The Invitation I Didn’t Know I Was Writing to Myself

The Invitation I Didn’t Know I Was Writing to Myself

The Invitation I Didn’t Know I Was Writing to Myself

How a handpan taught me to stop trying to get it right.

How a handpan taught me to stop trying to get it right.

Gary Yost 13 min read

My first handpan, a D Celtic Minor made by Rebecca Dancyger of Spirit Handpan, photographed on Mt. Tamalpais.

Percolating in the back of my mind for six months was a writing assignment that I was stressing over.

I was editing a book about psychedelic experience, and its author, my friend DM Tripson, had asked me to write an Editor’s Note and I’d agreed. This was an important book and I didn’t want to screw up my big chance to say something profound, especially since I intended to start it with the famous Alan Watts quote “I’m in the business of effing the ineffable.”

I woke up one day near the end of the project, sat down at the dining room table with my tea, and the entire piece popped out almost faster than I could transcribe it from thought.

I’d heard of automatic writing but had no idea how quickly it could happen.

Then I picked up my tea, read through what I’d written, and one passage stood out like it was in neon.

I was encouraging the folks who’d read it to approach the book not as a collection of instructions they needed to follow, but as an invitation to discover their own ways of becoming more present.

I’d written:

The point is that we are being shown a menu of tools that we can use to advance our journey to become more authentically ourselves. We can choose what resonates with us from this menu; modify or even invent our own tools, and play with this newfound power of speaking to our unconscious in a way that activates presence.

I wasn’t just writing to the people who would read the book.

I was writing to myself.

At the time, I’d been away from making music for more than a decade. My previous attempt to become a musician was a disaster.

To understand why those words mattered, I have to go back almost twenty years.


The cost of keeping up

Around 2006-2007, I was playing Hammond B3 organ in a blues band that performed regularly in Sausalito, California.

I loved the music. I loved the sound of the B3, the way it could growl, shimmer, and rip apart air molecules with those rotating Leslie speakers… it felt like I was punching a hole in the fabric of the Universe.

But I’d only recently taken up the instrument, and the musicians I was playing with were extremely experienced.

They were seasoned players who just had pure fun with the whole experience. Before a set, they might be outside smoking pot, laughing, and enjoying themselves. Playing music was something they knew how to do without making a fuss about it.

I was the junior musician in the band. And I was determined to keep up.

I practiced twenty-five or thirty hours every week, on top of everything else happening in my life. I didn’t want to be the weak link. I always needed to know that I was holding up my end.

Nobody was forcing me to practice that much.

The pressure was coming from me. In fact, my hands used to sweat so much during shows that I needed to wipe down the keyboard between every song. Having fun yet?

This wasn’t new for me. I’ve always been drawn toward projects that take me places I’d never been. Sometimes dramatically so.

I thrive on finding myself in unfamiliar territory and figuring out how to navigate it. On my last project before discovering the handpan, it was learning how to seamlessly stitch arrays of VR cameras together to make stereoscopic 360° immersive cinema, and I received an Emmy nomination in 2022 for doing just that.

That impulse has given me a very interesting life.

But during the B3 years, it came at a terrible cost… I began having trouble sleeping.

Then the trouble became severe insomnia. The intensity of the musical work, and the pressure I was placing on myself to keep up, had pushed me into a state from which I couldn’t easily recover. Being unable to sleep… night after night fully awake until dawn. This was the only time in my life I’ve ever had suicidal thoughts.

The insomnia lasted three years.

Eventually, I came to believe that if I wanted to sleep normally again, I had to give up music.

So I did.

That was a painful conclusion to reach, but it seemed necessary.

I didn’t stop loving music, but I stopped believing that I could pursue it without paying an unacceptable price.

And after that debacle, I stayed away.


An invitation to the unconscious

By 2022, I was deeply involved in editing DM Tripson’s book about psychedelic experience, preparation, and integration.

