Mom died 4 years ago at 86 years of age.  She lived a full life and was ready to go.  She showed it in many ways.

She had a good last weekend, was chatty and smiling, surrounded by dear members of her extended family.  Having pneumonia, we  knew her condition was critical.

When things turned for the worse, we tried to get her to the hospital, but she wouldn’t have it.  Her body started shutting down.  We called the ambulance off and she started to stabilize.  That gave her two more days of life, at home.

During those two days, she was not exactly lucid.  She could not speak but she was aware.  Seemed at rest.  It was clear that she wanted company, craved holding hands.

While she was at rest, all her children surrounded her in her room, taking turns at holding her hand and checking her oxygen levels.  But for the most part, we were in bad shape, sadness filling all our pores.

During her last night, there was a passage when we were all absolutely quiet, still.  Went on for what seemed ages and I couldn’t take it any more.  So I decided to break out the music and let her have the last notes of her life.  I’m not exactly sure why I chose this particular album but it seemed totally appropriate for the moment.

Daniel Barenboim is a very famous classical conductor and pianist from Argentina.  A genius with a great career, still very active at age 73.  He will be doing a whole series of Mozart and Bruckner with Staatskapelle Berlin at Carnegie Hall next season, conducting and playing the piano simultaneously.

A very little known gem by Barenboim is “Tangos Among Friends“, honoring his native Argentina.  While mom was not big into tangos, this particular album she really liked.  The selections are close to the music she grew up with and loved.  It’s very deep and sweet, yet a little sad.  Just transports you to a profound inner space.  Here’s a little taste, “Mi Buenos Aires Querido”.

Barenboim’s piano is fabulous, accompanied by a delicious heartfelt “bandoneón”, the Argentine version of the accordion (hey, more life for the accordion!!), and a string bass.

I know in my heart that mom was delighted to receive the gift of music one last time before she left, even as she was dozing off.  Maybe I should let Barenboim know that his music was honored in a pretty sublime way.

Bananas get all the publicity for being a very sensual fruit.  I withhold judgment on that.

Have you popped a raspberry in your mouth recently?  Try it.

Starting with the beautiful red tone leaning towards fucsia, caress your lips with one and the need for lipstick diminishes.

Then there is the velvety smooth texture, just a little furry and soft. Gently prod its center with the tip of your tongue and close your eyes.  Mmm, delightfully sensual.

I could stop here but let’s keep going. The taste, a little bitter or a little sweet and its crunchy texture finish off the experience of a perfect carb: low sugar and sky high fiber.

And then, ready for the next one.  Delicious.

The Akashic Field is replete with sexual energy.  Of course it is one of our primary drivers.  We would not be here without it.  Even though a very low proportion of the population is conceived via artificial means, by and large the survival of our species (and generally all other animal species) depends on sex drive.  No wonder it is so central.

We as individuals don’t need sex to survive.  In fact, there are many who go entirely without sex during large portions of their lives.  It’s a respectable choice.  However, what a waste.  It’s such a wonderful positive energy.

Middle Class Morality points us towards a path where our sex lives and the entire focus of our sexual energy resides in a single person: our partner.  We’ve already covered this in the “Marriage, the Secret Files” post.  Not only does this create enormous pressures and misunderstandings, this also makes us miss opportunities to enhance our lives.

A few years ago at a spiritual retreat where we got to talk a whole lot about sex, a classmate suggested that her sex life had been mostly defined by being a “good sexual worker”.  What she meant was not that she had prostituted herself but rather that in her relationships, her main goal was to satisfy her partner.  In a way, she was fulfilling the demands of traditional marriage.  But that left her restless, mostly disconnected.  She found herself fantasizing a whole lot during sex.  This resonated quite a bit with me.

As I’ve mentioned in other posts, I have struggled with self esteem a whole lot in my life.  Hasn’t been different in bed.  My foolish belief was that in order to be loved and appreciated by my partner, I needed to be the best possible sex worker I could be.  The objective of good sex would be to leave my partner absolutely and irrefutably satisfied.  Muti-orgasmic, howling, shivering.  Boy, what a good job.

I remember a movie a saw during my teenage porn aficionado years, “In Praise of Older Women”.  Older women have always carried a fascination for me, but that’s a story for another day.  The one line that I remember most was by one of the beautiful “mature” women (probably in her 30s or 40s) telling her young lover that in sex, each one is responsible for his/her own orgasm.  Hmm, a little different from traditional lore.  Not quite Middle Class Morality.  Certainly quite different than what I lived for years.

