Cheryl Connor Interview (April 8, 2013)

 

• “Every activity can be a transformative process.”

• Realized she was an artist when she was 7. She sang in church coir, had a beautiful voice, and got solos at the age of 7. She was already seeing herself as a musician.

• She remembers the experience of being in front of hundreds of people in the church.

• On family trips she would sit by herself in nature and write in her notebook (poems at the Grand Canyon)

• Always felt very connected to God/the divine—meditating on holy books.

• Meditating at 7 meant meditating on the text and prayer (which is one form of pointedness too). At the time she had a deep prayer life and had the experience of deep compassion and love while in the state of prayer.

 

• Q: So you’re relating your artistic life or recognition with spirituality?

A: Definitely. I was always connected to a deep experience of oneness with everyone, though the name changed at different times (aka name of God). As a child I was raised liberal Christian. When I went through my exploration period and questioned the Christian Church and the patriarchy, then I did my exploration of world religions; Quakerism, Unitarianism, Buddhism and Hinduism. When I found a Buddhist teacher from Tibet I studied with him for almost 20 years (can’t understand name) and I remember having a shift in my experience at that time because I had such a deep affinity for God—Jesus—as the intermediately between me and source. Now I was using all of this. There was a big shift. At first it was uncomfortable, but I knew this must have been what Jesus was like. I used Buddhism and other scriptures as a source of understanding. In 2000 I moved to the woods to heal and Tibetan Buddhism was more relevant than Christianity because of my connection to nature. I even felt that Buddhism was limiting.

• Q: Can you tell me your earliest artistic influences? Teachers—lets start with family.

A: My grandmother was a pianist and my grandfather was a violinist and they were a regular thing at our house. We used to spend hours playing songs and singing around the piano. In high school I had Dr. Richard Cellhammer (spelling?) who saw my gifts of music and encouraged me to get a finer piano teacher. So I studied at the Manhattan School of Music. He then saw that I was good in groups and suggested that I be a choir director, so he created a choir for me in high school. That continued to college. I’m very happy that he was so helpful to me.

• Q: Are there any accomplished or recognized artists that spoke to you tehn or through the years?

A: In the high school Dave Rubeck (spelling?) had a big influence on me. I played piano in my own jazz ensemble.I love jazz and I am an improvisational personality, even though I studied classically in the Manhattan School of Music.

• I was always attracted to unconventional, out of the box thinkers and that applied to everything. Like music, so I tended to like theater like the ART in Cambridge as opposed to the Huntington, which is more traditional.

• Q: When you experience art is there any visceral experience you can describe when you are performing, experience, or receiving any form of art?

A: Yes, very much so. I’m am a sound channel. I have 10 notebooks filled with my solo piano improvisations, several choral pieces, one musical I did on commission in progress. What happens to me is that I go into a deep place within myself. Frequently I wake up in the middle of the night with a strong feeling that something is about to be presented and I’ll go to my keyboard and I’ll play it and write down enough to remember it. I can experience your direct energetic signature and channel with your at the piano and make music that reflects your essence, which would be healing for you right now. I just started a business of this and converted a bedroom for sound therapy so that I can just be present with someone. In hose cases I definitely get a visceral sensation of vibrations coming in and sometimes get images in my head of what their issues are. Other times I’ll get little phrases and I’ll be guided to play in a particular key.

• I am almost finished with my book Songs for the New Earth and I have mediate on the psalms I used to mediate on when I was a little girl but now that I’ve gone through this whole journey I experience these songs very differently. In that case I get a visceral feeling from a line of text. I can feel the vibration of each sentence and get a sense of which parts have the highest vibration of light and which ones may actually not be genuine. I don’t know that and I’m not interested in researching it. I think the texts have been manipulated over time by different people with multiple motivations. Without getting into a historical or political dialogue, there are certain parts of every psalm that feel like pure wisdom to me. Those are the ones I use when I go into a deep place and listen for how in my current moment it reflects my understanding of source.

• Q: Do you see sound?

A: No I don’t have synesthesia.

• Q: There’s duca (the broken wheel) which is trying to set things right, which is where the artist starts. It’s a call and response. You hear the call in the middle of the night and use meditation to respond. They use their own particular methodologies that sync with some of the things we’ve learned.

A: It gets more subtle. For example, if someone is in a car accident all the way down to the more subtle things—feeling separation from ones experience you let go of all those sufferings first.

• Q: Can you choose/remember one duca and tell me how it struck you first and how this middle of the night things manifests itself?

A: I don’t feel as if I do create from suffering right now. I’m in a place of grounded clarity. Right now I’m doing a lot of receiving—I can create without suffering at this point. I’m completely in the flow now. But in the beginning, when I was living in the woods, I was on deaths door. So, I lied in a room with glass on three walls between two mountain ranges. So I would watch the sin rise and then watch it go overhead and watch it set—it was such a gift. What would happen then is I would get a sense like “I want to paint the color red” and I would pull out my paints and paint red. I wouldn’t even have an image necessarily. My Tibetan Buddhist iconographyon the walls wasn’t feeling like it fit anymore. It just was feeling like it was not my major source—this is not my gateway in anymore. This was a very Christian town in Vermont, there was so much love in this little church, and I was so touched by the Christian love in this town. I had kind of left behind my whole Christian background so I pulled out the Bible and I started reading the psalms and I started thinking “wow, how far I have come.” Coming back to the psalms was a sense of coming back home, seeing the beauty of this big circle of the journey I had and becoming whole. So in a way, the gifts of the psalms to me was to say there is beauty there and I have moved beyond their direct presentation, but they are part of me too.

