Let music love you! ( A Life line, from suicide to love divine #2)

Let Music love you! - ( A Life line, from suicide to love divine #2)

 Music is like a hot line from suiscide to love divine!….It changes  you before you even know its happening, at every phase ofour mental health curve music works on us! music is a mentor and teacher passing on the true life understanding of those who have gone before us.

Basically any emotion you feel stuck in, and want to be pulled out of is successfully transformed when we listen to the right music. Simply journey through the hypnotic spell of musics' magic. Music can take you immediately out of any space you want to transition from. Heres' what to do; 

First play something that is exactly where you are at ….angry or sad etc. Songza (on line) is like pandora but you can actually put in any emotion or activity and it will play for you all sorts of music resonating with your mood or intention. Then after you feel fully understood by the musicians simpatico with you, next put on something that is one notch higher in vibration than where you are at. So if you started out in despair and you played Tom Waits to revel in existential debauchery, then you  went into heartbreaking fury with Courtney Love (ok I'm showing my age!) and then longing for release with Evan Essence, you might get to the revenge of Adelles' anger anthems, all in the same listening session. You will be in a very different space by then. You will have gone from despair and disempowerment to the great satisfaction of revenge, and a little higher towards the empowerment of righteous anger! You will feel lifted out of the original place simply by having enough will power to put on the music and allow it to change your mood! And if you are swept up into dancing it can be positively embarrassing that we can go from pathos to elation so quickly! 

The vibration of music; When mountains sing!

There is a movie scene that has eternally caught my mystical attention. I think of it again and again in wonderment.  It is the opening adventure of "meetings with remarkable men" Which is the true account of Mr. Gurdjieffs life. In the scene he is allowed to witness with his father, a competition between the greatest musicians of his country. The movie begins with Gurdjieff as a young boy walking with many royally dressed musicians and families carrying fine instruments and velvet pillows and persian rugs into the desert mountains. Soon the procession meanders into a canyon. The Giant rugs are unrolled and families settle somberly onto their extravagant pillows with definite intensity of focus. No one makes a sound. The audience faces a stage of hauntingly beautiful desert cliffs carved by ancient winds. One by one each musician plays against this backdrop. All ears are steady in anticipation and absorbed concentration. The most heart felt music is played . Many different kinds of instrumentalists play extremely rare levels of composition.  But no one claps. All three hundred or so people gathered wait in raptured silence for a full minute after each musicians last note sales out across the cliffs. Yet there is an air of disappointment when silence resounds. But at last one musician comes forward. he is robust with a red beard and sings and plays pipes alternately. When his composition comes to a crescendo ending, the silence feels pregnant and then it happens….the true proof of great musicianship; The mountains suddenly start resounding with his sounds. Yet the cliffs are singing a different song! The choir of mountain crags are bouncing the chords back and forth on and on down the corridor of the canyons walls. As the walls of the mountains begin to vibrate in response to the song their echoes become more and more complex with multilayered harmonics. And so the winner of the contest is handed a baby goat as prize. And in reverence the whole gathering packs up the caravan in deep silent satisfaction.

 The other night I was coming home at 2am from Salsa dancing and i was singing one of my own songs over and over. Some how the song was all new to me as I sang and I kept hearing strangely beautiful harmonies as I drove through the night stars. When I reached home I was spell bound by these harmonies getting more multilayered. So I just stayed sitting in the car and slowed down my parts. As I sang them an over tone began to sing with me a clear resounding counter harmony. Some how the vibration of my voice was interacting with the car to produce a call and response of sound. As I went deep into meditation following the sounds flowing from me and back to me simultaneously I was transfixed by the harmony being sung to me. was it  from another dimension? Yet it was right here with me louder than my own singing!…. Resonant reciprocal vibrational sound frequency response! sounds so fancy! How can I explain something so magical? Do you even believe me? Then I had the thought "how amazing it would be if these vibrations of sound where like a tuning fork for the audience creating a reciprocal vibration in their bodies as they listened?

