Are You Awake?

Hello my friends. Today is Day 9 of my Restorative Retreat. I am so happy and grateful that I can stay here for a while and not feel like I have to get up and go anywhere else for the time being. When it feels right and I feel ready and well rested I will take a ride up to RI and get some more of my stuff out of storage but I am not making a plan other than to pay attention and follow my guidance on that.

I have been absorbed in sound and music in various forms. I’ve spent quite a bit of time practicing the piano and playing the guitar, trying to break out and explore new possibilities rather than just sticking with what I know- which Is easy to do on the piano because I don’t know much at all other than the notes and basic scales. I do understand the basics of creating chords also so I have a little bit of very basic foundational material to work with.

… And… some time has elapsed since I wrote the above- I am now on day 13 of my stay-at-home retreat! I have completed a painting (see below!), created several very simple short riffs on the piano, painted a couple of stools for the breakfast bar in my kitchen, made homemade pizza (and had Mahesh & Mukta over to help me eat them), explored double drop D tuning on the guitar, taken a two-hour online yoga class on the day of the most recent full moon and been working on whitening the bones of a turtle skeleton and shell found down by the pond on the property where I live. I’ve also made a few short meditation videos intended basically to help my friends end their evening on a good note. I spent hours one day going through pictures from the Sound Body Wholistic Health Center- my old sound healing center in St. Pete- just to pick out a new cover photo for the Facebook page for the center. And I’ve watched a whole bunch of episodes of “Doctor, Doctor” on Amazon Prime- AKA “The Heart Guy”!

I have several plants that Mahesh and Mukta gave me waiting to be planted. Cannas and kalanchoe… and a rosemary plant that I bought at the market. My yard is very drab. Needs some new life for sure. It’s small but there’s plenty of room for some herbs and flowers to brighten things up. The truth is I’ve been nervous about digging around too much in the yard because the one day I did in the spring I was introduced to chiggers- not fun!

Last night before bed I had a teaspoon of honey with cannabis extract in it. It is supposed to help with sleep. It didn’t- in fact it had the opposite effect. I was up til somewhere around 5 a.m. At a certain point it occurred to me that perhaps I should focus on “waking up” rather than going to sleep. I am fascinated by my dream state… isn’t my “waking state” equally as important, if not more so? And what does it mean to be awake? So I picked up Francis Lucille’s book, The Perfume of Silence.

I have only just started it but I can pretty comfortably say that it is on the nature of consciousness and non-dual reality. In response to a question in the beginning of the book he uses the sound of birds and ambient outdoor sounds as a reference point. He says, “Ask yourself, ‘Where do they appear?’ If the answer is that the bird is singing 50 feet from here, see that this is not actually your experience, that it is a concept. The actual experience of the sound is happening at a zero distance from you, not 50 feet away. It is not happening there but rather here, always. Everything is always happening here and now.”

Immediately I tuned into the sound of the crickets “outside” and suddenly felt that i was floating in a sea of consciousness. Everything that “seems” to be happening to me and around me is happening within the consciousness of I AM. I picked up my journal long enough to write “There is no separation between ‘I’ and my experience of the world around me- around the body I seem to inhabit. I am in fact inhabiting everything I seem to come into contact with.” And then drifted back out into the sea of consciousness…

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Blissed To Tears

I did finally make it home to my house of wholistic sound a little over a week ago. A two and a half week trip that evolved into exactly one month- full of surprises, old friends and new, sound journeys, car breakdowns, a visit to a gated community for hippies (The Farm, Summertown, TN) and much more!
Amazing what happens when you leave a house for a month. I could not have imagined how overgrown everything would be! Also factoring in living alone for the first time in my life- no kids, no sweetie, no mom to take care of... an interesting time in my life. Some days I feel like I am a bit lost and floundering and I have to remind myself that I have never done this before, not even knowing at times how to start my day... Yoga? Coffee? Music? Art? Writing? Breakfast? Vitamins? Weeding?

It's not sad and not particularly lonely although I suppose it could become that. More, it's just weird! When someone else is in the house I know what to do even if I think it's not necessarily what I want to do.

Meanwhile this blog is supposed to be about music and sound. And I am sitting at my dining room table loving the sound of the beautiful glass chimes that Josh Poll of Zen Glass in St. Pete, FL made for me when I had my sound healing center, which I finally hung up a couple of days ago. I have an entire box of chimes that people donated to the center which eventually all need to be hung in my new home and place of healing sound pleasures and treasures.
I opened up Facebook this morning and was greeted by this video of a most amazing version of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". I was blissed to tears. My total inspiration for the day- how can you not love it?!