A very good friend of mine whom I’ve loved dearly confronted me with the idea that being a good sex worker is not necessarily effective or enlightening, or maybe even exciting or intimate.  Her point was, men and women feed off of each other’s desire.  This had never dawned on me.  What a discovery: it is exciting for my partner to see me excited and expressing my own sexuality.

For the past several years, I have been focusing on my own desire and sexual energy.  Today, I revel in sexual tension, sexual energy.  Clearly, I believe it’s “up there” in the Akashic Field and I can tune into it anytime I want.  I can also trigger it by very real down-to-earth interactions, which in a way can be interpreted as instantaneous uploading and downloading through the Akashic Field.

I used to think that my sexual energy, my desire, was dirty and needed to be hidden.  The last thing I wanted a “nice girl” to know was that I had “dirty thoughts” about her.  Today, I have come to grips with the fact that I am a very sexual man, I tune into sexual energy consciously and unconsciously, I let it travel through me, I play with it, I enhance it and I very much can decide what to do with it.  It is mine.  It is a gift of the universe.  And it is something that can arise independently from any one particular person or circumstance.  And it actually doesn’t even have to do with the sex act since sex can be filled with sexual energy just like it can be totally devoid of it.  As an old college professor of mine once said, there is a huge difference between sexual connection and genital gymnastics.

So, what is sexual energy to me?  How do I access it?  Where does it come from?

We are culturally conditioned to believe that men are turned on by visual queues while women are turned on by stories.  There may be some truth in this but I believe men and women have the capacity to tune into sexual energy from many different sources and triggers.  I clearly get aroused by very specific imagery.  More on that at another time… maybe.  But what I’ve come to learn and experience is that there is no aphrodisiac like connection, intimacy.

I feel sexual energy in my body.  It is a very specific set of phenomena, not always the same, but always noticeable.  Once it’s triggered, it can linger for hours or days.  I used to think that the only two possible outcomes of sexual energy were either satisfaction or frustration.  This actually tainted quite a few interactions with women: once sexual energy was triggered, we either wound up in bed or we parted not quite so friends.  What a waste.  As many other things in life, the beauty of sexual energy is being able to enjoy it in the moment as it happens, in the now.  Doesn’t matter how it evolves.  It will take its course.  And I know that physically there are so many ways of reaching satisfaction that I can feel independent of any one of them.  Once again, going back to earlier posts, I can take responsibility for my own sexuality, making decisions as a powerful adult, painting the canvass of life in blue or red.

Being sexual with a partner involves free will.  Even in marriage, we should never expect that we will engage in sex by default.  And that is also a key element of connection and intimacy.  Sex with a partner is being a co-creator of our mutual experience.  There is no more delicious feeling than this.  Starting to understand that there’s the possibility of connecting, locking eyes, smiling, gazing at each other’s lips, hearing each other’s voice utter words of love with profound tones of surrender, lightly touching, slowly, from the periphery inwards, embracing, kissing…  The rest I will leave up to your imagination, your taste, your repertoire.

The beauty of sexual energy is that it happens, it’s created, along the way.  So it can actually happen just by locking eyes, or by gazing, or by hearing each other’s voice.  So it can happen with anyone with whom we connect at some intimate level.  It’s foolish to believe that it can only happen with one person in one circumstance.  It misses so much of what is possible to enjoy in our daily lives.  And just because it happens doesn’t mean that the only possible outcome is winding up in bed, or failing in frustration.  Life is full of possibilities for which we have the ability to co-create.

We all crave connection.  We are all sexual beings.  Yet we are culturally conditioned to hide our sexuality in the deepest recesses of our private closets.  Let’s just be out there and enjoy who we are, at every moment, while we remain powerful and independent in our decisions, choosing our words and actions wisely at every moment.

“Mary Poppins” is probably my favorite movie of all time.  The music is beautiful and catchy, the dancing delightful, the mood uplifting and inspiring.  Julie Andrews sings masterfully.  Her tough yet endearing persona, her sparkling deep blue eyes make it impossible not to be totally mesmerized.  Dick Van Dyke is also pretty great, profound and likable.  I find myself using expressions from the movie without even thinking about it, like “spit spot” to hurry up my girls in the morning.

When my older daughter was a toddler, we watched Mary Poppins pretty regularly on Sunday mornings in its full 2.5 hour glory.  For me, it’s not just an aesthetic pleasure.  It actually causes intense emotional reactions.  Touches a fiber in me.

Ervin Laszlo is a pretty interesting author.  A classically trained pianist who became a well respected thinker.  Not an easy read.  He embodies a philosophy that might just give us an out, a path towards the end of the tunnel, in trying to understand the nature of our existence.

His main construct is the “Akashic Field”.  In new age, we hear the term “Akashic Records” quite a bit.  Well, the Akashic Field contains the Akashic Records and more.

