There are things that can be said with music that cannot be said with words. Language is beautiful. However, words are simply discrete points on an unbroken continuum of experience.
Music contains all of the spaces between those discrete points.
When we hear it, it wraps us in its embrace and takes us away to other places. Moving us deeply on an emotional level. And certain types of music can be very healing and nurturing.
They can be very uplifting as it connects us with a deeper sense of purpose and provides those moments in which all of our needs are met.
It’s a pure, sincere expression of prosperity.
For me, I started my relationship with music quite young when I was 5 years old.
However, that didn’t last long because it was my mom’s dream that I learned piano. Needless to say, I had toys to play with and the great outdoors was calling at that young age.
When I turned 11, I became drawn to the guitar. After the fiasco with piano lessons, my parents were skeptical of my enthusiasm. They thought that if I got a guitar that it was going to sit on the shelf and collect dust.
So they weren’t really up for investing much in a guitar. After some sincere begging, I finally got my dad to take me to a little dusty pawn shop and pick up some old, beaten up Fender guitar.
It needed some serious love. But to their surprise, I played the hell out of it and showed this guitar all the love that I had!
Well, it’s 29 years later and no guitar of mine has sat on the shelf and collected dust (for too long at least!).
Music as an Antidote to the Disconnect of Modern Life
Guitar was my escape from a world I never felt fully part of. It allowed me to fill in the gaps of what was missing in life.
In my experience, this is true of many other creatives I’ve met. It seems that there are things that we can just naturally access through our creative expression that we have trouble sourcing amongst the normal routines of everyday life.
In fact, those precious moments of creative expression really enrich everyday life. They make the ordinary moments extraordinary.
I loved the creative process so much that in my late teens I wanted to be a professional musician.
I went to music school for a little while and almost took that dive fully after working as a guitar teacher part-time and getting local gigs.
But then I had a profound realization: I didn’t want to taint my relationship with music by having to rely on it for an income.
That pressure can strain the creative process to the point where it no longer yields fruit.
Instead, I wanted to keep the relationship with music pure.
I wanted to allow it to be light and playful and give myself the freedom to experiment and allow pieces of music to come together and flourish in their own time.
Not based around some externally imposed schedule. As a result, music has really been my medicine amidst all of life’s disappointments, challenges, and heartbreaks. Playing guitar is like a salve that soothes the pain and actually transmutes it into something usable.
This relationship with music has allowed me to build a sense of resiliency and allowed me to find meaning in those painful moments that are inevitable in all life.
I’ve owned many guitars in my day, too.
There was a period of time where I was traveling lots, or, you know, doing business, and I would pick one up, carry it around for a bit, and then sell it off over here when, you know, I only had two bags to take on the plane, and the guitar was the third bag.
I remember once I was in Peru and I had this little travel guitar with me. I met a Peruvian guy that was a little bit younger than me. I played this travel guitar and he was absolutely mesmerized by it.
He decided that he REALLY wanted it. He flat out asked me if he could buy it.
And I thought, “Well, this guy want this guitar much more than I do so maybe it’s meant for him!”
I ended up selling it to him and it was quite beautiful to see how much joy that he received from this exchange.
He obviously could not get that kind of travel guitar in Peru. For him, it was an experience of acquiring something rare and beautiful, so I was happy to let it go for a better cause.
Picking up and letting go has been my story with musical instruments throughout my life.
Until recently when I worked with a South African luthier named Theunis Fick, who tirelessly worked with me to craft a guitar to my exact specifications.
This is a totally new experience. Something I’ve never done before. With the amount of time, commitment and devotion that went into creating this guitar I can assure you, I won’t be leaving it behind.
The first day I played it, it was a brand new guitar. It was like a child fresh out of the womb.
As I played this guitar, I thought to myself “Wow, this thing is going to grow and learn as we develop this relationship!”
The more I play it, the more the wood of the guitar responds to the frequencies that are vibrating through it. Adapting organically to the unique signature of my playing from soft fingerpicking melodies to energetic percussive styles.
And so as a result, it will only blossom into its own sound and character after many years.
