Dear Subscribers,

Glad a few of you enjoyed my New Year's selections. If the truth be known, it took hours to choose and there were many tangents and runners up!

However, let's be serious. There was a lovely custom in Japan of eating mochi and drinking green tea for the first three days of the new year. I feel we owe it to ourselves and each other to take time to process what is important and retune our vibrations so as to orient ourselves properly in life. There are a few items on my very personal to do list, but also some concepts worth sharing.

Yesterday, I started with the intent of taking you around the world in music and dance, but there were sooooooo many links and variations in audio and visual quality that I broke the feast into smaller portions. My purpose is to demonstrate that we more or less have music in our blood, not just in my blood but everyone was actually created in a sea of sound. If you don't resonate with a czardas, you might be missing the gypsy gene but don't grieve, just find what pleases you.

When Gail and I facilitated music therapy for each other, we heard sounds that have never been produced (yet) on Earth. In one instance, I went inside one of the fish in Pisces and heard music that was so unbelievably marvelous that I could hardly wait to leave this Planet and go somewhere much more interesting. The sound was being used for healing and when passing out of trauma and perhaps through the portals of life and death — more accurately life eternal — all that needs to be healed is healed, in this case with music.

Everything is a vibration so there are vibrations that produce hardness and those that produce flexibility, vibrations that tempt and ones that challenge, vibrations that wound and those that heal. We are therefore responsible for the energies we put into motion and this is actually how we create karma or ease the burden of karma we are carrying. So, really, everything you do makes a difference. One can feel insignificant but because energies interact with other energies and everything has a frequency and resonance, we are setting harmony in motion or contributing to discord. Obviously, there is absolutely no one on Earth who actually wants discord or the consequences that ensue from that discord. So those who are contributing to the discord are doing so from a place of personal unease. Once we realize this, we can make the choice to be true to ourselves rather than stuck in the dissonance that is hurled at us day in and day out, but we each need to believe that we can truly set harmonizing energies into motion.

Music and dance are interesting studies from this perspective. The original composition usually stems from bursts of inspiration acting on the psyche of the composer but then the issue of how to interpret and perform arise. Playing the music, choreographing the dance, and ultimately performing the pieces are ways that we join forces with the inspiration behind the music and perhaps make it accessible to others. The impact is potentially immense. Perhaps even more importantly, the diversity of music and performances is a message to all of us about the diversity of life on Earth. Just as we have countless cultures with their ethnic preferences, melodies and rhythms, we have countless composers in each culture and countless other species of life sharing this Planet. It is by accepting the differences that we assure the survival not just of our uniqueness and heritages but also of the Earth itself, a planet being torn apart by strife.

It was intentional on my part to offer lively music with gorgeous costuming and choreography because in what one of my musically gifted companions in life called the Xeroxed culture, the ethnic traditions represented are obliterated by the monotony and now tyranny of business suits and other uniforms. In fact, I was chuckling last night as I remembered a movie date years ago. The man showed up in purple velvet trousers which were, to tell you the truth, gorgeous, but . . . He told me he liked to dress colorfully and recalling a similar event some years earlier, I yielded. The point is, there is a peacock hiding in most male psyches and that peacock looks weird in pinstripes. Likewise, women have a tremendous desire to encompass all variations because they must function as the matrix containing all thoughts and ideas, weighing carefully before rejecting since anything that is rejected is lost in space until it is able to reorganize itself in a way that assures acceptance.

So whether we are seeing our present times as the shopping mall version of conformity or the web versions, the risk is that by fitting in with dysfunction, we cut ourselves off from our roots and whatever part of our identity stems from those roots. This is an apt image because if we look at the plant kingdom, we count a minimum of 2.5 million species, but the powers that be would reduce this to a few genetically modified staples such as corn, wheat, tomatoes, sugar, and soy. This is the discordant world of monopoly, not the true Earth world of bliss in diversity. People who work on assembly lines or take orders from overseers have the same dilemma as members of the plant kingdom that wish to survive. Their identities must be crafted so that the core values are preserved. Those values are very often found in ethnicities or religious beliefs, but they are actually bigger than these ephemeral phenomena.

By this, I mean, if we look at cultures or ethnicities, we see that these have changed. Take Egypt of the pharaohs and compare it to modern Egypt or Caesar's Rome and Verdi's Italy or the Aztec and Incan civilizations and Latin America today. If a culture is crushed, we lose something of immense value, but worse than that loss is the misfit of the replacement civilization. Over the next few months, I want to explore some of these ideas in a way that helps each of us to reconnect and if this means disconnecting from a few allegiances, the disconnect may be worth more in the long-term than the short-term loss. Our world has to change. It can change for the better or for the worse and that fate is actually in our hands.

Since every journey does in fact begin with a first step, let me propose that we all embrace respect. This means we offer it to others and demand it in return. For instance, there have been occasions in my life when I responded to someone saying, "I am interested in your opinion but I need for you to state it politely or I won't really hear what you are trying to say." I try to offer this respect to people, animals, and plants. I fail sometimes, but I keep trying. I firmly believe that if we worked hard enough at this, no one would be willing to poison the Planet much less go to war. Let's try harder.

Blessings!

Ingrid

Copyright by Ingrid Naiman 2011

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