I am absolutely convinced by my own experience and plenty of reading that no matter how scientific we want to be, there is a reality out there that we cannot perceive with our 5 senses.  We are integral part of that reality.  We are interconnected.  Do I believe in God?  In a sense I do, but not in any shape or form, definitely not anthropomorphic.  I find myself referring more to “the Universe” than any other term.  My fellow shamans use “pacha mama”, literally “Mother Earth”.

The Akashic Field is the all encompassing informational and energetic content of the universe.  Everything that has ever happened and that will ever happen is recorded in it.  Every thought, deed, word, perception, feeling, interaction, we have in our lives is recorded up there and it’s available for anyone to tune in and “see”.  Mathematically, life is a series of “functions” (f(t), g(t), etc.) where t is time and each function represents an aspect of our state of being, our location, our position, our words, our thoughts, our feelings.  It’s all up there.  Can never be erased.  Can never be “taken back”.

But so is everyone else’s.  And so is the experience of every sentient being to ever inhabit the universe.  And so is every concept ever to appear in the universe.  We did not invent 1+1=2.  We just “downloaded” it from the Akashic Field.  Likewise, “love” is all over the Akashic Field in the experience of all the sentient beings that have preceded us, like fear, anger bliss and any other “energy” that we may have ever experienced.  We didn’t invent it.  It’s all up there and we just “tune into” it.

I grew up with a very mechanistic mind.  Always loved physics, particularly classical mechanics.  It all seemed so neat, organized, tangible.  The last 50+ years of physics have actually screwed it all up because there’s a lot more we don’t understand and that doesn’t fall within a comprehensive beautiful pattern.  But many believe that the pattern exists and we get closer and closer to it with every spin of particles inside the Large Hadron Collider.  Are we really searching for the Akashic Field?

One of the gems of modern physics is “quantum entanglement”.  One of the gems of modern psychology are “mirror neurons”.  They’re in essence  the same thing: we are instantaneously interconnected with related particles, beings, people, with whom we relate.  Water changes its crystalline structure depending on how we think and feel about it.  It becomes beautiful, original, symmetrical if we love it.  We sense and follow the moods of those who surround us.

So clearly there’s a lot more to the universe than what we see.  How does this relate to immortality?  And what about Mary Poppins?

I have come to believe that our experience as unique identifiable human individuals spans our life on Earth and that’s it.  Our soul is created by and within the Akashic Field when we are conceived, we acquire individuality, we acquire free will (and so does everyone else), we experience life and express ourselves with creativity while our bodies are alive.  Our legacy is every instant of our life.  The purpose of life is to live every instant the best way possible.  But the day we die, we cease to have individuality.  Our “energy” is already uploaded into the Akashic Field.  We reunite.

So what about reincarnation?  Clearly there are people who carry energy from specific people in the past.  Even the child Dalai Lama may very well be in tune with the dear departed incumbent.  But isn’t it possible that rather than acquiring the identity and individuality of the old Dalai Lama, the child just “tuned into” and “downloaded” the energetic imprints of his personality?  Likewise, we can carry the energy imprints from all our ancestors, from our entire race, and from any other sentient being that every lived, because with the right antennae we can download it, maybe even without noticing.

The perspective of non-immortality is actually quite liberating.  When it’s over, it’s over.  It makes every moment worthwhile.  It makes being “present” critical.  But it also makes it very transparent.  It’s all up there.  There’s no hiding.  There’s no lying.  That’s why this blog of transparency hasn’t been that huge leap into the precipice: my story is already up there.  Writing it is just putting into words.

The character in Mary Poppins that touches me most is Mr. George Banks.  The scene that touches me most is the exit of the chimney sweeps: Bert approaches Mr. Banks and says it the way it is: “you take care of everybody; and who takes care of you?”  Isn’t that the story of our adult life?  Aren’t we all trying to take care of ourselves?

The fact that we live an individual experience while we’re alive on Earth makes us feel isolated and separated.  We crave recognition, nurturing, love.  We crave connection.  Which we can never get unconditionally from anyone in particular.  The only way to connect with that loving nurturing energy is by literally downloading it from the Akashic Field, either in the form of instantaneous connection with another, or by accessing all the love that is already stored up there.  Our own energy patterns are magnets for the energy stored up there.  If we want love, we need to start with love inside ourselves.  If we want recognition, we need to start with recognition inside ourselves.  The image I now like to use is that of the flame of life burning inside my heart.  The flame that can connect me with all the love that’s every been lived on Earth if I let it come through.

