Frank DeMarco refers to his guides as The Guys Upstairs, or TGU. I refer to mine as my Cosmic Committee, using the nomenclature of my shamanic teacher Hank Wesselman.

Last night I clearly had a visit from my CC, in a dream. I was asleep in bed, in some kind of apartment, condo, large hotel suite, or whatever. A maid-type person opened the door, while I was still asleep in the morning, and let in a fairly large group of official-looking women who wanted to interview me about some kind of position I had applied for. I asked who gave permission to let them in like this, and the maid said, “Mr. Kookooberra.” I asked who he was, and she said “the Prime Minister.” All this in a British accent. I said “I’m American” as explanation for not knowing who was PM. I excused myself to brush my teeth and said I’d be right there, but I woke up.

I’ve thought on this one as to what it means (I have a hard time sometimes with dreams, forgetting that the symbolism in them is usually pretty direct, because I am pretty dense) but decided that it was once again somewhat literal: my CC wants to talk to me about something I’ve “applied to do” but I’m asleep and they can’t get through. They were sent in dream form by the PM, or the Head Honcho, because they’re not getting through when I’m awake.

My life has been extremely intense the last couple of months due to an exceedingly heavy load at work; I’m working straight through including weekends, until the project is done, and clearly I am “asleep” in terms of listening to my CC. Don’t know how to fix it other than quitting my job.

 

video

http://www.youtube.com/user/coopsdeloops

I received this as a post on an email list I’m on, and wanted to share with everyone.

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Scientists say the Earth is humming. Not just noise, but a deep, astonishing music. Can you hear it?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, April 23, 2008

This is the kind of thing we forget.
This is the kind of thing that, given all our distractions, our celeb obsessions and happy drugs and bothersome trifles like family and bills and war and health care and sex and love and porn and breathing and death, tends to fly under the radar of your overspanked consciousness, only to be later rediscovered and brought forth and placed directly in front of your eyeballs, at least for a moment, so you can look, really look, and go, oh my God, I had no idea.

The Earth is humming. Singing. Churning out a tune without the aid of battery or string or wind-up mechanism and its song is ethereal and mystifying and very, very weird, a rather astonishing, newly discovered phenomena that’s not easily analyzed, but which, if you really let it sink into your consciousness, can change the way you look at everything.

Indeed, scientists now say the planet itself is generating a constant, deep thrum of noise. No mere cacophony, but actually a kind of music, huge, swirling loops of sound, a song so strange you can’t really fathom it, so low it can’t be heard by human ears, chthonic roars churning from the very water and wind and rock themselves, countless notes of varying vibration creating all sorts of curious tonal phrases that bounce around the mountains and spin over the oceans and penetrate the tectonic plates and gurgle in the magma and careen off the clouds and smack into trees and bounce off your ribcage and spin over the surface of the planet in strange circular loops, “like dozens of lazy hurricanes,” as one writer put it.

It all makes for a very quiet, otherworldly symphony so odd and mysterious, scientists still can’t figure out exactly what’s causing it or why the hell it’s happening. Sure, sensitive instruments are getting better at picking up what’s been dubbed “Earth’s hum,” but no one’s any closer to understanding what the hell it all might mean. Which, of course, is exactly as it should be.

Because then, well, then you get to crank up your imagination, your mystical intuition, your poetic sensibility — and if there’s one thing we’re lacking in modern America, it’s … well, you know.
Me, I like to think of the Earth as essentially a giant Tibetan singing bowl, flicked by the middle finger of God and set to a mesmerizing, low ring for about 10 billion years until the tone begins to fade and the vibration slows and eventually the sound completely disappears into nothingness and the birds are all, hey what the hell happened to the music? And God just shrugs and goes, well that was interesting.
Or maybe the planet is more like an enormous wine glass, half full of a heady potion made of horny unicorns and divine lubricant and perky sunshine, around the smooth, gleaming rim of which Dionysus himself circles his wet fingertip, generating a mellifluous tone that makes the wood nymphs dance and the satyrs orgasm and the gods hum along as they all watch 7 billion confused human ants scamper about with their lattes and their war and their perpetually adorable angst, oblivious.