 I knew what was happening!  When we lived in Tepoztlan Mexico we had a similar experience. Music was part of the street life in this region. It was a spiritual destination for expatriates from all over the world as well as the Cuernavaca Elite. This meant that there were bands of extraordinary musicians speaking many languages from all over the world yet music was their common language. They were often highly skilled, disguised as hippies, to get away with playing their hearts out together on roof tops at night. There were often music parties in the glamourous TP village (built for tourists but super fun for locals to inhabit). In the middle of the cliff alcoves at night a gigantic PA system would be set up with candles as the only lighting. Then the most avant guard rockin sexy intoxicatingly mystical music would begin sailing through the majestic mountains. Along with the harmonies were bats swooping down to taunt us! In this setting of constant improvisational surprise there was a singer who created three over tones when he sang. These tones were distinct separate melodies from his one melody. The harmonics he caused were like high flutes. One day he came to the house next door to me. Our houses were joined by the windows of our kitchens  on a crescent moon patio we shared from the adobe duplex we lived in at the time. Our Canadian friends who lived next door were recording an album with state of the art equipment set up by the roadies of a roving recording studio. So they were able to capture this singers other worldly sounds on the album! Listening is like seeing a ghost caught on film. You think "awe photo shop tricks!" But I saw and heard this musician in person. The layer upon layer of melodic harmonies and strange flute vibrato in separate melodic levels would fill our ears. Yet these overlapping melodies were not coming from his human voice. Yet he caused a vibrational response from the surrounding physical world to resonate into sound responsive Spirit music!

And then there is making music! bliss that comes when the music is intoxicating!

Some times I am afraid of the intimacy of the way music gets into my heart and makes me sweat and tingle. I start to resist it. I know its calling me to totally merge and surrender to oneness with it so it can claim my whole system. The music makes the demand to be followed. Its command is only semi negotiable. So if I try to do my part without listening fully, then I am completely out of sync. I figure The melody can go anywhere …sort of like my theory that all roads lead to the same place…"just head in any direction and aim where you want to go eventually the circle of all roads interweaves the web" My daughter cries "oh no you don't! Not the all roads connect thing again! " She has seen me find my way many times by this method after being lost for a long time all along the way! So when there is a map, or a GPS …. I can just see my mother shouting at the GPS like she did last time I tried to show her how it worked "stop telling me what to do! I'm going a different way if I want to!" Like mother like daughter I guess! But when it comes to music the map is the score, the gps is the groove, surrendering into the trust of a map out of our grasp until we feel the perfect flow of going with it! When I do this resisting the map the musicians I work with get so mad at me they just stop playing. So I have to have more courage. I am afraid of inhalation by sex with music! But I am getting more brave as I continue to survive rehearsals. the closer I get to the source of those sounds the happier I feel.

There is a journey we take as musicians that is out of our control, the music its self feels as if it starts to compose the melody of our lives as we dream the music in our sleep. The feeling is all about pleasure. Even if its a painful song , it hurts so good!  And the music insists "this bliss is what life really is about! Come with me now and you will find out how much pleasure you can handle!" Then the dance takes over your body in response to your musical wave you are riding and now you are fucked! You will never be able to stop your love of the music and dance that allows you to have heaven now without even having to die for it! Ah but you would die for it because you do surrender and swoon and die and become reborn again and again just by listening. Right music lovers? You don't have to be a musician to know what Im sayin!

Making music with others creates community

There was a time period when I lived in Sebastepole California where we were part of "Ecotopia". That is We got to come to a a charismatic leaders garden for a weekly potluck with families with lots of kids beside his man made pond with a little fake waterfall. (but the pond lotuses were real!) We would all eat and swim and then we would dance for two hours to a gabriel Roth five rhythms wave, world beat dance mix for two hours no talking! Then there would be a sharing circle in which any one who needed anything could ask and we would all do our best to give it to them. And next a hot tub for some and a fire circle for joking and deep story telling, for others. It was so fulfilling! We were fed to overflowing in spirit - heart- body! All of this centered around the music -dance journey together! 

What is a bon fire with out the music? What is the celebration with out the dance to the live musicians? 