I know I’ve been to many places in this post.  It’s come from the heart.  If I am to summarize and bring it home, here’s the core of my spiritual beliefs, my articles of unproven faith:

• We exist as the individuals we know ourselves to be only during this one life on Earth.  We come from and are part of the Akashic Field.
• Every moment counts.  It’s all up there.  Can never change.  What’s already happened is a sunk cost.
• Life is not fair and there is no grand plan.  We are surrounded by beings who have exactly the same free will and creativity we have.  So shit happens just like beauty happens.
• Our energy is a magnet for similar energies.  That is the real karma and dharma.

Blessings of light and love.

I was raised Catholic.  There is no reincarnation in Christian tradition.  As a mathematician, I have a very difficult time accepting this paradigm: a spirit is conceived, a person is born, a finite lifetime of choices determines the outcome for infinity.  Heaven or hell.  Eternal bliss or eternal suffering.  Can the finite really rule the infinite?  I don’t think so.

So the next best thing is reincarnation.  Life is like going to school while death is a vacation.  At least this gives us continuity and opportunity.  For many, reincarnation is a core concept.  In Buddhism, the perplexing tradition is to search for the reincarnate Dalai Lama in a child after death of the incumbent.

The ultimate objective of reincarnation is perfection of the soul through toil, overcoming karma through dharma.  How many of us have been aching to feel those past lives with their enormous hidden messages to unlock the mysteries of our subconscious existence?  Even shamanic practices include the possibility of voyaging to past lives.  Who doesn’t want to be a naughty courtier in Louis XIV’s entourage?  Or a pupil in Plato’s Academia?  Or Mozart himself transcribing piano concerti that are already written in our mind?

Let’s do the math.  If 100 billion human lives have roamed the Earth over the past 200,000 years, of course a very large proportion perished during childhood until well into the 20th century.  Let’s say that in reality there have been 30 billion adults ever alive on Earth.  If there are 7.4 billion of us today, the result of Lucy’s legacy, then that’s barely 4 total adult lives, past and present, on average, for each one of us!!!  That doesn’t seem like a lot of opportunity for perfection of the soul via toil, karma and dharma.  I feel kinda cheated.  And if we reach 11 billion souls on Earth by 2100, the reincarnation business is going to get tougher and tougher.

Let’s take it a little further.  So, are souls eternal?  Or at least coincident with the life of the universe?  If so, how many are there?  If there were 2 human beings 200,000 years ago, then someone had to plan for at least 7.4 billion from the beginning, no?  So what’s the limit?  At what point are there no more souls for humans being born?  Doesn’t make sense.

So maybe we souls do have a beginning.  Let’s say that between the big bang and now, 7.4 billion souls were created.  When?  By whom?   So maybe we are not eternal but maybe at least perennial?

A few years ago I read fascinating but very tough book called Immortality by Stephen Cave.  The premise is that we are absolutely infatuated with the idea of our own immortality; we crave it psychologically.  We cannot fathom non-existence.  So we create mental constructs that help us get there.  We are so wonderful, how could we not be immortal???  But I ask you dear reader, if you remember the last time you were bored on a Sunday afternoon, flipping channels because there’s “nothing on”, how immortal do you really want to be?

So maybe we are not perennial after all.  If we accept the idea that just like there was a big bang there will be a big bust and the universe will end, then at some point between now and then, our souls will collapse and we will reunite again in some fashion.  When?  By what force?  Under what circumstances?

We will go a little deeper into this in my next post, “Mary Poppins and the Akashic Field”.  Stay tuned.

Dear Reader,

Do you believe in Lucy?  Do you believe in Adam and Eve (or at least Eve)?

Since 1987, biologists believe there is evidence that all humans come from a common female ancestor who lived about 200,000 years ago.  The science behind it is “mitochondrial DNA”.  While our biblical selves might think of her as Eve, scientists have called her “Lucy”.

There are about 7.4 billion of us alive on Earth today.  How many humans have trolled the planet since Lucy’s times?  I saw an estimate of about 100 billion.  I ran my own numbers using some very liberal assumptions and came up with 1 trillion.  Probably the 100 billion number is closer to reality.  It is a finite in some strange knowable number.  It’s not a gazillion.

Why does this matter?  How does it tie to anything?

You shall be patient and wait for another post, dear reader.

Cheers.

Maria Schneider is petite blue-eyed blond.  She’s a beautiful woman in her mid-50s.  I have actually never talked to her but have been to a couple of her performances and saw her pretty up close.  That was an incredible treat.

Her persona evokes calm and centeredness.  Seems very low key and unassuming.  Not quite distant, but not quite approachable either.

As with many other cultural tips, I first heard about her from The Economist 2-3 years ago.  I became a fan almost immediately.