The book explored both practical and metaphysical ways of enlisting our unconscious, and how the intention to do just that can bring epiphanies into our ordinary lives. It sometimes took me weeks to understand sections well enough to translate them to readers in plain English.

I’ve never been particularly comfortable with the idea that there’s one correct way to approach consciousness, creativity, or personal development.

What works for one person may do very little for another… and what interested me was the possibility of experimentation.

That was the spirit in which I wrote my Editor’s Note.

And when I read it back, I saw that I’d just given myself permission to do something I’d been terrified to attempt.

I could make music again. But I didn’t have to do it the way I’d made it before.

I didn’t have to return to the B3. I didn’t have to join another band. I didn’t have to measure myself against more experienced musicians or spend thirty hours a week practicing to make sure I deserved to be there.

I could invent another way.

What fascinates me now is that the Editor’s Note itself had arrived through a process very much like the one I was describing.

I’d spent those months absorbing the material, thinking about it, and developing my own relationship with the ideas using psilocybin and other methods. Then, when it was time to write, something felt ready to come out.

I don’t think that means effort and preparation are unnecessary. Quite the opposite. The months of research and editing mattered.

But preparation and control are not the same thing.


Finding a way back

I had a friend, Cory, who was doing some interesting things with GarageBand and I asked him to teach me how to use it.

I wasn’t thinking about becoming a performing musician again. I wasn’t planning an album or a concert. I just wanted to express some of my feelings through music.

GarageBand gave me a place to begin. Eventually I moved into Logic Pro and began exploring virtual instruments.

I could work with sounds and textures without having to become proficient on another physical instrument. I could experiment privately, following whatever interested me, without the expectation that I was preparing something for other people to hear.

And for roughly a year, that was how I made music. I still have those recordings, and some of them are very beautiful to me.

Percolating in the back of my mind for six months was a writing assignment that I was stressing over.

I was editing a book about psychedelic experience, and its author, my friend DM Tripson, had asked me to write an Editor’s Note and I’d agreed. This was an important book and I didn’t want to screw up my big chance to say something profound, especially since I intended to start it with the famous Alan Watts quote “I’m in the business of effing the ineffable.”

I woke up one day near the end of the project, sat down at the dining room table with my tea, and the entire piece popped out almost faster than I could transcribe it from thought.

I’d heard of automatic writing but had no idea how quickly it could happen.

Then I picked up my tea, read through what I’d written, and one passage stood out like it was in neon.

I was encouraging the folks who’d read it to approach the book not as a collection of instructions they needed to follow, but as an invitation to discover their own ways of becoming more present.

I’d written:

The point is that we are being shown a menu of tools that we can use to advance our journey to become more authentically ourselves. We can choose what resonates with us from this menu; modify or even invent our own tools, and play with this newfound power of speaking to our unconscious in a way that activates presence.

I wasn’t just writing to the people who would read the book.

I was writing to myself.

At the time, I’d been away from making music for more than a decade. My previous attempt to become a musician was a disaster.

To understand why those words mattered, I have to go back almost twenty years.


The cost of keeping up

Around 2006-2007, I was playing Hammond B3 organ in a blues band that performed regularly in Sausalito, California.

I loved the music. I loved the sound of the B3, the way it could growl, shimmer, and rip apart air molecules with those rotating Leslie speakers… it felt like I was punching a hole in the fabric of the Universe.

But I’d only recently taken up the instrument, and the musicians I was playing with were extremely experienced.

They were seasoned players who just had pure fun with the whole experience. Before a set, they might be outside smoking pot, laughing, and enjoying themselves. Playing music was something they knew how to do without making a fuss about it.

I was the junior musician in the band. And I was determined to keep up.

I practiced twenty-five or thirty hours every week, on top of everything else happening in my life. I didn’t want to be the weak link. I always needed to know that I was holding up my end.

Nobody was forcing me to practice that much.

