Inner Life

It is possible to create a vibrant, creative, sustainable, engaging career in music and the arts while cultivating a deep, vibrant, quiet, contemplative, self-aware inner life.

In fact, a strong understanding of how the soul, mind, heart and emotions work together with the body is going to protect and preserve life and the arts.

The pandemic has brought us to a place where we think of what's important and can I say, transcendent? The things that are important are not the glitz and glamor of a social and digital presence in the communities we find ourselves in. Devastatingly, we see the results of lives not rooted in a deep understanding of truth, goodness and beauty. My life is hollow, vapid and frankly meaningless without a cultivation of an inner life.

For me, of course, this is rooted in my Christian faith which I need to say is not the faith that is promoted on various cable channels and media nor the faith that was held up my a former president of the United States which will remain nameless and his spiritual advisors. It is a faith rooted in Jesus of Nazareth, handed down to a group called the apostles. It contains the deepest mysteries of the universe. It handles the complexities of life in raw honesty. Truth and goodness and beauty are explored in this path in grand detail because they are rooted in God himself. You will also have to wrestle with the nature of evil and look at the horrifying realities that many of us face on this planet on a daily basis. In other words, it is not naive but it is prodding and begs you to ask questions of yourself; sometimes painful questions.

So where are you in your inner life? Have you taken up meditation during this pandemic? How are you reflecting on what is important? As musicians and artists, we need to take this part of our lives very seriously.