This same time last year I had the sensation that events were unfolding in carefully orchestrated ways. At the time I attributed it to the fact that I’d been doing a ton of yoga nidra practice and had recently finished a week immersed in it during a yoga nidra teacher training. Curiously, I find myself in a similar situation again this year on the heels of too much jet-setting and absolutely none of my usual practices of meditation, yoga nidra, and hatha yoga. Instead, I am called to one of my most powerful practices: invite unknowing. It sounds a little odd and possibly not even that useful, much less powerful, but bear with me while I ramble on about it instead of writing a coherent article describing my interview with a conductor.

In a lifetime long ago, a tragic and somewhat dramatic set of events upended my apparently stable life. This instigated a massive re-processing of beliefs and a re-formulation of my world view after which I enjoyed a honeymoon of sorts. During this period it dawned on me that, though my life was not what I had thought it was, NOTHING BAD WAS HAPPENING. It was a supremely (but quietly) joyful time and one which I did not want to disturb by actually going out on a date. I was walking around in a perpetual state of self-contentedness: working, rock climbing in west virginia, and cooking peach crepe breakfasts for friends on the front porch, so why rock the boat. It was with mixed emotions that I met Adrian, an inspiring & fascinating mountaineer who was out of the country more than he was in it. I considered it a deal-breaker that he was 12 year my junior and so was bound and determined to keep our developing friendship just that. Without recounting all the synchronous details I will simply say that despite my most earnest attempts, 6 months later we embarked on a relationship which, at the time, felt as if it was not my choice to accept or reject. Hindsight has only served to cement this impression. What did it mean? Of course I thought I knew - it felt like I was being rewarded for the hardest emotional work I’d done in my life but then there was even harder work yet to come when, in the summer of 2002, when Adrian told me that his future did not include me. Again I dug deep to find the gift buried in the emotional wreckage and it became apparent, over time, that while the most resonant realization I came to while rebuilding my self after crisis number 1 was that when there are harsh events in your recent memory and harsher possibilities on the horizon, there is still refuge in the present. What I still needed to grasp, and what I learned in spades while dating a mountaineer, was that though there are fresh and vivid memories of the past and incredible anticipation of future reunions, the present is still the only place to be. got it.

That was almost 7 years ago and the ways in which my continuing friendship with Adrian enriches my life make it unnecessary to wonder why we were brought together though it was clearly not what I had projected at the time. My flirtations with synchronicity were in their infancy at that time. Shortly after we broke up he reignited with his college sweetheart, Lissa. It was an incredibly challenging environment in which to heal from a broken heart. In a rare moment of true knowing, I awoke early one morning that fall to a certainty that she too would be a central character in my life (they have since married). Though it was much easier to invite unknowing on the nature of Lissa’s role in my life (after all, I’d not yet met her) I was not yet consciously practicing the invitation. As circumstances played out, Lissa and I met about 9 months later when she drove me from New York to Baltimore. I was returning from a solo re-empowerment trip to Asia and as luck would have it, she was driving down to visit Adrian for the weekend. The friendship we developed in the subsequent years has served to shape the direction of my life in hugely significant ways. It was with her encouragement and support that I resurrected the long-dormant artist in me.

Fast forward to October 2007, just a few days ago, when the gears of the universe seem to have picked up momentum, taking me on a path unintended. I was at a conference on the mysticism of sound in Vancouver that I rather impulsively registered for despite the fact that it would require me to fly home from a vacation in Spain only to stop-over for about 6 hours in my home town of Baltimore before continuing west. What drew me to this event were the Sufi contemplative chanting practices known as wazifas, which I learned of while on a silent retreat in May, becoming entranced by their simple melodies sung in swirling rounds. The conference ended, for me, after a jaw-dropping piano improvisation by a conductor & musician visiting from Munich. Following his performing I simply did not want to hear another note so I began my exit as the next musicians were setting up on stage. I noticed the German pianist grab his coat and leave as well and so wandered off to find the bathroom hoping to give him time and space to make his get away. I’m not all that clear why I was avoiding him other than I did not want it to appear that I was following him out to gush over what, admittedly for me, was a transcendent performance. When I left the theater about 10 minutes later he was still at the front door waiting for another conference attendee. Since he was standing right in front of me, I did my gushing, bent his ear for what I fear was far too long, said goodnight, and walked back to my hotel.

