Rebirthing the Lost Songs of Ancestors
Inter-Being was listening even when I thought I was alone
As much as I wanted to be reunited with the lost songs, they also have been searching for me, or searching for someone to be their voice and instruments.
In the past nine years, I spent thousands of hours playing my songs by myself. Now I know. I was never alone. Inter-Being, the Mystery Weaver, has always been listening and watching me. One day, she tapped on my shoulder and said, “I heard you.”
My First Music Teachers: Nature and the Lost Songs of the Ancestors
I have had a secret longing to sing since I was a young girl, yet I never had a chance to until I was 41 years old.
I grew up in the 70s in China during the Cultural Revolution. It was a time when the traditional culture was dying. My parents were among the first generation of scientists of the new China. Their entire life was occupied by their work.
There was almost no music in the environment I grew up in. This was a time before TV became a household item. Going to movies was a luxury my family seldom indulged. The only popular media was radio. My favorite radio program was a thousand-year-old storytelling tradition called Ping Shu, which usually featured historical drama stories. A story can last several hundred hours long, which was broadcast as 30-min long episodes spanning months or even years. Thankfully, that was my education in traditional culture.
My family lived in a dorm close to my parents’ work unit. My parents, my sister and I lived in a 250 sq ft room with two beds, a desk, a wardrobe and a dinner table. A coal-burning stove and a shelf in the hallway were our kitchen.
I spent a lot of my childhood time outside. My parents’ work unit was situated on a beautiful campus on the edge of Shanghai, where the city meets the countryside. The campus had lovely meadows dotted with wild berries and violets, enchanted groves of forests and whimsical playgrounds constructed by children’s imagination.
Back then in Shanghai, a five-story building was the “high rise”. The streets, lined with beautiful sycamore trees, were filled with constant streams of bicycles. No personal cars. Electrical buses filled with people ran up and down streets.
Our material life was primitive. No electronics. No telephones. We got water from a public water closet shared by five families, who also shared a public toilet. We washed ourselves in a public bathhouse. There was hardly any entertainment such as concerts or theatre plays.
In this primitive environment, I was able to preserve the wild part of me that has not been tamed by civilization. I did not mind the simple material life. I roamed free in the city streets and countryside that has not seen industrialization yet. I would bike to the nearby villages with my friends and get lost in trees and fields. Bugs and butterflies were our playmates. In hindsight, the wilderness I immersed myself in was my first music teacher. I just was not aware of that.
When I was a teenager, I encountered ancient Chinese poetry. I was smitten. Many of these poetry is about feeling, sensing and attuning with the natural world as living, breathing beings. Not primitive beings to be used and exploited, but beings as wise teacher to be revered and listened to. Through these poetry, I felt as if I instantly levitated out of the modern era and traveled back in time to meet with poets whose names were etched in Chinese history, such as Li Bai, Xin Qi Ji, Du Fu, Qu Yuan, Li Qingzhao … These poets had shaped Chinese language and Chinese Spirit with words flowing out of their heart. They are my ancestors. I could feel their soul’s vibration transmitted through their words in my blood, flesh and bones.
In Chinese language, poetry is 诗歌, Shi Ge. It means poetry-song. In ancient times, people sang poems instead of reading them. The majority of poets were men as very few women had the opportunity to receive education. Yet, it was the women musicians who turned the poetry into songs. Most of these women musicians played a role equivalent to Geisha, a status slightly more elevated than prostitute.
In modern days, the song part of the poetry-songs was lost. Only silent words are left on the paper, with an empty void around them. Staring at the void, I could almost hear the music, yet my voice was muffled, coarse and crackly. I did not know how to sing.
What was lost was not just the songs, but the identification with our own culture. Most adults around me had no awareness of the most luminous gems of the ancient culture, such as Zen Buddhism, the Tao or the original teachings of Confucius.
