I feel hesitant talking about meditation. I’m glad self care, mindfulness, and mental health have entered our cultural consciousness. But I struggle to discuss meditation when it as seen in our culture only as a tool.

Meditation, for me, is tonalization.

There are all sorts of productivity techniques and social justice innitiatives and pop-art that capture my attention moment to moment. They feel like passages from a show piece for the mind. But when I return back to the root, to the fundamental, meditation guides me to a study of myself in order to leave myself behind. Meditation isn’t doing, it is not-doing. Just as tonalization is not-doing. Tonalization is stripping away of technique and virtuosity– investigating the resonance of the fundamental without adornment. Tonalization is the understanding of it. Tonalization is the falling-in-love with what is.

I can’t not talk about meditation because meditation practice has profoundly and irrevocably altered my worldview and my physiological understanding of my place in the world. In any given moment I can see through several dimesnions– my sociatal inheritence, a sensational awareness, and an inverted animism of the ‘myself’ in the present.

Meditation has fundamentally turned inside-out my work as a violin teacher. It is embedded in every learning principle, technique, and activity we engage in the lesson. Meditation carries me throughout the day.

I wouldn’t prescribe it to anyone. It isn’t a panacea. It isn’t without its concerning side affects (link).

It has given me access to a layer of consciousness that was always there, but I wasn’t aware of.

Think of the magic in a child’s when they hear the ring of a ring tone for the first time. That is the crystallization of wonder that I experience when I sit on my cushion. It wasn’t that the ring wasn’t there before. It wasn’t that I had to ‘do’ something to hear the ring. The meditation simply opens the door for the mind to see itself. Here.

“I have lived on the lip of insanity,
wanting to know reasons,
knocking on a door.


It opens.
I’ve been knocking from the inside.”
Rumi