A documentary about AOMUSIC and our non-profit foundation is being made into a documentary. As of yesterday we have funding coming in from a producer on the project. Yet until the shooting of our Documentary we are going to Nepal as we promised to film and record the children that will be on our next album released in Feb. 2013. Our Kickstarter Campaign has only a few more hours and this is the money we need to travel and record, and film this beginning of an amazing journey of marrying Music with Cause.

Please visit our page and help up make our goal. We would be so grateful and so would the children.

Blessings Maya

AOMUSIC Meets Hollywood

Jul15

Nepal Monastery

AOMUSIC had gotten the attention of Hollywood. The story of this is amazing. As many of you know, we were invited to trek to Nepal and record some children for our new album to be released Feb. 2013. And word spread in Nepal that we were coming, people heard the beauty of the music and the message of love that is AO and suddenly we got an invitation to come to visit the sacred Caves of Maratika and record. This is an arduous trip, yet this ancient site houses a majority of sacred Buddhist teachings.

This pilgrimage to the holy Caves of Maratika is in Halesi. Maratika Cave and Monastery is located south east of Mount Everest and was the retreat of Mahadeva while he was in hiding. For both Hindus and Buddhists it is one of their most famous pilgrimage centers. Here is a note we received from the Monastery:

“Regarding Maratika: We have now a project to reconstruct our Maratika Monastery as it is falling a part also this year’s earthquake has made little problem. For this project many buddhist high masters including H.H. Dalai Lama has written the supporting letter for this project.”

So, now we can help give back to them through the sale of the album and help their project because of their generous invitation. So our trip expanded and we were planning to go in the monsoon season, with swollen rivers and nighttime hikes for hours.

Suddenly another email. We were invited for an unprecedented trek to Solukhumbu Monastery. A rugged overland passage. Here is the proposal from our contact there, and their historical invitation. It reads,

“O yes i have some new idea for you or AO music, since you are in Nepal.
When you are in Nepal you can take your crew to my teacher’s monastery in Solukhumbu, which is the most beautiful place, it is like Tibet, where now more than six hundred monks and nuns doing prayer every day, i think that make a great experience for AO. My Guru His Holiness Trulshik Rinpoche who is also the main guru of HH Dalai lama has recently passed away, after many months praying here in Nepal, his precious Kudung, which is his enlighten body, is now in his Monastery Solukhumbu. If you are planning than i can organize a trip and guide to accompany with you i really think it will be good for AO music since we see that AO will be beneficial for so many people. For that sense that place HH Monastery is the most powerful place, if you are targeting music and chanting with visual beauty.”

So as you can see there is not only a story about the dedication of AO to bring World Music a new voice for change, involving children all over the globe, but our reach now can be educational and inspiring with this trek to Nepal and beyond.

AO trains and records children, most of whom are living in extraordinary circumstances. These children have never been in choirs before and are from the poorest of the surrounding villages. They will be singing about love, light and our world for the first time, in a harmonically creative language. This is a signature for AO, that the language cuts across all boundaries and languages and creates a universal, harmonically pure vibration. You will see the effects of this on the faces of all the children of AO.

AO have been astonished at how these requests open new doors for changing the hearts of people. “But how could we fund this in such a short time?” we asked. Then a phone call.

“This should be a documentary” he said. And before we knew it a dozen interested film people, PBS producers, Independent directors, videographers and Bollywood interest just flooded in. Without effort. An amazing gift for the simple act of holding the vision. One song at a time, one child at a time and one dollar at a time. One person said that this is a “Dream’Gig” and AOMUSIC has a big dream: To allow for the change needed on the planet to be both initiated by the light of children and the musical purity that is AO. Then to give back to as many children in need as is possible. Why? Because the children hold our future in their hands.

We are now going to Nepal in August to complete our original vision of recording the children of Chitwon and finishing the album and we have given the month of November over to returning to Nepal for all three treks, this time with a film crew and substantial funding.

And what I can say about living in the flow is that the Universe knows when Spirit is at the heart of life and gives such abundant support and love that it takes my breath away.
The project is cooking, growing sea legs, gaining funding and can be the single greatest help to advancing the causes of these children by creating both life changing music AND now creating a visual reference for spirit at work on a suffering planet.

We still need your help to get to the children in Nepal in August and want to have everyone who can give a tax deductible donation to make this trip a reality, become part of our team as we make this documentary. We will be looking for those who want to participate as associate producers or even carry our bags. As I will continue to say, It Takes a Village to Create Change. And Richard Gannaway and I have been the first to “move our feet” to fund the vision. We have used our own resources to make it thus far and I have given up coffee, time to even take a shower and Richard has given up vacations and sleep. But we cannot move to the next level of the vision alone.

Please visit us at our Kickstarter page http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/933732314/ao-music?ref=live. For only $10 you can receive our Last Album,” And Love Rages On” which was shortlisted for the Grammys this past year. This trip takes $10,000 in support. We are nearly one third there and have less than two weeks left to generate the funds or if we are short our goal even $10, we lose all our dedicated funding.

You can Donate tax deductible contributions on our AO website at http://www.aomusic.com/ao/blog/wordpress/ and join us on the adventure. Please see the gifts we will give back to you for helping us get this first leg of the trip to Nepal accomplished.

And if you simply cannot push a button and donate $10, $50, $100 then do us the next best favor please. Send an email to 5 friends. Tell someone how interesting this project is and point them to all our YouTube videos or my website. Your spreading the word and sending an email to friends is worth it’s weight in gold.