Conditioned by the mentality that the scientific and technological achievements of the west were the “standard” for development and progress, the Chinese collective psyche at the time was enshrouded in painful shame and denigration of our own culture. Underneath the shame was a choking blanket of grief, the pain of losing the connection with our ancestors. (Read this for more of this part of the story.)
Rebirthing the Lost Songs
Growing up, I always thought my voice was terrible. I grew up with the mentality that a lofty pursuit such as music had to start at an early age. Otherwise, it was a lost cause. Whenever I heard a piece of music or a song I loved, I felt a pang of grief inside. I wished I could sing, but it was “too late” for me. I mourned.
What I did not know was that the universe had a different plan for me.
Fast-forward twenty years. In 2000, I was in my 30s and I settled down in Seattle, where I gradually grew into my fuller self.
One of the blessings in my life was that I would encounter mentors who took me under their wings. One such mentor was an astrologer and Tarot reader named Monica. She introduced me to the metaphysical studies of astrology, numerology, and the Chinese oracle I Ching. These studies awakened the “witch”, or Wu-Witch (巫, Chinese word for shaman) inside of me.
At that time, I was working as a research scientist in the pharmaceutical company Merck, fully immersed in the hypermasculine, hyper-rational side of the world. Encountering Monica and reviving the Wu-Witch inside of me was exhilarating and life-changing.
The hypermasculine, hyper-techno-rational world felt dry and devoid of feelings. I felt trapped by it and did not how to extricate myself. My heart was thirsty for a more enlivened world. I related with the story told by the movie Matrix. In the movie Matrix, the lead character Neo was a computer programmer living inside a “matrix”, a virtual world constructed by technology. Meanwhile his body, along with millions or even billions of other humans’ bodies were entrapped inside bio-capsules, used as battery cells to fuel the “super-computer”.
This movie plot rang true with my intuition. I knew that the hyperrational world that my job identity centered around was only a sliver of a much deeper, more enlivened reality. Yet, my eyes, ears, and senses were blinded, deafened and muffled by the super-techno, hyper-consumerist, hyper-rational cultural conditioning. It felt like as if this cultural conditioning had “grafted” VR goggles into my consciousness. I longed for a deep transformation that would allow me to take off these clunky VR goggles, so that I can feel, touch and inhabit the deeper layer of reality that was blocked from my senses.
I don’t believed that one has to retreat into remote mountains or island to feel this Deep Reality. This Deep Reality is not dependent on geographic coordinates but is a function of the state of our own consciousness. I vowed to dive into a transformational journey so that I could experience this Deep Reality with my own senses right here and now in our daily, mundane life, amidst the hustle and bustle of the city.
Initiation into this journey of transformation involved many mini deaths. In 2011, five years after I met Monica, she passed away from a rare disease, leaving behind a gaping hole in my life. I lost my best friend and mentor. That was just one out of a series of losses. One by one, I let go of my scientist job, then marriage to my ex-husband, then the hard-won status, identity and wealth accumulated through decades of disciplined work. This “VR goggle” had been programmed into my nervous system for the past twenty years. Prying it off from my face was a bloody process.
In 2014, I turned 41. I was trying to establish my acupuncture clinic in a Seattle suburb. But I felt extremely frustrated by how the ancient spirit of Chinese medicine was watered down, appropriated and commodified by the hyper-rational, materialistic-oriented regulatory agencies. I sensed inside of me, a bigger leap into the unknown was beckoning. I started the initial phase of my work that eventually led to the founding of the Resonance Path Institute and the publication of the Resonance Code.
But I was also gripped by fear. At least being an acupuncturist would offer me some sense of security, a guard rail on a steep, unstable path into the unknown. Without this guard rail, I did not know who I would become or how I would survive in the world! Plus, it was a token of the legacy left by my ancestors.
