Dear harmonic friends,

Greetings from East Hampton, New York. Just back from an amazing songline voyage to Esalen, where the group we had for the week of Harmonic Presence/Harmonic Chant teachings and practices had truly transcendent moments.

After a weekend of 2 concerts in Los Angeles, produced respectively by the exceptional organization The Center for Conscious Creativity and highly-valued Los Angeles event collaborator, outstanding acupuncturist, cellular meditation pioneer and distinguished René Daumal biographer Kathleen Ferrick Rosenblatt, we then visited Taos, New Mexcio, where I was born, and where we were able to spend delightful time with my 80-year old godmother from the Taos Pueblo, who told me "we gave you the privilege to sing."

We then drove north into Colorado's stupendous San Luis valley, with the sun setting above the San Juan mountains far to our left and the full moon rising above the Sangre de Cristo mountains to our right. The middle way...

Crestone is a nexus of extraordinary spiritual communities, including the American headquarters of outstanding Tibetan Buddhist lama Tsoknyi Rinpoché, whom we venerate, and whose Pundarika Foundation (www.pundarika.org) furthers his profound work. We were honored to meet with his principal team and to chant for and with them in the evening's luminous mountain light. We hope to offer a benefit concert for Pundarika next summer.

We were also honored to spend time at the Crestone Zen Center of Richard Baker Roshi, where the extraordinarily resonant dome may well house a summer 2008 Harmonic Presence retreat session that I very much look forward to.

And now here we are by the sea in East Hampton. For information about teachings and sessions in East Hampton this month, please write harmonicpresence@gmail.com.

We then return to our main center, Pommereau, near Paris, France, for a weekend retreat Nov 30-Dec 2, and then to Katmandu for a concert appearance on Dec 9th in honor of the 10th anniversary of the Rangjung Yeshe Institute (http://shedra.org/dinner.php).

The following weekend we'll be in Prague for a weekend of teachings and a concert.

Our foundation is preparing a number of collaborative projects for 2008 to further explore both traditional and contemporary approaches to the search for essential harmony in mind, body and spirit. Our work links mind, music, meditation and the medicine of deep harmonization.

We welcome your voice in the songlines of the journey.

With all best wishes,

David
Harmonic Presence Foundation

harmonicworld@gmail.com
203 843 3524

Greetings, reader. I've been working online (the Harmonic Prsence Online Study Program) with a dear person battling life-threatening illness. Having been silenced this week outwardly with bronchitis, I've been able to bring the work more inside, so to speak, and also, knowing sickness myself makes me more open and attuned to wanting to be as helpful as possible to others. So, having had to cancel an online session with my dear student-friend, from whose battle I am learning so much, I felt spontaneously moved to writing something instead. Maybe you will find it somehow helpful, as well. I wrote it partly in a kind of attunement to how I used to feel when I read some extremely precious letters I received from my root guru, Lord John Pentland (www.lordjohnpentland.com), of the Gurdjieff Foundation.


from David... "I have been thinking about our sessions and work together and was wondering how inbetween the sessions whatever is most helpful about them could continue. So I was wondering, do you practice inbetween? By practice, I don't mean just physical vocal/chant work. Practice means taking time and giving space to some kind of active immersion-- it could include listening to the music, meditating with the music. It could be moments of silent inward listening awareness, where, no matter what is going on on the outside, you are more aware of yourself, taking in impressions of the moment, the others, yourself, from a place of more inner freedom and detachment. Detachment is a tough word for us sometimes. It doesn't mean indifference, not at all. It can be a deeply compassionate gaze on life that just lets everything be, while fully participating. Fully participating not necessarily by only going outward with one's energy and attention, but fully participating just through being present with awareness. It takes no extra energy at all; it just means letting one's attention naturally return more to its source. We don't have to think or wonder what that means or how to do it-- it's a natural process that is initiated the moment we let go even just a little bit of our hold on everything. It's like invisible muscles that are too tight and we can just slowly learn to relax them-- consciousness muscles! There's an immediate release of tensions... the breathing gets right away a little freer... there's immediately more open awareness about what's going on inside and out... I become more of an active listener to whatever life's vibrations of the moment are... often this brings an immediate opening in the feelings-- gratitude for this nourishment of the present moment, like consciousness being nourished, fed... the nourishment is the universe flowing back in... the returning tide of one's very own energetic core... which is always going out, going out, going out... that very fact can serve to remind us that the tide of consciousness can come back, come back, come back, much closer, right back in.

It seems to me when we begin to awaken some to the movement of presence flowing back in, when there is some contact with that, that it's then that "practice" can come in as a kind of support or help. Usually we try and initiate the process, which most often comes just from the mind and doesn't take us very far. It all goes better when rediscover the movement of return to ourselves as already underway. Then we can subtly join in the process... awareneness exercises to just kind of support the process, the movement, that we already feel to an extent.

So it's at this second phase where things like breath awareness can really help.... just silently following the breath... they make an amazing awareness team, awareness and breath awareness. So do listening and listening awareness... sensation and sensation awareness... space and space awareness.... light and light awareness... if little by little the center of gravity can be that of the awareness, like the tide pulling back in, then whatever is seen, heard and felt is not just part of the flowing out, but an expression of the flowing in.