And get to know each of us at AO on my website at: http://www.mayalunachristobel.com/heartbeat/

Blessings and thank you, Maya

A Sore Subject

Jul1

I have had so many inquiries from those of you who have been following my journey this year, regarding my having taken a job with a friend to write a screenplay. I have posted many funny and amazing stories about this journey of taking one man’s experience and writing a screenplay that does justice to his extraordinary moments. All in 120 pages.

My work on this project took five months of my life and led me to amazing people and my going to The Film School in Seattle, fly fishing with Tom Skerritt and his wife Julie, finding amazing mentors to work with me, learning about fundraising and producing. What I have learned about myself as a writer and about the business of making movies has been invaluable.

Yet, what I have learned about the way the industry works has been disheartening even more so than I already thought I was aware of. In the end, as those who become agents or lawyers in the mix do, the project was taken away from me, contracts disregarded, I was not paid and my friend vanished in search of Hollywood. So I lost a friend. It is always hard to deal with any disappointment or feeling of betrayal anytime, but when it happens with a friend, I am always stopped in my tracks and need to find my way to making sense of what happened. And I notice here that I use the phrase, “I am always”.

What I have come to know is that betrayal is commonplace. Betrayal is to be expected. Betrayal is in fact …necessary.

The irony is this. My very first screenplay of nearly 20 years ago was entitled “A Necessary Betrayal”. It is very appropriate that I must revisit my premise in that screenplay in my own life. The pitch went something like this: “The wife of a pedophile priest finds her own dark side in the arms of another”. Very melodramatic eeh? The rub in that story was….who did the betraying? Did the priest betray the wife and the children or did the woman who dealt with her pain and claustrophobia in the church, betray him? Did they each betray themselves and their higher sense of what is right? All of the above. So, in that story the pain of the betrayal by someone she loved led her to see how she had betrayed herself and in fact was capable of the same things she railed about. Hmmm.

Wiki says this about betrayal: Betrayal is the breaking or violation of a presumptive contract, trust, or confidence that produces moral and psychological conflict within a relationship amongst individuals. It always seems easier when it is an organization or anonymous person you feel backstabbed by, but when it is your family and friends it is an entirely other thing. We least expect betrayal from those we have learned to trust. The hardest part of this story is the need to ask this question: How am I responsible and how did I contribute to the outcome and create the betrayal? This question is far more difficult to sit with than the event of loosing a job, or pay or a friend. Because if we answer the question honestly, we cannot be a victim.

In the end this question leads to our inevitable responsibility for “self-betrayal”. I, in fact, did not listen to my inner voice whenever it cautioned me to not take this project. I over-road my inner knowing for the glimpse of a possible future for the story I was writing being on the screen. This was no different from my friend over-riding his loyalty to our agreement for the lure of a possible bigger deal in Hollywood. Therefore, as within, so without. OUCH! My inner reality of self-betrayal was mirrored by the circumstances of betrayal in my relationship to my friend and the project.

This awareness is life changing. In embracing the painful truth of this, there is no victim. I am not done to. I am a creator in my own outcome. In all honesty if I had listened to my own voice from the beginning I would not have taken the project. I believe this wholeheartedly. Bravely, each of us would do well to look at those betrayals in our lives that we hang on to or feel so effected by. Affairs, swindling, robberies, cheating, broken promises done with intent, broken contracts for a better deal. How have we contributed to those outcomes? Has our fear created a response in kind? Have we failed to speak up when we see injustice happening? Did we fail to confront our deep intuition that a husband is cheating or a boss is ripping us off? Did we have our head in the sand? Why? These are hard but necessary questions. Blame is far easier than self inquiry.

Being a victim in life is far too easy. Feeling victimized carries with it powerlessness. Taking responsibility for the outcomes of our love or business relationships is a stance of power and personal responsibility. I am endeavoring to stand in this place even in the midst of disappointment, loss and financial difficulty and dust myself off. I need to embrace my tendency to believe in only the best in a person and not see other signs that I might act upon to protect myself or create clearer contracts in life. From this vantage point the loss of this amazing project is simply “a day in class”. A master’s level course in knowing myself and standing up for what I know to be true. In this case I can be grateful for the learning so it may not happen again. I have become sensitive to the signs in myself and around me that I overlooked before.

And what I know is that the betrayals, especially in the entertainment business, are inevitable. I am stronger and more prepared in myself to do a better job of taking care of myself and seeing the industry for what it is. So, in the end I can thank my friend for all I have learned that I would not have without him and my future involvements will be clearer and more tuned to my own needs and knowing. I can only wish him well and will be the first in line to see the movie if it comes to a theater.

The post script in all of this is a silver lining. As this project that consumed most of my life slipped away, a space was left, and experiences and opportunity that could not have come my way have. Projects much closer to my heart and more tuned to the person I am are now available. And I have finally started to do my own project, a story needing telling that I would not have gotten to for a long time if there had not been room made for me to fill. I learned that what I am even more passionate about than writing for film is producing. This is a new awareness for me as it is unbelievably exciting.

So, before I sat to write an answer to all the questions I have been receiving, I thought long and hard about what to say. Knowing the subject of betrayal is a sore one for most of us. And I knew I needed to be very candid about myself…publicly. But, I think that what has come with age is my deep awareness that living a life un-clothed is far more interesting, invites far richer and real engagements with people and allows me to find the honest answers in myself to share with you.

Thank You.