I was torn by the inner conflict. I was desperate for guidance. One day, I found myself wandering back into the East West bookstore in Seattle, a new age bookstore where Monica used to work as an astrologer. When she was alive, I often went there to look for her. I would wait for her to get off work and we would have a tea, lunch or a walk in the neighborhood. After she passed away, I avoided that bookstore as it reminded me of the pain of losing Monica. But that day, driven by a strong intuition that, instead of avoiding the pain, I went head on into the pain. I was almost thirsty to taste it, as the pain of losing Monica was the only connection I had to reach her again.
I had not been in this bookstore for years. I roamed around looking for a vestige of Monica’s presence. I could feel her warm smiles and the bell-like tone of her voice. My eyes were filled with tears.
By the back room where she used to do astrological readings, there was a bulletin board, displaying a wide variety of business cards, flyers and posters, offering healing and metaphysical services and workshops. On the very bottom of the board was a simple card with a name on it: Kaija, music teacher. Voice, ukulele, piano and more.
I had tried a few music teachers in the previous few years. None of them worked out. Most of these teachers focused on teaching musical skills. Such skills are complex, requiring refined and sophisticated repatterning of motor control, hard to learn as an adult. The mechanical repetition of skills quickly bored me or triggered the conditioned reaction that "I-am-not-good-enough". I would lose steam and give up.
But a small voice in me encouraged me to keep searching. I picked up the card and called Kaija. It turned out that I just recently moved to the same neighborhood she lived in, and our houses were only a mile and a half away from each other! We even shared the same qigong teacher. Not only that, on the phone Kaija told me that when she was a young girl living in Michigan, she always tried to dig a hole to China. And she likes congee, the staple Chinese breakfast food.
I booked a session.
Immediately, I realized that Kaija was a different teacher. She did not try to “teach me a song.” We did qigong together. Through simple guided exercises and attunement, she guided me to open an “inner ear”, attuning to music within my heart and improvising on the spot.
Conventional music training usually started with scales, techniques and playing simple tunes. Improvisation is either not taught or reserved for only those who have become skillful. Kaija turned that process upside down.
Within fifteen minutes of simple exercise, a dam broke inside of my heart. Tears poured out like the Great Flood. I didn’t know what happened. I cried, and cried, and cried. I couldn’t stop. Kaija held me in her arms. Her purple shirt became damp with my tears.
That was pretty much how the first session went. I was so embarrassed and confused that I didn’t call her for another month!
Kaija was a classically trained pianist. After a decade into her career, her arms and fingers got into a severe cramp that she was not able to play classical music as she used to. Out of this crisis, she completely changed her approach to music. She started to study world music and developed a way to play piano and music that was much more organic, intuitive, and flowing, centered more on feelings than techniques.
The music room where she taught me music was filled with musical instruments from all over the world, many of which I did not know the name for. Kaija likes to wear colorful skirts and big hats. She and her partner Willow, also a music teacher, live like two hermits in the city. They do not own a car. They love Chinese tea and cook Indian food. They teach students in their house. Kaija hardly ever did advertisement of her teaching service. She told me that the card I picked up was the first advertisement she did in ten years.
One month after my first session with Kaija, I mustered courage to go back and had another lesson. Then another. And another. For the next six years, I studied with Kaija on a weekly or biweekly basis until I moved away from Seattle.
Kaija’s philosophy is that music is a universal language native to humans, and everyone is born to sing! Her way of teaching is not centered around learning pre-made pieces of music, but around listening to the river of music that was always flowing through our very being.
This is the first time I engaged in a learning process that was not geared towards exterior performance, outcome and objective, but focused on the quality of my inner experience. I knew that is the path to liberate my being from the “VR goggles”!
Learning music was like learning to speak another language. Kaija taught me to be patient and gentle with myself just like how a mother would be with a baby first learning to speak.
The music that flowed out first was poetry-song. I turned towards the poetry that nurtured my soul when I was young. Miraculously, I was able to hear the songs. And this time, I was able to sing them. With Kaija’s help, I started to learn how to compose a song, and play it on piano or ukulele. The more I listened to it, the clearer it became.
