Your voice isn’t just what you say.  It’s the vehicle through which you posit your whole presence and stand in the world. How you broadcast your brand, consciously or unconsciously, You.  From rappers to singers to speakers to lovers, your … Continue reading →

A follow up to the Yo-Yo Ma quote.

I can’t learn easily from some speakers.  I don’t get their message if they’re not congruent with their body.  Or actually I get a lot of messages, some of which I don’t want.  G.W. Bush was like that wasn’t he?

I was brought up with a lot of music, mostly classical.  The forms and dynamics are part of me, and this transposes to speaking and conversation.  One melody and a counterpoint maybe, a duet, some deeper resonances.  A Bach fugue will take you off on one tack and then bring in a couple more voices and get you into a whole universe, and then wind the whole thing down back to home and the original theme, or not!  You go in there, follow along and your mind gets sort of transformed, surprised, soothed, enchanted and so on but you usually end up back where you started.  Seems like good conversations are often like that.  And so is a good lecture.  And of course, themes stay with you, you’re forever changed.  It lives in you if it takes.

So what can I do with this information?  these experiences? for what I’m trying to do, teach, coach, help people transform and grow.

Well…………..I’m blessed with a very subtle Northern Ireland accent, actually an Ulster accent.  It can be sing-songy, but is definitely musical.  And it tends to get people’s attention.  So I have an in and a vehicle, I think, that maybe can open the channels for learning.  And if I can make my message interesting, appealing or compelling – play the music well – then I can certainly get people to think about things in ways that can change them for the better, whether their problem is physical, emotional, creative or spiritual.

Now that I think of it,  I just love going to work and am getting better at it.

“The role of the musician is to go from concept to full execution.

Put another way, it’s to go from understanding the content of something

to really learning how to communicate it and make sure

it’s well-received and lives in somebody else.” -  Yo-Yo Ma

Now doesn’t that speak to all kinds of communication?  I was looking for a quote to use on the rebuild of my OscarsVoice website.  I’ve been procrastinating on making some voice products where I’m trying to communicate how to be, do things etc. and in a last site I wrote that the energy and intent behind the words is as important as the verbal message.  One study suggested that personal communication is 7% verbal. 38% tone of voice and 55% physiology.

So I think I should do some practicing.

The role of the speaker/teacher ?……………….is to go from understanding the content of something to really learning how to communicate it and make sure it’s well received and lives in somebody else.

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” - Albert Einstein

Recently been around someone who’s always persecuted by life? by a person? a relationship? a system?  When you think about it, it’s a great place to hide and a great strategy for staying in the same place.  Now I know that sometimes there’s good reason to think this way.  You just might be right and/or you just might be creating the situation.  Facts are facts.  But I like this reverse paranoia idea -

- the delusion that everyone is out to help you.

When you’re lined up with your values and passions, the Universe does set this up.  Beginner’s luck is real!  Freshness, purity, in-tuneness, coming with heart from unimpeded instincts.  Reverse paranoia builds confidence and success in all kinds of ways.  And we need it, because the measure and development of character is not in our achievements, but rather in how we deal with difficulties and setbacks.  For problems are the roughage of life, and we’re really warriors taking them on every day.

So be a confident warrior knowing full well, successes pass as quickly as failures, and move on to the next thing with the Universe on your side.  Move from fear to faith and go.

I was having all kinds of confusion last week about what I was doing in my work.  Really, I was distracted by my thoughts about someone who just doesn’t like me and would wish I just disappear.  That led me on a huge mental and emotional merry-go-round.
There wasn’t much point in looking at what was wrong with this person.  That only brought me to all kinds of judgements and to a kind of stalemate about what to do.
I was the one disturbed here no matter what she was doing.

So……………better look at myself, eh?  And pretty quickly a whole series of unresolved memories made themselves known.  Similar situations, similar people all in a line.  Memory data that wasn’t cleared and was still clogging my freedom, my soul really.

So I looked up Dr. Hew Len and Ho’oponono.  The video can’t be embedded so here’s the link

He describes so wonderfully the art of clearing the memory data and going back to the “void.”  Physics calls it the “phantom force of emptiness,” Shakespeare, the blank, Jesus, the foundation stone.  Only from there can you build something that’s moved by perfect information, not things we’ve learned and kept in our subconscious storehouse.  Dr. Len calls it Love.

