Judgement and Circling Around Again

Oof. It's Thursday morning. And I'm doing my best to keep up with blogging, but for some reason, this last week has been HARD. Trying to make time to write new songs, doing things that are so far outside my comfort zone they give me anxiety attacks, and trying to keep everybody fed and happy have definitely been a challenge for me. 

At any rate... Yesterday I started something new. Sort of. 

If you listened to the podcast I recorded for my friend Debbie Philp last week (sheesh, it seems like it was a month ago already), I talked about the Judgement card in the Tarot deck. (Stay with me here. You'll see how it all works out in my neurodivergent way.) And I was talking about how we sometimes have to make choices and use our best judgement in life. 

Three years ago when I was doing some life coaching with Debbie, she asked me to write down some goals and dreams I had. One of them was to do kirtan performances at yoga studios once they started to open up again. (This was still at the beginning of the pandemic when most yoga studios were closed down.) She asked me in one of our sessions what that would look like, and I was like, fuck I don't know. And after we talked it around a little, I realized that it really wasn't something that I felt aligned with at the moment, so I used my better judgement and made a choice and let it go. 

Except. A few weeks after that, I started a daily mantra practice using my mala beads. I started focusing on mantras that I was already familiar with from 15+ years of yoga practice, and then it evolved into a dedicated mantra practice with the Green Tara mantra that I learned when I did a week of study at Kripalu in the Berkshires with a Tibetan monk named Lama Migmar Tseten. 

That mantra practice lasted for almost 2 years, and then I felt in my heart I was done. 

Right after that, I was invited to join a 21 day meditation challenge by someone I knew in my pre-Covid life, so what the heck, I did it. Every day we were offered a Sanskrit mantra to practice in meditation. 

But I got so effing bored just sitting there reciting the mantra, so I decided to make it a musical mantra practice and every day I would get a ukulele and write a chord progression and a melody for the mantra. I started recording them and realized that I still love singing mantra and kirtan. Oof. 

Then a friend of mine on the Left Coast told me about this teacher, Mx Puja Singh, and I started following them on Instagram. Yesterday they posted an amazing little video of them doing vocal warmups along with a link to an online Sargam training and I was like, fuck it, I'm in. 

I've been looking for some kind of vocal exercises to do lately, and I've also become aware that I'm spending way too much time on my phone in the mornings. Most days, my body can't do much asana practice, but I can still sing. And this training course is a great introduction to Indian music and the system they use, different from the European solfege that we all learn (or we should learn) in school. 

So my goal is to spend 30 minutes every morning doing these vocal exercises and learning more about mantra and the Hindu sacred science of sound. 

So what the heck is going on  here? I don't know. But it feels like things are starting to circle around for me again, things that came to me intuitively in the past but I couldn't or didn't follow through on are presenting themselves now for me to explore. 

I mean, divine timing and all that, right?

Anyway. I did my 30 minutes of singing this morning, and it felt pretty good in my body. And I learned some new vocal warm-ups and facial exercises that were fun. Even Tucker loved them - he came and sat right close to me while I was singing. So either he really loved my singing or he was really scared and wanted to know why Mommy was making all those weird lip vibrations and shit. 

So anyway. Stay tuned for more. I've got a pile of stuff to tackle today, so I'm off. 

Oh, and P.S. If you love handmade jewelry, I'm going to have lots of new stuff for the holidays. Not ukulele related, but whatev. I'll go off and make some uke videos this weekend for you to make up for it.