At the beginning, the music I made was raw and primitive. I would be confronted by my inner critics. It said nasty things.
“Forget about it. You will never be able to do it!”
“You are just daydreaming! Only people starting young can be musicians.”
“You don’t deserve it!”
This voice was the imprint of living inside the hyper-controlled, hyper-judgmental world. It was my internalized tyrant and colonizer, the voice that dominated and imposed hard, external standards on my inner “wilderness”. I recognized my 6-year-old self, 4-year-old self, and even younger selves being shut down by this inner critic. I heard the voiceless cry out of pain frozen in the past. So many times, my tears would wet Kaija’s shirt. For a long time, Kaija would prepare a tissue box during my music sessions.
At those times, Kaija would sit in silence, or sing gentle songs. “Let the tears flow.” She would say to me. “The tears will melt the critics.” And she would hold my hands and look into my eyes, telling me that she trusted that I could do it.
Gradually I learnt not to judge myself for not being good enough. Instead, I allowed myself to be completely immersed in the joy of making music, no matter how “good” or “bad” the music was. As long as I was enjoying it and expressing my feelings through it, it was satisfying.
Since I met Kaija, music has become a daily companion. Ninety percent of the time I improvise my own music. Improvising music has become my mindful practice, turning my attention to how I feel and sense my being and the world in the present moment.
I did not think too much of playing music to perform. Instead, music was an inner river, a good friend to have a visit and sit with, enjoying a conversation and a mindful reflection. I allowed the melodies frozen in ancient memories to gently melt like a glacier. When I was tired, sad, or feeling lost, I would also go to the river to release, renew and regenerate. Throughout these years, hundreds of songs and tunes have passed through me, comforting me, connecting me to my ancestral lineage as well as lifting me up to live from my most authentic self.
With this river of music lapping by my side, I allowed the process of learning musical skills and techniques to unfold naturally. What Kaija has taught me was how to open my heart to listen to the river of inner music. Still, I would need skills to translate that river into music I could hear. That’s when I realized that when my heart was open, the experience of skill-learning could be completely different from the experience of learning skills for the sake of performative objectives or external goals.
Learning musical skills by following the opening of my heart did not feel boring, repetitive or repressive. I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of this process, completely absorbed with never a moment of dullness. Even the simplest repetition of skills can be filled with deep feelings.
The only “downside” of this way of learning is that I kept the music as a private endeavor for myself for a long time. “This is just for my own healing.” I thought to myself. Again, I did not know that the universe had a different plan for me.
The Unseen Hand of a Mystery Weaver
In the summer of 2023, nine years after I met Kaija and started my musical journey, my partner Joe and I arrived at the contact improvisation dance retreat on Orcas Island.
Contact Improvisation is a form of improvised partner dance, a hybrid between modern dance and Aikido. Two or more than two people move spontaneously with one another, sliding with and bouncing off from each other, sharing weight, or sometime even taking flight over one another.
Improvisation is a theme that threads through my life, through forms of dance, music and theatre. It is a practice of letting go of what you know and diving into the edge of the unknown with your whole body. If I have a religious practice, it is improvisation. For me, improvisation is the embodiment of the Tao – as the Taoist proverb says, the Tao lives in spontaneity. Improvisation helps me to take off the “VR goggles” installed by the hyper-techno-materialistic-rational cultural conditioning.
As I give myself to the mystery, the mystery also comes to meet me in these spontaneous moments. Many important events in my life happened through the spontaneity of the universe, like the meeting of Monica, Kaija, and meeting my partner Joe on a contact improv retreat in 2012 in Port Townsend.
In this Orcas Island retreat, I gave myself permission to completely relax into the joy of dance and connect with a community of dancer friends, most of whom I have known for more than a decade. It was a time like returning to the Garden of Eden – dance, natural beauty, connections, naked swims in the deep blue of a mountain lake, laughter and sleep under the fruit trees in a fragrant orchard.