But most of all, I believe the Earth actually (and obviously) resonates, quite literally, with the Hindu belief in the divine sound of OM (or more accurately, AUM), that single, universal syllable that contains and encompasses all: birth and death, creation and destruction, being and nothingness, rock and roll, Christian and pagan, meat and vegetable, spit and swallow. You know?

But here’s the best part: This massive wave of sound? The Earth’s deep, mysterious OM, it’s perpetual hum of song? Totally normal — that is, if by “normal” you mean “unfathomably powerful and speaking to a vast mystical timelessness we can’t possibly comprehend.”

Indeed, all the spheres do it, all the planets and all the quasars and stars and moons and whirlpool galaxies, all vibrating and humming like a chorus of wayward deities singing sea shanties in a black hole. It’s nothing new, really: Mystics and poets and theorists have pondered the “music of the spheres” (or musica universalis) for eons; it is the stuff of cosmic philosophy, linking sacred geometry, mathematics, cosmology, harmonics, astrology and music into one big cosmological poetry slam.

Translation: You don’t have to look very far to understand that human beings — hell, all animals, really — adore song and music and tone and rhythm, and then link this everyday source of life straight to the roar of the planet itself, and then back out to the cosmos.

In other words, you love loud punk? Metal? Jazz? Deep house? Saint-Saens with a glass of Pinot in the tub? Sure you do. That’s because somewhere, somehow, deep in your very cells and bones and DNA, it links you back to source, to the Earth’s own vibration, the pulse of the cosmos. Oh yes it does. To tap your foot and sway your body to that weird new Portishead tune is, in effect, to sway it to the roar of the universe. I mean, obviously.

At some point we’ll probably figure it all out. Science will, with its typical charming, arrogant certainty, sift and measure and quantify this “mystical” Earthly hum, and tell us it merely comes from, say, ocean movements, or solar wind, or 10 billion trees all deciding to grow a quarter millimeter all at once. We will do as we always do: oversimplify, peer through a single lens of understanding, stick this dazzling phenomenon in a narrow category, and forget it.

How dangerously boring. I much prefer, in matters mystical and musical and deeply cosmic, to tell the logical mind to shut up and let the soul take over and say, wait wait wait, maybe most humans have this divine connection thing all wrong. Maybe God really isn’t some scowling gay-hating deity raining down guilt and judgment and fear on all humankind after all.

Maybe she’s actually, you know, a throb, a pulse, a song, deep, complex, eternal. And us, well, we’re just bouncing and swaying along as best we can, trying to figure out the goddamn melody.

…my cat. I have two cats; one I would call an Old Soul Cat and the other I would call a Young Soul Cat.

The Young Soul cat is aggressive, domineering, insensitive to any needs but her own, and engages in magical thinking, in that she believes her persistent whining is why I feed her.

The Old Soul cat is more or less the opposite; live-and-let-live, egalitarian, and sensitive to my moods in the sense that if I am upset/unhappy, she does her best to cheer me up. She also doesn’t whine, beg, or otherwise make a pest of herself. She seems to understand that I feed her on my own schedule and doesn’t try to change that but just accepts what comes her way, including the aggression of the Young Soul Cat. Her MO is to accept as much as possible, and get out of the way for the rest of it, while being present/engaging on whatever level is requested.

OSC (Old Soul Cat) has had a toy for quite a few years, which is a dirty sock she stole out of the laundry basket. She carries it around, mostly when no one is home (we find it in all kinds of places) or when I’ve gone to bed. She yowls at it and if you aren’t familiar with the act, you’d think she was being tortured by something….but apparently she is pretending the sock is a critter she has caught and is playing with. I have heard similar yowls when she has caught a lizard and is carrying it around in her mouth. The sock goes in the refrigerator at night to prevent the yowling from waking me up in the wee hours, and she gets it back when I get up in the morning.