Taking It To The Next Level

Listening to a fantastic radio show saluting Brian Wilson- "June 9, 2015 broadcast of the Magic Transistor Radio show on WPRK FM, Winter Park, FL, USA, spotlighting the music of Brian Wilson, in celebration of the June 5 opening of the motion picture Love & Mercy in American cinemas." Click here to listen. It's so good! There are some great and different arrangements than what you may be familiar with- like the version of "California Girls" which is very cool.
Playing music during 11:11 event with Alex Grey

Spent a long time this evening looking through old newsletters from the Sound Body Wholistic Health Center. How I miss that place! I love where I am... and I am still trying to figure out how to get things really moving the way they were when I had the center in a space that is my home. There was the Monthly Sound Healing Movie, frequent sound healing and nada yoga workshops by myself and so many others, concerts with Sacred Voices and Fred Johnson at the center and all over the St. Pete area, weekly sound journeys, garden lunches, playing music for all kinds of events, drumming classes and so much more. I am astounded when I look through the old newsletters and my appointment books.


A gorgeous cake from a memorable birthday celebration at the center!
 The truth is that, beyond giving birth to four awesome sons who have grown into amazing men, I feel like the center was my greatest achievement thus far- and I am certainly not ready to throw in the towel! How to take things to the next level in a totally different environment, that is the question.
Practice session during a tuning fork workshop

Sacred Sounds Revisited


Katurah Robinson, dancer, & Fred Johnson, vocalist (International Bazaar?)
In this moment I am sitting at my dining room table listening to a fantastic recording of a group of amazing and dedicated musicians and dancers who got together to raise money for the Sound Body Wholistic Health Center in 2007. This was the sound healing center that I had opened in St. Petersburg in 2005. Early in 2006, just as things were really getting off the ground I sustained a pretty serious head injury and was basically out of commission for about a year. The community did not want to lose the center which had become an oasis, so a core group of supporters put their heads and hearts together to keep it going. One of the things we did was to start a membership to the center which raised enough money to keep things going throughout that year but it was still a struggle, so in 2007 beautiful Jacqueline Connelly and her husband Kenny from the International Bazaar in Ybor City told me that they wanted to have a fundraiser for the center.

The International Bazaar was a huge space that sold items from around the world- clothing, gifts, jewelry, instruments and also hosted wonderful community events and had a great network... Jacqueline put together an amazing event with so many incredible musicians and performers from all over Tampa Bay- African musicians, dancers and drummers, jazz musicians, belly dancers, poets and my dear friend and colleague, sound healer, musician, awesome vocalist and the best MC ever, Fred Johnson

Ha, I didn't know what was on here. There are three CD's- one is missing. I am listening to the second one, just checking it out- and suddenly I am hearing myself speak with gratitude to all the people who made this event happen, who believed in the center, who experienced the healing power of sound. And now Carol Mitchell kicking butt with her amazing voice... "Let your little light shine, shine, shine." A group of us, seven women singing together, Sacred Voices- me, Carol Mitchell, Cathy Costa, Sharon McCord, Robin Hill, Jennifer Samuel-Chance and Penny Heffelfinger. I miss my singing friends so much. I miss our weekly gatherings at the center and all the singing we did together in other venues, on our own, in churches, in mosques- wherever there was a sacred space and an opportunity to come together with our voices and our hearts.
Sacred Voices- Katurah Robinson, Sharon McCord, Rosie Warburton, Robin Hill, Cathy Costa
at Unitarian Universalist Church, Clearwater, FL
Fundraiser for Haiti
I love where I am and I also miss my sound healing center and a place that is geared for having groups of people on a regular basis. I haven't quite figured out how to weave all that into this space. Listening to this CD is definitely an inspiration for me.

Sound Still Heals!

This is going to be abbreviated so that hopefully it is posted before midnight! Celebrated my 60th birthday today with some dear friends at a great restaurant  (Cav) in Providence. Rough start though... woke up this morning with a terrible pain in my side and my back. Did not want to have to cancel party which has been postponed numerous time over past two months due to various other people's illnesses, inclement weather (that means snow, and lots of it!) and who knows what else.So tonight was the night.

I knew it was digestive, after eating popcorn at the movies last night and then following it up with corned beef and cabbage when my friend Lynda and I got home at 10:30 craving something with protein. As it turned out, that was not the best choice! What to do? Sound healing. Took my pendulum and made a little map of what possible organs it might be. My hope and suspicion was that it was intestinal but the location of the strongest pain said it could be kidneys. This was all after I had taken various supplements to get things moving, had cranberry juice mixed with black cherry juice for sweetener and some water. The pendulum went straight away to large intestine. Whew- I knew at least that was manageable. I was praying it wouldn't go to kidneys, a much bigger problem.
Then I made another map of the all the different notes of the chromatic scale. I had never done this before. It was an experiment. I thought perhaps I could see if there was one particular frequency I needed. The answer (according to the pendulum)? F#, unequivocally. So the first thing I did was get a crystal bowl that was a very pure F# and play that for a few minutes. Then I went and got my set of Fabien Maman's tuning forks which is also a chromatic scale and designed to be used on the body. I tapped the F# and placed it on the area in the front of my abdomen that was hurting and got Lynda to do the same on my back behind my lower left ribs. The pain began to decrease in intensity.