In the middle of the retreat, there was an open mic session one evening. This retreat had been happening every summer for more than a decade. But the open mic was a new thing.
In 2023, after the pandemic, I met with a group of artists that I enjoyed hanging out with in Bellingham where I now live. I started to go to the open mic they host. The Bellingham open mic hosted by my friends is a very warm, welcoming space, held by people who are open-hearted, sensitive to the feelings behind the music, and not so much into jostling for status. I started to get the hang of performing for others and enjoyed it.
However, that night on Orcas I didn’t have much desire to perform. This was my vacation time. I just wanted to relax.
Right before the open mic began, people were lounging on the lawn, laughing and chatting. It was a lovely evening on a paradise island in the middle of summer. Everything was being painted orange and red at sunset. Someone played a handpan. A delicate female voice sang a gentle song.
Suddenly, my chest filled with a sweet sense of nostalgia and grief. I started to weep. I missed the country and land I left behind. I cried for the long, arduous trans-cultural journey I travelled and the many broken pieces that I have not healed inside. More than anything, my heart seared with an aching longing for what humanity could be when the web of belonging is re-woven by humans placing arts, beauty, poetry and music at the center of our culture again.
Then the open mic began. One of my close friends, a skilled family constellation facilitator, gracefully asked us to honor a piece of ancestral lineage that brought us to where we were and enabled us such privilege to receive and experience all these beautiful blessings. I was amazed how her invitation matched my inner currents.
The next thing I knew, I was standing up in front of scores of my dancer friends. I told them that I was going to sing a song in Chinese that I composed over a poem written by Li Bai, the eighth century poet, considered the greatest of all time, my childhood hero. This was one of the first songs I composed when I started studying with Kaija. I didn’t provide the translation, instead, I asked people in the room to just listen, and allow images to arise as I sang.
Then the river flowed through me. I saw people’s eyes light up. I knew they were in my river now. We were together in a boat floating through time, history, and the vast span of our human hearts. This is a song that I have sung to myself countless times. I have given life to it. In this setting, it assumed a power that took over the room. It brought sunlight and a rainbow. It transported clouds and mountains from China into the space around us. Musical notes and Chinese words slid through my throat like white caps flowing through a roaring river.
People were transfixed by the spell cast by the song. They reported images that matched well with what the poet expressed in ancient Chinese. However, the real surprise came afterwards.
After my song, a dancer named Ward Serill approached me. I only met him once at a previous dance retreat in Port Townsend. He is tall and walks in an elegant stance. With a stunned expression on his face, he asked me,
“Do you know a person named Red Pine, the world-famous translator for classic Chinese poetry?”
“Yes, I know Red Pine. I have his translation of Tao Te Ching.” I replied.
“I have been making a documentary movie about him for the last three years. I have been looking for music like yours for the movie … ”
Bill Porter, pen name Red Pine, local to Port Townsend, is a world-renowned translator and writer specializing in Chinese classic poetry and spiritual sutras. He is famous for translating Taoist classics Tao Te Ching and the Buddhist Heart Sutra. He introduced ancient masters such as Cold Mountain, Stonehouse, Wei Yingwu and Tao Yuanming to English-speaking readers.
Ward Serill, an award-winning documentary film director, also a Port Townsend local, had spent the last three years crafting a movie called Dancing with the Dead, telling the story of how Bill’s life, starting from wealth and privilege earned by a father with a criminal history, meandered through a lonely childhood, domestic abuse, army services, and arrived at a life-long love affair with Chinese classic literature. Red Pine also brought to daylight the Chinese modern hermit culture, a legacy thousands of years old, which has heroically survived capitalism and industrialization. It is carried on by men and women who choose to live mostly solitary, meditating in caves of the Zhongnan Mountain in West China.
Throughout the production of the movie, Ward felt what was missing for the movie was a feminine voice that would give the audience a taste of the musicality and resonance held within the original poem’s sound. Yet he did not know where to find such a singer.
