The Making of a Music Healer
Healing Music Bio

My entry into the world of healing music has been a long and joyous one filled with many serendipitous moments and fantastic adventures that started the day I was born. The moment I took my first breath I was already creating music. You see, I did not cry in the delivery room. I hummed. As my mother recalls, every nurse and doctor in the ward came into the delivery room to listen to the humming baby.

And so, from day one I was already creating healing music with my voice. I have no doubt that is my soul-purpose. But is has by no means been an easy journey. Most of my life has been a spiritual quest remembering that soul purpose, re-awakening to my highest potential, and creating my dream as a reality.

I have only marginal fragments of my early years that offer insight into my true nature and power as a healing music artist. When I was four, my parents took me to have my IQ measured. One of the tasks was to play back a simple melody on a toy xylophone. I not only played back the melody, I finished it with a complementary musical phrase. The doctors told my parents they had never seen a child with such musical aptitude before. I have no memory of this event, but I smile when my mother recounts it.

I began piano lessons at the age of eight and a half at my own behest. My grandmother would not let me play her piano unless I knew how, so I implored my parents to give me lessons. It was quickly apparent that I was naturally gifted. I began writing pieces that I would play for my teacher during our lessons. My first “official” composition, The Waterwheel, was penned when I was eleven.

I studied piano with Ellen Buoniconti for ten years, winning numerous competitions and writing numerous compositions along the way. On the surface I appeared to be on the fast track to concert pianist land, but inwardly there was something else going on.

When I was 11 or so, a very strange event happened. I had been having night terrors and irrational fears for quite some time. Often times I could sense the presence of something in my room with me but I could not see it. Naturally, this was a terrifying thing for me, as I did not know about spirituality yet and I was sensing a spirit guide. One day I decided to face my fear. I said to this presence that I was not afraid of it anymore, and as soon as I said that I felt a rush of energy enter through my abdomen and fill me up with strength.

It was a long time before I fully understood what happened that day. It was a pivotal moment for my own spirituality because something inside me had been unlocked and I became interested in studying the occult. (I now understand it as a spiritual empowerment, the first of many.) By the time I was 18 I had read most of Jung and Cyril Scott's little-known book "Music: It's Secret Influences Throughout the Ages."

In college I studied piano with Harris Crohn and Chung Hyo Chin. I majored in composition and studied with the Pulitzer Prize winning composer, Lewis Spratlan. I was doing all the things that I had been taught were expected of me, but I didn't feel fulfilled. Something was lacking and I was searching. I was still actively developing my own concept of spirituality and integrated religion and New Age Spirituality into my academic course load.

During my senior year I began to shift from the traditional path of a young academic composer to a more intuition-led career path. I remember the catalyst for this shift very well: I presented my latest, most ambitious and cherished, autobiographical piece to my thesis advisor. After hearing it he said it was “not thesis material.” The impact from those words plunged me into a state of confusion and self-doubt that caused me to question my envisioned career trajectory. I had played the same piece days before in the campus center and garnered an audience of weeping listeners. They were weeping because the music was so moving and beautiful! I couldn’t understand how it was not thesis material if it had such an impact on the audience. I also wasn't aware of the power of my healing music at the time.

Less than a month after that event I had a very intense and strange dream involving a red jewel that led to my second major spiritual empowerment. You can read more about this dream and how it plays into the larger picture of my cosmic identity and the inter-dimensional link between sound and crystals here. Let's just say I wasn't in Kansas anymore!

After graduating with honors, I was awarded the graduate fellowship as the Assistant Choral Director for the college during which time I began writing choral music and studied choral conducting with Mallorie Chernin. This was a very interesting twist of fate as I had applied for the Orchestral Assistant position since I had never sang in a chorus in my life. It seems the universe was really adamant that I recover my public singing voice that I packed away after a traumatic tenor solo in the school musical in 5th grade...

Mallorie was an instant supporter of my music and gave me the opportunity to perform Maybe Not Forever (2002) during a televised concert in Tono, Japan where the Amherst College Choral Society was touring in 2003. I will always remember the impact it had on the audience and the many people who came up to me afterward to thank me. I also received free voice lessons during this time and studied with the amazing voice coach, Rod Gisick. His instruction would prove to be invaluable for laying the foundation fo my future crystal bowl singing .

