Music, Sex and Poetry

What a blessing to spend a week with the most wonderful Guru in the world, H.H. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. Who, it is whispered will be someday soon recieveing the Nobel peace prize.
Sri Sri promotes peace, love and kindness, living in the present, joy, music, ayurvedic food, yoga and one world family .He is most well known for his beautiful breathing techniques including Sudarshan Kriya. Sri Sris breathing techniques radically reduce stress, depression and anxiety.
He started out teaching them to a few people in Bangalore, India, and this year in India 2.5 million people showed up to honor him. When he first walked into the room, or should I say danced, waving a flower, mobbed by his joyous devotees, I began to cry. His presence was just filled with loving kindness, I just felt like it was all ok, the all seeing, all knowing, all loving Sri Sri Ravi Shankar was here to heal me and the rest of the world. I have never witnessed anybody like him. You could feel a shift in consciousness every time he entered the room; the room was transformed into a space of peace, love, harmony, joy, and celebration. He describes consciousness as the ocean he says that we are all divine; he says that life is short and your problems Just let them go .
Trained as a physicist. Yes, hes the real deal, a modern day saint. With his wonderful sense of humor, which involved even putting on a pair of Elvis sunglasses on the Purnima Festival, the day of the Guru. When two thousand devotees showed up, sang bhajans, waved flowers, gave gifts, danced, slept and listened to the beautiful words of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, talking of the importance of having a guru or a master. When you have a problem he said, Just give it over to the Guru.
Of course you have to go and experience his holiness to really understand what Im saying.
The course was seven days of breathing techniques. Getting you back to the all essential you in Sri Sris words. Blissful and divine. Sitting up right and cross legged on a floor, with five hundred other bodies in a room with nothing but the breath and silence, your own thoughts and feelings, and Sri Sri and his teachings, breaking you on through to the other side, bliss, your all essential nature.
He firmly believes all our essential natures are blissful, divine and peaceful it is only stress that causes constant mind chatter that gets us away from who we essentially are. That war is created by an overstressed world, his teachers go into prisons, into war zones and witness miracles as people are taught a new way of life.
I can tell you it works, when I arrived I was drained exhausted, in Sri Sri s words my prana was low and it was fascinating to watch my non stop aggravated mind chatter. But by day three it really started to clear, and I really began to feel at peace. The sunlight started to become golden and warm on my skin, the grass, green, soft and lush. I became attuned to the subtle movement of my nature and the nature around me. Without the constant mind chatter I felt light, joyous and creative, playful and in harmony with my experience. In fact everyone seemed to be feeling lighter and lighter. Children played we all sung bhajans at lunchtime and one could only dream of the world being such a utopia. . Its not that we dont feel as human beings but given a loving, supportive atmosphere we can all feel good. No matter our background, when we feel enveloped by his holinesss vision of love and one world family, life is a divine journey stretching out in front of us.
Check out the website:Art of Living
I am heading up to Montreal to spend some more time in the presence of Sri Sri and hopefully come up with some beautiful songs of peace for him, and our one world family.

I went to stay with an artist in San Diego last weekend, her house, that is shaped like a boat was a feast for my imagination, full of huge paintings of bright flowers, altars, chandeliers, and feral cats. Every nook and cranny had something interesting, and like a performing artist she would read from books and demonstrate her own hand made tarot deck. We sat on a huge deck and ate under a big Pepper Tree above the ground in the evenings, huge ship paintings circulating in the gallery.
One night I slept on the sofa, which was by an open door, the warm air coaxing my dreams. I lay there dreaming of love and possibilities, and wishing that the artists were the rulers of the world. We would live in a very much more creative world, artists have such original viewpoints and they are often kind and sensitive people.
She showed us around San Diego, we went to India Day in Balboa Park at the United Nations International Village. She showed us the beginning of one of her mural paintings on a canvas attached to a wall and lit by candlelight. We walked the enchanted hills by night and we could just about see the glittering lights of Mexico on the horizon. We had Sunday in a camp site with friends, we all sang Beatles songs, I pretended I was a messenger from the Queen of England come to wish her friend a Happy Birthday. We also sang old British songs like; Maybe its because Im a Londoner. I was impressed at how well my American Cousins knew all the words!
We sang Imagine by John Lennon, probably one of the most beautiful visions an artist has ever expressed of his dream for the world, one of the ladies had tears in her eyes while we sang.
Yes if only the artist ruled of course we d have a bit of chaos, but lots of love and I think the more I go through life the more I realize what John said was entirely true;
All you need is love-its the glue thats keeps the whole thing together.
I want to vote Bono in as president!

