What your love of music is telling you about your heart’s potential

A few weeks after learning meditation in 1996, I was sitting alone in my living room, practicing what little I could in the silence.

All of  sudden—WHAM!—a huge presence of Love overwhelmed me. What was THIS?!

As a musician, I experience love in many forms: the passion of playing, the pleasure of connecting with great artists and friends, or an inspired performance that opens my heart and helps me FEEL.

But this was was a deeper, purer experience of Love than I had ever felt.

I was baffled. There was no one else in the room. 

It was like a 10-foot sphere of Love stepped in and said,

“Hi, I’m LOVE. Good to meet you.”

We all have sacred love of music moments that transport us into a different emotional universe. My most powerful came to me as a 6-year old listening to my dad lead songs in our tiny old house in Chicago, then as a young teenager transformed by the West Side Story Symphonic Dances while lying under the stars at Tanglewood, and as a grad student mesmerized by an exquisite Joffrey Ballet duo to Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in Charleston, SC. Each of these dramatically deepened my love of music.

I realized that my love of music helped open the door and create the space for this more universal Love to come flooding in.

I had up until then experienced love as an outward flowing energy of emotion, affection, expression, longing or attachment, but this Love didn’t need desire or even another person on the other end of it. My breathing, usually agitated, became suddenly still as this powerful presence showed me the fullest potential for my heart.

It was a WHOLENESS I had never experienced before.

As a spiritually immature 28-year old, I had no idea where to go with this. Assuming it was mine forever, I foolishly went back to my habits of restlessness.

I woke up the next morning, and it was gone.

But in it’s place was a life-long desire to get it back again.

After hours (and years) of self-study, introspection, attunement, and most of all, practice, I found it again.

I built the patterns and habits that allowed me to call upon this Love by opening my heart not only outward, but primarily upward. I have been inviting this Love into my performing, conducting, teaching, and writing now for many years. I know that when I’m not feeling it, I can get it back, for I’m told by wiser heads than my own that this Love has always been my heart’s fullest potential.

So when your love of music awakens for a moment, go deeper with it. Take your experience into stillness and allow it to resonate within. Create the space to make it feel at home.

Allow it to open the doors to your own heart’s fullest potential.