After completing the fellowship, despite the encouragement of others, I was still conflicted about returning to Grad School. I wanted to continue my musical education but I felt my music had no credibility in the academic world. My dreamlife was as active as my waking one and they two seemed to be blending. I knew there was more than the mundane world I could see outside my window.

I continued to compose and focused my attention to my spiritual interests. Through skillful rationalization, I decided to attended the Stillpoint School of Massage Therapy to learn a "practical trade" to support myself with for when I would return to school. Little did I know that decision would forever change my life for the better and open up doors to undreamed of possibilities.

Massage school brought me into much closer communion with my own body and my abilities as a healer. It soon became apparent that I had strong latent empathic powers and I began to develop them through touch. The program coordinator took me aside in the last month of the program to tell me she had never seen a more gifted student pass through her doors in the 20+ years she had been teaching massage. She said I have "eyes in my fingers," and that I will touch the lives of many many people with my gifts.

After becoming certified I spread my wings to the West Coast. The whole decision and process to relocate across the country was itself like a dream, seamless, sudden, and smooth. I did not know why at the time, but I knew I had to move to San Francisco, fertile land of New Age possibility and home to a great deal of healing music.

My work as a massage therapist there led me to Reiki, and then to Sound Healing. The people I met opened door after door after door. Then it happened, I discovered the world of healing music. It was like discovering a new continent, but one that I knew was there all along with lots of friendly people already populating it.

I can only say that I was divinely guided to enroll in the Globe Institute of Psychoacoustic Music and Sound Healing. My semester there threw open many doors to my own hidden powers I held shut since my early childhood, including the healing power of my own voice and my direct connection to the angelic realm where I have guides actively working with me to bring down the music of the spheres and other healing music to the Earth plane.

Suddenly my life-long struggle with the expectations of my musical talents became crystal clear. My curious idiosyncratic tendency to sing spontaneous passionate melodies revealed its true multi-dimensional origins. It was an affirmation for my inner convictions to abandon academic musical composition to fully express my healing music. I had found a solid keystone bridging the gap between my passion for music and my gifts as an intuitive healing music artist.

Of course, my soul-purpose awakening did not end there! It wasn't long before I was introduced to crystal bowl singing by Lisa Raphael. In an instant more fragmentary memories and idiosyncrasies lined up to reveal a larger picture. As a child I was obsessed with making wine goblets sing by wetting my finger and tracing it around the rim. In college I even wrote a score with wine goblets as part my theses. It was all made obvious as latent subconscious information leading me closer and closer to the real instrument of my power and capabilities, the crystal bowl. Together, my bowl and my voice creating the most powerful healing music I have ever encountered.

As an astounding aside, when I was six I had a dream that induced an anxiety attack. The dream was abstract and appeared to be two rings wobbling and rotating on top of one another. Just recently I was at a gathering and performing pre-birth trauma healing with my crystal bowl singing in a jacuzzi. Looking at the rim of my bowl wobbling as it floated in the water triggered the recall of that dream. It wasn't a dream at all! It was a glimpse into my future, into that very moment when I was doing healing work with my bowl. The two rings I saw were actually the rim of my bowl in the darkness. My six year old body and mind found it a little too difficult to integrate such an intense psychic phenomenon and reacted with the anxiety attack.

As if I thought crystal bowl singing was the ultimate manifestation of my healing music journey, the final component of my soul-purpose awakening, my crystal realm origins, revealed itself to me in another moment of insight while singing with my crystal bowl. That story can be read in its entirety here. Suffice it to say I have an innate understanding and calling to teach the similarities between sound and crystal healing because they are indeed one and the same.

As a healing music artist, I have now manifested and developed my dream into a reality. I am able to follow my soul-purpose, spreading the sounds of joy through healing music, wherever I go. I am truly blessed, and the beauty in it is that I know you are too. Just remember who you really are and the world will provide for you!

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