ABOUT
Music has never simply been something I do. For me, it has always been something far more personal; a place of healing, connection, transformation, and truth. A few weeks shy of my 17th birthday; I suffered a traumatic experience that would change the course of my life. While most of my friends were having the kind of high school experiences you expect at seventeen, going to parties, football games, school events, playing sports, and spending time together; my world had become a nightmare. I was hospitalized for the better part of a month; doctors telling my parents to prepare themselves. Life was continuing around me while mine seem to have stopped. Instead of worrying about the ordinary things teenagers worry about, my soul was undergoing a deep transformative experience that would only grow as the years passed.
The isolation was painful, but it also pushed me inward. With so much of the outside world out of reach, I began exploring an inner world I ha never consciously known existed. That is where music became more than something I loved. It became a lifeline, a language and eventually a path back to myself.
The more I wrote and played, the more it felt as though music was moving through me faster than I could keep up with it. Melodies, lyrics, chord progressions, and entire ideas would arrive nearly fully formed, and often felt less like I was creating them than recieving them.
As I spent more time inside the music, I also began to understand it differently. I started noticing how certain chords coud create tension or release, how a melody could stir something physical inside the body, how harmony could soften an emotion that had fet unbearble just momets before. Certain sounds seemed to resonate in very specific places within me, changing my mood, calming my nervous system, or giving shape to feelings I could not otherwise express.
Without having language for it at the time, I was beginning to understand music as something more than sound. I was experiencing it as a form of divine connection; between the body, the emotions, the spirit and something beyond myself. The more I played, the more I realized that music did not only reflect what I was feeling. It could change what I was feeling.
When I say music saved my life, I mean it in the deepest sense of the words. Music became the medicine I needed to survive. It became the bridge between who I had been, who I was becoming, and something greater than myself. Through it, I found healing, meaning, and eventually my way back to life.
I was blessed to have had a career in both teaching and performing, connecting deeply with students and audiences, sharing the medicine that once saved my life. Eat, pray and play. Always remember, no matter who you are, you too have a song in your heart that can heal your soul.