The next morning I made my way to the airport only to find my flight to Denver had been canceled so I was re-booked on a flight through Chicago. As pre-boarding began I heard a page for a passenger with the same last name as the visiting German who I was sure had said he was heading back to Munich. But no, it was he who responded to the page. In the few minutes before boarding I approached him and found that he’d made a last minute change of plans to stop-over for one day in Washington. After mutually arriving at the word synchronous to describe the strangeness of the mornings events I remember him saying it had snowed the day he left Munich and that it felt like fall which he liked since his birthday was in November. Mine too. What day? As I spoke the date I could almost see it coming out of my mouth and crossing space. His facial expression only barely revealed his surprise and he showed me his passport which you, no doubt, have figured out revealed that we share the same birth date.

After I explained that, though we were headed for different airports, we’d only be about an hour drive apart at the end of our trips so we made a tentative plan to meet for coffee in Washington the following day. I couldn’t believe my luck! I had pages of notes from the conductor’s talk at the conference and so many questions for him. I determined that a conductor, or at least this one, is really an experiential educator. I recently had the same epiphany regarding my own yoga teaching to which one of my experiential ed friends replied. “Um, yes and this is an epiphany why?” I suppose it was because my education both in art school and engineering could only be described as exclusively heady, nothing sensorial or emotional about either.

The conductor shot me a text message at 3p.m. as I was stepping out of the shower. An hour and 15 minutes later I pulled up to the National Gallery of Art as he was walking out. While driving down from Baltimore I considered the many questions I wanted to ask him but it occurred to me that maybe I should approach this meeting in the same way I met with a Tibetan Lama a few months ago (see Interview with a Lama - August 31, 2007), that is, not quite knowing why it was happening but knowing my complete presence was required. Our conversation was too short but resonant on topics including consciousness, philosophy, and music.

It is becoming clear to me that if I actually want to interview deep thinkers and write about it I’m going to need much more practice since I seem to digress into conversation while in their presence and meandering essays, such as this, when writing about it later. The fact is, I enjoy the hell out of plumbing my own depths. What is unique for me this time around is that I’m doing a remarkable job of holding at bay any attempts to decipher the meaning of these uncanny events, arguably the most unequivocally synchronous happenings of my life so far. Looking back on my old self I am reminded of a child watching a movie full of plot twists. They turn to you and start peppering you with questions of why and what will happen the only answer to which is “shhhhh. all will be revealed“. That question-peppering child is still in me but I now have a practice that has allowed me to relax into these real-life plot twists: to invite unknowing, a practice given to me during my emotional reconstruction in the aftermath of the Adrian breakup, ironically by his (and now my) friend Joyce. Joyce… the experiential educator. When I have shared this practice with others I have noticed that it is almost always translated to tolerate unknowing or something similar that implies simply suffering through the uncertainty but there is a different quality to an invitation - it is softly receptive.

Invite unknowing. Why? To practice getting out of one’s own way. When we think we understand the meaning of a synchronous event it often leads us to a projection into the future, as in, “because X happened it means I am to do Y”. Several years ago I cold-called a tea salon in Manhattan because Lissa thought it was a great fit for the art I was generating at the time. The owner invited me to bring my work to New York and subsequently gave me a show. I interpreted the swinging open of the door of opportunity as a mandate, though I practically sold my soul in the process of bringing both the work and the show into existence. The gallery owner was one of the most difficult people I have ever had to work with and though the work hung for several months in a lovely space in Manhattan, I did not sell a single piece from that body of work until the show came down. My only other show, one curated and hung by Lissa two years earlier, almost completely sold out. When we hear stories like these the urge to declare what they mean is almost overwhelming which brings me to the companion to invite unknowing… avoid declarations. When we declare, we enter the known zone, as Joyce calls it. No learning happens in the known zone. But I am discovering, in this moment, that it’s quite challenging to END an essay without a declaration and so it appears I am called upon to end it here, pianissimo. shhhh…

Not long ago, I was fortunate enough to have a private interview with a Lama. It was a somewhat impulsive decision inspired by my ongoing ruminations on the issue of free will - i.e. do we have it? My views on this topic have undergone an accelerated evolution in the most recent 7 of my 43 years on the planet instigated by an unceremonious disabusement of the notion that I was actually in control, but that’s another story altogether. As it turned out, my efforts to engage the Lama on one of my favorite topics were thwarted either by language or cultural issues, though I’m not sure which. So there I was, on a couch with a Lama all to myself wondering what to ask next so I went big asking him what is the purpose of life?