Ms. Schneider is a composer, arranger and conductor.  Her music is both powerful and silky smooth.  She has enormous sense of harmony, instrumentation and flow.  Even though I spend a lot of time immersed in piano and string classical music, Maria’s jazz winds take me to bright and ethereal places.  I listen to her music when I’m down and I need to connect with my center.

Seeing Maria and her band live was an enormous treat.  I don’t frequent the jazz clubs in New York but I should do it more often.  It’s quite an experience.  The ambiance is very intimate, the food is acceptable and the crowd is just fun, devoted and rowdy.  Classical is sometimes too stiff, like the ridiculous tradition to not clap and acknowledge until the very end of a piece, even if it’s an hour and a half.  Not so with jazz.  I absolutely love the tradition of acknowledging solos and virtuoso passages as they come up.

I love the fact that the Maria Schneider Orchestra is made up of mostly middle-aged men who follow their female leader to a tee.  I admire her quiet yet commanding presence, how she occupies her space, and how she achieves beautiful sound and flow.  I’m sure nobody in her band doubts who is the boss.  And the result is that their sound is as tight as can be and they all look happy.

Maria does something that you would never see a stiff and arrogant classical conductor do.  Each one of her pieces features at least one solo, sometimes several.  Now, each one of these musicians is a virtuoso in his own right, the pianist, the guitarist, the accordion (yes, there’s life for the accordion beyond the Polka), the drummer (who’s a lot of fun to watch, his energy, his perpetual smile), and each one of the winds.  When a solo begins, Maria sits down on the stage floor, closes her eyes, bows her head and listens.  She gives her soloist space.  Reverence.  Wow.  This may go on for 5 minutes.  But when the solo is coming to an end, she will once again stand up in front of her 17 men, and take them back into perfect harmony and rhythm.

I want to be a Maria Schneider groupie.  If only she came to New York more often…

Today I recorded another guided meditation: “Purification for the Aching Heart”.  Enjoy!!

I have been playing my “wounded child” routine.  I don’t enjoy it.  Luckily, it happens less and less.

My mother was a beautiful, loving, caring, devoted woman.  She had her hands full.  Seven children, husband, mother, dogs, plus a pretty large extended family.  She was smart and resourceful but just wasn’t well prepared to cope with all the pressures.

Beyond having to juggle her resources, she had to deal with very tricky issues in her marriage as well as with her children.  I know she did the best she could in spite of how I may feel about my personal experience with her.  That, I am clear about and I honor.

With so many “constituents” to handle, there was an inevitable barrage of conflict.  Everyone with their own agendas and interests.  Just human nature.  She didn’t handle conflict well.  Didn’t really have the tools or the education to cope.

So my personal strategy to get her attention from a very early age was to play the “wounded child”.  Never really worked very well I have to say.  For the most part, she would ignore it and laugh it off.  I still carry it with me and comes out particularly in my interactions with women who are very close to me.  What folly.

There was a time when I used to believe that my life would be perfect were it not for those damn feelings.  Mr. Spock and Commander Data were close to ideal.  But I have now come to believe that feelings are critical part of the makeup of our humanity, not only as an aesthetic choice but as a survival tool.  Feelings constitute a language that communicates our internal selves with the outer world.  They are literally a call to action either on our part or on those who surround us  (“run, tiger on the loose!!” or “come closer hot mama cause I’m feeling it too” or whatever).

But I have also come to believe that feelings, like many other things in our modern existence, are antiquated and not well adapted to our current surroundings.

Having been primarily in touch with my intellectuality all my life, I have been on a quest to explore my feelings for more than 5 years now.  I believe I have made a lot of progress, but clearly there’s plenty more to do and learn.

My primary dilemma when faced with intense feelings, anger, lust, fear, sadness, etc., is not so much identifying them but discerning whether or not they actually carry useful information, an appropriate call to action, or if they are merely a mirage, an echo from a neural system that adapted to a different reality than what I live today.  That’s where the wounded child becomes tricky to handle.

I am a sensitive guy.  With people I consider close to me, I can get easily hurt.  I put a lot of effort in my relationships.  I try to be the most present dad/husband/brother/friend/employee/boss I can be.  I cater to my constituents, which has come in enormously handy when I play a consulting role in business.  But the problem in close relationships is that I expect balance and reciprocity.  I want to be recognized, seen, heard.  I crave “the witness to my life”.

My mother used to tell me that she loved me, and I didn’t believe her.  Not exactly that I thought she didn’t love me.  She just didn’t love me with the recognition that I wanted.  So I would pour ever more of my being into her expecting something different than what she was already giving me, which of course would never come.  She gave me what she had, not what I wanted.  And I have the darnedest time appreciating that.