It helps to handle this bliss that I keep falling in love with the musicians I work with! Then there is all the love endorphins rushing in along with the creative high! I 'm a junkie for all things that release love endorphins. But my way is the opposite of sleeping your way to the top. I'm happy to be on the bottom!!! (literally!) I  guess I fall in love too easily, so I see why musicians become womanizers…all things great  just have to be ok to say yes to! Its the surrendering into such swooning "yesssss!" and all that is good and delicious that makes the music possible! Artists have reputations for "doing" their models, and actors are notorious for falling for their fellow actors only to dump each other to partner up with their next theatrical team mate….the art and love are entwined. So I worry I'll just have to be a "manizer" to be a bonified  authentic musician. Its a terrible thought but I'm comforted that at least men seem to just delight in being used like that.

 But I would do it again and again because the combination of love and music is so much the same thing! How can you separate them? And then there is the sheer bliss of sharing this experience of joining in creation when we are taken into trance with the other musicians (or artists of our chosen art form). Its as if you Musicians or actors or muralists etc..have seen a UFO together. You just can't explain to anyone what just happened when all of those sounds converged into one song. Or in the script we became lost to who we were as we start to believe our parts in the play! Or perhaps we painted and actual porthole through which spirit now pours or we can disappear into the very gateway we painted. We traverse a spiritual world made visible! The actuality of music and the Art,  is not ours, even though we get to feel it flowing through us. The music passes through our bodies. So we follow the music when it leaves us, as willing captives, loving the leash! We follow the muse into the next song or back again along the loop ( noose)  of the one that claims us until we are released in surrendered emptiness to be filled by the next song!

How to stay balanced when music gets you too high;

Now I understand why so many musicians end up drugged up or dying of overdoses. The feeling of creating music is an endorphin rush that keeps fluidly expanding. I am pretty sure that " trippy psychedelic alteration of awareness" goes along with the birthing of most Art forms. And we are irrevocably altered by the river the arts carves through us. All sorts of debris are moved up and out as the creative river washes through the terrain of our beings. 

I had the great good fortune to date a  joyous musician who is still shaping my singing path today. I had a front row ticket to his life and back stage pass to the underpinnings of his rockin rock star career. He had his success capped purposefully. He kept it at just the perfect level between fun heart connected notoriety and miserable entrapping fame. So many secrets to his profoundly personally successful musical career were revealed to me on the back of his motorcycle as we zipped from adventure to gigs. He was flying me back and forth from Miami to be with him.  His story is the antidote to the Amy Winehouse tragedy. I'll call him "Diego" . Diego is a Brazilian guitarist and singer song writer who gigs almost every day, some times even twice in a day! He plays alone as a solo act using a looper for multidimensional layers of his playing, at other times he accompanies singers, assists church choirs, is the main guitarist for a really popular Samba-Funk band and puts together all different types of ensembles from original to new versions of cover tunes sets, playing for club parties up to two thousand and simply for four or five e couples having quiet drinks after dinner. consequently his lavish and  modest success means he is constantly faced with the temptations of debauchery that most musicians give into. Many of his super talented musician buddies squander their privileges before and after gig hours  with the expected drinking, pot smoking, and empty sexing that endanger their careers and inevitably shorten their lush lives. I'm sure he enjoys joining them at times. Perhaps they would get so high from playing music that they felt they either needed help to come down to earth, or just couldn't stand coming down and wanted to keep getting higher. Or maybe after hours of playing they just wanted a reward that would help them relax. 

Yet Diego's way of dealing with the too high factor was in most cases totally different than some of his gig mates who were dangerously drunk around him after gigs. It would be two am and Diego might  say "Hey Im feeling so high, how about we go Kayaking in the moonlight?"  He called me often In between two stressful gigs or on his way home at 2in the morning. One time he had taken his skate board out of the trunk of his car and zoomed all over the parking lot until all stress from the last gig was gone. Another time he went out paddle boarding in a storm. Or if it was sunny and all he needed was his guitar he would ride his motorcycle or bike to the gig and arrive elated before even playing. Before or after gigs he had hours of high energy of a very young man to give to me in creative intimacy. then he would sleep like a baby, wake up around eleven and meditate without fail every day for 20 minutes. This way he entered a peaceful mind before even talking. Then he would make really fresh food of a vegetarian diet and do rigorous yoga while I did my prayer dancing.