In the moment I could recognize my disappointment - no juicy new fodder on free will and a very simple answer to life’s biggest question. His answer: to be happy… To be happy? That’s the only reason we’re here? No learning, no self actualization, no finding our higher purpose? Nope, we’re here to be happy. For the life of me I can’t figure out why I found his answer so surprising, after all, when I teach yoga nidra I tell my own students that their senses, thoughts, and emotions are all pointing them in the right direction, they need only to tune up the receiver, not use yesterday’s data and make sure that what they are reaching for IS, in fact, making them happy. In my own life, the act of paying attention, the kind of attention only possible for me when I’ve slowed to a snail’s pace on retreat, has illuminated many actions of habit that are plainly no longer serving me. Collecting fresh data can yield surprising results especially when it leads us away from things we’ve known and loved and towards those we were sure we’re not so keen on. It would seem we spend the first several decades amassing the sets of likes and dislikes that form so much of our identities. Unless we adopt a practice of challenging our own perceptions these ideas harden and eventually deny us the ability to move fluidly through those challenges we have absolutely no control over.

I love the expressions “come to your senses” and “be sensible” and exploring what they mean literally and what they’ve come to mean. If we go back to them literally, we can explore, with curiosity, the physical sensations we experience as a sensory guidance system but in for this to work we need to actually sense what we are feeling in our bodies when we’re feeling down or frustrated or joyful. While this might sound easy, anyone who’s tried this practice will recognize how incredibly quick we are to move away from pure sensation and into stories and thoughts as we essentially shortcut the process, i.e. use yesterday’s data.

I have learned and re-learned the value of this practice over the years, first exposed to it (though accidentally, briefly, and quickly forgotten) first during a yoga nidra workshop with Richard Miller in 2002. Not long after that I got many more lessons on this when my good friend Joyce coached me through a big heart-break. When I would relate my misery she would, without fail, ask me what it felt like. No matter what I answered (I’m sad, I feel soooo sad) she would challenge me to bring it back to my senses. This was such a radically new practice for me I really had no idea what she wanted - I had so completely short-circuited the processing of my body’s emotional signals into thought and story that her questions seemed nonsensical and downright frustrating. It was her patient and insistent repetition of the question “but what does it feel like… in your body?” that eventually allowed me to experience the power of this practice first hand.

By the summer of 2006 I had forgotten the name of the teacher who’s workshop I’d accidentally signed up for years earlier (I though I was taking a weekend yoga workshop while in Berkeley on business) but for reasons I cannot explain, I had a nagging need to resurrect his name and feared that I’d lost it forever. It was during this time that I was undertaking a massive purge as part of selling my house of 10 years, a 4 story behemoth filled to the brim with art, files, and too much furniture. I was convinced I’d thrown away the handouts from that weekend workshop only to discover them squirreled away in a random file folder. For no reason I could understand I was thrilled to have resurrected his name, Richard Miller, one so ordinary to have defied my efforts at recalling it.

A few short weeks later I received an email from a local yoga studio announcing that none other than Richard Miller would be coming to Maryland to teach his first ever yoga nidra teacher training. Nuh uh. I simply love serendipitous experiences like these, they blow me away, no small feat considering my early years as a hyper-rational Spock-like science type. I still am quite a logical being but I’ve adopted a radical empiricism about my data collection - I no longer collect data only with my mind but strive to include my senses as equal partners, dropping down the ladder of inference as the experiential educators like to say. It is precisely this kind of radical empiricism as described by William James that is required of us to be happy, no? James is a recent discovery for me. His writings resonate with the scientist and mystic in me and are just one more framing of the same practice of experiencing each moment with the fresh curiosity of an unjaded scientist seeking, simply, to be happy.

Yes, to be happy might be a ridiculously simple reason to be here. If only it was as easy as it is simple.

I recently uncovered further evidence that if you want to make god laugh, tell her your plans… Thrilled to have focus and mission to my mostly contemplative life, early this year i embraced a plan to go to graduate school. GRE prep books were purchased, universities researched, professors contacted. I was looking for a program in which i could study the oh-so-fun field of neuro-psychology where thought, emotion, feeling, behavior, and chemistry come together. Though no single event has acted to derail this plan, it has become apparent that while the subject matter entertains me greatly, the rigidity of academia might not fit my nature and lifestyle which, these days, has little if any structure. If I were one to focus on the outcome and marshal on I might be able to convince myself that the PhD would be well worth the pain and suffering but I gave up choosing to suffer some 6 years ago and now only end up in that unhappy state when I stumble upon it unconsciously. It’s a practice, to be sure.

