MY HARMONIC JOURNEY

There was a time in my life when I lived and breathed music.
Not as a hobby, not as background noise--
but as the language of my being.

In my early adulthood, I was committed. I tried to build a life as a professional musician.
Jazz was the field I ended up finding most alive.

​It had space. Soul. Danger.
It was the only language I knew that could hold contradiction and beauty in the same bar.
Where you could fall apart mid-solo, and somehow still land on your feet--
or on someone else’s.

Jazz taught me to listen.
Not just to notes—but to space.
To silences. To breath.
To the unspoken agreement that something sacred is happening here,
and we’re shaping it together.

But the world of music wasn’t always tuned to that same frequency.
As a young woman in the 70s and 80s,
I wasn’t just trying to be heard musically.
I was trying to be heard at all.
To be seen. To be respected. To be safe.
There were rooms I had to fight to enter, and contracts I couldn’t quite decode.

I felt torn.
I loved the music, but not the compromises.
I wanted to stay true to the resonance, but I didn’t yet understand the system.
And trying to survive within it often felt like asking my soul to sing through a locked jaw.

Then one day, sometime in my late twenties,
something shifted.
A whisper. A message.
Call it Spirit, God, or just inner clarity—it said:
“This isn’t your path anymore.
Not like this.
Change your instrument.”

So I did.

I went to university.
Studied psychology, philosophy, the human sciences.
Tried to understand what drives us, connects us, breaks us, heals us.

​I discovered that everything is relationship.
Between people, between thoughts, between stories, between systems.

The music was still there—just in a different key.

When I read The Turning Point by Fritjof Capra, something clicked.
Quantum physics, systems theory, consciousness—it was jazz again,
but this time the players were particles, ecosystems, societies.
Still rhythm. Still complexity.
Still beauty emerging from unpredictability.

Later, through Social Ecology at Western Sydney University,
I began to see the pattern behind the pattern.
How the world doesn’t change through force,
but through re-attunement.

I became a counsellor.
And again, the music returned.
Each session was like a duet.
Listening for the unplayed note.
Holding silence long enough for a person to hear themselves.

Eventually, I started thinking about bigger systems--
organizations, cultures, futures.
I began seeing them as orchestras:
Some chaotic, some dissonant, some waiting for a conductor who listens.

And here’s what I’ve come to know:

We don’t need more control.
We need better tuning.
We need to design for coherence, not compliance.

Win-win – my favourite value-  isn’t a tactic—it’s field harmony.
It’s recognizing that in a well-tuned system,
your success increases mine, and mine increases yours.

So now, I don’t call myself a musician professionally.
But I am more musical than ever.
Because now I hear the music beneath everything:

In a conversation.
In a team.
In a system.
In a breath.
And if I had stayed on that old path--
forcing myself to “make it” in an industry not ready to hold me--
I may never have found the wider song I was always meant to play.
​
Now, the instrument is my life.
The stage is the field.
And the audience?
They’re the ones tuning themselves back into harmony—just like I did.