The pressure was coming from me. In fact, my hands used to sweat so much during shows that I needed to wipe down the keyboard between every song. Having fun yet?

This wasn’t new for me. I’ve always been drawn toward projects that take me places I’d never been. Sometimes dramatically so.

I thrive on finding myself in unfamiliar territory and figuring out how to navigate it. On my last project before discovering the handpan, it was learning how to seamlessly stitch arrays of VR cameras together to make stereoscopic 360° immersive cinema, and I received an Emmy nomination in 2022 for doing just that.

That impulse has given me a very interesting life.

But during the B3 years, it came at a terrible cost… I began having trouble sleeping.

Then the trouble became severe insomnia. The intensity of the musical work, and the pressure I was placing on myself to keep up, had pushed me into a state from which I couldn’t easily recover. Being unable to sleep… night after night fully awake until dawn. This was the only time in my life I’ve ever had suicidal thoughts.

The insomnia lasted three years.

Eventually, I came to believe that if I wanted to sleep normally again, I had to give up music.

So I did.

That was a painful conclusion to reach, but it seemed necessary.

I didn’t stop loving music, but I stopped believing that I could pursue it without paying an unacceptable price.

And after that debacle, I stayed away.


An invitation to the unconscious

By 2022, I was deeply involved in editing DM Tripson’s book about psychedelic experience, preparation, and integration.

The book explored both practical and metaphysical ways of enlisting our unconscious, and how the intention to do just that can bring epiphanies into our ordinary lives. It sometimes took me weeks to understand sections well enough to translate them to readers in plain English.

I’ve never been particularly comfortable with the idea that there’s one correct way to approach consciousness, creativity, or personal development.

What works for one person may do very little for another… and what interested me was the possibility of experimentation.

That was the spirit in which I wrote my Editor’s Note.

And when I read it back, I saw that I’d just given myself permission to do something I’d been terrified to attempt.

I could make music again. But I didn’t have to do it the way I’d made it before.

I didn’t have to return to the B3. I didn’t have to join another band. I didn’t have to measure myself against more experienced musicians or spend thirty hours a week practicing to make sure I deserved to be there.

I could invent another way.

What fascinates me now is that the Editor’s Note itself had arrived through a process very much like the one I was describing.

I’d spent those months absorbing the material, thinking about it, and developing my own relationship with the ideas using psilocybin and other methods. Then, when it was time to write, something felt ready to come out.

I don’t think that means effort and preparation are unnecessary. Quite the opposite. The months of research and editing mattered.

But preparation and control are not the same thing.


Finding a way back

I had a friend, Cory, who was doing some interesting things with GarageBand and I asked him to teach me how to use it.

I wasn’t thinking about becoming a performing musician again. I wasn’t planning an album or a concert. I just wanted to express some of my feelings through music.

GarageBand gave me a place to begin. Eventually I moved into Logic Pro and began exploring virtual instruments.

I could work with sounds and textures without having to become proficient on another physical instrument. I could experiment privately, following whatever interested me, without the expectation that I was preparing something for other people to hear.

And for roughly a year, that was how I made music. I still have those recordings, and some of them are very beautiful to me.

Cascade Falls

Looking back, I think that period was essential. It let me find my way back to music without recreating the circumstances that had driven me away.

But after a while, I became aware that something was missing. I wanted to put my body into it.

I wanted to touch something and have it resonate.

I wanted rhythm and melody to come through my hands.

And somewhere in the background of all this was an instrument I’d first encountered through DM Tripson.

At his psilocybin retreats, a musician friend of his frequently played the handpan. He sent me audio recordings from those medicine circles. I’d never heard anything like it, and its beautiful physicality and pure angelic sound made me feel connected to the realms I visited in my psychedelic experiences.

I began looking into handpans.

I didn’t know anyone who owned one. I’d never played one. I had no way of knowing whether I would enjoy playing it or whether I’d have any aptitude for it.