More and more I find myself reveling in the wonder of discovering where I am, which at the moment, appears to be as the member of a band. I did not plan this yet it is most evident I was meant to end up here. Whether I will stay here is no longer my concern having relaxed into the understanding that I am really… not… running… this show. How I came to choose my musical instrument is detailed in an earlier essay dated august 10. The events laid out clearly seemed to be indicating that I was to buy a harmonium. Curious. I decided to do so as soon as I could find a buyer for my home of 10 years - one which served me well but had quit me as a source of comfort and delight. On September 26th I bought the most beautiful red signature23 from keshav das in new york. When it arrived I discovered I had absolutely no idea where to start to learn to play it. Through the patient indulgence of my good friend and violinist Mehu (meee hooo) I quickly recalled how very much fun it is to play music WITH people… any music, any people.

This simple realization propelled me forward and soon Melissa (mehu’s real name) and I were sticking our big toes in the kirtan pond. Kirtan is an indian practice of devotional chanting that has inspired me from my very first experience of it in yoga classes despite my fears & judgments regarding its flake factor. The physical effects (check affect?) were undeniable and so beat out any resistance I had to the practice though it was some time before I admitted my love of chanting to friends and family. The unknown plan continued to unfold when Melissa and I were joined by a percussionist well-versed in indian classical music who just happened to marry an amazing singer from Kerala, bringing her to us here in Baltimore in February. Scott and Rei, short for Resmi (ray shmee ) so became the 3rd and 4th members of our little baltimore kirtan posse.

I must emphasize that our union has not at all felt like our own doing. Music simply began to pour out of us when we played together and so we were drawn to give ourselves a name. Anyone who’s tried to name a cat, much less a band, knows that the difficulty of the task grows exponentially with the number of people participating. But there again, it was delivered. As I trolled around the web, googling and digging through wikipedia I came upon the most wonderful word sruti.

Oh sruti! The word just keeps on growing in richness for me. The first couple definitions I’d stumbled across were “an single musical note in indian music” & “that which is heard by the innermost ear”. This would have been enough but I soon discovered it is also the term for divine revelation. The Upanishads and other classical Indian spiritual texts are considered sruti. “That which has no author” is the most recently discovered definition that simply could not be a more perfect way to describe the melodies that have written themselves.

I recently returned from a 10 day silent retreat with my teacher, Richard Miller. During this rich and beautiful silence some of his most rewarding lessons have started to really take up residence in my cells. I have begun to trust that I always know the appropriate response or action in every moment f I am willing to stop and listen to it and that this is… sruti! Admittedly, this requires a fearless practice of emptying out, of not co opting the experience, task, or story as mine. I have begun to feel as if I am being played as an instrument in this life. That I need only vibrate when plucked.

Sruti is available to us all. It’s in the attractions & aversions, the likes & dislikes, the criticisms & judgments, the joys & indulgences. Give yourself permission to listen and stop pretending you can’t hear it.

i’ve been thinking, lately, about buying a harmonium. i’ve wanted one ever since discovering the fabulous katchie gaard in berkeley, my home away from home for several years when i was writing software for a biotech company out there. katchie’s yoga classes were (and probably still are) amazing, inspirational, funny, and sound-infused, thanks to her portable harmonium.

i’ve been through a slew of instruments in my life so far starting with my choice of cello on entering the fourth grade at roland park elementary with mrs. reila. my dad had played the cello which is, i guess, why i chose it. i did and still do love the sound of a cello but as a fairly tiny girl it kinda sucked to lug around so i switched to clarinet - a nice portable instrument but one that, even then, had a little too much dork factor for me to stick with it. later, i coopted my sister’s oh-so-cool flute and played, just for fun, with my mom at home, mostly bach duets. after a completely mortifying episode during which i choked in front of a crowd gathered for my dad’s second nuptials i left the flute and all instruments alone for several years. though it’s still traumatic to remember i will confess, for your amusement, that my musical selections included take five accompanied by the church pianist. ouch.