That same drama has happened many times in my life, and still happens, even within the last few days.  So here’s the dilemma:

• I’m on a mission to get in touch with my feelings;
• my feelings tell me I’m upset because I’m not being recognized the way I want to be recognized by somebody close (generally a woman);
• clearly, that’s information of some sort – a call to action;
• I can either do nothing and let it pass, say something expecting a change, or leave.

I have exercised all three copiously.  But in the end it is so hard to discern mirage from reality.  How can I in the heat of my internal battle clearly discern if I’m righteously justified or just being a baby?

Clearly no relationship is obligatory.  But no matter how close I got to it, I was never able to simply say goodbye to my mother.  I hung in there until the end, sometimes being a better son than others, sometimes being more critical and vocal, sometimes feeling her love and closeness more than others.  But in other circumstances and with other people I have made the choice to take distance, say goodbye.

In the end, there is no right answer.  Every decision is just that, a decision.  Painting the canvass of life in blue or red.  No magic.  Just personal choice, free will.

I cannot ignore my wounded child.  But neither can I give it free reign to act out its part as it pleases.  The responsible adult needs to intermediate, discern, decide.  That’s where “counting to 10” comes so handy.  So hard…

Today I recorded my second guided meditation.  Check it out at the Guided Meditations page.  More coming soon.

I grew up immersed in music.  That is probably one of the greatest gifts my father gave me.  He had a very eclectic taste in music and had a decent collection of LPs and cassette tapes on a limited budget.

Three staples of classical music are the three “B”s: Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.  The first classical piece of which I have real conscience is Bach’s violin concerto in E.  I absolutely love it still as well as its twin version for piano.  I came to discover a little late in life that classical composers recycled their own material quite a bit.  Bach did it unabashedly.  Ultimately, creativity is not necessarily about creating from scratch but rather doing parallel shifts to adjacent white space.  That’s what Bach did by transcribing from violin in E to keyboard in D, but it’s exactly the same music!!  I don’t listen to Bach often but usually smile every time I do.  So full of life, so masterful.  This particular concerto as well as Brandenburgs 4 and 5 will make me stop and listen whenever they’re playing.  The harpsichord solo in the first movement of #5 is one of the most breathtaking musical moments in my book.  Musical orgasm.  Buildup of incredible virtuoso drama, ending in absolute release when the orchestra picks it up where it started and takes you to the end, just the way it should be.

My family was immersed in Beethoven.  Dad splurged on a heavy LP set of the 9 symphonies from Deutsche Grammophone that’s still probably somewhere in one of my brother’s house.  Another powerful musical orgasm: the most famous piece of music ever written, the initial orchestral run through the Ode to Joy in the fourth movement of the ninth symphony, which starts with a very quiet bass/cello section, then brings the rest of the strings and clarinets in, a little tension with the violins up high and ends up in full orchestral blast, led by the winds.  When I hear Symphony No. 9, I’m always left with a feeling that there’s no other music I can hear for a while.  I have had it all.

An early attempt by all the budding domestic piano players at home was the Moonlight Sonata (we could all master the first movement but nobody every got beyond butchering the third one).  My paternal grandmother was a decent piano player with a heavy bend towards Beethoven as well.  She did a good job with it.

But Brahms was conspicuously absent in my household…  I have no idea why.

I hold my shamanic studies and community very dear to my heart.  When we get together for class or practice, I know with certainty that I’m going to leave uplifted, inspired, in awe, and with some fresh knowledge that may require some intellectual effort but more importantly a strong connection to my intuition, trusting my instincts.  I smile a lot during class.  I wish I had a greater chance to practice these learnings.  Maybe one day after I retire from business I will dedicate my life to shamanic healing.  Who knows.

I love my teacher.  In a world where I experience few heroes, I look up to her as a wise woman who has a lot of heart, healing, intuition, wisdom to offer the world.  I thank the universe for having let me know her.  She’s also a lot of fun.  Quite a talent for chanting, drumming, voyaging.  My deepest experiences of trance have been during some of our learning sessions with her.  Always to the heart of love.

So, what does shamanism have to do with Brahms?

There are three particular things that have stood out in my shamanic apprenticeship: the power of drums, the energy of crystals and the importance of creative use of the voice.

During one of our classes on drumming, we partnered up as we typically do and drummed into each other.  My partner that night had the intuition to focus on my hip.  With all her might, she struck her beautiful elk skin drum into my pelvic area, front and back.  What energy.  My body felt the vibration like nothing I had ever felt before.  My body recorded and stored.  Never forget that feeling.

Coincidentally, the morning after I was on a flight to Toronto for business.  I had been listening to Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s dream.  As it ended, I felt the urge to go to Brahms.