 He answered his emails while gently bouncing and rolling subtle stretches on his physio ball that served in the place of  a chair.  Yet mainly he just received gig invitations and accepted his agents directives on his phone , minimizing computer time.Any night without a gig was an opportunity to go social dancing. His favorites were Zouk, and samba clubs. The dance was very heart connected, often starting with hugging and ending inevitably in laughter! We spent many ecstatic hours practicing together these dance forms. But I was impressed also at his ability to rest in a luxuriously simple manner. He might get inspired to go star gazing or just chill by hanging with friends. He might unwind by creating original music with me. If we were doing errands he had the habit of holding my hand all along the way. But his hand was so alive! There was an exchange of our energy going on that made even hohum errands become full of recharging closeness. I was invited on the smallest errand and these were often our funnest moments by surprise. Yet what was normal life to him felt like over the top decadence to me.

He is like a  mentor to the musicians who work with him and adore his company. Such healthy fun habits  make him more successful, more healthy, fifteen years younger seeming than the younger musicians around him. And in addition he is on time, well dressed, and able to help the other musicians who are scrambling to get to it together. He would arrive to a club irreverently friendly so that his disarming authenticity had a way of uplifting every one who he either confronted or complimented.  But I am not really suggesting we try and be literally like Diego. It's that the things he did to stay balanced all had common elements that I think we can really benefit from.

1) He is going for more joy and pleasure (not less), so instead of being afraid of ever expanding bliss and numbing his pleasure he's surfing the pleasure that his art gives him. He's staying on the crest of the wave to get even more of a rush and longer ride all the way up to the sand. Now my mother insists this is not and end to its self. She added when she read this

" We must embrace the lessons in pain to be capable of cultivating love. Certainly Diego went through many trials also to learn his music stick with it and courageously offer his music in a strange new land. So on the level of spiritual growth there are things that are horrible that we must learn from…significant how we react when things don't go how we want..gigs can be crazy…unpredictable…yet you must maintain your cool and be the life of the party  no matter how your feeling. So there is strength in learning how not to express negative emotion. Being a channel for the good vibrations of music also makes you an aware witness. It can be life aligning just to recognize and see what we don't want in self and others. Just the recognition melts the habit we don't want in ourselves. "

 2) He is engaging in habits that all feed health. His sporty little hobbies bring him outside into the sun and or strengthen his body.

3) He's releasing the negativity in life and stress through the playing of the music.

4)  He is the first to admit he that his first wife is his guitar. She owns him, she commands, insists, gushes because of him, and she is totally worth his full commitment above all other mistresses or wives! So there is surrender to a higher calling that creates inner peace and outer abundance in the giving…we give into our calling and as it claims us we become more and more capable of channeling the blessing for more and more people to do the same.

Music  that causes an orgasm in the heart

I had the great good fortune to be working on my music with Freddy. In addition to being a masterful poet he is also a wizardly musician and studio technician. While collaborating with him on my songs I asked if Freddy had any original music of his own that I could help him with. Silly me! He didn't need any help!! When I heard his songs I literally had an orgasm in my heart. I didn't know that was possible, it felt like I might die except it felt so good and there was no fear, only tears. Why did his music do that to me? I couldn't understand the lyrics in spanish. But the emotional quality conveyed in pure sound touched all of me. It was so beautiful!!! 

I asked to read the translation of the lyrics and found words of unimaginable beauty expressed where we normally reach wordlessness. I read more of Freddy's lyrical poetry. When I read them I feel an overwhelming body buzz similar to how his music affects me.

I needed to know more about the source and process of such great art. I found out that Freddy had endured terrible atrocities in Peru. Yet right along side these tortures he had witnessed the most beautiful acts of love and sacrifice. During this time he became aware of the only things that really matter in life. 

Right there in hell he used his own consciousness to focus and find everything that was essential to him. From what could have destroyed him, instead he forged himself out of the gifts of love and sacrifice from others who saved him. He was then able to harness his own power of love and realigned his life to follow his heart when he survived. 

He said the private album I heard is his way of making beauty out of pain. I hope he will have the time and self worth to release this miraculous album to us all. I am contemplating how music and poetry that makes beauty out of suffering actually orgasms the heart. My own songs became so much more full of magic by Freddy's artistry. And when I hear them now they fill me with overflowing swelling love. I wish you could hear his songs too but perhaps we all will soon.

