Dearly Beloved Friends,
I just got back to Petaluma after an incredibly healing week at the Strawberry Fields Forever Music Festival, held at the Living Miracles Monastery in Fruitland, Utah. The Festival was sort of like a "Course in Miracles Woodstock"... with a full sized outdoor stage, and lots of incredible musicians gracing us with their beautiful music. Such joy!
For me, the most healing aspect of the Festival was in allowing myself full permission to stop trying to be a "good musician" (or a musician at all), but to instead allow myself to just be! As many of you know, I've been spending a lot of time these past several months sinking inward in prayer and meditation, learning to hear that "small, still Voice" within and letting go of past self-concepts of the ego. My self-concept as a "good musician", for example, has been falling away, and in fact, prior to the Festival I was unclear as to whether I was even Guided to go to it, since I wasn't really feeling much inspiration around my music anymore. Still, all the signs and symbols seemed to be pointing towards me going to the Festival anyway. And so in order to feel at ease with it, I decided to simply give myself full permission to play music ONLY when it felt like it was truly coming through me from the Spirit of Inspiration, and not out of any sense of trying to please an audience or meet someone's expectations. For those of you who are familiar with the "no people pleasing" principle, this was going to be about a specific form of that called: "no audience pleasing". ;-)
And so when it came time early in the week for me to go up on stage to play an hour-long set, I was given an unprecendented opportunity to practice this full-on and face one of my biggest fears: to be in front of a large audience who are expecting me to play music, and yet not feeling inspired to play! And this is actually what began to happen about a third of the way into my set! Fortunately though, I stuck to my principles, relaxed through it all, and it turned out to be quite a healing and interesting experience to say the least. :-) It was more of an "unperformance" really...
I started off the set by playing a few songs I had been planning to play ("The Wind" by Cat Stevens; "Peace of Mind", an original of mine; "Strawberry Fields Forever" by the Beatles; and "Just Relax", another original) but then felt the wind just come completely out of my sails! It began when I started having trouble tuning my guitar, and then noticed that I really felt like just meditating rather than playing! (This was what I had been afraid of might happen.) I didn't, however, feel completely comfortable with the idea of just closing my eyes and inviting the audience to go inward with me, and so instead of panicking, I simply tried to be as authentic with them as I could. I basically just shared about what I was experiencing in that moment. Gradually, the awkwardness began to dissolve a bit, and the audience and I ended up having some playful banter back and forth about my "unperformance". Then finally, after a bit of that I finally told them that I didn't think I was going to play any more music. Lol...
I thanked them and walked off stage, and was greeted by a big hug from David who, with much childlike enthusiasm, said, "That was GREAT!"... which I probably desperately needed to hear in that moment! If I had been anywhere else, I probably would have had lots of angry fans rushing me to ask for their money back. But at this "Festival of Forgiveness", it was nothing but love and hugs of gratitude! It gave me a certainty that there really isn't ever anything to fear; that I need not ever fall to the temptation of "audience pleasing", and that so long as I am being authentic and following my heart, it will be healing for all. Many of the musicians, in fact, came up to me later to thank me for "facing their fears for them". So that was very reassuring.
Although I didn't play much music on MY set, I did end up playing lots of lead guitar and doing some back-up singing for OTHER musicians at the Festival... including of course, Armelle. Her set was absolutely beautiful, for it was also a pure demonstration of transcending fear being that it was the first time she had ever sang on a real stage! She started off by singing her first song a capella ("Remember Who You Are"), and for perhaps the first time ever (in my perception, at least) she sang the whole song perfectly on key with such grace that it literally made me cry! When she invited me up on stage as planned to play the rest of the set with her, I just became totally overwhelmed with emotion and had to take a few moments of silence before being ready to start playing.
(As an aside, I just gotta say here that in my experience there is NOTHING more exhilarating than being totally raw and shamelessly "naked" in front of many sets of eyes! From my perspective, this is really what the whole Festival was about. It was about nothing more than developing the willingness to drop the mask of self-importance, and be completely authentic regardless of how it may look.)
For the rest of Armelle's set, she and I sang four more songs which we'd played and sang together before, and it was an experience of such Joy for us both! We sang her songs, "Trusting You", "You Can't Be Perfect (Hear Me)", "Only Love", "No Need for More", as well as a beautiful cover song from the movie Once called "Falling Slowly".
From what I hear, the sound engineering team there in Utah is now working on putting all the music from the Festival into a professionally sounding CD, but if you're interested in hearing a rough recording of our sets now, I've embedded the recordings for mine and Armelle's sets below, which David Hoffmeister had graciously recorded on his iPhone. The sound quality of these recordings is not exactly what the world would call "good" - it's what you might expect from an iPhone recording at a live concert - but if you tune into the FEELING that's present behind the sounds, you will certainly be able to capture a glimpse of the profound Love that was shining through us!
The first one below is the recording of my performance (or "unperformance", if you will), and the one below that is Armelle's, which begins with the end of Lisa Fair's M.C. speech just before introducing Armelle. Both recordings are approximately 45 minutes long.
Also, if you'd like to hear more of David's iPhone recordings from the Festival, not only of the other musicians, but also including the spirituality talks which David gave each afternoon at the Festival (which were quite deep and profound), you can find it all by visiting his Soundcloud page: http://soundcloud.com/david-hoffmeister.
May these recordings lift your Spirit and remind you that there is no need to try being "perfect" in this world. Our true Self is already Perfect in Eternity, and has never been tainted in the slightest bit by our comical dreams of separateness.
With Love Eternal,
Erik
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