I should explain how an English chick got to be making psychedelic music in Los Angeles.
Well, originally I trained in England as an actress. At twenty-one years old I lived and worked in Rome, Italy for three years, acting in horror movies and English speaking theater. I was then cast in a Colombia Pictures film called Age of Treason. I went and filmed in North Africa and then went to Hollywood for three months. While in Hollywood I got a great inside look at what would life was like as a young Hollywood actress, and promptly decide it wasnt for me.
I returned to England, lived with my parents for a while and began reading lot of biographies and autobiographies looking for a creative mentor. I read about Bardot and Mae West, James Belushi, Disney, Luchino Visconti, all manner of creators.
Then one day I saw the movie "The Doors" directed by Oliver Stone, of course Val Kilmer, as Jim Morrison was the sexiest thing Id ever seen, I was hypnotized and a door was opened. I clearly remember the day I went out and bought the book from an English bookstore, No ones gets out of here alive by Danny Sugermann. I stood on a train station and began to read the book, the trains rushing either side of me; I knew my life was about to change.
I went and bought a tape of the music and of course as if by magic that night there was a power cut in London and so I sat there with a candle and switched on the music. Ill never forget first hearing the tinkle of those keys, the baritone voice as it sang Riders on the storm .
I was hooked, the poetry, the hypnotic sounds, the charisma of Morrison and his mystical musings, his way of framing life.
Those film students I thought were genius they wrote songs, created scenes and a rock myth of movie proportion. I was swept up and decided having written poetry as a child and trained as a performer, over a few months sitting on a mountain in Spain with my sister reading Jack Kerouac, listening to Morrison and reading Joseph Campbell, that if there was one thing worth doing, it was going to the West Coast of America and making music.
So my sister and I headed out it was quite an adventure as you can imagine.
Ill tell you some more over the next few days ...

I spoke to a favorite friend of mine yesterday, a Cherokee Medicine Woman; she had been on a vision quest for week. A vision quest is when you go and see new medicine to heal the planet. She told me this story:

"Once upon a time we all knew were divine, we all knew we were a piece of Great Creator and we knew the earth was divine too.
Each of us had a silhouette a female or male twin flame and we lived in harmony with them.
We did not try to devour or own them; we honored them as also divine. We knew we were connected to all things, the plants, the trees, the animals and all the human relations.
We didnt feel alone, we didnt feel hopeless we were in harmony, we came from the star nation and Great Creator created us all in his image, the image of himself."

I love to talk with this woman she is inspired, she has inspired me to write songs that will help heal the earth. The album Im working on right now is really dedicated to that, healing myself and healing the earth.
For the Navajo the singers were the healers, I spend a lot of time around healing artists and often find they have a great sense of what the planet needs now. We can heal our bodies with the right foods and yoga, our minds with meditation, we can learn how to go to the silence and just be.
Today Ill do that, just go to the silence at least for a couple of hours.