Have you ever noticed that a lover who touches your heart-spirit  with magical words or music, some how opens your body without touch? What a huge advantage a lover like that has over everyone else!

 Sex of music!

What is sexual? Isn't it an energy running thats electrical, smooth and flowing? Doesn't it carrie us like music does, on waves of multidimensional connection? Then there is what special music does for making love!!! I highly recommend we all get more set lists together for different kinds of love making expressions…tender, rockin & rollin, heavenly sensual, spiritually divine, sexy ecstasy, deep and profound, wild and fierce, playful and silly….etc!

What about the realm of music that comes from the Gods & Goddesses?

 There is a craving that the nature spirits and heavenly beings have to hear the incredible music of the humans realm. 

 Several times I heard the ancestors response of gratitude. We were in a teeny cathedral theater dedicated to God the mother. we were practicing ancient African rhythms on authentic drums hand out of what seemed to be still living tree trunks. We were in accidental worship space as we synchronized our rhythms together. Then it came the audible sound of hundreds of ancestors singing in five part harmonies. we were fed by them a transcendental awe that we may have brought to their realm!

When I was part of an African dance company were were often daunted by the impossibly aerobic choreography. We were learning complex polyrhythms we could barley summon strength to dance. But then they would come…the spirit Drums! Carrying us high on winged feet! Next the choir of the ancestors singing in us, as us would be giving us miraculous abilities to danced. It was as if we were on fire. It was as if fire was our pure nature!

Yet when I went to other drum and dance gatherings where the hippies were randomly banging I would feel sick. I could feel the hungry ancestors clamoring for their nectar only to be made nauseous by human arrogance and laziness. Then when any drummer appeared out of the noise to play the ancient rhythms  the Ancestors  would soon be inspired. Then a call and response of improvisational communication would start to bounce back and forth between the worlds. This "improvisation" would be rooted in polyrhythmic awareness….suddenly everything will change. Every average person of every age who hears such an exchange going on becomes a magical dancer! The ancestors have come with gratitude. Then they to carry us into their experience  of light bodies as we dance they enter us simultaneously to taste once again, the bliss of the human body!

Recently here in Shelburne Falls after a rehearsal as I was driving away from the band I heard all new base parts as loud as a sound system playing in my mind. The parts kept changing so beautifully. I was riveted to the sound! Yet I am not a bass player. I don't even play any instrument but my voice.Yet The bass took  over my mind and sang to me as rhythmic melodies. They thwacked in n the car wipers,They thrummed in the gravel of the road, they wapped in wind whipping a bag in the back seat…etc!. It started from the super melodic and sensual rhythmic sounds of an excellent base player who had graced our group. His music got into me and I couldn't stop hearing his bass parts. Yet somehow I heard all new bass parts. Life really was all about that base!

Dance that music allows!

Have you noticed your self begin to sway when the music of the wind gathers your spiritual bliss together for you? 

Have you noticed a riot of movement about to burst you into gyrations when that rhythm that is just so grooving takes you on? Yet have you had the privilege to see deaf peoples dance? They feel the music through musics pure vibration! Gabriel Roth is a dance leader who noticed that when people surrender to their dance our movements go in a familiar arch that takes us through a journey. So if you DJ a dance and you take people through five distinct kinds of rhythms you will help them ride a full wave of expression. We naturally start out very flowing then we need to get more rhythmic and staccato, which leads us into the readiness for release into wild chaos, and this sails us into lyrical ecstasy and we come down into deep silence and stillness of reverent movement. Gabriel Roth taught this way of dancing our prayers. Its sublime! I continue her gift to me in my kitchen. I made myself various musical wave mixes. I put them on my I-pod and I also dance my prayers around my little village town so that I am integrating my love for the sun the air this life, my body and all our journey as one! The five rhythms also correspond to the five emotions. So Another way to allow music to help you get out of one emotion into the next is to dance your emotions using Songza again helps because you can find music categorized by emotion and dance it through you system or dance the emotion you want to be in can be even more effective than practicing the one you are good at!

So love yourself enough to engage with music while you are here on Earth! We are more privileged than ever before to be able to hear music from all over the world at the press of a button! Give e yourself the upliftment! Turn off the TV. Find your music and let it permeate you!!! Love Eve