Sometimes we play “name that composer” at home.  My older daughter stopped having fun with it a long time ago but my little one enjoys it.  I give her silly clues like “Bach is very perky but intense”, “Mozart is light and playful”, and “Brahms is drama, beginning to end, fast or slow”.

So I didn’t grow up on Brahms.  But he has become close to my favorite composer of all times as an adult.  It’s a pity that the story goes that he trashed a lot of his music because he didn’t think it was good enough, which is why there aren’t many of his pieces.  What a deep, dark, tortured soul.  Madly in platonic unfulfilled love with Clara Schumann.  I admire just about all his repertoire.  But my favorite pieces are his two piano concertos and the symphonies.

That morning on my way to Toronto, I started thumbing through my Brahms collection and had the urge to go down to the symphonies.  The first few bars of symphony no. 1 are a heavy insistent drum beat that feels like the call of destiny to wake up and live.  This drumming went into my ears, into my spine and down to the seat of my pants where I felt an explosion of pure energy.  I dropped my iPad immediately.  At this very moment, the flight attendant was offering me coffee.  I couldn’t speak.  He probably thought I was a lunatic on drugs and just kept going.

I have dipped a toe in the water trying to blend classical music into shamanic rituals and practices.  A journey of discovery.  Also, more on crystals and the use of voice at another time.  I am actually planning on recording some simple visual voyages/meditations for my dear readers, so stay tuned.

One of my fellow practitioners read Doctor Conde and wondered if part of the reason I remain anonymous is some shame about my shamanic practice.  I want to say and declare that that is absolutely not the case.  I am very proud of my native american roots and see shamanic practice as connection to them and with the spirit world in order to be “of service”.  Shungo, my dear colleagues.

To end today, I want to acknowledge and honor the beauty that many many composers left behind as their legacy for humanity.  Thank you Brahms.  Also, I want to acknowledge the thousands of extremely talented musicians who spend their lives today learning a very unforgiving trade from which most cannot make a decent living.    Without them, this beautiful music could not come to life.

So dear readers, next time you have a chance, go to a classical concert.  It’s ok if you fall asleep during the music.  Your subconscious will still get it.  And if you have a chance to listen to chamber, even better, hopefully in a small venue where you can feel the vibration of the instruments penetrate every pore of your body.

Last night, I had the second of three consecutive business dinners.  These occasions tend to be taxing on me but last night I was able to stay intellectually and emotionally present, without exasperation or getting disconnected with a desire to bolt.  I believe that’s progress.

New York is an awesome place for foodies. Turkish Kitchen is another of my favorites.  I unfortunately don’t go there often enough (once a month maybe?) because I run the risk of taking more time than I’d like including walking there and back.

The food was just fabulous.  I was very happy to see they had one of their lunch menus available for dinner (they called it the “Early Bird Special”).  I like fully structured meals.  They’re aesthetically beautiful.  Also, they ease one small anxiety I have in these situations.  Here’s Dirty Little Secret No. 3: I loooove dessert.  I never skip it at any lunch or dinner.  I find that most people in business settings will skip it.  I don’t.  So I will typically make the point upfront that I will be having dessert.  But a full prix fixe or pre-set menu accomplishes it automatically.  I like to completeness and balance associated with it.

I try to stay vegetarian.  To the extent that I can have a balanced fully vegetarian meal, I will.  At home, my wife is a kind artist who will structure meals just right for me.  Her gift of love.  But I love eating out too much and I will choose balance over vegetarian.  So I will eat fish at restaurants 3-4 times a week.  I also have to confess that I ate a pork medallion (in fig compote) in December at a place where there were no better choices; I loved it and my body tolerated it well after 7 years of no meat.

How did I get here?  Do I think it’s a good thing?  What does my body say?

I have always loved food (and dessert).  But I was not properly educated to think about it.  Never had any criteria for eating other than “do I like it?” and “am I full?”.

I have very bad genes relative to heart and autoimmune diseases.  By the time I was in my early 40s, I had ballooned up nicely to close to 200 lbs., size 42 pants and a slew of “lifetime maintenance” drugs.  A very dear friend of mine changed my life by gently suggesting that maybe I should read “The Zone” by Dr. Sears.  My friend knew me well enough (we’ve been buddies since we were 6) to appreciate that the accounting style suggestions in the book would resonate with me.  The book has enough science to sound credible for someone who had always ridiculed diets as fads of temporary hope and lunacy.

