Paying homage to my 19 year old self.

When I was 19 — a freshman in college — I was heavily reprimanded by my French horn professor for not booking enough hours in the practice room. I had booked 15 hours a week, and she expected I be in there for at least 40.

I couldn't imagine what I'd do in a practice room for 40 hours a week, and after she docked my grade for not putting in the work, despite delivering a flawless end of year performance, I changed my major to French, let go of my music scholarship, and dropped my aspirations of being a professional musician after knowing only that path for my entire life.

At the time, I was recovering from a childhood rife with adversity and constant illness, and was unconsciously seeking out a path that didn't feel like a constant battle, because I literally didn't have the energetic capacity in my body for anymore struggle or challenge.

I didn't have the emotional maturity at the time to understand that the reason I had such an aversion to spending hours in the practice room was because I had never learned HOW to practice, and so even though I had relative perfect pitch and could sightread almost anything at what was once a pretty advanced level (until I got to college), practicing the way most musicians tended to practice actually was extraordinarily challenging for me. I also perceived not being instantly perfect as a total threat to my safety, and so to push my edges in that way was something I was instinctively not available for at the time.

And so I gave up, with a nice dose of justification that I didn't want a life where I spent 40 hours a week sitting in isolation (joke's on me, because I ended up in banking where I spent 60-80 hours a week doing just that for many years!).

I've been in a very intense process the past two and a half months, writing my talk for this TED Talk coming up in a couple weeks in Chicago. As I began this process, I had writer's block for five weeks, and then wrote almost the entire thing in two hours after I channeled it through in a meditation (ask me some other time about my time travel meditation technique where I pull in details from "the future" in order to get clarity about where I'm headed).

I thought the pain of having nothing to show for myself for five weeks was the worst of it and that the struggle was over, but since then, I've been under even more intense pressure to actually remember what I channeled that morning, and get it so deeply engrained into my bones that I can share it again on stage and not sound like a robot, without exceeding the 18 minute time-cap TED enforces.

And I find myself revisiting a karmic lesson I successfully bypassed back when I was 19: in order for me to execute this talk well, and step into my greatest potential, I was going to need to clock actual hours on the mat, rehearsing lines like the scales and etudes I avoided back in conservatory. ***Like it's my full time job.***

I'm a pretty disciplined person in general, but this was next level discipline for me, because of the emotional barriers it entailed. This process was, for a few weeks, a wildly-uncomfortable-edgy-about-to-black-out-or-fall-asleep-and-needing-to-constantly-be-on-the-ready-with-my-inner-cheerleader-when-I-wanted-to-give-up endeavor.

You guys all saw my fancy photos from Norway, but what you didn't see was me pacing around the living room of my airbnb every day before giving myself a "recess" to go play in the mountains, trying to not fall asleep reading my lines over and over again and using every ounce of my energy to not tear myself apart when it took me two hours to memorize one single paragraph.

This is what resistance looks like, and we all have it somewhere. Me, too.

I'm delighted to report I broke through while I was in Norway. I gathered up a tiny but enormous and essential sliver of power that was locked up in some unhelpful and limiting beliefs I had in me that I couldn't do this, that I couldn't remember my talk, and that memorizing would somehow detract from my authenticity and expression.

Today, I delivered the first half of my talk without error and with tons of charisma and gave myself chills from a stage in the middle of a park in Copenhagen. And now I've moved onto getting the second half into my DNA with way more resources available to nail it than I had a week ago.

And the best part: I have LOVED every minute of this process since, of the running lines, of the wandering aimlessly in nature talking to myself, of having every element of my day be aligned to this singular purpose.

This talk means the world to me. Not just because the topic is extremely important for humanity right now, or because it's a TED stage and the opportunity and exposure are enormous. It's important to me because in the talk itself — in the text and in between the lines — I pay homage to my 19 year old self. The young woman who only knew music, and who was so terrified of her own greatness, and so deeply in need of healing, that she walked away from her dreams. This talk is calling her back.

The Body's Language and Its Undeniable Impact is my first composition — nay, my first symphony — from the other side of a portal that took me 18 years to walk through.