Coming from love, I can have my mind cleared and get my freedom back.
Everytime I am disturbed, it is my responsiblity to clear it, not anyone else’s.

Check out the video and Dr. Hew’s many methods to do this.  The structure is the same all the time.  I’m sorry, Please forgive me, I love you, thank you.
In a way the same as praying for the person who harms you, that they have what you would wish for yourself.

It’s very beautiful and it works miracles.

That’s what Merleau-ponti said are the two most relevant questions.

Immanuel Kant claimed that we are set up with the notions of space and time and cause built in. These don’t come from experience, rather are templates on which we build our world.  Cause implies time – one thing causes another, simultaneously or one after the other.

So…….where are you?  seems a reasonable question, since you create your perceptions of your place in the world, or in any activity for that matter.  I am here, surrounded by what?  In what predicament or work activity or pleasure or place of communication.  You’re always communicating and the world is always responding.  So where are you now? in the scheme of things big and small.  And what words will you use to describe it.  You move from here.

What time is it?  What is the marker of how you’re doing?  What time is it for you in the overall movement?  Crucial in a race.  Relevant all the time.  Are you moving with the flow, forwards or backwards.  Can you reset the clock? the position, the starting whereness.  They do in basketball.  They don’t in art or the creative process which seems to have its own time frames.  Although you can maximize these processes.  Growth, of anything, has it’s own framework and evolution.  Where are you, and where are you at in the timing of that frame.

To dance you have have to know in some part of you, the where and the timing, or there’s no dance.  Music?  lovemaking?  production?  playing?  Are you in tune, in time, in place? static? continuously changing?

Do you have to answer these questions?  or just live them.  Living them is the best, but setting them up is part of innovation and dream making.

I am becoming delightfully aware, or re-aware of these kinds of things as OscarsVoice develops.

This is a bit of a follow up to the Josh Waitzken post.  It just came to mind that he stressed this a great deal.  Sensing and feeling where the energy is and moving from a state of relaxation, even in a fight.

Baseball hitters have a moment of pure calm before they release the swing.  Hitters don’t do well when they ‘press’ or muscle their effort.  Just relax and enjoy yourself is always what the mangers and coaches say.  It applies everywhere.  I asked a really good salsa dancer how to do what he does – I really thought I needed a lot of moves and brilliance and so on.  He said the most important thing is to relax.  After all the learning and practice has been done, just relax and let it come to you – I said that.

It’d certainly true for writing too, and planning.  After all the thought and worry and sorting out, let it come.  It always does.  For me, it usually comes after I’ve given up on it coming, after I’ve gone into despair.  It always comes on its own.  But I always have to go through that space and that fear.  You’d think I’d have learned that by now.  But it always surprises me.

The Art of Learning

I always was intrigued by the coma state, wondering what was going on there.  Now my background is brain science, so this just sits there for me wanting to be understood.

Well, I had a client once who had a motorcycle accident and was in a medically determined coma for eight days.  Of course there are different levels of coma, and what’s going on will depend on things like the extent of damage to the brain and so on.  But here he was sitting in front of me, so I had to ask, “What was it like?”

He said it was like nothing, except he was everywhere in a nothingness.  ”But I had one thought.   If I don’t do this right, I’ll never get out of here.”  And he did suffer in waking life from a fear of not getting things right.

And then a colleague told me about his friend, who was in a coma for forty days after an accident.  He said that man was just terribly, terribly frightened the whole time and knew he could do nothing.  He hated it and never wanted to talk about it again.

I think when people are in a coma it’s a good idea to just be with them, very peacefully, just being there.

Now I imagine you can go to that state of consciousness in deep meditation, or maybe some people can, like an undead state, but aware.  Or maybe in a severely dissociated state, switched off, not in touch with the outside world and not in another functioning state of mind.

The hypnotist Jerry Kein, and others use a hypnotic coma state to help healing processes.   Hypnosis does allow for very profound healing in the body.  I think some comas do too.

More later