I used to think the goal was to figure out how to be the best version of myself and then go be it. I've come to think differently. Not because I found a better self-improvement strategy, but because the whole frame eventually stopped making sense.
If you've been feeling hemmed in or held back in some important way, maybe this is worth sitting with together.
Submerged in Einstein's Question
I was devastated when my second marriage came unraveled. Everything I'd put my faith into, the idea of marriage and family, my church, God, felt like it had abandoned me. I felt cast out into the universe with nothing to hold onto.
One night lying in bed in agonizing loneliness, I found myself consumed by the question Einstein called the most important one humans ever ask: "Is the universe a friendly place?"
In my deep grief, I needed something to help me feel anything other than what I was feeling, which was unbearable.
I needed something. Anything. I went to the piano I'd hauled around since childhood and sat down. I tried playing things I'd played occasionally for years, lame attempts to gloss over the agony. Nothing I already knew was going to help.
I knew instinctively that there was only one thing I could do that was going to be satisfying in any kind of way. So I opened both palms and started smashing the low keys and making the deepest, loudest, and most awful cacophony possible.
Almost immediately I started crying, which quickly turned to ugly sobbing.
I knew enough about healthy emotional catharsis to know this was good. But there was something in this experience I didn't quite expect.
The part of me that just moments before had felt utterly alone suddenly felt deeply connected with that horrible noise. That part felt not only heard and seen but reflected and mirrored, directly, instantly, in real time.
Somehow the universe was demonstrating in real time and in real experience, viscerally beyond doubt or question, that lonely part wasn't really alone after all.
I experienced the piano as a portal to something deeper than I was normally aware of.
The Kitchen Revelation
Recently, after 25 years of using music to help people connect more deeply with themselves and each other, I was standing in my kitchen when an old idea hit me in a new way.
There is no clear place to draw a boundary between self and other, not our skin, our energy, our thoughts, beliefs...
Later that day when I sat at the piano pondering this idea, I was able to let go of "separate selfhood" just a little more, and something shifted. The sounds emerged a little more easily. They felt alive and engaging, and were more interesting and fun to hear.
Without trying to prove anything, I simply explored what happened when I let the delusion of separation dissolve into the sounds.
I have found, in that moment and many others over years, when we find that grounding orientation, the sounds that emerge from that place are much more inherently musical.
Why This Matters More Than Ever
Federico Faggin, the physicist who invented the microprocessor, has been studying consciousness full-time for over 20 years. He and philosophers like Bernardo Kastrup at the Essentia Foundation are arriving at something that unsettles a lot of assumptions: consciousness is not a product of our brains. We don't generate it. We exist within it.
Instead, our whole selves exist from it. We don't need to do anything or prove anything to "get it."
Not "we have consciousness." More like: we're a wave in an ocean, temporarily risen up, convinced we're separate from the water.
Our belief in separation severs us from the source. Climate change is what happens when we treat nature as "out there." Political polarization is what happens when we experience others as fundamentally different from ourselves.
And that crushing anxiety many of us carry, that's what it feels like to believe we're alone in holding everything together.
How Piano Becomes Portal
Improvisation isn't about being talented. It's about getting out of the way.
When we sit at a piano without sheet music, without a plan, our thinking mind has nothing to grab onto. No notes to read. No structure to follow. Just us, the keys, and this moment.
At first it's uncomfortable. Our fingers hover. An inner voice starts in, you know the one. But if we can stay with it, something shifts. Our fingers find a note. Then another. Not because we came up with the notes all by ourselves, but because something moved through us. The music seems to be finding itself.
Old habits take time to loosen, which is why a sustained practice matters. I designed a practice for exactly this, called Tune U. It's not about playing piano or playing "music" in the conventional sense. It's about discovering that the boundary between you and The Music is more porous than you thought.
What Happens When the Illusion Lifts
Briony Greenhill was one of the guests on a sound improvisation summit I produced in the spring of 2020, just as Covid hit. The topic was how to use sound improvisation to navigate the unknown, timing that turned out to be uncanny.
Briony teaches vocal improvisation. She had played piano for years, had even taught it, but hadn't connected with it in a long time. It hadn't been truly enjoyable or satisfying.
I gave her one lesson in how to engage the piano in a wholly different way (a technique I call Playing the Fields), without chords, scales, written music, or note names. A few weeks later she described her experience:
So he has this crazy method. I was a full-time piano teacher for five years, I've seen just about every method there is, and I've never seen anything like this.
Omg. It is so simple. And so genius.
Now I do it for just 10 minutes a day. It starts messy, then it gets musical, then it gets deep. Often I cry. And music starts to flow through me again. Like it used to.
I'm not making mistakes anymore. I'm staying effortlessly within key.
It's like he's helped me get back into the heart of music.
— Briony Greenhill, Musician, Vocal improv coach, Workshop leader
That's what happens when we let go of old beliefs we've had a death grip on for years, decades, even all our lives. We experience ourselves as part of the whole rather than separate from it. The weight we've been carrying alone was never ours alone to carry.
The Sound of Connection
This is also what becomes possible in group improvisation. When each person is listening and responding rather than performing, something happens that resists the usual explanations. Vocal improvisation coach Chloe Goodchild describes it well:
This improvisation process really assists you to embody what I call sound awareness, to not just hear it on the outside of yourself as an interesting idea but to be able to feel it in every cell of the body.
— Chloe Goodchild, Vocal improvisation teacher and coach
What's Stirring
The people drawn to this practice aren't usually beginners. They're often healers, coaches, leaders, doctors, people who've already climbed many mountains. But they've reached a point where individual achievement feels hollow. Something is missing. That something is the direct experience of connection to everything else.
Knowing we're all one is just information. Living it takes practice. And that practice doesn't have to be years of meditation or therapy. Sometimes it starts with sitting at a piano and discovering what it takes to let go enough to allow The Music to flow.
A few questions worth staying with:
What might be wanting to emerge through you right now?
Is there something flickering that seems to be trying to get your attention?
Have you ever wanted a different relationship with music, one that suited you and your life better?
A good way to see if this approach might fit is through the Listening door, the Piano door, or the Drum door. Each one gives you a felt sense of what this work is actually like.
And if you want the thinking underneath all of this before you try anything, that's here: Read My Philosophy.
For further reading:
- Federico Faggin — Irreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature
- Bernardo Kastrup / The Essentia Foundation
- Oliver Sacks — Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
- W.A. Matthieu — The Listening Book
- Eileen McKusick — Electric Body, Electric Health
- John Stuart Reid Jr. — Cymatics
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