It's to support the possibilities of moments like this that the different "physical" approaches or octaves exist... so for example, humming exercises, humming music, humming harmonic chant, can be a way to 'channel' or 'accompany' the flow of awareness, help it spread and help the body be more open to it.

the quieter we get, the closer we are to the real fusion of open awareness and open space, inside and out.

i hope you find this little morning meditation helpful-- having lost some outer voice capacity for a few days, i am able to remember and share the fact that the real music is that of the awareness, of the consciousness-- our ultimate home.

Much love and great peace to you, friend.

David







--
Harmonic Presence Foundation
www.harmonicpresence.org
325  8th St.  Brooklyn, NY 11215-3313 USA
Tel.   +1  203 843 3524
Skype:  davidharmonic

MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/davidhykes
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4j1wmleD1eU

Fondation Présence Harmonique
Pommereau, Autainville, France 41240
www.presenceharmonique.org
Tél. +33 9 52 56 74 69 (global) ou 02 54 72 82 12

I've been thinking further this idea of mine, that what we need is a Global Warming of the heart, and how it can help cool these worsening environmental results of our over-heated minds. It's a specific idea, a specific approach, remedy, response, in actual physical terms. In actual bio-energetic terms, if you will.

The environment is also inside. Ecology is also the inner biosphere. It's open and permeable. "If you think it's a bubble, you're in trouble."

The idea about how a global warming of the heart could help an essential cooling down of the mind comes from the pointed observation by a revered Tibetan teacher that we modern folk, east and west, north and south, tend to suffer particularly from what is called restless "lung" or mobile energy-- not just in our lungs, but in the very energetic make-up of our moving, over-dynamic-but-quite-lazy "wind energy." yes, this observation is perhaps most apt to tuned-in, powered-up "modern earthlings" with plenty of "juice" (in the plugs and tanks at least). We're too juiced up and the walls are cracking.

As a practitioner specializing in sacred chant the past 30 years, this theme of "lung" energy has been very present for me (in projects like my 1991 CD, "Windhorse Riders", yet I too have clearly had to face this tendence in my own "modern earthling" make-up.

Extending this vision of an over-heated earthling mind to great Nature and our current planetary situation is as simple as you looking up from your goddam computer screen for a minute... :-)

Sorry... but you're reading a little more intently now, perhaps...

The general getting-all-heated-up state of the planet, I wager, is directly connected to our over-heated minds... let's call it Infection Convection....

So, to be very specific, I propose, in addition to echoing happily all energy-saving suggestions like "Tune In, Turn it Down, Turn it Off," that we all consider adding "Cool it off."

That means addressing in oneself this issue of the over-active, heated-up, restless, lazy "lung" or moving energy. Trouble is, we're all a little deaf, as it were, to the "Hear/Know Good, See/Know Good, Speak/Know Good" litanies, please like "center yourself more," "meditate every day," "do more yoga" or whatever (not to mention the New Age's favorite aspirin-like reach-for, so-called "healing sounds-- "take two mantras and call me in the morning").

So let's try a more inner approach to "cooling off...". I claim that a global warming of the heart-- more compassion, openness, tolerance, peacefulness and yes, love love we do-- will be one as they say contributing factor to the Great Cooling Off of the Mind...

So-called breath work can help... basic mindfulness, remembering to "come back to oneself" can help... it can be simple, almost neutral... the self-healing dimension can be almost invisible but quite present...

...just cooling off... in the mind.... letting the energy settle back down... to a warm-hearted place....

to a quieter presence in the abdomen...


no rush...

all in good time-.....less

so necessary... proclaiming to no one but oneself... i really need... and i is a big 'we'... a spiritual ecology, vibrational ecology, a global approach...not just to the globe, but to global being, to being, globally... some ecological balance in this frayed jungle of thoughts, concerns, worries, realizations... some harmonizing of the urgent work both inside and out that all we double agents-of-change are bound to do -- at once inside and out-- undercover but overly uncovered-- one might say, exposed to the elements... here's to a-hopin' and a-prayin' that the great indoors --the vast heart of the human being-- recover its warmth in hopes that the great outdoors can start to cool off... it's all heat from war of the minds who have forgotten how cool and refreshing it is when it's quiet, in the great indoors, the central peace can erase all the edgy wars... it's the mind that's globally too hot, and the heart globally in need of warmth... it's from the overly-hot mind, all the heat from explosions, from the burning, from the external combustion of the ifs, ands and butt-headed egotists we are, hard-hatted and hard-heartedly delirious in our little cages of self-interest. banging on the bars like worn-out gongs from an unforged monastery-- if we hear nobody's listening then at least it's clear that the work begins at home... we can hear all music once the listener is united...

.

It was wonderful to be at Esalen again; our Harmonic Presence retreat weekend with 25 of us was powerful and moving-- just like the ocean so magestically displayed before our very I's.

the sun has set, sky is quiet, darkening; waves still visible and audible

Hosted By: Cité de la Musique, Paris
When: Saturday Feb 04, 2006
at 9:30 PM
Where: Cité de la Musique
119, av jean Jaures
Paris ,
FR
Description:
Cité de la Musique, Paris

Click Here To View Event