Summer!

Hi everybody! I´m writing this from Oslo, but I will go back to Trondheim again today. I´ve been her for over a week now to do various things. Last weekend I went to yet another meditation workshop. So I´ve had enough input for a while. I´ve also been practicing with some opera singers for some concerts in August. Singers and opera is really the key words for this summer. I have plenty of things to do now, and most of it is accompanying singers. I don´t think there will be a single moment of boredom this summer. There´s a big one coming up this Saturday on the island Ytterøya. This is an annual event with several great singers, mostly professional and good students. The location is very special because it´s outdoors on an old farm property. You have to take a ferry to get to the island, but the last years we´ve had 5-600 in the audience. Normally we have 2 pianists to cope with this, but I´m alone this year so my plate is full. 

I´ve done a couple of interesting things this weekend. First of all I did a solo recital in a private home here in Oslo on Friday. This guy has a nice Fazioli grand piano in his living room and invites his friends over 1-2 times a year for a concert and party. I was lucky enough to be the pianist this year, and I did a 45 minutes concert with Russian and Norwegian music. The surprising thing was that the Opera Director in Oslo, Paul Curran, attended the event. He´s known for his straghtforwardness and brutal honesty. So it was very nice to hear that he truly enjoyed the concert and the following party. He was a really cool guy to talk to. His main passion besides opera is piano music, and especially Scriabin! So we had some things to talk about. 

The other interesting thing I did this weekend is something TOTALLY different. You see, I´ve been very interested in health and diet in the past. It all goes along with my spiritual interest. And for the past years I´ve been following, more or less, a high-fat low-carb diet. I´ve been enjoying this even though it has been kinda hard to maintain. But since my spiritual interest and insight is developing, I wanted to look into what the spirituality says about food and dieting. I did have an idea of course and I knew that it was a vegetarian diet. But I wanted to really look into it and dig a little bit. And I found exactly what I was looking for. http://www.timelesshealth.net/ 

I was so relieved because here we have this health-geek that has done all the research for me. He has tried all the diets on the market, including the paleo-diet I´ve been into +++. He also have a high spiritual interest and has done spiritual research and backed it up with scientific facts. He made a diet program called diet of the masters. The word masters here refer to the spiritual masters like Buddah, Krishna, Jesus and also the Greek masters, athletes and the healthiest cultures of the world. These people didn´t care if the food they ate was called carbs, proteins or fat. But they sought the food with the most nutrition. Because even if you eat plenty of calories, the body will tell you to eat more if it lacks all the nutrition it needs (vitamins, minerals etc etc). It seems like the old masters ate 1-2 times a day, vegetarian and exactly the right products. You can check out the details yourself if you´re interested. But I´m going to start testing this now. So I prepared my body this weekend by fasting for 24 hours and doing a C24 body cleanse. Quite an experience... 

Ascension

Hello everybody! I would like to write something about ascension today. This weekend I went to Oslo to learn ascension. But what is it? It is a form of meditation. Ascension means to rise up or transcend. And what you´re actually doing is rising above your mind and entering the sphere of the infinite. I´ve been in touch with a variety of self development programs and spiritual systems. Some of them focuses on positive thinking, how to organize the thoughts and use them to your advantage, how do control the thoughts and so forth. Ascension goes straight to the point and learns us how to go beyond thoughts (and feelings and everything else related to the term "mind.") So instead of solving our mental problems and dissolving our bad mental patterns from the outside, ascension takes us straight to the core and dissolves the thought-patterns from the inside. 

I know this is weird stuff if you´re not familiar with spirituality. But all of spirituality (real spirituality) is about finding the Self which is beyond the mind (thoughts/feelings). Or to put it this way: it´s about keeping the focus and attention on the gap between the thoughts instead of the thoughts. And what do we find there? Silence. Is that silence nothingness? According to all spirituality it´s actually everything. If there wasn´t darkness, we wouldn´t have light. If there wasn´t silence, there wouldn´t be sound. Anyway, this is the ultimate meditative state - the goal of all meditation. This is the source of ultimate solutions, unconditional love, infinite energy, peace, total freedom, joy and bliss. Our natural state. This is a state without societal conditionings, limitations and ego. It´s the God within! Our wise inner master. 

Hmm.. I kinda feel sorry for you that you have to read all this, especially if you aren´t interested in spirituality. hehe. But I´m telling you: If you have any problems in your life, this will solve it. All the solutions, energy and love that we need and want in our life and society is exactly there - in the gap between your thoughts. NOT thinking sounds like an impossible task. And it is. But we can all learn how to stop identifying with thoughts. Because thoughts are mostly just bothering us - blaming us for things from the past, worrying about all kinds of hypothetical things in the future and so forth. Thoughts are for the most part just irrelevant associations. If you start observing your mind for a while, you will notice that. We think that we create a nice, streamlined, logical line of thoughts. But they really don´t have any connection. It´s just one thought associating with the previous one. It´s a machine that just runs on its own. It never stops - not even when we sleep! And the problem is that we think we are the thoughts!! We are controlled by our mind, we are addicted to it. It runs our lives, but it´s not really us! You can observe your thoughts, can´t you? If you try right now? Just watch the thoughts for a minute, count them, observe how they are connected. Now.. if you can observe your thoughts, how can they be you? If you are your thoughts, who is observing them? By being inside your thoughts at any time, you can never be in the present moment. You can never really live and express your full potential. Again observe it... a thought is either from the past or the future. 