• Q: So I’m projecting this is where your duca started and then you started to heal yourself and out of this rose the impulse and the inception of the art. Do I have that right? Can we have a little more of that?

A: I was a really healthy, high-energy woman. I was a lawyer, law professor (Suffolk, Northeastern, BU), an assistant US attorney, assistant attorney general—a demanding career. I had a life-threatening illness that resulted from high levels of exposure to electro-magnetic radiation. Experts in the field said that most people did not recover unless they moved to the woods. So, I left my career behind not knowing what was ahead for me and taking a chance to save my life. During that time period I lost my cognitive functioning, most of my body systems were not working, I had neuropathy in my feet, I had a hard time walking—so it was quite a severe disability. I would do anything. I even risked not having my young daughter live with me because if I was not alive I wasn’t going to do her any good…. I did it to save my life. There was a lot of physical suffering and I think that because I was such a high powered individual I need that derailment back to the girl who I was before all of this. I was always a sensitive, poetic, and spiritual little girl and because I had a good brain I got onto a whole journey of saving the world as an intellectual professional. A creature of my time graduating from Mount Holyoke at a time when to go be a music teacher would have failed the women’s movement. We got such a strong message that the doors were opening up. The suffering for me was not in alignment as who I was as a person as what I’m doing now.

• On her house: it really did give me the gift of unplugging me from both the professional world and organized religion because my direct experience with nature and of the powerful influence of the world without electromagnetic fields of civilization was healing and illuminating. I could recalibrate with support from the external world but found it in the woods. I was there four 3.5/4 years and wasn’t really done healing when I moved back. There are parts of my consciousness that have cleaned up since I’ve returned. I could operate on a neurological level—I could function, I could teach a class, but there were certain levels of awareness lacking. It was quite a journey but I had to do it because I was suffering. I’ve been back 6 years.

• I had to re-integrate and stabilize my whole energetic body when I moved back. It’s just like meditating. You can do it for 10 minutes but not all day. My energetic body was capable of being on some of the time but not all of the time. Now I am in charge all of the time.

• Q: What were your daily practices when you went back?

A: I walk in the woods many days of the week. Being in the woods is very important for me. At least 5 times a week I spend a couple hours in the woods. I rest in silence and I compose and write my spiritual practice. I do less formal meditation and do more being present. I sit for a while in the mornings and journal, compose, write, and then do worldly activities in the afternoon.

• Q: So after you put yourself on the healing path how did the art arise?

A: When the music started coming through me in Vermont when I was dreaming and awake. I was called to look at the Declaration of Independence by my source after Guantanamo and I started hearing music from it. I would write down the notes that came from it. I had never looked at choral pieces ever but I just had to write one. The music just kept coming. There were days when I would just her the music and it would go through my body, but while I was hearing the music I could feel it move to different parts of my body. My sense was that the music was actually healing me. I was giving and receiving music from my own healing journey, but it’s ok to share it with other people now. The vibration of sound is healing for human beings. That’s it.

• Offers group music therapy to feel more of a sense of a group consciousness.

• She described the journey from her illness of reacting to radioactive stuff—living in the woods, buying a house in Vermont, three walls of glass, recalibrating her rhythm. Receiving music.

• Q: Has your art transformed you?

A: Music was healing for her physical body. At a second level, the more you open up to sound and color and words being received it changes your perspective on the nature of reality.

• On transformative power: “Understanding the power of consciousness, the collective consciousness, and how individual and collective consciousness is connected to the consciousness of everything living on the planet.”

• Q: How does that manifest itself experientially?

A: I know things—it cultivates a way of knowing. It doesn’t require me to have thoughts about it, but I know things…This is different than empathy… what I’m saying now is that you know things—you have a greater underlying competence in an innate kind of knowing and images and words can flow through you and so can the intelligence of the universe. Your individual knowingness is expanded.

• Q: How does compassion play into all of this? The basic being of who we are is compassionate. Is compassion the factor that allows one to receive and feel what other people are feeling?

A: I think there’s a higher vibration than compassion… love. Compassion is a vibration, but there are higher levels than compassion… Any qualities that we cultivate in Buddhist practice; equanimity, clarity… all of those enhance the ability to be receiving creative activity. If your mind is so busy… you can’t receive. If you’re angry you can’t receive. Any of those indicators block creativity. The absence of any of those indicators block creativity…. The opposite of compassion is hard-hardedness and if you’re hard-harded its true that an angry person has a harder time receiving. But angry people can still be creative.

• Out of the 8 factors (from Mahali): to be honest, if I had to look at art, conceptuality is a major obstacle to creativity, but I don’t know if that’s in that list. Conceptuality is the last level of obscuration before you’re in a state of one-ness.

• Q: Is compassion one of the driving forces of embodiment? Because how can you embody something without having compassion for it?

A: I wouldn’t use the word driving force with compassion… from my own experience I think of compassion as a ground, not as a masculine will. It’s the ground from which action and creativity can arise.

• There are loads of people who are creative out of ego. It’s not an obstacle—if you’re not compassionate you can still be a successful artist.