Last night I had this amazing experience with this coach out in Colorado. She does this work called intuitive something. We were working on a few troubling beliefs. Shyness, fear of not making money from the new album etc. I told her how I’d spent every cent I had on this new album and now its push coming to shove and you know I'm scared shitless if it doesn’t do well. I'm back to square one. So she asks me if I want to do some work on it. She gets all quiet and then all of a sudden she says I want you to go back to when you were nine years old and tell me what you see. I ask her should I try to remember where I was or lived when I was nine and picture something from then or what? And she says no, don't think, just let a picture bubble up from your heart. You'll know. Pretty crazy stuff but you have to trust the process as they say. So I tell her I'm seeing this scene where I'm in this music class at school and we’re trying to learn the recorder. I didn't know if was nine or not. So she uses muscle testing on herself and tells me that that was it. So we go to work on it. 

It was quite amazing. We had to learn to play this song by Simon and Garfunkel, el condor passo or whatever that song is called. I can’t remember the name, but whenever I hear that song up until last night it always gave me the creeps. Because back then I had such bad ADD that I could never focus on anything for more than like 03 seconds so I always did terribly in school. I never learned anything, for twelve years I didn't learn a thing in school. I was a straight D student who made it through on charisma and luck. And I always felt bad about this. Back then they didn't know there was such a thing as ADD. You were just considered a bad student. So here I was in this class trying to learn how to play the recorder and I just couldn’t do it. Everyone else could. Even the cheerleader type girls could do it. But I just couldn’t concentrate enough to hear what the teacher was saying. But back at my  home where I could be free to just do whatever I wanted in my own way and in my own time, I was already playing the guitar and the piano and writing my own songs. So it set up this strange dichotomy inside of me where I was always kind of lost in the real world, even in music class—like I was kind of an idiot who couldn’t even learn to play the recorder, let alone understand math or science, but I was comfortable in my own element and doing really well with music on my own. 

Later on I actually sat and thought about it and that memory was dead on from when I was nine years old. Its uncanny really how she does this but she knows where to go for the healing of whatever you are working on. She knows exactly what age to take you back to, even if you don't.  So we went through this whole process and it took maybe two hours and by the time it was over I felt amazing. Really healed by it. a whole section of my life—which were my school years, twelve years of my life---healed and resolved, where before I was just kind of in resistance and denial to even thinking about any of that. I would never let on or acknowledge that it ever affected who I am now. I just blew it off.

So later last night I went to this club to check out some music. And one of my friends asked me to play. Normally I don't go up and play by myself. I haven't in ten years. Very infrequently, because I get so nervous and self-conscious about it. I don't mind playing with my band, but I hate playing by myself. I always find a way to say no or if I have to I sneak out before its my time to go on. I never understood this before. I think people think I'm being a snob, but I'm not. I'm just nervous as hell. But last night after this session I understood the whole game that was going on inside. So I said yes to this guy, o.k. I’ll play a song. Then I got nervous anyway and tried to sneak out. But he came up to me and said c'mon go up there. So I sat there for like five minutes unable to stand up and finally I stood up to play. And the funny thing is that I was more nervous than I had ever been. I mean I really fucked up a bunch and actually wanted to stop in the middle and start over. It was that bad. At one point I said to the audience, I'm so fucking nervous. And someone said, we can tell. It was funny if not pathetic, because I play around all the time with the band. So it really makes no sense. But I did it anyway. 

I think that forcing myself to do that was a good step in the right direction. Even though I messed up a lot and probably did more harm to my career in those ten minutes than the good I have done in ten years, I still think it was a good thing to do. At least now I feel more on the outside of it. Like ‘o.k., wow, I can see that this is going on now.’ whereas before I was so inside of it, I thought it was me. I just think the whole thing is hilarious, someone deliberately setting this up as their career but never really wanting to do it because they are so self conscious. The irony of it is hilarious. “what do you do?” “oh I'm a singer and songwriter.” Oh really? Where are you playing? Oh I really don't play out. But you should hear me at my house. I'm fucking awesome when I'm alone at my house. LOL.