Someone asked me recently why I settled on the harmonium for teaching and playing. I replied that I never felt like it was something I chose - it chose me.
The harmonium wasn’t my first instrument, or anything I knew of in its current form for the first 27 years of my life. Since youth, I had an interest in music. At age 9, I started on clarinet, then piano, sax, and voice. I played in wind and jazz bands, marching band, rock bands, sax quartets, choirs, and played and acted and sang in musical theater. My younger brother compared our house to a “circa-1920s ragtime lounge.”
At the music conservatory at The University of Maryland, I focused on music theory, composition, clarinet performance, and Spanish language. I participated in men’s choir, orchestra, wind ensembles, a Spanish church choir, a trad jazz ensemble (think 1930s New Orleans Dixieland) and a Balinese gamelan ensemble (I don’t know what to tell you to think of - it’s otherworldly).
Still no harmonium.
Directionless after college, I knew I needed a better way to cope with stress and anxiety. I started taking yoga classes while living and working in New York City in 2006 and something clicked.
During my 1st yoga teacher training in Brooklyn in 2009, our teachers told us we were going to have a kirtan. No one really knew what that was. That December evening we sat in a large circle in a quaint old house in the country and tasted the bliss of kirtan for the first time. And the main instrument used to accompany the kirtan was the harmonium. We finally met.
With my piano background, I picked up the harmonium quickly. I bought one and started teaching lessons, encouraged by my teacher, Summer Deaver. From that moment 13 years ago, I've been teaching harmonium ever since.
I'm blessed the harmonium has come my way and "settled on me". I haven't had to compromise my love and passion for music but rather I've been able to connect my training and experience as a musician with my spiritual path as a service to others in the yoga community. And for this I am deeply grateful.
