I find it endlessly fascinating how the universe sets you up with the life lessons that shape your personality and the opportunity to later choose to step into your soul work.
One of my biggest lessons, that turned out to be major influences to my journey, I didn’t even find out about until I was an adult.
In my 30’s, my Mom told me that I almost died as a baby.
When I was ten months old I came down with whooping cough. One day I stopped breathing and turned blue, choking on phlegm in my throat. Mom, in her panic, grabbed me by my feet and shook me. This eventually dislodged some of the phlegm and I started to breathe again.
Not long after this discovery, my aunt gave me a book about near death experiences in children. The results of the author’s research gave me an understanding of how a child’s development is affected by a near death experience. A child, or baby in my case, has no frame of reference to integrate an experience like this. It gave me an understanding why I always felt so different from other kids as I was growing up.
Now, I understood why I have always had an unshakeable knowing that there was so much more to people and to life than what I observed in the ordinary life of everyone around me. This near death experience placed my feet solidly on a spiritual path. It sparked a lifelong search for meaning and for that soul connection I felt as a baby that was planted so deeply in my being. And that I longed to find again.
Then, when I was sixteen, the universe introduced music in a big way. I found my first guitar under the Christmas tree. I fell in love with this beautiful instrument and its music.
But when I finished high school, I went off to university for a year, teacher’s college then teaching elementary school in a small town in northern Ontario. My guitar and music got placed on the ‘back burner’.
I’ve always felt that those four years teaching elementary school were one of my greatest failures. I’m a teacher. I’ve always been a teacher. And it broke my heart to feel that I was failing at something that I loved to do.
But teaching public school wasn’t what I was meant to do. And I had put music on the back burner. The universe gave me another opportunity.
During the summer, I took courses towards completing my degree. When I took my first course in music history, it rekindled my love for music and lit a fire under me in a very big way. I decided to return to university to complete my degree in music. Up until then, I had only had a year and a half of guitar lessons – and several years on the back burner.
But I HAD to learn more about music, so I went in to see one of the professors at the university and asked what requirements I needed to be accepted into the music program. He told me that I would need a Grade 8 in guitar and at least Grade 2 theory and Grade 6 piano.
I was teaching in a small town on the northern shore of Lake Superior. The nearest teacher who could teach me Grade 8 guitar lived an 8-hour drive away. And I had no car.
But I had a fire lit under me, so I found a way. Once a month, I hopped on the bus on Friday night and traveled all night to this teacher for my lessons, then all night on the bus on Saturday night to get back home again. Fortunately, I was able to study piano and music theory in the town where I lived.
It took me two years and I had my entrance requirements to be accepted into the music program at Queens University.
This enormous drive to learn and share music led to decades of learning and understanding the dance between the ego mind and the intuitive mind. I continued to get up on stage over and over again to share my musical voice, no matter how much I messed up or how much I succeeded.
My spiritual journey joined this drive and I became a devoted student of my own thoughts. To go even deeper into my own psyche, I took all kinds of courses in alternative healing and energy medicine, eventually leading to training with two of the pioneers of sound healing – Jonathan Goldman and Tom Kenyon.
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Mount Royal University |
Enter the universe again. I received a phone call (from out of the blue) and was asked to create a program as a facilitator in a study on stress. Sound healing was being tested as one of the interventions. The people in the group that I worked with were so excited about how sound and music was helping them manage stress.
So about a month after my work was completed in this study, Sound Wellness was born.
A new voice emerged.
A voice to help you find your own inner sanctuary where you have access to wholeness, harmony, safety and soul connection that no amount of stress or chaos in the outer world can touch.
A voice to assist those who are awakening, with the most ancient and powerful tool humanity has always used to connect with each other and with the deep inner peace of the soul. Sound and music.
I remain in awe of the beautiful ways in which the universe nudges us to choose the paths that lead us to our purpose in the world. And my heart fills with gratitude that this purpose is of such powerful service to others.