How one gig changed my life (write in style pt. 3) A story of yoga & rock and how to write love letters to life

I wrote this fan letter exactly five years ago. At first glance, it doesn’t seem to have much to do with my series on HOW TO WRITE IN STYLE, the current focus of my Blogging DiAries, but when you think again, it actually has EVERYTHING to do with it. It is, in fact, the perfect response to a statement recently made to me by a wonderful friend and colleague, who declared:

Do you know what? I have no idea what you actually stand for anymore!

I totally get why she asked. After all, I make music, I write and I teach yoga, all of which seem to be completely separate entities. Nevertheless, they are all connected by one shared effect, which makes the answer to Katharina’s question very simple indeed:

I stand for freedom – freedom from negative patterns of thought defined by others and the freedom to love, to have feelings and to be vulnerable. Freedom is all about actively experiencing life and feeling alive, about seizing the moment as often as you can. It’s about escaping from the constraints of your mind and using your body so that you can come back to thinking with a clear head.

I’m well aware that for some people, such an approach sounds awfully pathetic. But don’t judge me just yet; I’ll tell you exactly what I mean in a bit. A visit to one single concert, for example, can change an entire life. It can be a truly revolutionary experience. Sounds like pathos? Well you’re actually not far off the mark: “pathos” is the Greek word for “passion”. And come to think of it, passion is something that we all desperately need to have.

I also stand for the knowledge that I am more than just what I think and feel. With all of this at the back of my mind and pulsing through every cell in my body, I’m perfectly equipped to write, to make music and to teach yoga, always using words and sounds with an inspiring impact, motivating both myself and others to follow our intuition and do exactly what is right for us, even if it means doing nothing at all.

This was not the only thing that I learnt while training to be a yoga teacher with the BDY, a course that I finally began five years ago after being inspired by this concert (and successfully completed last autumn after four and a half years that flew by like just a couple of months). My training also pulled an abundance of knowledge back up to the surface, knowledge that used to be at the forefront of my mind during my punk rock performances in the Palatinate provinces of Germany or on the mat at the Iyengar Yoga Institute in London at the turn of the millennium or even when reading the works of Rilke or Nietzsche at various unis.

At times, this knowledge was once suppressed and buried by a professional upbringing that required me to adapt to the ‘normal’ world of work by means of full capitulation (including crying on the toilet, being bullied by patriarchal bosses and suffering burnout due to absolutely no life-work balance or time for my kid WHATSOEVER). It is the knowledge that Henry David Thoreau’s book WALDEN, including its strong advocation of carpe diem, and the film Dead Poets Society actually anchored at the core of my inner being at a very early stage of my life, namely knowing how to be a free spirit who needs to be surrounded by and communicate with like-minded spirits. Why? In order to save the world, just a little bit (and with a bit of pathos thrown in for good measure!).

And now, after five years have flown by faster than the speed of light? I still cry, of course I do, but I don’t do it in secret on the toilet anymore. And when I do cry, it’s not for all that long or all that often and most definitely no longer has anything to do with a job that makes me miserable.

I sometimes even cry simply because I’m so happy and grateful, for instance for the fact that as a mum in her mid-40s, I can still (or, indeed, finally) get up on stage myself with my band Jetsun and see the impact that I can have on my audience. Who knows, maybe I can even inspire some of them just like Jay inspired me five years ago, on the day that I decided to completely transform my life.
Put in a nutshell, my message is clear: Get moving – it’s your life to live! Start out by asking yourself: “What do I stand for?”

Do you need another little nudge to get going? In that case, keep reading and be inspired!

 

“Don’t treat him according to his deserts; after all, how would even the best of us fare if we got our deserts? No, think of him as he was in the hour when you loved him most…”

 – Jens Peter Jacobsen.

For many people, the word “love” is four simple letters that can send shivers of fear down their spine. People who want to be taken seriously in intellectual or academic discourse in particular steer well clear of it. This is surprising given that love leads to knowledge and emotional cognition, especially in the case of a love of music or, indeed, love resulting from music.

Forget cock rock; cog rock is where it’s really at!.

This big L-word is certainly the perfect way to describe the phenomenon better known as Rival Sons. When it comes to inspiring strong emotions and, what’s more, actions, the band’s singer and songwriter Jay Buchanan is the master: his songs and his presence have that special performative impact that can only be achieved by great art and great artists. A visit to just one single concert performed by this band can change an entire life. It can be a truly revolutionary experience. Sounds like pathos? Well you’re actually not far off the mark: “pathos” is the Greek word for “passion”. And come to think of it, passion is something that we all desperately need to have.

 
It actually all started out pretty harmless: When I came across the track Face of Light by chance on Facebook, I immediately fell head over heels in love. Its lyrics, vocals and arrangement are a prime example of pure song-like beauty at its very best. And then I saw the video, which hits the nail on the head in terms of simplicity and genius with its slow-motion scenes of the members of band wrapped up warm and strolling through a typical English landscape. Show people! Show nature! It really does work. Not even the drum set and amps slap bang in the middle of green-grey meadows and in front of picturesque stone walls can take away from its perfection, which is precisely why I turned up the volume and watched the video time and time (and time!) again, for months on end.

Yes, words. Buchanan isn’t really a fan of them. If you ask him, “words can make a daft person seem really smart and a smart person seem really daft” (beaconmoment.com). Instead, he prefers to emphasise “the superiority of the human singing voice in cutting through the crap”, believing that while using nothing but words provides some sort of camouflage, a singing voice leaves you with no place to hide. This fact was even recognised by Nietzsche in his first monograph, The Birth of Tragedy, in which he woefully declares: “It [the soul] should have sung!”. By his own admission (Buchanan’s, not Nietzsche’s), he was initially too shy to sing because it felt like crying on stage, in front of everybody.

As a singer myself, I totally get what he means. Oh Jay, it’s such a shame that I can’t sing to you right now, but I’m afraid my words will just have to make do. So let me tell you that your performativity had such an impact on me that on that very evening, I decided to finally start training as an Ashtanga yoga teacher, a dream that I had been fostering for so long but never dared to explore. Come to think of it, yoga actually has a similar Dionysian and Apollonian effect to a good rock concert: you can completely lose yourself in the moment while you systematically learn how to mute that disco of thoughts dancing around in your mind. (My belief in this yoga-and-rock analogy is currently stronger than ever thanks to my recent participation in a highly fitting course in the philosophy of yoga held by the legendary Eberhard Bärr.)

After the concert, we lingered at the merch stand for a while, accompanied by the sounds of the supporting act, Hong Faux from Sweden. The band was pretty good but not in the same league as the true stars of the show. Suddenly, these very stars, all of the Rival Sons, were standing right next to us, making their way through the crowd and picking up where their music left off, namely seeking direct contact with their audience. I must have been one of those people who came across as truly verbally stunted that evening as I stood there, my knees shaking, and failed to produce anything more than a nervous stutter. When Mr Buchanan, the modern personification of both Apollo (the God of form) and Dionysus (the God of ecstasy), stated: “Hi, I’m Jay, what’s your name?”, I responded in what can only be described as a very un-God-like voice, much like that of Andy Pipkins in Little Britain: “Yeah, I know, you’re a poet”.