Occasionally the sock disappears and we can’t find it anywhere, and it always ends up that we left a door or cabinet open, she took it in there while we were gone, and then when access to that place becomes possible again, the sock re-appears. Recently the sock disappeared for several weeks, and we had given up on its showing back up again; we looked everywhere, with a flashlight, that we thought it possibly could have gone. I gave up and tried to give her another, to-me-identical sock, that I wore for a while to get that glorious foot smell on it. She would have none of it….I gave it to her, she sniffed it, and simply walked on, because it was not HER SOCK. No substitute for this cat!

Shortly thereafter, I looked, once again, in the hall coat closet, and lo and behold, this time I saw the sock in there! I got it out, gave it to her, and she was all smiles. In retrospect, I realized that she had all along known where it was. She tried to get in the hall closet, and I, the All-Knowing-Human, informed her that she was not allowed in that closet and did not open the door. She, being the Old Soul Cat that she is, accepted the situation and my denseness in not understanding what she was trying to tell me….that the Sock was in that closet. And she just accepted and waited for the resolution, come as it may or not may.

If I could have the personality my cat does, I would be truly blessed. She has, in addition to her loving, accepting nature, a streak of pure scamp-ness that endears her even more to me. Even at her geriatric age of 16 (she still bounces around the house on occasion) she will occasionally get “that look” on her face and I know that mischief is just around the corner. It’s never horrible mischief, but it could be that a chair is going to have fabric that is a little more tattered than it was before. Oh well…I can accept that, can’t I?

Ryan expressed an interest in hearing (pun intended) about my lucid dreams that contain music.

My first experience with this was decades ago, when I was in my late 20’s. I took a course in TM (Transcendental Meditation) and faithfully started the practice, mentally chanting my mantra for 20 minutes a day. I found the meditative state so pleasant, that I simply meditated for as long as I could stay in the state, which was sometimes 40 minutes. At the time I was self-employed giving private music lessons in my home, and I had a lot of free time since the lessons typically started at 2:30 or 3:00 PM in the afternoon.

One morning I was doing my meditation in my usual very comfortable chair, and I reached that point of “no thought” that I liked so much. Then, I started hearing, as if I were wearing stereo headphones, the most beautiful music….it was as if a stringed instrument orchestra were playing inside my head. The sound was as “real” and vivid as any sound I’ve ever heard; I wasn’t “fantasizing” this music; I was hearing it. I was sitting up and very much not asleep, but I was also clearly in an altered state. I found I could “direct” the music to “go” anywhere I wanted, just by willing it. I don’t remember how long I stayed in this state with the music, but the memory of it is still very clear.

I didn’t get into this state very many more times in meditation, but I found that I could access this state in the hypnopompic state (that place between sleeping and being awake, typically occurring as you wake in the morning.) I would set intent (intent is very, very important for experience) sometimes two or three nights in a row, and then in the waking hours I’d hear this same, gorgeous music. Other times, I’d hear music that was equally gorgeous but not “restricted” to a string orchestra; I remember one time I was hearing music that was a full orchestra, including some ethereal pecussion, that I had never “heard” before….and I wished I could remember it well enough to write it down after I became fully conscious. I realized that that was what Mozart did….by his own description, the music appeared in his mind, and all he had to do was write it down. I think he called it “just scribbling” or a similar term.

Ryan expressed an interest in hearing (pun intended) about my lucid dreams that contain music.

My first experience with this was decades ago, when I was in my late 20’s. I took a course in TM (Transcendental Meditation) and faithfully started the practice, mentally chanting my mantra for 20 minutes a day. I found the meditative state so pleasant, that I simply meditated for as long as I could stay in the state, which was sometimes 40 minutes. At the time I was self-employed giving private music lessons in my home, and I had a lot of free time since the lessons typically started at 2:30 or 3:00 PM in the afternoon.

