Switch On (Shine Your Light #3)

Switch On (Shine Your Light #3)

Thinking about cake What lights you up? The signs are unmistakable: awakened energy, captivated attention, and a joy that beams through your smile. Well, that’s easy! Cake! Cake lights me up! Especially angel food cake with raspberries! Actually…I was talking about

Music, the Heart, and Hope

Tuning my share of 150 elementary string players before their joint rehearsal the other day was the perfect opportunity to practice sharing kindness and love from a relaxed heart. It kept me calmly focused, and definitely helped me perceive one

Musical Shifts of Consciousness

Last night I hosted a screening of a beloved movie, after which I experienced what is commonly called a “shift in consciousness”. I felt deep joy and connectedness, and my mind rose above worries for the future. All I wanted

Music, Yoga, and the Divine Response

Live music & yoga: what incredible, dramatic impact they have on each other! I experienced this firsthand in February at the Northwest Yoga Conference. Then in March, I had the opportunity to collaborate with a yoga class, this time with a

Transforming Performance into Ceremony

Over the past 20 years, I’ve had the honor of directing Ananda choirs in deeply powerful performances of Christ Lives: an Oratorio, composed by Swami Kriyananda. Just a few days ago a friend likened the experience more to a ceremony than

It’s Time to Redefine Our WHY of Music

It’s Time to Redefine Our WHY of Music

Imagine working towards a high-level performance: tensions build, expectations rise. Breath tightens. Cortisol flows increasingly into your bloodstream to cope with the stress, leading to eventual disease of body and mind. We justify it all as perfectly acceptable, because “the

3rd of 10 Obvious Inaudibles: Joy

Joyful performances can’t help but inspire. Musicians performing with Joy draw us into their sphere of inspiration. Their subtle physical cues of relaxed pleasure and confident presence trigger something within us—perhaps due to mirror neurons in our brain that elicit our own inner experience of uplifting

Music and Meditation: Keys to JOY

Deepen your experience of JOY using the divine dynamic duo of music and meditation. This workshop is perfect of music lovers, singers and instrumentalists of all abilities and experience. It features group singing specifically tailored to take you deep into an experience of your soul’s true nature of JOY.

5 Ways to Soften Musical “Scar Tissue”

I recently had the honor of teaching an esteemed colleague how to meditate. The next week he told me of an immediate benefit: “I was walking through my college campus during the Viola da Gamba Society Conclave—hundreds of viola da gambas everywhere—and passed

A Search and a Call for Truth in Music

15 years ago I was an inexperienced spiritual seeker armed with a righteousness that rivaled JP Sears’ Ultra-Spiritual spoofs. I made a dismissive comment about a musical piece of angry, arrhythmic dissonance to my dear friend and cellist, Andrew Eckard. He knocked me off

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