Keep It Light: The Journey Back to Play

There are certain nudges in our life, a divine inspiration, that call us forward on a path, even when we don't know where that path will lead us. I've learned over the years that these nudges rarely arrive with explanation. They arrive as a pull in the chest, a name that keeps surfacing, a plane ticket I buy before I fully understand why. Not knowing used to frighten me. Now I recognize it as the shape that sovereignty actually takes when it's working. Guided by the intuitive intelligence that is innate in my being. Not certainty. Just fully trusting the process. And following the call.

The beginning

I have not spoken much about my journey as a musician here in this space. I had always felt that was a side note in my very, complex, shall we say, biography. Music was just always there. It was part of me before I had language for what a part of me even meant. It was part of my ancestry, carried in blood I never chose and wouldn't trade. But I never realized its importance in how I moved through the world, in how I express my essence, until I felt my soul’s song quietly rising from the deep within me.  

It started as my way to move through feeling, to give it a voice, a movement. I was always a sensitive child, one who felt things at a depth that had no outlet, because my voice was not always welcomed. So I turned to my guitar. I remember the weight of it across my small lap, too big for my body, my fingers reaching for shapes before I could name them. I would sit in my room for hours alone and not notice the hours passing. There was a kind of time in there that didn't follow the rules of the world outside the door, where expressing myself was dangerous and staying small and hidden away was safe. I always fell for the somewhat melancholic tones, a true sucker for a good minor key. It wasn't sadness exactly. It was truth, a truth I could feel in the marrow of my bones. The kind of music that would give you chills up your spine. The kind that moves you. Minor keys have an honesty that major keys sometimes try to cover with rose colored lenses.

I started playing for others, on stage for crowds, at nine or ten years old. I didn't have stage fright or fear of being seen that way. That's the part that still surprises me looking back. I just wanted to play, the way water wants to move downhill. It wasn't ambition. It was simply what I was made for.

But as happens to so many of us as children, there are subtle and overt ways our confidence begins to erode. Mine wasn't uplifted so much as it was shut down, quietly at first and then not quietly at all. I began to withdraw. To doubt talent I had never had reason to doubt before. To feel not enough to play with others, though no one had ever proven that to me directly, just subtle exclusions that I internalized. Looking back now, I can see why and how these voices were used by other’s fears, but it became something I believed was wrong with me. Belonging rejected. I couldn't hear the voices that wanted to cheer me on, to encourage me. I could only hear the ones that wanted to make me small, and eventually I couldn't see myself at all, except through their eyes. That's the cruelest part of that kind of erosion. It doesn't just take away your confidence. It takes away your own vantage point, to be unable to see yourself as you are, only believing other’s fears and projections.

How often do we internalize those voices and let them govern entire areas of our lives that have nothing to do with where the voices came from? How completely can we shut down a single channel of soul expression until the shutting down becomes the norm we forget was ever chosen? The freeze that comes can be crippling.

Over thirty years I silenced myself so thoroughly that I lost the simple gift of play. It calcified into perfectionism, the kind so unforgiving that playing with others, or in front of them, felt like standing at the edge of something with no railing. So I shut it down. I would hide in my room and play, not to explore, not to create, but to remind myself the spark was still there. To check on it the way you'd check on something buried, just to make sure it hadn't died. I still played open mics here and there, funky bands in the background, always in service of someone else's expression. Supporting another's soul song while keeping my own tucked somewhere no one could touch it, including me.

The calling

Fast forward to 2020. After years of treating this gift as something to keep hidden, I felt the call again. To sing. To play. To remember the pulse that beats in every cell of the body, whether or not we ever give it permission to move. I had been deep in study of the energetic healing arts by then, and I began to see the profound correlations between frequency and its medicine laid bare in front of me, as if they had been waiting patiently for me to look. I remembered reading, back when I was a child, books about the power of music and its capacity for vibrational healing. I had known even then that music would matter to my path. I just didn't know the shape it would take, or how long I'd make it wait.

I purchased my first sound healing instruments, a set of crystal bowls, and began exploring how their droning waves interacted with the field of my voice. I had already been channeling intuitive insight for others through healing sessions, words and messages moving through me toward someone else. Now that channel opened for voice and song intentionally, and something shifted. A different kind of transmission became possible. 

I began noticing the subtle nuance of tone, how different instruments created different effects in the body, physical, mental, emotional, subtle. How layering texture could shift an entire experience. How a harmonious interval and a dissonant one asked completely different things of a nervous system, and how both had their place if you knew when to use them. My musical background gave me a framework I hadn't expected to need again, applying music theory and rhythm to this new understanding of frequency's effect on the electromagnetic field of the subtle bodies. It felt less like learning something new and more like two rivers I'd kept separate finally finding the same bed.

Then, the gong. Grotta Sonora gongs, to be specific.

The gongs

I came across their page on Instagram years ago and became entranced. These weren't textural, atonal gongs, the kind that exist only to wash a room in noise. They were musical. Melodic. Harmonious. They were art, they were music, and they were medicine, all folded into one beautiful piece of work. So I ordered my first gong directly from them, The Golden Spiral. The potency held inside that fifteen inch piece of metal was unlike anything I had ever played. It opened a portal of consciousness inside me that I didn't know was there to open. I could feel the resonant waves moving around me and through me, and I could feel my own consciousness shift in real time, not metaphorically but physically, like a key turning. There was a certain sentience to this beautiful instrument, a voice beyond the striking of the mallet. One that was singing along with me. 

I felt something in that gong that went deeper than an instrument. I could feel the heart and intention behind it. The hands that shaped the metal, the years of craft that let those hands know exactly what they were doing, the love and devotion poured into every curve of it. It was palpable in a way I still don't have full language for. It cracked open a curiosity in me I hadn't felt in years, and once it opened, I couldn't close it again. I had to learn more. I had to understand the source, who created this, where did it come from? Its story was written in the lines of its curve, in the hammering of the metal. And now I wanted to meet the author of this story.