As if directed by the unseen hand of a mystery weaver, Ward’s artistry of movie making, Red Pine’s life strewn together also through a series of spontaneous impulses, and my musical expression cultivated through improvisation, converged with each other in an embrace. After the retreat, I received an invitation from the movie production that commissioned me to compose nine songs for the poetry in the movie. They also purchased Reed, the song I composed over a three-thousand years old love poem, probably one of the oldest ones in Chinese history, as the ending score. My performance became the ending scene of the movie.
The movie was released in Oct of 2023. In Port Townsend, the premiere show tickets were sold out within five minutes. In fact, the eager viewers crashed the theatre’s website server. The theatre had to add another show the day after. Since then, I have been touring with the movie crew up and down cities of Puget Sound, as well as the Bay Area, performing live music in the after-show program. By the end of August 2024, I will have toured with the movie in nine live shows. On those programs, I tell my stories and share my cultural journey. I become an ambassador for a voice of ancient China, through the rebirth of the lost poetry-songs.
And the web continues to weave itself. Several months ago, I met a music professor from Western Washington University at an open mic (Yes! open mic is where magic happens.) She is inviting me to do a concert based on these poetry-songs at the university’s concert hall in Nov 2024.
My own concert!? Imagine someone telling me this at the beginning of my journey, or to the lonely girl who was reading poetry all by herself? Life is so full of wonder and surprises!
There could have been a million reasons that this would not have happened. Ward injured his finger at the beginning of the dance retreat. He could have chosen to leave, yet he stayed. I could have chosen not to perform anything and just relax. My facilitator friend could have chosen not to ask us to reflect on our ancestors. I could have sung one of the dozens of English songs I composed. The evening could have not been so gorgeous to moved me to tears … Yet everything happened as if being orchestrated by an invisible hand weaving threads of mystery …
Afterthoughts
My journey of rebirthing the lost songs gave me a sliver of the taste of the Deeper Reality outside of the matrix. Through my music, I have opened my senses to “listen” to the calling of this Deeper Reality.
In one of the after-show programs of this movie, one young woman commented on how modern technology herds the attention of younger generation to social media and get “connected” through devices. Through the movie and the story of how Ward and I connected, she realized that there were other ways of communication that were not dependent on devices and social media, probably not even dependent on spoken or written language.
The universe is more than just a cold, programmed, hyperrational matrix.
Planet Earth is an organism, an Inter-Being, in which we are her cells. Our nervous system and her nervous system are intimately attuned with one another.
For me, these are no longer abstract ideas but a lived experience. This Inter-Being has a heartbeat. Her heart is connected to our heart. I kept listening to the deepest longing of my own heart, and followed the thread being shown to me at each present moment. In many dark moments, there appeared as if there was no way forward. That is when I would improvise, create and hack my way through. Eventually, this interconnected being tapped on my shoulder and said - “I have heard you.”
As much as I wanted to be reunited with the lost songs, they also have been searching for me, or searching for someone to be their voice and instruments. It has been more than nine years from the moment I met Kaija to the moment when Ward and I met on Orcas Island. During these years, I spent thousands of hours playing my songs by myself.
Now I know. I was never alone. Inter-Being, the Mystery Weaver, has always been listening and watching me, or anyone who dares to take off the VR goggles and follows their heart’s calling.
I offer Living Song Mentorship, one-on-one or small-group sessions, in person or over zoom. Living Song Mentorship help you connect with your Earth-rooted life source through voice and songs. Please see here for more information.
I am so touched and cried. Deeply resonance with you. I love the flow in your life and looking forward to hearing your living song, maybe someday in Germany or wherever corner in the planet. That is so beautiful! By the way, since the first time I heard your voice, I love it. It is just so grounding and peaceful, full of healing energy.
Thank you for sharing Spring. I am so inspired by the long arc of your beautiful relationship with voice and song. I am left feeling renewed and bolstered in my own journey.