“The Zone” did indeed resonate with me to the core.  Two key messages came through: portion control, and balance.  For about a year, I carried a spreadsheet in my old brick Palm Treo (this was before iPhones) and would populate the numerical description of the meal I was about to eat to make sure that the “counts” worked.  That habit sounds crazy but came quite naturally to me.  After about a year, I got the hang of it and decided to drop the spreadsheet.  It was enlightening though.

“The Zone” doesn’t tell you “don’t eat potato chips” but if you do and follow the counts, it doesn’t work; you’ll go hungry all the time.  So I became a salad eater just to feel full.  After six months, I had indeed lost 50 lbs (which never came back).  After a year, my medical stats improved enormously and without telling my doctor, I stopped taking all medication.  Today, I take no drugs, legal or illegal, with the very rare exception of a headache pill every now and then.

But The Zone had its bad consequences as well.  I started drinking more because alcohol counts are so small, so I was very comfortable with a couple of glasses of wine with lunch and dinner every day.  Then, I ate a lot of meat and fish regularly, including smoked salmon for breakfast every morning.  After six months, my psoriasis was breaking out intrepidly.

Then, I read another book (still on paper) on psoriasis (of which I don’t remember the title but there are tons of them out there) that argued that the only way to improve psoriasis is through diet.  It pretty quickly went through the list of foods to avoid: alcohol, coffee, red meat, processed sugars, the usual suspects.  I decided to try it out for 6 months.  So while staying “in The Zone”, I eliminated red meat and coffee, moved to just fish and tea, kept my desserts and reduced the alcohol to 3-4 glasses of wine per week.  I tend to exaggerate my rituals, so fish became my staple 3 times a day every day.

My medical stats continued to improve and the psoriasis got significantly better.  But ultimately everything has a cost.  No free lunch my dear readers.  I discovered that my mercury counts were off the charts, so I had to reduce the fish dramatically.

Book #3 then came to my attention: “Diet For a New America“, by John Robbins of Baskin Robbins fame.  What a beautifully articulated book.  Extraordinarily convincing.  The argument flows at 3 levels: 1) health stats are better for vegetarians and even better for vegans; 2) the food industry treats animals horribly; and 3) producing meat protein consumes multiples of the resources used to produce vegetarian protein.  I was sold.  And then came the new experiment to go vegetarian, tending to vegan.

I tried it for a full year.  Quite a balancing kinda stressful act to stay veggie, mostly within The Zone and eating out a lot.  I tried new restaurants and came up with a list that covered foods, expected times, costs, etc.  This is really when I started appreciating Indian because I came to realize that there really is no better vegetarian eating than Indian.  Second place is Middle Eastern, which covers many similar cuisines.  But going vegan and eating out is almost impossible.  There are just not enough yummy choices.

After a year, my next annual physical came and my medical stats had actually deteriorated, particularly my colesterol.  I was baffled and sad.  Thus I abandoned full-time vegetarianism and drifted back to where I am today: pescaterian with the occasional “sin”.  Sometimes I’ll have escargot at my favorite French place and even though I don’t get tempted by beef generally, I do salivate a little bit around fois gras and pate.

Alcohol was another story.  Trying 3-4 glasses of wine a week became a nightmare.  I was constantly asking myself how many glasses I had had that week.  My hangovers increased over small quantities of red wine the night before.  And my cheeks would tingle when I drank it, like a novice.  I decided to solve the stress by simply taking the decision off the table: no alcohol.  Zero.  That helped me in social situations because I didn’t have to think about making exceptions.  And people started to know that I don’t drink and that was that.  That is one of the greatest decisions I have ever made since I have an enormously addictive personality as the 1000s of hours I spent playing Sudoku in years past would attest, and alcoholism runs in my family.

Michael Pollan wrote another fabulous book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma“.  So much thought and background work went into it.  I admire authors who will go deep into their subjects and research and toil to build their story.  It’s not all about the ability to put words together beautifully but also about having something to say to begin with.

While “The Dilemma” didn’t swing me to eating meat again, it does present very convincing arguments.  Even though little pigs make very cute pets, the idea hasn’t become popular (I don’t think my wife would agree to keep one at home).  Also, don’t remember the last time I saw someone with a cow as a pet in their backyard.  The point is that by consuming and utilizing domestic animals, we help their species survive.  Doesn’t justify brutality, but is a great case for humane treatment and allowance for carnivorism.

I don’t stress about food and counts as I used to.  I’ve learned to enjoy it and leave it there.  But I do watch my weight and my medical stats.  I also exercise a lot, for which New York is great given the opportunities we have to walk around.

So dear readers, that’s the story of how you got to have a healthy Doctor Conde puttering around.  Food is a critical part of the story.  Who knows, without these life changes maybe I wouldn’t have made it this far.

Here’s to life and health (and desserts).