One morning I was doing my meditation in my usual very comfortable chair, and I reached that point of “no thought” that I liked so much. Then, I started hearing, as if I were wearing stereo headphones, the most beautiful music….it was as if a stringed instrument orchestra were playing inside my head. The sound was as “real” and vivid as any sound I’ve ever heard; I wasn’t “fantasizing” this music; I was hearing it. I was sitting up and very much not asleep, but I was also clearly in an altered state. I found I could “direct” the music to “go” anywhere I wanted, just by willing it. I don’t remember how long I stayed in this state with the music, but the memory of it is still very clear.

I didn’t get into this state very many more times in meditation, but I found that I could access this state in the hypnopompic state (that place between sleeping and being awake, typically occurring as you wake in the morning.) I would set intent (intent is very, very important for experience) sometimes two or three nights in a row, and then in the waking hours I’d hear this same, gorgeous music. Other times, I’d hear music that was equally gorgeous but not “restricted” to a string orchestra; I remember one time I was hearing music that was a full orchestra, including some ethereal pecussion, that I had never “heard” before….and I wished I could remember it well enough to write it down after I became fully conscious. I realized that that was what Mozart did….by his own description, the music appeared in his mind, and all he had to do was write it down. I think he called it “just scribbling” or a similar term.

How do you know if the problems you’re having with your chops are dystonia or something else?

 When you have dystonia, it is like you tell your chops to do one thing and they do something else. Sort of like you try to raise your foot and instead it wiggles side to side. That would be dystonia. The muscles are fine in other applications, but when you try to play your instrument they do strange things. You might be able to free buzz, even buzz your mouthpiece, but when you try to play your instrument your face contorts, or your lips go flaccid, or your neck twitches, or any of a large number of other things you don’t expect and weren’t trying to do.

One misconception that is fairly common is that dystonia is “just a need to relax.” Possibly this has come about because sometimes it manifests as “locked jaw” or an immobility…and an observer would think the person “just needs to relax.” What the observer doesn’t understand is the “I wasn’t trying to do this and my body is doing it without my permission” aspect of dystonia.

The other thing about dystonia is, the harder you try the worse it gets. (See the post about intent path corruption.)

If you take some time off (weeks or months) and then pick up your instrument, you might be able to suddenly play it again, and you think to yourself, “I’m cured!” Until you start trying to do regular practices and then it all goes weird on you again.

If this is what is happening to you, it could very well be dystonia.

If you suspect you have dystonia, the very first thing you need to do, MUST do, is quit playing. Completely. I know of one person who developed it and was offered an “embouchure rebuilding” by a teacher. He still had some range left; but when he put serious effort into the embouchure rebuilding exercises, he lost the rest of the range. He trusted the teacher to know what he was doing, and got completely ruined in the process. So if you want to try some embouchure rebuilding exercises, go ahead, but if things get worse intstead of better, see Rule #1 and stop playing. Completely. Immediately. You will not regain your ability to play until you stop playing.

See the rest of the posts about dystonia to better understand what it is and what you can do about it by yourself. There are few people who can help you with dystonia, and they are pretty scheduled up. Especially beware of those who give you advice of “just relax” or “you just need to practice more” or, an offer I got, “If you send me $$ I’ll give you lessons over the internet that will fix you right up.” Uh Huh.

I learned this information from a phone conversation I had with a fellow who has had dystonia for many, many years. He has worked some with Jan Kagarice of North Texas U, and he was paraphrasing what she told him. Since I am paraphrasing him, what I’m writing might not be what Jan herself would tell you if you consulted her. But it did ring a bell with me.

He said that he was told that people with dystonia have some interesting things in common in their upbringing and their personalities. They had parents who demanded perfection, and they then applied that to themselves as they became adults. And they tend to be rigid, unbending.

I found I resembled that description. I also recognized that the progress I have made was due entirely to the fact that I was able (and willing) to depart from how I played the instrument, and seek new ways of getting similar results. What I do to make a living requires both a perfectionistic mindset and the flexibility to find on-the-fly new ways of doing critical tasks, when things are falling apart around me. So despite the demanding childhood and the perfectionist mindset (what pro musician is *not* a perfectionist???) I was lucky enough to have the mental/emotional flexibility to seek new solutions and the patience to implement them over time.

