I was heading to the beach yesterday and, right before setting foot into the lido, on its very threshoId, I had a sudden, flashing image of myself lying on the ground, eyes wide open: as if I had been shot dead, but looking like some sort of beautiful, gothic Snow White - pale skin and a bright red liquid coming out of me somewhere. Could have been the cover of an album.
Hm, puzzling. I let it go.
Once on the beach, I laid down and sunk into a meditation. I knew what I wanted to focus on and was determined to apply what I am recently learning...
BUT, out of nowhere - again - a picture of John Lennon this time popped up in my mind. He looked the way he did at the time he, was shot dead. The image was black and white; he wore no glasses, a turtleneck and his most iconic, happiest Yoko-eyes. He definitely looked like someone who's in joy and bliss, smiling a Cheshire cat's sly smile which in that moment clearly meant to me that he had interrupted my mental broadcast on purpose, to pay me a visit. I acknowledged such (most pleasant) image as an interference to my meditation and after a quick "HI, JOHN!" I just tried not to hold on to it, observing the thought without getting attached - as they teach you to do.
Only, it wouldn't leave, and it started moving.
The conversation that followed is too private, intense and most importantly way too LONG to be told here: the meditation lasted about 60' (and I cried for every single one of them actual, wet, copious tears, under my big shades - thank God for having them - while lying in the sun).
What I am here to share is instead that the experience made me clearly realise, once it was over, something I had sensed several times in the past, in fact since my very childhood, but couldn't really be sure of: as it turns out, you can have a real, personal, flesh-and-blood-like relationship and love for someone you haven't met, or met yet (not to mention someone you can no longer meet, but that is more intuitive and accepted because it respects the delusional space-time linearity we perceive).
It wasn't too long ago that people used to fall in love with the portraits of their future spouses, after all. And although my love for John didn't feel of marital nature at all (I happen to worship Yoko, incidentally), that I felt in his presence was indisputably Love - capital L - straight off my human heart to his and viceversa.
Not that it surprised me, but so far I had no tangible evidence: now I've gone from thinking so, to knowing - and as far as I am concerned, oh boy, I can assure you.
It's not the celeb, nor the Beatles, nor his artistry, or glasses, or songs: I love him.
Imagine that! Can you imagine?
Was it real? What is real?
"In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make."
I was offered the idea of meditating by a musician friend of mine, some 18 months ago, and I decided to go for it because I found out that it followed the very same principles I have been teaching by for my entire professional life (next year I'll celebrate 20 years of teaching).
You don't teach the body what to do: intuitively enough, physiological matter is way too complex to be controlled by our mental awareness (and sufficiently intelligent not to be). It is the other way around: the road will teach how to drive on it and will shape you as a driver (Kerouac being one of my other best friends, and John Cage another one... yours?).
What you do is:
you keep your ego out of your way,
your throw your sound expectations and ideas of what is right/acceptable out of the window,
you shut the F up (both as is avoiding to sing out loud unless it becomes unstoppable or inevitable, as well as in restraining yourself from commenting on yourself FOREVER),
you let that John-black-and-white picture which is the music score talk to you and build up in you,
you wait for that one day when your healthily kept body goes from thinking to feeling and then knowing.
Then you are ready to embrace the message Love gave you - and you effortlessly give vocal birth to it.
(Under 99% of unsolved passages, I find out that the student doesn't really know what's written, and has placed his own marks on top of the composer's.)
It is obvious, all human activities involve mental planning and anticipation, yet singing is mostly not taught that way.
(Lennon or Plato, we need to stop looking at the pictures on the wall of the cave and give them a chance to show up as the real thing.
We may be in for more than we bargained, we may be able to swap our limited image with our endless imagination, free from the chains of narcissism forever.)
In the whole process, the only time you are allowed to listen to yourself and your voice is when it is an embryo in your head, before it becomes audible.
What comes out of your mouth is for others, not for you: the audience, of course, but most importantly the dead and the gods - don't forget: you don't cheat or mess with them.
I'll be in Sanremo in the first half of September because I got in the final rounds of the biggest Italian rock competition (but let's talk about that some other time and don't try to look me up: I have a stage name); then I'll be in Milan from the second half of September on, regularly working.
Tomorrow I'll put out a final summer sale on the sessions plus the ARKive: my life in Milan will be quite intense and I'll have three paths to follow, so truly I need to plan ahead, and you do too, my beloved ones.
La Maestra
