By Jeanne Sager
CALLICOON — January 28, 2005 – Kazzrie Jaxen is pickin’ up good vibrations.
Music has been a central theme in the life of the Callicoon pianist – but it was several years of self-imposed silence and solitude that brought her closer to her true calling.
Jaxen was banging on a toy piano at 2 years old. She was writing tunes at 4.
By 6 her father, a violinist, was beginning to see the promise of another musician in the family, and she started classical training.
Jaxen’s true passion turned to jazz when she was a teenager, and she became a teacher and recording artist.
But in the late ‘90s, music stopped for Jaxen – her muscles were weak and her heart wasn’t in it.
Doctors diagnosed chronic fatigue syndrome, and Jaxen shut down.
She closed the lid on her piano and put her weekend home in Callicoon on the market.
But it was that home that would be her savior – on a weekend visit to check the house overlooking Callicoon, Jaxen realized just how much love it had to give.
And in her condition, Jaxen said she had to go where the love was.
So the woman who had declared she’d never leave New York City took the home off the market and moved to Callicoon.
For two years, Jaxen kept to herself. She simply didn’t have the energy to be social.
“People in the community were so sweet,” she recalled. “They left me alone.”
To help build her strength, Jaxen started taking walks along River Road in Callicoon. She would stop at intervals to drink in her surroundings.
And it was through the waters of the river that she began to feel life flow back through her veins.
“Nature became my primary care physician,” she said.
Shutting out all other thoughts and all other noise, Jaxen “listened” to the positive energy flowing from the trees and the rocks. She watched the beams of light skipping over the waves of the water.
“It was very clear to me that I needed to place myself near the river, the trees, the rocks,” Jaxen said. “The realm of nature is silence, but you slip in there and it’s so alive.”
Slowly, she began to play again.
Jaxen taped herself at work on the piano, and one day she realized she hadn’t just played for a few minutes – she’d pounded her heart out for a good 45 minutes.
She said it was like a “torrent” of energy that suddenly swept through her body.
Playing the tape later, Jaxen lay on the floor just listening, and she could feel the vibrations of the music in the floorboards of her home.
“I knew something had happened,” she recalled. “I felt lifted out of the heavy space I’d been in.”
Over the next eight or nine months, these floods of energy came out in Jaxen’s music a total of five or six more times.
And one day, while she was playing, a friend spontaneously rolled under her piano. She played, and the music washed over his body, reverberating in the ground.
“We were both kind of blown open,” Jaxen recalled.
Schooled in the Chinese art of Chi Kung – an exercise form based in meditation – Jaxen was already familiar with the ebb and flow of energy and the effects of the environment on the body.
But these experiences made her curious about this “vibrational healing.”
“I wanted to know, am I crazy or could this have something?” she pondered with a self-deprecating laugh.
Jaxen found her answer in New Hampshire at the Stillpoint School for Advanced Energy Healing.
There she learned about reading energy fields and the effects of energy on the body.
Everyone has their own energy, Jaxen said, but traditionally our own awareness levels are so far down that we don’t notice.
That’s where her silence came in – like someone suddenly blinded notices a heightened sense of smell or taste, the solitude helped enhance her ability to “read” energy.
“It relates to what scientists say – that we’re only using a tiny portion of our brains,” Jaxen explained. “But attention is the currency of the universe – attention begets awareness.”
Jaxen is now beginning to formally offer vibrational healing sessions – inviting people to slide under her piano while she plays.
This isn’t a way to cure someone’s illness, Jaxen said, but a way to help people open up to themselves.
“We’re all carrying around different kinds of things inside us,” she explained. “Healing is a tricky word – everyone relates it to fixing.”
Music, she said, has the power to release things that we have hidden away. Some people cry, some laugh, some recall distant memories, others fall asleep under her piano.
“It’s like parts of us that were asleep waking up,” she said.
Meanwhile, Jaxen just plays what she feels – “the music does what it needs to do,” she said.
Jaxen’s planned a round of workshops that will each start with a lesson in Chi Kung to help people better understand energy flow through the body.
Then she’ll turn to the music.
Workshop sessions set for Thursdays from 1 p.m.-3 p.m. will begin February 3. Saturday sessions, which will run during the same time period, will begin February 5.
Each workshop will meet for a series of four sessions, once a week for four weeks. Each workshop is open to six participants. A commitment to all four weeks is required, and the total cost is $100.
Jaxen also offers private sessions.
For more information, call 887-4036 or e-mail Jaxen at kazzrie@catskill.net.