into stuff that is a bit difficult to follow (at least for me!) but he is so pleasant to listen to and it suddenly becomes quite mind-blowing at about the 15-minute mark, so stay with it! It is well worth it.
I did finally make it home to my house of wholistic sound a little over a week ago. A two and a half week trip that evolved into exactly one month- full of surprises, old friends and new, sound journeys, car breakdowns, a visit to a gated community for hippies (The Farm, Summertown, TN) and much more!
Amazing what happens when you leave a house for a month. I could not have imagined how overgrown everything would be! Also factoring in living alone for the first time in my life- no kids, no sweetie, no mom to take care of... an interesting time in my life. Some days I feel like I am a bit lost and floundering and I have to remind myself that I have never done this before, not even knowing at times how to start my day... Yoga? Coffee? Music? Art? Writing? Breakfast? Vitamins? Weeding?
It's not sad and not particularly lonely although I suppose it could become that. More, it's just weird! When someone else is in the house I know what to do even if I think it's not necessarily what I want to do.
Meanwhile this blog is supposed to be about music and sound. And I am sitting at my dining room table loving the sound of the beautiful glass chimes that Josh Poll of Zen Glass in St. Pete, FL made for me when I had my sound healing center, which I finally hung up a couple of days ago. I have an entire box of chimes that people donated to the center which eventually all need to be hung in my new home and place of healing sound pleasures and treasures.
I opened up Facebook this morning and was greeted by this video of a most amazing version of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". I was blissed to tears. My total inspiration for the day- how can you not love it?!
So far this has been an extraordinary trip. Last Monday when I was driving from St. Pete to Tallahassee my phone battery got down to about 35% so I plugged it into the radio as I needed the GPS. A while later I loooked at it and it was down to 17%. This was weird... I thought it must be a problem with the charger so I stopped at a Mini-Walmart (who knew?) and bought a new charger that I could plug in to the lighter- within a very short time it was down to 13%. Now I was nervous. I was taking "the scenic route" to Tallahassee and definitely would need directions. I stopped the car and wrote down the directions to Ryan and Arielle's house, where I was going to be staying. Now it seemed that my phone was dying and I was nervous. I wrote down the directions on a piece of paper, texted Ryan and told him I was turning off the phone to save the now remaining 7% so I could call if I needed to reach them when I got to Tallahassee.
I drove the rest of the way to Tallahassee and when I got off the state road and was about a mile from their house, all of a sudden my battery light and brake light came on inside the car. Miraculously I made it to their house, went in and told them I had thought that my phone was dying but apparently it was really the car! Ryan relayed to me what good fortune I had because his dad has an auto repair shop so my car had broken down in just the right place! This was true for more reasons than just that. I could have broken down on the beautiful but very sparsely traveled road to Tallahassee. Also, since I had in fact reached my destination, we were able to transfer my instruments right away to Ryan's car, drop my car off at the shop (it started- another miracle!) and then go over to the yoga studio where I was going to be doing the Sound Journey the next night.
The car needed an alternator and front brake pads. My rule of thumb is that if a car repair is less than $500 I'm doing okay- this one was $384 and I had the cash to pay for it so I was relieved all the way around. I would always rather know that my car is safe and not have to worry.
The rest of the week there was great. Everyone loved the Sound Journey and I did a number of private sessions. The Abundance Wellness Center was such a beautiful space for everything I was doing, Arielle and Ryan and their little boy Aidan were sweet and wonderful hosts with a house fill of instruments from around the world, and I spent the last night at my new friend Lydia Rydiell's magic little house in the woods amidst her gongs and crystals. It was all so amazing.
On Friday I left my new friends in Tallahassee and drove to Murphy, NC to visit some old friends- two of my favorite people, Mahesh and Mukta. This was my time to take a break and stop working for a few days. I had a wonderful relaxing visit with them, laughed a lot, ate some good food, hiked in the woods and left today for The Farm in Tennessee.
Unfortunately I didn't get far! About 3 miles from their house a light flickered on my dashboard, a strange burning smell began to emanate from under the hood and my car struggled to make it up the next hill. A short distance away was an auto repair shop. I turned in, turned off the car, turned it back on thinking I should pull closer and it didn't want to move. I got out, called Mahesh and Mukta to find out if there was somewhere else I should bring the car too and Mukta said this was the place. Good thing since apparently it wasn't going any further!
So- my trip to The Farm has been delayed. I am back at Mahesh and Mukta's awaiting the verdict on my car- something to do with the transmission for sure and possibly in need of a new radiator as well. Again, I can only be grateful that I was down the road from my dear friends, that I get another two days to relax no matter what the problem is, and the way it looks we'll be able to reschedule the Healing Sound Journey at The Farm for either Friday or Saturday evening.
Meanwhile, here is a moment that caused a round of uncontrollable laughter in the woods near Murphy. Mukta, Mahesh and I were walking and we came upon this crazy gypsy moth caterpillar nest. I was curious what would happen if I started overtoning- the caterpillars went crazy! Mukta said, "You are the only person I know who would come upon a nest of caterpillars and start toning!" That sent us all off into fits of laughter for quite a while!
The other exciting thing is that my sister sent me this article today from last Saturday's New York Times, Sound Baths Move From Mainstream to Metaphysical. I would say so, if there is an article about it in the NYT. A lot of people (especially my family) have thought I was pretty crazy trying to make a living doing what I do. Clearly I was just ahead of my time!!!
I can't go another day without at least a brief update. I have to get up early tomorrow and go to Osprey to give some treatments and every day has been long and intense, but also very rich and wonderful. This is one of the best sound journey/healing trips I have done in a very long time- maybe the best ever. Such a warm, open appreciative reception. A very successful workshop last weekend and time spent with old friends and new. Have set up two more sound journeys since I've been here and new opportunities are opening up every day.
Saw two beautiful friends I made in the Bahamas last year this afternoon and will go back down to their house in Sarasota on Saturday and give them each a sessions. All in all it has just been great. Tomorrow night and Friday night I do Healing Sound Journeys and another on Tuesday in Tallahassee where I will stay for 2-3 days and give sessions also. So bottom line, it's all good!
This is a picture taken earlier this evening when I was setting up for tomorrow night's Sound Journey at the Temple of the Living God in St. Petersburg.