We carried on this way for a while and then it occurred to me to go on the Soundweaver (vibroacoustic sound table within a copper dodecahedron) with Boris Mourashkin's music. Boris is a dear friend and a Siberian sound healer who completely healed himself of severe chronic pain from a very serious car accident with the use of his own musical compositions. I know how powerful and effective his music is. By now the pain was already starting to decrease and move around. I went on the Soundweaver and listened to a 20 minute recording from his CD "Points of Light." I didn't experience any pain while I was on the table and clearly when I got off it had dramatically subsided, if not gone away altogether.
Rosie Warburton, Boris Mourashkin & Linda Romero
at the Sound Body Wholistic Health Center, St. Pete, FL c. 2005.
Ginger tea and followed by some jook- good to go! Wonderful birthday party tonight- no pain! Sound still heals.

Now It's My Turn! (or What I Am Taking From "Your Turn Challenge")


Today is the 40th day of My Turn Challenge. It became "my turn" when, after 7 days, the official "Your Turn Challenge" was over and I decided to keep going, committing myself to shipping every day which, for me, means writing a blog post every day.

In the ancient Indian healing science of Ayurveda, it is said that it takes 40 days to break an habit, change a habit or create a new habit. Although it takes 21 days for a habit to create new neural pathways in the brain, it actually takes 40 days for those pathways to become fixed as a new habit.

I feel like I'm well on my way with the commitment to keeping up with my blog and believe it or not, my life is changing because of it. I wake up in the morning thinking about what I am going to write and can't wait to get to it. Last night I didn't get my blog posted until something like 11:53 pm but I still got it done before I turned into a pumpkin!

The word "practice" comes to mind. This is a practice. I am practicing essentially to become a bit more structured, a bit more disciplined, so that I can continue to make room for all the things I want to do, create, and accomplish- on a daily, weekly, yearly and lifelong basis- different levels of goals.

Yesterday I decided to add a new My Turn Challenge to my day and I have committed to doing a simple yet powerful group of exercises every day for 7 days- The Five Tibetan Rites of Rejuvenation. About 12 years ago I did them consistently for two months. I began to feel very positive changes in my physiology after as little as two weeks and I would have to say that after two months the change was quite dramatic. Then one day I had a bad fall playing tennis a little too ambitiously, damaging my wrist and my knee, and I never got back to practicing the Five Rites consistently again. I do them sporadically, once very few days or weeks, usually when I have some sort of pain in my body which they typically seem to relieve quickly. I want to do them, I know they work wonders for me but I don't. What's up with that? Who knows... I don't need to figure it out- I just need to make a change.

Yesterday, waking up with a pain in my neck from carrying wood, I decided it was time to do them and then I thought, "Well, what if I just commit to doing them every day for a week just like I did with blogging?" Start with a simple doable goal. So that's My Turn Challenge for this week. I'm off and running with the blogging- I won't let go of one to pick up the other.

I also just started a book that my therapist recommended to me- Vinegar Into Honey by Ron Leifer. I was talking to him yesterday about the challenge of finding time to read during the day. Why should that be a challenge? I love to read but of late it is. I start to read just before I go to bed when I am so tired I can't read more than two pages typically! It suddenly occurred to me that I could use the My Turn Challenge idea for this too and I decided that when I wake up in the morning- before I check my phone for messages, emails, updates and suddenly discover an hour has gone by- that I will pick up the book and read for at least 15 minutes. Then I can get up do "The 5 Tibetans" (which is exactly what I did this morning- Day 2 of Tibetan Challenge).

One of my bigger goals is to finish writng a book on sound healing that I started well over ten years ago. What I am anticipating is that by getting in the flow of writing in my blog on a daily basis, very soon I will get back to writing something every day in my book and one day in the next year or so it will be done, completed, finito!

The working title, by the way is Sound Possibilities: Restoring Balance and Harmony Through Sound and Music.

Oh and by the way again- I am very excited that I have gone from typically less than 20 page views a month on my blog to 129 yesterday!

So again, a big shout out to Winnie Kao, creator of Your Turn Challenge, and Seth Godin whose work was the inspiration behind it, to all my Facebook Your Turn Challenge new friends, supporters and motivators who on some level I answer to every day and look to for continued inspiration. Also to all the people, friends known and unknown, who "like" my Wholistic Sound Facebook page, who are members of my Sound Body Wholistic Health Center Facebook page, who read this blog, who come for sessions, workshops, sound journeys and meditations and to my four amazing sons- Namdev, Moose, Ben and Nic- who I believe have all come to appreciate that I am always pushing the envelope and know I will always support and encourage them when they want to do the same, do something daring, think outside the box, take a chance, step into the unknown. I love you guys!