Hi! Before I get to this, I want to speak for a moment as someone who has known food scarcity in my childhood. The effects can be severe, especially if it goes on a long time. So click this link to your local food bank, and be generous with the people in your community whose food security is threatened by the shutdown. Remember: there are children in your town who are directly affected by this insanity, and they don’t deserve to feel hungry tonight (or any night!).
Thank you! Alright, let’s get into this.
What do you do when your nervous system is stuck? The stuckness I’m referring to could be depression, anxiety, despair, or even rage. In any case, it’s that feeling of full-body/brain takeover, as if a weather system has blown in out of the clear blue and is now wreaking havoc, with no sign of an ending.
Every day I get up and build, from scratch, an inner shelter that protects my nervous system and I from the chaos of the outside world. Yep, I’m talking about meditation, and I use music for this purpose. Music has held a place in human consciousness since the very beginning of our species, because its powers are so immediate and extraordinary. Along with calming us the fuck down, it can also energize us and inspire pure joy, the kind that sustains us through dark times.
Needless to say, I’m extremely picky about the music I build my shelter with, but it has to be ultra-soothing and calm. I have a wide funnel but a narrow filter for this type of music. It includes some mid-90s Sheila Chandra, some vintage Brian Eno, the occasional low-grade Radiohead, a sprinkling of classical pieces, plus some random harp/flute/synth-y stuff from various new-age musicians.
If you want to build your inner shelter through meditation, you’re gonna need music that is calming, soothing and healing. Once you get deep enough into meditation, and your music is working so well that your nervous system can calm itself down automatically when you hear it, you may want to add visualization to the process. I think of this as adding windows to your inner shelter. Once you get good at it, you can even think of it as a door that opens to your highest potential, a place where you can experience what lies beyond deep healing, and chart a new course forward in your life.
This is a big job, and my friend Julia Francis is up for it. You may recall my Womancake interview with Julia from a few years ago, where she talked about how she pivoted to being a sound healer who plays crystal singing bowls and vocalizes with them. Since then her work has become so popular that people started asking her to release a record of her extraordinary healing music, so they could work with it at home. Big news: it’s finally here, and this coming Wednesday at 10am PST I’m going to interview her about it!
We’ll talk about how we met, some remarkable things we have in common, and how her amazing singing bowls actually work. Her new album is all about visualization and healing, and I’ll have her talk us through how it works so you can be ready to try it for yourself. This will be my very first Substack Live interview, so please bear with me as I go through the steps.
I’m so looking forward to this!!!