Rivers Coumo

“I meditate for two hours every day… I’m more happy, calm, spontaneous, and creative and I treat people better. I think I make better decisions. For about 15 years, I wouldn’t connect with the audience at all. But recently I actually have been putting my guitar down, picking up a wireless microphone, running out into the crowd, looking people in the eyes, high-fiving them and really enjoying that connection. I don’t know if that would have happened if I wasn’t meditating, if I still had so much stage fright. I might still be in my shell…

I see the fear, as it arises in my body, as a physical sensation and when I recognize fear as just a physical sensation, I am less likely to let it run my life. I can say, okay there is the fear, and here is what I am going to do. And at the same time, the more I practice this detached observation, I find that the initial physical sensation of fear subsides and goes away, and then I’m just left feeling very pure, and I can do whatever I want. It’s very cool. It’s benefiting those around me too, I think. The band’s having more fun and the crowd is definitely having a lot more fun and yeah, I enjoy what I do now.

With this practice I now have a tool to calm myself back down and think more constructively and helpfully… I thought that meditation would rob me of the angst that I believed was essential for my connection to music. All the experiments I have tried in my life have always been an effort to improve, maintain, or recover that connection… I had been wrong all these years in trying to connect to my creativity by violent means, for example, by mining my adolescent anger for “Say it Ain’t So”, crucifying my leg for Pinkerton, or consuming Tequila and Ritalin for “Hash Pipe”. Mcleod says:

These devices [such as the ones above] do not work in the long run because they draw on our system’s energy to generate a peak experience. Peak experiences cannot be maintained, and when they pass, the habituated patterns and the underlying sense of separation remain intact… Instead of generating peak experiences for inspiration, I could strengthen my power of concentration through meditation so that I could get more and more inspiration from subtler and subtler experiences. Not only that, but the practice would make my life better, and make better the lives of those that live with me.

A friend gave me to the link to S.N. Goenka’s Vipassana courses (www.dhamma.org.) … I’ve been practicing steadily ever since… I’ve attended 12 ten-day courses, 2 30-day courses and 3 45-day course. I’ve also served as a volunteer at about 7 courses. Since then, I have found that the areas of tension in my mind—the fear, the anger, the sadness, the craving—are slowly melting away. I am left with a more pristine mind, more sharp and sensitive than I previously imagined possible. I feel more calm and stable. My concentration and capacity to work have increased greatly. I feel like I am finally much closer to reaching my potential. I also received training in conducting meditation courses for kids so I do that about once a year.”

~ Rivers Cuomo (born 1970) is an American musician best known as the lead vocalist, guitarist and songwriter of the rock band Weezer. Rivers Cuomo was raised in Yogaville, an ashram in Pomfret, Connecticut run by the master yogi Satchidananda Saraswati. He has a brother, Leaves. Cuomo attended a private school on the ashram. “We practiced hatha yoga and meditation every day as part of the school. I didn’t really enjoy it. I was a kid and I just wanted to go outside and play tackle football.”

“My life had gotten very complicated. At the time I thought I had to deprive myself and suffer so that I could get in touch with my creativity again. Looking back, I don’t think I needed to experience that deprivation to pull myself out of the place I was in, I’m not proud of that, and I certainly don’t endorse jumping from one extreme to the other. Before I started meditation I was extremely skeptical and even fearful that it was going to rob me of the angst that I felt was necessary for my songwriting, I committed to sit once and if I felt like it was making me too numb or spaced out, I was never going to sit again. I was in such an agitated place that even just sitting once, I could see the benefits, I got up twenty minutes later and I was like, ‘Woah, I feel calmer and that’s a good thing.’

Before meditation, I was looking at fame and wealth as the goal of my life. After practicing meditation for a while and listening to Goenka speak, I’ve come to see the dangers of accomplishment, success, fame, and wealth. While there are good points to that kind of success, Goenka recommends that you give back a portion of your income, or give time to centers, serving so that other people can meditate, and view your efforts as benefiting not just yourself but everyone else. This helps dissolve your ego even as you become more famous, even as you make money.”

I’ve been in bands where even if you’re in the middle of nowhere with a broken-down van, you laugh your guts out and puke all over each other. That’s not Weezer. I no longer vacillate between the extremes of being a dictator and telling the guys exactly what they have to play or, on the other hand, shutting down and being totally passive and saying ‘Play whatever you want; I don’t care.’ I can collaborate and discuss and say, ‘Hey, that sounds cool; why don’t you try it a little more like this?’ and I can take criticism from them. They might say, ‘Hey, why don’t you sing it like this?’ and I don’t get angry at them. It’s much more comfortable to be in this band. It’s much more comfortable to be alive now. If you compare the songwriting and the singing on Maladroit and Make Believe, you can hear a huge difference in how present I am, My voice is so much more expressive and in touch with my emotions now than it was before.”

“When you get really excited or agitated, when you’re thinking you’re so great or hot or whatever, you don’t realize that the line you just wrote maybe isn’t all that great. Maybe you could’ve gone a little deeper and discovered something more profound to say. I would concentrate my mind by focusing on some really intense emotion within me. I would be overcome by that emotion, allowing me to block out the internal chatter. While that worked temporarily, those emotions come and go and as you get older they’re not as intense or reliable. In any case, it’s not a good life if you’re constantly trying to dig up those intense emotions and cultivate all that negativity within yourself. Who wants to live like that? Even if it means you can write songs off of it.”

'Though he has been a seeker his whole life, Cuomo is careful not to use the word “spiritual” to describe his search for meaning. He claims it’s difficult to say exactly what spirit really means and believes a more accurate description of his quest would be “artistically searching.” The key to this search is the investigation of his mind, observing how it works. Cuomo feels that by exploring his own mind, the insights he gains will not only help him to create better music but also to become a better human being.” ~ Jeff Pardy

“Cuomo married Kyoko Ito, whom he had known since March 1997. The couple has a daughter, Mia, and a son, Leo.” ~ Wikipedia

Photos ~ Rivers Cuomo of Weezer performs during Taste of Chicago 2015
       ~ Kyoko Ito & Rivers Cuomo