If you´re still reading this blog at this stage, you probably realize that I´m quite inspired from this weekend of ascension. :-) I´ve been familiar with all these principals for a long time. But as I said, it´s close to impossible to force your mind not to think. Ascension, as far as I can tell after 1 day, is a remarkably simple way to go straight to the core and dissolve the surrounding thoughts. But the point is to stay in the core, not to remove the thoughts. And the thing is that everybody on planet earth have experienced this already. Because small babies are there all the time!! Just watch them. They are totally in the moment, living naturally, without worry, with total love and no limits. You´ve probably also lost yourself to a nice piece of music, having a moment of total silence in the beautiful nature or something like that. You´re also experiencing it all the time, every day. Because there will be a small gap between each thought. We just have to keep the focus on the gap, make the gap longer and longer and expanding from there. This is our natural state. So spirituality and the whole idea of mediation, no-mind etc, is nothing special, intellectual or anything like that. It´s simply about discovering who you really are - to regain your true state. 

Exam Concert

Alright, it´s about time to tell you about my exam concert. Last week was the big week! And what can I say? My head feels kinda empty now after having actually done it. Monday - Wednesday was really intense in one way, and quite relaxing in another way. It was a WONDERFUL experience to work with the conductor and orchestra for 3 days. I learned a lot from it and the result was quite good in the end I think. Being a soloist with an orchestra is a situation that is stressful in a way, but very nice too. I like it a lot. And when I get more experience of the situation I think I will really love it. The relaxing part was that I was actually able to NOT get stressed out in between. I didn´t practice too much or think too much about the performance between the rehersals. 

I was surprised to see quite a number of people attending the concert at 1pm on a Wednesday. There must have been 150-200 people there. The feeling I had afterwards was: "it was ok.. could have been worse, could have been better." So I guess I did the best I could then! The comments from my friends in the audience were very positive indeed. And the critic from "Adresseavisen," the biggest newspaper in Trondheim, was very very positive and gave a great review. I shared the concert with a flute player, and she got wonderful reviews as well. So it was a very special day for us. He used us as examples of the young and upcoming generation of musicians; well reflected about what we´re doing without being bound by tradition. He said that our performances could have been made on any stage and still be great. 

I must say I haven´t really had time to sit down and feel how it is like to be done with all the studies. I´ve been in Trondheim and somehow attached to the Music Conservatory since the autumn of 2000. So this is the end of an era for me. It is definitely time for me to look outside Trondheim. And it´s not that I haven´t started doing it with all my touring and everything! But I think I should break loose from the town for a period of time now. I can always return later. But for my own musical and personal growth, I think it´s important that I leave this area. I really feel like being based outside Norway for a few years. The US is of course a natural choice for me since I´ve done so many concerts there and started to get good contacts. So I will go for a 3-years O-visa from 2010 and see what happens. But the best thing would probably be to roam  around a little bit. But establishing a kind of base in the US for a period could be cool. 

Being a freelance performer is extremely interesting. The thing I´m thinking about now is "how much to control it and how much to just go with the flow?" In the bigger picture the answer is indeed "go with the flow." But for instance now, I´ve booked a 4 week tour in September, applied for a 6 months residency in Banff, Alberta and started booking another tour in April-May 2010. It is sort of a way of controlling things since I´ve "locked myself up" for a year! But then again, tours should be planned a year in advance and if I didn´t do it myself it wouldn´t be any tour at all. Anyway.. I´m sure it´s just a matter of getting used to it and getting tuned in. After all, the really good gigs are booked at least a year in advance. The big experienced concert musicians are fully booked 3-4 years ahead probably... I guess the only thing I should control is saying "yes" to gigs that I actually want and "no" to the ones that I don´t want. So it all comes down to doing what you enjoy doing the most. It also comes down to trust. I have to trust that things will work out, that I will get enough money, that I will have new ideas, that something will come to me from outside etc. I guess trust is the opposite of fear? The ultimate trust is probably that everything that happens is auspicious. No matter what will happen, it will be a great experience and a source of growth. Good and bad are just labels for our mind and society. It is what it is and it is auspicious. 

So to sum it up: it will be a very interesting period in my life! Ok, now my mind IS empty from all the candy, unhealthy food, beer and lack of meditation and physical exercise following the exam. :-) But I´ve already started to look forward and tomorrow I will be fully operational again.