One person I know who has dystonia does tend towards inflexibility. I can’t address the perfectionism, but musicians don’t get much of anywhere without it.  And I know her childhood was not the greatest either. The person I had the phone conversation with, who has had dystonia for 20 years, struck me as being very, very rigid when I talked to him. I considered it a huge benefit that I played other brasses, because I had other similar techniques to draw from, that allowed me to figure out what needed to change with the horn playing. But this fellow, when I suggested he try another brass, answered: “I am only interested in playing trombone. I’ve only ever wanted to play trombone.” … displaying the very rigidity, apparently unknowingly, that he had just described to me as being a personality characteristic of people who develop dystonia. Fascinating.

In reading various writings by people who have overcome dystonia, it seems that the process can take years; so far for me it has been two years, and I’m not 100% back yet. So I’d say that patience, and the ability to let go of panic, desperation, and just deal with it with a level head, are very useful. Also very hard to come by if you are a pro and about to lose your livelihood because your chops have decided to do strange things. If you are a pro and have happened upon my blog, if you can track down Jan Kagarice at the U of North Texas, she has helped quite a few pro players overcome dystonia. She is very circumspect and you would not have to worry about anyone finding out.

In my personal study of what is “going on” with my own embouchure dystonia, there were some key mental light bulbs. The first one was that although my horn playing was trashed in a certain range, my euphonium playing (larger mouthpiece) was working just fine in that same range. Therefore….certainly this was not a “muscle problem” because it if were, then the muscles should function less well, not better, with the larger mouthpiece. What, then, was going on?

I started trying to discern what was different, for me, about playing euphonium as opposed to playing horn. I had played horn for quite a few years before I took up the euphonium and tuba, and my brass technique was at a more advanced level when I started on these larger cups. I wanted to see what I did on euphonium that allowed it to work, and also if I could then transfer that to playing horn. What I figured out was that the way I put attention on my embouchure was different between euphonium and horn. Specifically, it was how I focused on my upper lip.

An example of what I mean by mental focus: as an exercise, put all of your attention on your right big toe. You weren’t aware of it before you read this sentence, right? But it was surely there; you just weren’t focused on it. Now…how warm or cold is it? Can you feel it touching your shoe? The toe next to it? I’ve never met a brass player who didn’t put some kind of mental focus on their chops; for me, it just happened to be different for euphonium than it was for horn. I can’t tell you what was different, only that it was.

I have called this special kind of mental focus an “intent path.” The intent path is mental. It’s what your brain does when you intend to do anything physical…when you intend to stand up from a chair, when you intend to bring your fork to your mouth, when you intend to play a note on your instrument. I know one fellow with dystonia who has no problem until his instrument gets within an inch or two of his face, and then his head begins to wag back and forth from side to side as if he were emphatically saying NO! His intent path is corrupt; it’s got wrong signals in it. The more strongly we try to control the malfunction, the worse it gets, because we are focusing even more intently on that same, corrupt intent path. All of us with dystonia need to change our intent path.

How do you change an intent path? I can only tell you how I have changed mine, slowly over time. I introduced slightly different sensations into my playing, by putting attention elsewhere than my upper lip (a lot like you changed your attention when I asked you to focus on your right big toe.) I introduced slightly more pucker into my embouchure, because that changed the sensation of forming an embouchure. In addition, I stayed away from playing the horn until the old intent path started to be less “grooved.” You’ve heard the phrase “grooving your golf swing,” right? You groove a path for a physical motion by doing that motion over and over. With dystonia, that groove gets messed up and doesn’t work for you any more, and you have to do two things: you have to un-groove the faulty path, and you have to make a new groove in a new path. The new path doesn’t have to be dramatically different from the old path, but it does have to be different in the ways that count. Sort of like if you have ruts in the ice going up your driveway and your wheels spin in the ruts, but if you drive right next to the ruts in the snow, you can go just fine. You just can’t get up the driveway if you try to drive in the ruts.

