Music of Life

When I first started picking up and playing with a guitar it was not with an expectation to learn to play the guitar - but with a curiosity and desire to let feeling communicate through strumming and picking the strings - and later, through singing as well.

What’s the feeling? The feeling that moves currently - alive in me now - that might become a song or express an atmospheric.  I found that expressing feeling, communicates back its source such that the feeling deepens, purifies and changes. It is a kind of alchemy in consciousness.

I realized at some point that my ‘playing’ was in fact praying - in life - but not in religion. I found a way that I could put aside distraction and connect and open to an immediacy and an intimacy that at the time I associated with the ‘inner me’. There was never an overt verbal petition - but a simple desire to be connected - at the heart.

This feeling dimension is so important to me in life that I have largely avoided much of the technical training and maps and models for life, music - or in fact anything. It isn't that I need to negate them - but that they always tend to put the focus on the world or form, and put the soul or spirit second or indeed out of the picture. Soul is heart connecteness - or feeling into Life. Emotions are limits and coverings over true feeling - and are associated with stories that the mind spins about itself.

Negative emotions are the stuff of guilt, hurt, pain, anger and hate. They are potent in that they carry charge - but are not usually safe or appropriate to express in the form that they are triggered. Introspection and enquiry can uncover the thoughts and beliefs by which we ‘set our self up’ to inevitably fail, be disappointed or hurt - but this is very difficult when we are also using our thoughts as our guide. For we believe them instead of seeing them as beliefs.



Music offered itself as a vehicle for growing an identity in feeling, that bypassed the thinking mind. To simply and directly ‘rejoin the music’ that underlies and is embodied in my feeling being restores a sense of communion, connect-ness, inspiration and meaning.

For ‘the music’ embodies the dimension of our participation in a shared expression of life, that the problematic, control based, thinking mind blocks by its very nature.

The problematic mind seems to be justified from a sense of having had some experience of disturbance or difficulty imposed upon it. But whatever the problem is about, it has common elements with all problems - and these include exclusion, isolation and threat or danger of adverse outcomes.

To ‘rejoin the music’ is to short circuit the process of time in which eventually, you will release the justifications for self exclusion, or the need to hold the past against another and deny a shared present, or the defensive and anxious stance by which everything is perceived fearfully and not clearly embraced or engaged at all. And you will let life flow again in your heart, as a living presence of Soul appreciation. My point is - why get stuck and suffer all the drama of self involvement in conflict - when you can simply rejoin the music - from where you are at now.

We tend to emotionally resistant to letting joy flow when we are upset. However, even ‘frozen and stuck’ are energetics that can speak - enough to be a carrier for a willingness to be ‘picked up’ by inspiration - life’s music. It is not that there is a required form - but that life is flow - and the experience of blocked life is depressing to our spirit. To find any flow is to find your willingness for life.

What is tending to block life and assert itself with force is a mental attitude of judgement, an unquestioned assumption of guilt and sense of safety in limitation. No matter how intense or complex this may seem, it is truly a passing affliction of ignorance and not expressing our right mind at all.

In music I have a way of not replaying the tapes of that mind, and allowing or opening to a fresh experience of now - that comes to me freely like a gift - because I released the assertiveness of a self willed mentality enough to let life through.



But I realize that love of truth is underneath and within all of what I attempt to write about.



To try to use music too consciously as a therapy would be to lose its soul - for music is a language of the heart - and heart is also the guide to its own ways. It is true that we can force life to dance to our own tune. For a while. But such a curiosity indulged is exactly what sets the scene for a mind of control to take hold of our life and cause us not only to forget to play - and to play - but to become fearful, conflicted and uncertain and distrustful.

Oneness with oneself is a natural thing - so natural that it has no conceptual language, except in symbols that point to things unspeakably true.

Singing, making music and dancing have tended to become things in their own right. As entertainments, products, ritualized forms to mix and match in presenting our ‘identity’ to ourself and others. Yet the truth is that the Soul is the dimension of being in which we feel - beneath all the  vanities and superficialities of self image.

To gain the Soul is to willingly lose such a world - not as a sacrifice - but as a restoration to sanity, wholeness and a certainty or singularity of feeling that is free of the definitions of concept.