Sounding What’s Present is an invitation to meet yourself through rhythm and listening.

With one drum and very few choices, attention shifts away from thinking and toward sensation, impulse, and timing. You’re not asked to make music or develop patterns, but to let sound arise in response to what’s here — and to stop when it completes.

In this simple field, rhythm reveals its natural intelligence. A change in intensity, a pause, a repetition — even the most minimal pulse — can carry meaning. You may experience how sound moves through you and how it is received by others, without explanation or performance.

No musical background is needed. Only a willingness to listen and let what’s present find its voice.

Playing the Fields is a simple and surprisingly powerful way to meet and engage the piano in all 12 keys in one hour.

This is not a collection of songs, a theory‑heavy curriculum, or a performance program. It is about orientation. Rather than telling you what to play, this course shows you how the keyboard is organized so you can move with clarity and confidence. The 88 keys begin to resolve into clear, repeating patterns, and the instrument feels less overwhelming and more playable.

As you move through the short videos (<45 mins total), complexity reduces to simple geometric relationships you can see and feel. You are not copying or chasing correctness. You are exploring. Even early on, many people find themselves making music that feels real rather than mechanical. Once the layout becomes visible in this way, you may be shocked at how easy the piano becomes. The keyboard opens.

Go slowly. Touch the piano. Let the patterns settle into your hands. This approach begins with listening and direct contact rather than pressure or performance. What you discover here is not only how the keys relate, but how you relate to them. And that shift often carries further than expected.

Establishing orientation through listening, contact, and choice.

The Core is where we come from and where we return for our vitality, inspiration, and sustenance. We will explore and play with the essential skill of navigating the unknown capably by playing and experimenting with it through an intuitive approach to improvisation on piano.  

You will be introduced to tools to use regularly to notice your foundational creative connection and how to retune and realign it.

In this Core course, you will:

• nurture and become more deeply familiar with how to improvise in all 12 keys

• develop a physical and auditory sense of where you are at all times

• use sound as a reliable way to orient, ground, and respond

Choose the Core if you want a clear beginning, and a foundation you can stand on, on the piano and elsewhere, regardless of what comes next.

Sustaining practice across greater musical and perceptual complexity.

The Journey builds on the Core by zooming in.

You will learn to:

• clearly distinguish notes that create tension from those that offer release

• understand this relationship as the central engine of music

• nurture your capacity to stay present when tension arises

• apply specific, practical techniques that make this process intuitive rather than theoretical

This work is taught at a primordial, hands‑on level, so you are attending to the emotional impact of the different notes as you absorb the structures of harmony.

The Tune U Quest is a radically new approach to mindful awareness and creative expression.

You will engage with the piano in an entirely new way than you likely ever have before.  Instead of approaching it as an instrument for performing or "achieving" something, we will be using it as a way of learning how to renegotiate your relationship with your deep nature, with music, with your thoughts and inner voices, and with the piano, too.

In the process, you will regain your own sense of clarity and agency for experiencing yourself as you are deep down, and as a creative instrument on your own terms.  From this new vantage point of your own authentic self, you can experience everything you come across in new ways.

This program is a 12-month program that includes the 4 quarterly courses.

These 4 courses comprise the complete yearlong framework grounded in the 4 seasons, the 4 directions of many indigenous traditions (incl the Cherokee here in North Carolina), and the 4 Paths of Creation Spirituality (laid out by Matthew Fox).

By incorporating these spiritual traditions along with many perspectives on personal, social, and political points of view, this program offers a way for you to T.A.P. the Flow of your own deep connection so you can bring your unique gifts more clearly, creatively, and courageously to this world that needs them so much.

The Listening Practice

This is Step 1.

Before you play a note, before you learn a scale, before you touch an instrument, you listen.

The Tune U approach to improvisation begins here because listening is where music actually lives. Not in the fingers. Not in the theory. In the quality of attention you bring to sound.

This practice is a meditation. It invites you to explore how you listen, and whether there might be other ways. Ways that are more open, more receptive, more present to what sound actually is before we decide what to do with it.

It takes about 10–15 minutes. You can do it anywhere, even in a noisy room.

The effects can be immediate or they can build over time. Either way, this is the foundation. Everything else in Tune U rests on it.