That’s very exciting because it’s a relationship and it’s something that needs to be cared for and nurtured over time.
Creativity Creates Purpose and Prosperity
As I mentioned earlier, there have been several periods in my life where I have put the guitar down.
Those busy periods where I was so engrossed in other projects that I couldn’t bring myself back to the sanctuary of doing what I truly loved. I always noticed that those periods of life were accompanied by a sense of purposelessness.
Over time, I realized that playing guitar is my compass.
It’s that sacred time where I just get to be and sort through all the noise and distraction in life and allow me to hone in on something that matters. In studying spiritual traditions and alchemy, I realized that everything taught in those traditions is mirrored in the creative process.
The creative path is truly beautiful because it’s coherent and it puts us into a coherent state.
To embrace creativity requires equal parts of discipline and surrender. It engages both hemispheres of the brain. This is proven.
It’s been neurologically verified that musicians and creatives have greater cross-communication between both hemispheres of the brain.
A Tragedy Overcome
I had a friend who was a very accomplished musician.
At the age of 30, he had an unexpected and devastating stroke.
It was terrifying because my band and I were coming home after tour and saw him leaving on a stretcher being hurried into an ambulance.
Immediately, we unhooked the trailer and followed the ambulance to the hospital. We later found out that he had a stroke.
It was a major stroke, and prior to the ambulance getting there, he had been alone at home for 15 hours.
The doctors had a grim prognosis – they said that he was going to be severely compromised for the rest of his life.
What they didn’t know was that he had a natural advantage – he was a lifelong musician.
Initially, he was on a slow path to recovery. He didn’t have motor functions, he couldn’t even speak.
Eventually, he partially regained his motor functions and as soon as he could pick up his bass again, he started playing music. That was when his recovery improved significantly, astounding the doctors.
And that just goes to show the power of creativity to forge neural coherence. Prior to picking up his bass, different parts of his brain were not talking to each because of the stroke.
After he started playing again, he began reactivating the cross communication between both hemispheres of the brain.
Creativity & Coherence
A coherent state is when we’re functioning optimally with both hemispheres of the brain in perfect synchronization. This activates the corpus callosum that connects us to our heart energy.
This is the essence of inner peace, balance, and well-being.
This is the nectar bestowed from walking the creative path that lives inside all of us. It extends far beyond our moments of creative expression and becomes useful to other areas of life.
It enhances our sense of well being and our sense of spiritual purpose. It creates emotional vulnerability so that we can show up better in relationships. It allows us to think outside the box and problem solve in new ways.
The gifts of the creative path are applicable to our business and our life’s work.
It contains equal ingredients of discipline and surrender.
One must learn the technique of their craft.
As a musician, we practice our scales. We have to learn chords.
Sometimes when I’m playing guitar, I sit there and I focus on getting one note right for a long period of time, but it’s done from a space of devotion.
We naturally want to improve and get better because it’s done out of pure love and leads to a greater experience of flow state.
The more that discipline and structure is brought into practice and honing our craft, the more freedom and space that it provides to improvise and to surrender into the creative process.
Everyone is Creative
One of the most disastrous things in modern society is that people have come to believe that they’re not creative.
This is a horrible lie that we tell ourselves.
Every single person I have met is creative. They might just not recognize it.
To be creative is to be human and it has many ways of unfolding.
It could be the way that we raise children
The way that we tell stories.
The way that was engage our imagination.
The way that we prepare food.
These are all part of the creative process.
And the more that we can just take a moment to pause between thoughts and say, What if I tried this instead? And we experiment a little bit and see where it leads. That’s the moment that we’re engaged in the creative process. That’s the moment where we’re stepping out of the box and into the miraculous.
I hope to leave you with this: Just do the damned thing that your heart longs for!
Take some time to remove the distractions.
Commit yourself to that thing for at least a couple weeks.
Really gift yourself this time to begin a relationship with it.
Remember, the hardest part is simply getting past the inner doubt, the self criticism, the self judgment, and taking that first step into doing what you think you might feel like you love doing.
Because once you’re in it, there’s no going back.
It’s kind of like the Hotel California. You can check out any time, but you can never leave.
