Spirit led me to kirtan literally by the ears when I walked by a neighbor's house on a warm, windows-open kinda day and heard people singing inside in a way that caught my heart. There was an instant clarity:  I WANT TO BE PART OF THAT!

 

Following this longing led to a year and half-long collaboration with Daniel Tucker, Aletha Mcgee, Gabriel Robinson, and Joss Jaffe in a project called Diva's and Deva's. It was during this collaboration that I started to truly cultivate my home as a temple space and began hosting kirtans.

 

As I spent more and more time with the mantras, things in me began to change - not least that I began to have what I affectionately call "kirtan radio" playing in my head pretty much all the time!  It was like the mantras had begun to sing Me and had become a way to pray constantly for a more peaceful world - inside and out.

 

In the summer of 2011 I went to soak in the healing waters of Harbin Hot Springs for the first time. The fluidity and softness and other divinely feminine aspects of that sacred place began teach my own awakening feminine.  I also went religiously to "church" in the temple there on Sunday mornings, which involved big-voiced powerful kirtans led by Ganesha Das, which I joined on flutes and response vocals. This really solidified my commitment to the practice, and my heart got bigger and bigger in it as I surrendered my voice to filling that huge, holy space.

 

In the spring of 2012, I was gifted a vision: offer Songs to The Mother in the Harbin Temple for Earth Day.  I was joined by dear friend and bhakti-heart Richard Bock,who gifted me his old harmonium.  That gift felt like the biggest initiation - a recognition from an important elder that I had something to bring through this channel.  We chanted to all the glory of Earth as Ma that night and I have been offering Songs To The Mother every month since, with awesome support from Stephanie Winn, Alex Jacobs, Andrey Samode, and Todd Robbins.

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In 2015 I moved to Portland, Oregon and began new collaborations with drupad devotee and strode player Brian Bontempo, violin guru Greg Allen, and guitar wonder Hamid Shibata Bennett.  I have had the honor to work with a number of different fine percussionists.  

 

During my years in Portland, the practice has become more and more Tantric.  The path more and more one of surrender to what is in the channel moment to moment.  Instead of practicing chants, what I now practice is that surrender.  My Kirtans are now nearly 100% improvised as I am leading them.  I permission the room to really find the thread and sing what's arising in them.  The result is deep and very emotionally 

authentic prayer with big harmonies and jams that go on for 20 to 30 mins at a time.  My greatest pleasure is to invite the kind of chaos that becomes magic if we can sit with it in reverence instead of fear.

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I have also begun making my own recordings of original chants in a more solo format.  I hope to record a full album of these soon and also to have more professional quality recordings of the live events, though the magic of them is hard to capture since it is the electricity in the room as well as the sound that makes them special.