When Light House was born, I knew immediately that these instruments would need to live at its center, not as decoration but as a necessary organ of the frequency medicine the space was built to hold. I was on a mission to bring their magic here in a real way, so I reached out to the source directly. I wanted to connect with the creators themselves, to craft a set that would harmonize with the specific intention of this space, this vision that moved past the label of sound healing into something closer to touching consciousness itself. I wanted the vibrational impulse of these instruments to dance with the subtle bodies of everyone who walked through our door.

Madhava and Margherita curated Light House's set, and I was enthralled in a way I wasn't prepared for. I had never experienced sound the way I did while playing those gongs. There is a sentience to them, a consciousness enhancing quality I haven't found in any other instrument, before or since. Playing them, I could go so deep it felt like a portal, often transporting me into new awareness, sometimes having profound journey-like experiences as I stared into the depths of the design, and I began noticing that others could too. People would leave the Gong Wash sessions describing profound, timeless, meditative experiences, the most striking being a floating sensation, their whole body vibrating until it felt like they'd been lifted. Lightness. Clarity. Coherence. Hearing them describe it again and again, I knew I had to meet the people who built these tools. I had to see the land they were born from. To see where the threads of this story weave together.

Then came Mike Tamburo, master composer and gong wizard in the truest sense of the word. I had the joy of hosting him for a sound meditation concert back in April. Lying there, listening to the vast, polyrhythmic waves moving through the room, layered in complexity I couldn't fully track even as I felt every part of it, I knew immediately I wanted to go deeper into the “how”. Not just the experience of it, but the architecture underneath. So when I learned Grotta Sonora was teaming up with Mike for a long weekend intensive, the nudge was undeniable. I had to go. I had to meet these people, stand on the land that birthed these instruments, and deepen my study of the gong at its root.

the journey

Some might call me impulsive. I've made peace with that word, because what looks impulsive from the outside is, from the inside, simply obedience to a call I've learned not to argue with. Yes, I must do this. That's the whole sentence. No plan attached, no explanation required. It's the same nudge that built Light House in the first place. I didn't have a blueprint for that either. I just knew, following the Yes that told me it's time to go.

So I bought the ticket and braced myself for something I couldn't name yet. I wasn't prepared for the love and beauty that would take shape in those ancient Etruscan caves of Calcata, standing alongside the brilliance and pure devotion of those who surrounded me. Nothing could have prepared me, honestly. Some things you can only understand by standing inside them.

When I think of an intensive retreat, my past experience has trained me to expect catharsis, deep transformation through hard work, potent initiation through endurance. Seriousness, in other words. What came through this weekend was something else entirely, and it turned out to be exactly the medicine I needed. Play. A word I have never fully known how to inhabit. Life, for me, has always been a demonstration of strength and endurance, proof of resilience rather than an invitation into curiosity or joy or ease. I didn't know play was a language I was allowed to speak.

By day one, surrounded by people from all over the world, different languages and cultures folding into one room, I noticed we all carried the same thread underneath everything else. We spoke the language of heart and sound, and it required no translation. The word kinship sat on the tip of my tongue the entire weekend. Watching people from Latvia, the Netherlands, Turkey, Germany, Ireland, and Singapore gather on this ancient land to play, genuinely play, like children handed the rare gift of powerful, unusual instruments and told to go explore, changed something in me that I don't think will change back. It planted a phrase that hasn't left me since. Keep it light. Which is, of course, exactly what a place called Light House was always meant to do.

Our visit to the Hypogeum of Calcata was one of the most profound moments in the whole experience. The moment I stepped in, the walls stopped feeling like a boundary and became something closer to a throat, and the sound wasn't traveling toward me so much as traveling through me, the same stone that had held ceremony for thousands of years before I arrived, now holding the vibrational memory that lives within its ancient walls. Voices and gong tones and other instruments wove together in there, none of it separate, until the whole room seemed to be singing back at us. This was an ancient temple where the Etruscans once gathered to honor the land through shared resonance, and standing in it, I understood I wasn't hearing something new. I was hearing something ancient. We were only the most recent song added to it.

There is a particular silence that follows when the last voice and the last gong tone finally settle, where the reverberation keeps living in the rock long after your ear stops registering it. I sat inside what came after and felt witnessed, by something loving and patient. Something that had been waiting, without urgency, to see who would come next. I walked out of the Hypogeum a changed human. Recalibrated. Tuned, finally, to the frequency of shared harmony rather than the frequency of proving something, of performance.

The depth of gratitude I feel for Madhava and Margherita, for showing us that sound and music are meant to be shared, a gift offered back to a world that badly needs it right now, is difficult to put into words, as it is beyond words. It is felt. This is a connection I intend to nurture, because their understanding of what medicine the world actually needs right now sits so close to what I've been trying to build here, without always knowing how to name it. I see now that music is the bridge. It's the one language we can all feel, the one that moves beneath and beyond words entirely.

The biggest thing I learned in Italy is that devotion does not equate to seriousness. Devotion can simply mean showing up with your whole heart, again and again. Tending to that spark so that it becomes an illuminating flame, a passion. Following the pull even when it doesn't explain itself. Feeling the pulse and rhythm of life move through you without needing to control where it goes. And that the sacred lives in the joy of our soul’s expression. It doesn’t have to be dressed in the curated performance, it can simply be beauty for the sake of beauty. This is the spark of inspiration I'm carrying home to you.

Music is a gift meant to be shared and experienced together. That's what we'll do here.

Let's play.