It has now been two years since I realized I had dystonia. I quit playing for pretty much six months, with only occasional tests every few weeks to see how things were doing. I had to let that deep groove that was the corrupt intent path, melt a little bit before I put a lot of effort into making a new grooved intent path. My embouchure is not entirely reliable at this point in time. I only play twice a week because if I play more often, I tend to slip into the old rut. If I have the time to do a slow, careful low-range warmup, I can almost guarantee that I’ll have a dystonia-free rehearsal. And on the days when my chops do act up, I have the tools now in place to find a fairly immediate work-around because I’m pretty familiar with my new groove. I get into trouble when I go on auto-pilot and fall into old focus habits. All I have to do is yank myself out of those habits and jump out of that groove.

It was a long haul though. If I had been pro….I think I would have been toast; as it was I did lose my position in the orchestra I was in. But I am still playing horn, not quite as well as I used to, but well enough. My sound is still there, but if I try to do very fast 16th-note passages, my chops get unstable. Right now, I’ll take that instead of the alternative, which was hanging up the horn. I love it too much to hang it up.

 The next post will be some information I learned about the personality characteristics of people who develop embouchure dystonia.

Years ago, I was having trouble with what appeared to be osteoarthritis; at one point the joints in my spine hurt so badly that it was difficult to turn over in bed at night. Since osteoarthritis runs in my family, reluctantly I started myself on an ibuprofen regimen, which did take away the pain. Then I happened upon a book; I don’t remember its title exactly because I’ve been unable to find it again, but it was along the lines of “Arthritis: DON’T learn to live with it!”  Most of the book applied to RA, but there were about 30 pages at the front that applied to OA; the essence of this section was that OA joint pain could be gotten rid of by not eating nightshades. The nightshades are tomatoes, hot and sweet peppers, white potatoes, eggplant, and tobacco. The book said that some people got relief in a few weeks, while others would have to wait as long as nine months.

I decided that this was one of those treatments that was free and could do no harm, so I tried it. In two weeks my pain was not gone but it was distinctly less, and I decided to stay off nightshades. I had to be a detective; there are hidden nightshades in many things. I would have a flareup every time I ate tuna fish, of all things, and finally I realized from reading the label that canned tuna fish often has something called “vegetable broth” in it for flavor. Well, guess what was in that vegetable broth in the can of tuna fish? Nightshades! I became an obsessive reader of labels, and was astonished at what I had been eating in terms of chemicals. I cleaned up my act.

For many years I stayed completely off nightshades, and had no joint pain problems. Since I was and am a musician, that was important. I also type a lot in my work….not a good idea to have aching finger joints. Then, five or six years ago, I found I could again eat nightshades without noticible consequence, and I went back to enjoying salsa and baked potatoes. Never was a fan of eggplant.

Then, in the last couple of months, my hip started bothering me. Well, now I’m almost 60 and that is “normal” at this age, right? Well….remembering my past experience with giving up nightshades, I did it again. It took about two weeks, again, for the pain to go away, and now I am on another quest to find out what I’m eating that contains nightshades. Especially one has to beware of anything that tastes spicy-hot, since likely it has hot (chili) peppers in it. I did a “food challenge” yesterday with a favorite salad that I buy from the local health food store. The last ingredient on the label is “spices” and it does have a nice zesty taste. This morning at 4 a.m. I was awakened by strong painful twinges in my hip, and I have my answer. Sigh…so many allergies, so few things I can eat without a reaction.

If anyone reading this knows how to de-sensitize the body to allergies in general, I’d like to hear about it. When I lived back East I had major pollen allergies; here out West they are not that bad most of the time. But I still react strongly to various foods and would like to find a way to calm down my immune system so that it doesn’t make me miserable with reactions.

So if you have OA, or even RA, and you have the discipline to give up nightshades, I’d give it a year to find out what happens. All it takes is determination and focus.