Next month at the Chopra Center’s Seduction of Spirit meditation retreat on Marco Island, Florida, world-renowned singer/songwriter Beth Nielsen Chapman will give a special guest performance.
Beth Nielsen Chapman
Beth is an acclaimed musician, known for her heart-opening lyrics, soaring melodies, and bell-clear voice. She released her debut album, Hearing It First, in 1980, to critical acclaim, and she has since written many big hits for herself and covers by an impressive and eclectic group of artists including Faith Hill, Bonnie Raitt, Willie Nelson, Trisha Yearwood, Neil Diamond, Patty Griffin and Emmylou Harris, to name but a few.
In 1993, Beth’s world was turned upside down when her husband was diagnosed with cancer. Three years after his death, she released her album Sand And Water. The album’s title song, a highly moving meditation on living, dying, and surviving, took on a life of its own, bringing hope and comfort to countless people struggling with grief.
Then, in 2000, just as she was finishing a new album called Deeper Still, Beth faced her own battle with breast cancer. During the most difficult time of her chemo treatments and in the darkest of moods, she started to write the song “Happiness,” which became a centerpiece of her newest album, Back to Love, which will be released in the U.S. in late spring 2010.
“Having been off on these different musical journeys, I’ve loved this deep dive back into songs about human love and the human heart,” says Beth, who serves on the Advisory Board for Peacejam as well as on the Board of Directors of Healthy Child Healthy World.
“I’ve always been drawn to songs that are three-minute peepholes into the depth of our being human, the attraction and the tragedies and the thirst for humor and how we grow and learn and recover from it all; to me it all comes back to love.”
Seduction of Spirit has begun in beautiful Marco Island, FL. Davidji, our Dean of Chopra Center University, is starting off the event teaching 130 brand new meditators – then 120 more join the group tomorrow for a week of meditation, yoga, peeling away layers, diving deep, and discovering the most divine aspects of ourselves.
After this week of divine discovery and sweet surrender, our lives have changed . . . transformed . . . evolved . . . never to be squeezed back into that previously constricted space.