A Different Kind of Strength
The Story of How Mothersong Came To BeWhen I was thirty, a brief but profound experience changed the course of my life.
I was living in New York, rebuilding after leaving behind a successful career as a touring singer-songwriter in the wake of burnout. A relationship I had poured myself into had ended, and I found myself alone, grieving, and unsure how to begin again.
One night, I came home and stepped into the shower, overwhelmed by the weight of so much loss. As I wept, I experienced something I can only describe as a profound encounter with love itself.
A gentle, feminine voice arose within me — soft as a breath, yet filled with boundless compassion.
“Slow now,” she said. “Your every touch creates the world. So let your touch be gentle. Let your touch be sweet. A new world begins here, and it starts with you.”
In that moment, something shifted. In the years that followed, I would understand what that shift meant. I had never been missing strength. I had been missing connection — connection to myself, to the sacredness of life, and to the deep well of love that had always been there, in and around me, all along.
For about a week, I moved into what you might call a non-dual state, characterized feelings of peace and presence. No separation. Only flow.
And while that experience eventually softened, it permanently changed the way I understood healing. I came to know that we build inner stability not through pushing through but by letting something through. Strength comes through cultivating right relationship and connection to self, other, and the more than human world.
That realization became the foundation of my life’s work.
Over the years, this path led me to study Earth-centered spirituality, graduate from Divinity School, teach college level comparative religion courses on spirit and nature, navigate the profound initiations of motherhood, and deepen my relationship with the sacred through years of spiritual apprenticeship.
And then I discovered community singing.
I saw in shared song a way to embody the truth I had been learning all along: that we are not meant to journey alone. Healing happens through relationship. Belonging is medicine. Voices, woven together, help support the individual and collective healing our world needs.
This is how Mothersong Chorus was born.
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For thirteen years, Mothersong has been a gathering place for this practice of embodied connection. Across more than a thousand gatherings, we have sung, danced, laughed, cried, played, shared stories, and created something together that none of us could have created alone.
A place to belong.
A place to be witnessed.
A place to remember that we are part of something larger.
I created Mothersong to be the spiritual experience I had always longed for: a safe harbor where people are cherished as much as any teaching, where wisdom is discovered through the body, through the voice, and in relationship.
Because every time we tend to ourselves or one another, every time we listen inwardly and realign, every time we meet one another with presence and care — we practice the sacred art of connection.
And that is where our strength has been waiting all along.