sometime in my late 20s and early 30s i went through an electric guitar phase and a tenor sax phase. first, i bought a brand new mexican stratocaster and a fender champ. the guitar didn’t last long. i guess i just wasn’t the rocker i envisioned. the tenor sax lasted a little longer. i actually took lessons from a guy at the peabody prep in baltimore. he was a classically trained clarinet player who dabbled in klezmer on the weekends. he tortured me by making me play debussy… i am dead serious. i wanted to be an edgy bop playin chick, paying homage to my hero, john coltrane, but, instead, he gave me debussy. i abandoned the lessons but kept chugging away at ruby my dear, well you needn’t, and all blues from my fakebooks but eventually, even my beloved sax was banished to the closet.

recently, as i prepared to sell my house, stream-line my life and face up to the fact that i really hate cleaning gutters (more accurately, that i hate the fact that i *don’t* clean my gutters), i sold both the guitar and the sax and was, for the first time in almost 40 years, without an instrument. i’m not sure why this should matter since i hadn’t actually *played* either in ages. it was only a few short weeks later that i started fantasizing about buying a harmonium - a portable hand-handpumped organ-like oddity not that far from an accordion but closer to a melodian, a foot-pumped organ that my granny actually played and passed down to my mom. the melodian still sits in mom’s house though i don’t think she plays it either. we appear to be an instrument-owning, non-playing kindof family. but i have high-hopes that this time it’ll be different since i can cart the harmonium to yoga classes if i can ever muster up the courage to introduce my students to chanting. if they’re anything like me in my early yoga years (i mostly teach beginners) they will think chanting is a dangerous step toward white robes and a single pony-tail out the top of their heads.

meanwhile, as plans are made for a trip to new york for harmonium shopping, the reality of my impending move takes over and i’m left to deal with box-packing and list-making to shepherd my house to sale and me to a new apartment. as part of this daunting process i decided i’d make the switch from my $40 earthlink plan to verizon’s bargain $14.95 plan. after scheduling the move of my phone line for later in the month i hopped on verizon’s website and placed my dsl order. i immediate regretted it due to the uniqueness of my situation: my phone number was still active at my house and there is no phone yet at my apartment. no doubt, by fretting over the fact that they’d screw the whole thing up i brought the resulting snafu on myself. as my friend susan would say, i was vibrating at a very low level, inviting disaster.

as a result of some bizarre system error that noone at verizon believes is possible, the new dsl service was installed right on top of my working earthlink service making it so that no matter what address i typed into my trusty firefox browser, a maddening single page would be displayed: unable to connect to the verizon dsl network. the details of the hours spent in exasperating conversation with tech support folks assuring me that what i claimed was impossible are too dull to recount so i’ll fast forward to the point where i gave up fighting the giant machine, trying to undo what had been done. at 11 at night i decided i’d just try to install the new modem and activate verizon’s service despite the fact that earthlink still saw their signal as active. 30 minutes later i was online once again.

it was at this point i decided to call verizon and take advantage of the late hour to quickly get through to a supervisor and make sure they didn’t succeed in undoing what had been done. after all, i was now up and running. Mark, a perky guy with an upstate new york accent was determined to make me happy. i guess it’s worth mentioning that during my conversations with no less than 10 verizon support folks i was often less than… um, respectful in my tone. in light of the way things have since unfolded i’m feeling a bit embarrassed about that. that’s me, the tightly wound yogini. but i’m getting ahead of myself- back to mark - he was one of those rare customer service beings who actually wants to serve. while tapping away at diagnostics to verify my claim he tried to thaw me out. he asked me what i did for a living and which software languages i’d coded in. he told me about his history as a coder. i was annoyed. at midnight we left it that he would call me the following afternoon and get the whole thing straightened out.

as promised, mark called right on schedule. during one of the longer stints mark and i spent on hold with billing he asked me how my day had gone so far. i said it’d been good, that i’d got lots of packing done. how had his been? he said it was great, he’d bought a new instrument. i asked what he bought. he said, “I bought a… harmonium.” i cannot even begin to explain how, as he uttered those words, i knew what he was going to say. the shock was not diminished by 3 seconds advanced knowing. i was floored. i peppered him with questions and it turned out that he was a swami? i really have no idea what a swami IS but he, like me, has never played a harmonium and intends to use it in kirtan (sanskrit for devotional chanting). he told me where he bought it (www.krishnaculture.com in, of all places, houston). it’s at this point that i want to run right out to hire an existential detective, a la i heart huckabees.

i have been back and forth in my life on the questions of whether things happen for a reason. i suppose i have settled into the belief - ok, that sounds kindof fixed and it’s not - the feeling that we can either give events meaning and thus learn from them, or we can just curse the giants for screwing with our dsl.