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Because of the energy transmission in Transformance, from the words, the music, and the deep alignment contained within each piece, profound change typically happens within just a few minutes. It’s quite extraordinary to witness.

It takes no effort on the part of the person listening. The Transformance touches you at the centre of yourself, awakening and enlivening that part of you directly. No practice, no preparation, no letting go of the rest of your life.

Meditation has many genuine benefits. It can help us think less, or observe our thinking and become less identified with it. But Transformance does something different. It takes you directly to the core of yourself. That might happen occasionally in meditation, or it might not. These pieces are designed specifically to do that, and that is a very deep place.

If you’ve never meditated, don’t enjoy it, or find yourself fidgeting and bored within minutes, Transformance is worth trying. The words occupy your mind, so thinking isn’t a problem. The combination of words and music acts directly on you. You don’t have to be good at it, or be someone special, or sustain focus for twenty minutes. You simply need to listen and allow yourself to respond.

You might be surprised at what happens. Sometimes people are moved to tears, not because it’s sad or upsetting, but because it touches the soul. It touches your essence, and that is an exquisitely beautiful experience that we long for as human beings. There is an immediate relief in coming into contact with that part of yourself, a letting go of the strain and pressure of holding your life together that is so pervasive in our current culture.

The inner conflict, noise, confusion, and frustration subside. Your mind becomes quieter. You feel more like yourself, in a very simple way.

Alchemy happens at several levels when you listen to a Transformance.

The first is visible from the outside. The words and music are improvised live in the studio, and the alchemy between them is quite remarkable. Sometimes the music anticipates what’s coming in the words in a way that simply cannot happen through linear or intellectual planning. It’s magical, and sensitive people tend to feel it immediately.

But the deeper alchemy happens inside you.

You might begin listening feeling agitated, nervous, or worried. Without consciously trying to change anything, without meditating, practising, or letting go of something, you find that you begin to shift from the inside. A deepening happens. You drop into a state where relaxation, calm, and peace arise naturally, and with them, a profound sense of self.

In that state, the inner fighting stops. The feeling of being split into parts, of different aspects of yourself pulling in different directions, dissolves. What remains is a sense of being centred and grounded. Of being the right person, living the right life, at the right time.

Life starts to make sense. You can stop fighting it and relax into it, trust it, because you belong here. In your skin. In your life. In your being.

That is the alchemy of Transformance. Not something you do, but something that happens in the listening itself.

Most people spend a great deal of time in their heads.

We think about things, worry about things, get stressed, and are constantly bombarded by information from every direction: the media, work, family, social media, books, articles, and now AI as well. All of that pulls us into a headspace. And when we live too much in our heads, we lose our connection with ourselves. We feel more connected to ideas, words, and information than to who we actually are. It leaves people feeling fragmented and out of touch.

The instinct, when this happens, is to use the mind to fix it. To think our way to a better mindset, to work harder on ourselves mentally. But we’re already overworking the mind. Pushing it further doesn’t help. It makes everything worse, and puts tremendous pressure on the person trying to change, because they’re reaching for the wrong tool entirely.

Transformance works differently.

Rather than engaging the mind, it bypasses it. In the listening, something settles. You stop being pulled in multiple directions by other people’s opinions, expectations, and noise. You return to the centre of your own life.

From that place, clarity comes naturally. You can touch into what you actually want, rather than what others want for you. You feel connected with who you really are, with the person you came here to be. 

Just yourself. In the right place. Living the right life.

Alignment, as I use the word, means being aligned with the essence of who you are. Your true self. When you’re in that state, you relax. You feel at home in yourself, at one with yourself. Clarity and peace come naturally. When you’re out of alignment, confusion, stress, and worry can take hold, and it’s easy to get stuck in a loop with no internal compass to correct your course.

True alignment runs all the way through you, from the deepest part of who you are, out to the direction your life is taking and the future you’re moving towards. Everything lines up.

Transformance works with two elements to bring you there: music and spoken word.

Music takes us out of our minds and into our hearts and subtle senses. It engages feelings and experiences that words alone cannot reach. It touches the body, the heart, the soul, the sense of self. Each person’s experience is unique, because music meets you where you are. I believe this happens because the entire world is, at one level, made of energy, of resonance, frequency, and vibration. Music, especially music designed to expand consciousness, taps into that fundamental nature of reality.

The spoken word in Transformance is not simply words. It is an energy transmission. After many years of learning to transmit coherent energy through language, when I speak, I am not speaking from my head. I am speaking from the depths of my being, experiencing the meaning of every word all the way through myself as I say it. That coherence is what creates the transmission, and it is what helps the listener align with themselves.

When music and words come together in this way, something remarkable happens. The music enhances the words, and the words enhance the music. More specifically, the words speak to the mind in a way that is directly aligned with the heart, the soul, and the whole being. That relaxes the mind. It gives the mind just enough to hold its attention, so it can stop controlling everything and allow the full human being to come forward. You stop experiencing yourself only through your mind, and begin to experience yourself through all of yourself.

That is how alignment happens. Through deep listening.

The very first recording Gary and I made together, we had no idea whether it would work. We had barely practised together. There was no plan. I began to speak, and the first words that came were: “Do you know how beautiful you are?” Gary played his first notes. I followed the music. He followed my words, and somehow his music also anticipated them. What emerged from us as pure improvisation was so powerful that when we listened back in the sound room, I felt immediately: I want to share this with everybody. A natural synergy existed between us that we hadn’t known was there. It simply arrived in that first recording.

The second time we went into a studio, about a year later, we were just warming up. I said, “Let’s have a little play.” I didn’t thinking we were recording anything. I said the word “listen,” and began speaking about listening inside yourself. Gary started playing with me. When we went into the sound room afterwards, it turned out that it had been recorded.,We looked at each other. It just worked. That has been the experience ever since.

But what made that possible goes back much further than the studio.

I trained for 22 years with two Chinese masters, learning about energy transmission. My first teacher spoke about heart-to-heart transmission, the idea that words spoken from the heart land in the heart of the listener, not in the mind. My second master taught a deeper alignment, where speaking the truth means that what you are saying, thinking, feeling, and experiencing are all the same thing simultaneously. There is no gap between them.

When I record a Transformance, something else happens too. It feels as though I am living the experience of everyone who will ever listen, even though I don’t know who they are, where they are, or when they will come to it. When I speak about unfolding the soul, I am experiencing my own soul unfolding, and at the same time I am experiencing all those listeners unfolding theirs. The pace of a Transformance comes as much from you, the listener, as it does from me. That, I believe, is what gives the words their power.

Gary’s journey is equally rich. He spent twenty years in advertising, learning at the deepest level how music affects mood and emotion, because that is precisely what advertising music is designed to do. He told me once about a film he scored about the threat of nuclear holocaust, unremittingly dark until a single moment of hope near the end, where the music shifted. Watching the audience lift in that moment, he understood something fundamental about the power of music to change our inner experience.

He has since spent more than twenty years creating music specifically to help people connect with their hearts and release the grip of mental chatter. He has set the words of wisdom keepers from around the world to music, though until we met, that was never done as a live improvisation. The speech would come first, and the music would be added later.

What Gary and I did was to walk into a studio and do it simultaneously, in real time. I had years of experience recording live energy activations for my community. He has years of experience improvising music live in concert. We each brought that confidence into the room, and between us, something new became possible.