"How far to heaven,
Just open your eyes and look,
You are in heaven"
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Its nine a.m. Im sitting looking at the Pacific Ocean, South of Los Angeles. The sounds of the waves are hypnotic and soothing. Im going to sit on the beach all morning and just get in touch.
My mother who trained as a fine artist taught me to look at the beauty of Mother Nature, when we were out walking she would say, look at the daisies or look at the oak trees or look at all the colors! So I learnt to look and really revel in the beauty of nature. On a Sunday morning when everybody was at church my father took me bird watching, so in a way nature became my religious experience. For me there is nothing more uplifting than communing with Her, be it walking barefoot in the desert, sitting on an empty beach or horse riding in Topanga Canyon.
When I was twenty-three years old I trekked across the Himalayas in India, they were vast and I really felt such a sense of liberation, I was just as peck of dust, here for a moment in relation to these vast eternal mountains .I was supposed to be on the trek for seven days but we got lost and I was out there for fourteen days in total, we wandered around at the mercy of Mother Nature exposed to her great power. Its one of the few times coming from a small town in England that I thought, wow Im really in her hands . I sat and prayed, Please Im in your hands, I dont want to die".
I recently had to have some surgery, I have always taken my beautifully functioning system for granted, well it makes you think, nature has its way.
I studied with some healers after the surgery, Why me? Why surgery? Why this chakra?
Of course after analysis it all made total sense, the area of my nature I had abused.
Nature is genius you see and while were busy trying to exploit her and ourselves, we totally miss the point. This is heaven, our bodies are our temples, and we have everything we need if we just get in touch.

There’s nothing I love more than to be walking barefoot down a desert path, a guitar strapped around my neck and my Dictaphone tucked into my bra, this is how I like to create.
The blank canvas of the desert gives my mind the space and time to unwind. I have recently been writing a second record in the desert and all the songs are created like this. I get up in the morning and wander and whatever comes to my mind or soul I sing into my Dictaphone as I walk. I find a lot of inspiration talking to a wonderful Medicine lady. In the afternoons after I’d been fishing for inspiration, a typist called Mary comes and sits in my desert room and types out whatever madness I had come up with in the mornings. I am in love with the archetype of the troubadour wandering and spreading her bards. I have had a love affair with the desert outside of Los Angeles for as long as I have been living in the U.S.
I first arrived here in the States eight years ago; I was born and raised outside London, England. We don’t have desert in England, so to English people the desert is a miracle. Simply wonderful and I was captured by her beauty. The desert to me is all female very sultry and sensual, the warm breeze, the sand between my toes. It’s almost as if I feel she mirrors my soul. Of course traditionally the desert has always been a place of spiritual retreat.
I remember the first time I was there and someone said, “the desert always provides”, and that is ever since been my experience. When I need answers when I need sanctuary or creative nourishment I go off to the desert I like the people, I like the blank canvas, I like to have the time and space to witness my thoughts and detoxify from a world that moves overwhelmingly fast. I like the simplicity of life out there, and the space just to imagine all the possibilities. As Jim Morrison once said, “let your conscious mind we’re going into universal time” .I remember lying under a rock in the desert when it began to rain, it was magical, desert rain is as rare as true love. When the noise in my mind has died down, finally the heart talks and I can see my life stretching out before me like a magnificent dance.
Yes for me the desert is miraculous. You’ll always find me wandering there.

When I was living out in the Mojave Desert, when I first arrived in America, my sister and I lived in a cave for nearly two months. This is where I wrote the words for my debut album, “Beautiful to be Alive”.
Yes we were two girls in a desert garden created by a Mormon guy, way out there. The whole record is about that experience; “Caves of Possibility “ is about living the cave.
The inspiration for the song ‘Goddess” began when I met a woman called Dee, who made Native Indian art and she started talking to me about Goddess’s, the divinity of the female form, Goddess as Creatress, Goddess as life giver to all things. I was also reading a lot of Joseph Campbell at the time and he said the planet would be completely out of balance until God and Goddess sat next to each other once more. I do believe it; Yin and Yang must be in balance. When I go out to primarily female run places, like a spa I love to go to and I feel all that wonderful nurturing circular female energy I think, why wouldn’t we want more of this in the world? Why wouldn’t we want to honor the Goddess? And so the song begins;

“In the outer darkness
Before the beginning of all things
I floated alone
Made love to myself
Out of the ecstasy came the motion of the world
Out of the motion came a perfect song”

I felt like a Goddess when I wandered barefoot in a long black dress around the desert garden. They called me the desert Goddess and my only reference was nature and my internal spiritual journey. I was giving birth to my own creations, my songs and I wrote this song for all women everywhere who are all powerful, sacred, may you honor your spiritual path and give birth to all manner of wonderful things, each one of you.
From love to childbirth, from art to healing from Mother Earth to dance and poetry, you’ll find Goddess in all things, just feel her… she is wondrous.