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I heard Pablo Casals play Bach’s Cello Suites for the first time in June 1993 as I worked the phones at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival office. They were fairely thrilling, inspiring me to attempt a solo cello suite for my favorite cellist. I wrote a few movements and then began a new one. But this music seemed to require harmonies instead of the cello by itself. As I heard more notes in my head I began remembering that I had wanted to teach the MUSE women the chant I say every day to show my devotion to the goddess, Lakhsmi. I feel the effects of this chant in my own life, and wanted to share these possibilities with everyone. I could use this nice music that I had begun to write down, adding the Sanskrit chant to be spoken by the singers. In this way they would be forced to learn it. How fun! More music accompanied the words, and more instruments. After the chant I began inventing choral text from the introductory paragraph: Salutations to the Guru, and so on. It came to me to write down two verses from the Guru Gita; the sacred text that I say almost every day, all 182 verses. I was constantly reminded that my spiritual practices were having an enormously positive impact on my daily life.

Next I chose the Sanskrit phrase to say that everything is just as it’s supposed to be: this music and my disabled body; they're good, perfect. It sounded embarrassingly confident; I had to back down a little bit to let people know that I realized how extreme I sounded, much too involved in religion, for crying out loud. I had to say: I fear I've convinced the regular people that I’ve gone off the deep end, lost in religious fervor. Then I had to say how much I really love being here on this planet so that people wouldn’t think that I was planning to go meet the guru in Siddha Loca.Then I needed to sing.....That is perfect, this is perfect, from the perfect springs the perfect. And to state the principal message of Siddha Yoga, which is that your inner self already knows everything, when you meditate conscientiously to discover the truth within. There's a Goddess of all creation, Sarasvati. At the beginning of time she somehow messed up and could no longer write music, all she could do was influence humans to write it down for her. No matter what anyone says to me, I know that I don’t really create this music. I sort of channel it. During the entire four years of my writing down this music I sang to Sarasvati:

Sarasvati please come through me
Sarasvati I am your voice
Sarasvati my mouth your music
Sarasvati my thought your choice.

-by Therese Edell