SESSION DESCRIPTIONS

We will gather on Zoom. In every session, Meg & Gary will play together. Gary offers his mastery as a musician, composer, and recording artist. Meg relates these musical ways to our roles as leaders, Warriors for the Human Spirit, and persevering people.

As teachers, we focus on giving you direct experience, not telling or describing concepts, but offering you experiences in listening, harmonizing, creating, tuning.  We’re creating a sensory environment, with videos, music, and other visual means for you to know what harmony is in your body, mind, and spirit.

SESSION DESCRIPTIONS

1 – Listening for the Harmonies  We start by tuning in as a new group.  Gary will share his process of engaging master musicians from nine countries to create “The Journey Home.”  He will lead us in our first listening experience. (We’ll continue to explore this piece throughout the course.) In the second half, we’ll be awestruck by Cymatic examples of sound transforming into form. And we’ll tune into early ancestors who, 40,000-50,000 years ago during the Goddess culture of Eastern Europe, made flutes that still today play the Pentatonic scale.

2 – Harmony is a relationship. Harmony is created from relationships among unique contributors. Every instrument is essential for its sound, yet no one instrument owns the song.  Musicians use dissonance as creative tension, discovering new possibilities rather than returning to the old. We’ll apply this practice to working with teams, communities, families.  How do we shift from striving for diversity and inclusion to co-creating from unique sounds, knowing each is essential to create harmony?

3 – Field Creation as Harmonic Expressions. Fields are created from unique contributions/frequencies that together emerge as new harmonies. Field creation requires new behaviors: we contribute rather than demand that our personal needs be met.  As our energies interact at a vibrational level, we create insights and solutions not available through traditional problem-solving practices. And we invite in other sources of intelligence.  What personal behaviors support or impede field creation?  When have you experienced fields as harmonious co-creations?

4 – Inner Harmony. Inner harmony is the experience of feeling grounded and awake—tuned in to yourself and everything, an experience of “okayness” no matter what is happening externally. How do we create and sustain this experience? What practices help us deal with what disrupts it, especially discordant emotions and thoughts? How do we cultivate equanimity as our state of being, a felt sense of deep harmony with “as it is.”

5- Relational Harmony. We live in a world of increasingly strong energies of place and of who’s in the room. How do we tune in to these different energies?  How do we attune to one another? How do we acknowledge subtle energies impacting us?  How do we become confident of our own frequency and offer ourselves without demands, judgments or aggression?

6 – Team and Organizational Harmony. Leaders as conductors know the score and work with both individuals and the ensemble to manifest harmonious music and actions. How do we become tuning forks, aware of subtle harmonies and disharmonies? How do we use dissonance to discover newness?

7 – Retuning as a practice. There is a profound difference between tuning and rehearsing, contributing and performing.  We will learn from orchestras, both Indian classical and Western, for how musicians tune. How do we tune ourselves to be a contribution rather than a performance?

8 –Improvisation, spontaneous creation.  At this time of intense confusion and uncertainty, adaptation takes too long–we need to become skilled improv artists. What are the conditions that enable instantaneous responses that keep developing the music and the work?

9 – Listening for the Harmonies. How have you been changed in this exploration? Do you experience yourself as a frequency, as a unique instrument?  Are you intrigued to develop yourself as a tuning fork, as a conductor, a harmonizer, a field creator? Where is your curiosity leading you next?