PLEASE NOTE: If this entry interests you, consider checking out the blog by reading the first post FIRST. The info is cumulative and will make more sense if you read them in the order they were written.
I started tuning at a very young age, as mentioned in my first blog. A lifelong musician, tuning my violin or guitar, and later viola, cello, bass viol, harp, and finally pianos. Not to mention constantly tuning for good intonation as I sing or play the flute, or messing around with pitch-shifting as I do the tech work to engineer a recording in the studio. When I played Early Music in a consort (group) of 6 viols, each with 6 or 7 strings, I was the go-to gal who usually tuned up everyone’s instrument.
I started tuning at a very young age, as mentioned in my first blog. A lifelong musician, tuning my violin or guitar, and later viola, cello, bass viol, harp, and finally pianos. Not to mention constantly tuning for good intonation as I sing or play the flute, or messing around with pitch-shifting as I do the tech work to engineer a recording in the studio. When I played Early Music in a consort (group) of 6 viols, each with 6 or 7 strings, I was the go-to gal who usually tuned up everyone’s instrument.
Tuning is very satisfying. You take something that is not quite right and make it spot-on perfect. As a seasoned piano tuner I can gently nudge that string to snap into tune, and then to stay there (at least for awhile). When an instrument is in tune, it becomes its true self—resonant, most beautiful sounding tone emanates from its strings, once again.
For the first thirty-five years of being in pain (searing stress-related pain up my spine and neck, at times radiating throughout my body) nothing I did gave me more than a few seconds of relief. I’d have a great bodywork or chiropractic session, and minutes (or sometimes, seconds) I would be back in the same or worse pain. It took a combination of major two-by-four’s whacking me on the head to, like an alcoholic, hit bottom… and finally get it that I had to be committed to my own healing or A) I would never head and B) No one else could ever help me.
My Self-Tuning practice began the day I lay on the floor and started to feel into my body and energy for the first time, just feeling, not trying to do anything about it. What made this possible was a newfound ability to connect to ground—to literally feel plugged-in from the soles of my feet on up—as a result of a few years of great Rolfing sessions. Feeling the energy coming into my center and grounding points, and then feeling it flow around in diverse waves, angles and vectors of all imaginable sorts (slow, fast, deep, surface, bright, dark, etc.) something happened, even after just a few times of doing this, that really caught my attention: I started to feel better. Much less pain, movement of the pain, something was happening, and I wanted more of it!
About two years into doing this (yes, I’m a slow learner) I began to understand that what I was doing was a form of tuning. The tuning paradigm was certainly a familiar one, and now here I was doing it on my own system. Wow. I observed that now I could feel two things: a space or place in my body that hurt (was kinked up, distorted) and simultaneously, a space or place in my body that was just fine (open, moving easily, comfortable). What tuners do—always—to get a note in tune is play an out-of-tune note against an in-tune note, and then adjust the former to the latter. Stands to reason, doesn’t it?
An interesting thing happens when you do this: the out-of tuneness of the note DISAPPEARS into the in-tuneness of the other note. It dissolves, it vanishes, it’s gone. I began to understand that the old-paradigm of resisting constant conflict equaled ENDLESS SEEKING TO BE FIXED (or fix myself), with the key word here being “endless.” Endless trying, forcing, and hoping, which always ended up in the old same place, back in pain.
Tuning unisons on the piano is so satisfying… hearing those beats get slower and slower until you come to (almost, close anyway) perfection where the beats disappear and you are left with only the pure resonance of the note sounding. Our systems are exactly like that (being as everything is vibrations—sound waves, if you will). Our frequency makeup, just like frequencies on any instrument, can be tuned to resonance—to our perfectly adjusted spaces and places within.
One of the great discoveries I made, lying on my back, feeling into my body, slowly learning how to tune myself was that this perfect part of me existed for real. I learned that an aspect of me, no matter how long I had been kinked up in pain, was still perfect and whole. And I learned how to intimately access this perfect part (the in-tune part) and use it to heal the parts that were endlessly struggling in pain. this is the essence of what self-healing is about. You heal yourself with you Self—with that own life energy (which is a combination of one’s physical, mental and etheric energies).
The process of tuning myself was greatly facilitated as I learned how to use my imagination plus my core muscles to see, hear and feel the energy flows of my perfect whole self and use them to tune the energy flows that were out of tune with myself. More on those technical points in another blog. But just to say that the act of tuning is, indeed, based on reliable technical know-how combined with a developed intuitive sense. If you check out the blog about my main resources, you’ll see some of the masters that have taught me how to do this.
I’ve been blessed by sessions and books that showed me how to cultivate my core muscles (Craig Williamson’s book), how to focus my mind (Les Fehmi’s books), and how to circulate my consciousness through my energy system (Mantak Chia’s Microcosmic Orbit meditation). Combining their information with hundreds of hours of my own experience, the games and methods to tune myself, just naturally, evolved.
In my next blog I will talk about what it actually feels like to tune myself… so stay tuned!
Being both the tuned and the Tuner,
Laurel
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