But I was curious.


An instrument without mistakes

I eventually found a handpan maker on the East Coast who was offering a Celtic pentatonic instrument at half price.

She had discounted it because it didn’t have the tuning stability of a more expensive handpan.

I had no idea what tuning stability meant. Now, of course, I understand how important it is for an instrument to retain its tuning and the purity of its harmonics.

I just knew that this was an opportunity to try one without spending a lot of money.

So I bought it. And that was almost exactly three years ago.

The first thing I noticed:

There was no way I could make a mistake.

The notes of the pentatonic scale worked together so naturally that whatever combination I played seemed to belong. I could move around the instrument without worrying that I’d hit a note that was completely wrong.

And because a handpan is both a melodic and a percussive instrument, I could create rhythm and melody with the same two hands.

I didn’t need to choose between playing a drum and playing a keyboard. I could do both, simultaneously, on an instrument that responded directly to my touch.

It was freeing even though I didn’t know how to play a handpan. I had no technique to speak of. I wasn’t comparing myself with anyone else.

I was simply exploring, and I fell in love with it immediately.

Sixteen years earlier, I’d been practicing the B3 for twenty-five or thirty hours a week because I was so concerned about being good enough.

Now I was playing an instrument I’d never touched before, and my first experience was the absence of that concern.

I couldn’t make a mistake.

Of course, as I’ve become more experienced, I’ve learned that there’s far more technique and subtlety to the handpan than I first knew. Handpan scales can be quite complex and with that comes the opportunity to develop musical tension and release. Knowing how this works with each handpan scale is at the heart of melody, and I’ve made way more than my share of clunkers. I play frequently and practice to develop my listening skills, and I continue to push myself.

But this time, with this instrument, the foundation was different.

I hadn’t begun by trying to prove I could play. I’d begun by discovering how much I loved playing.


Letting the machines surprise me

I began combining the handpan with the most unusual digital instruments and effects processors I could find. I wanted them to do more than modify the handpan’s sound; I wanted to have an ongoing musical conversation with an iterated version of myself.

Eventually, this work became what I now call Beyond Handpan.

Alongside the steel handpans, I use instruments like the Neotone digital handpan and processors like the Soma Cosmos, with effects that can repeat, stretch, and transform every sound.

But the experience of playing is often surprisingly simple.

I begin with a rhythm or a melody. The electronic devices respond. And I listen.

Sometimes a phrase I’ve played comes back in a form I didn’t expect, particularly from the Cosmos, which is a kind of “drifting granular looper.” When I hit the record button on the Cosmos I instantly hear it come back as if from another galaxy. The sound that began as a brief gesture continues evolving forever or until I do something like reverse it or replace it with a new handpan phrase.

I’m frequently surprised by what I hear, and that surprise is at the core of the improvisation.

I respond to what the machines are doing, just as they’re simultaneously responding to what I’ve played.

This doesn’t mean I’ve surrendered control of the music. Do you remember that issue of preparation vs control? I have prepared with two years of practice as I assembled this rig, and that preparation has informed constant decisions in real time about how to dial in the parameters as I’m playing.

But I’m no longer trying to determine every detail of the outcome. In fact, much of the pleasure comes from not knowing exactly what’s going to happen.

Most of the pieces I’ve published on the Beyond Handpan website began as casual improvisations. I wasn’t weighed down by the intention of creating finished works for an audience.

I was simply playing.

Sometimes, when I listened afterwards, I realized that something interesting had happened, something new that I wanted to preserve and share.

In the past, if I knew a recording was intended for publication, I’d become nervous from the moment I pressed Record because I wanted every note to be just right.

But now there’s often no definition of just right. A surprising result is rarely a mistake. It is likely to be the most interesting thing that happens.

Beyond Handpan also draws on my long history in computer graphics as the leader of the team that created Autodesk 3D Studio and 3ds Max. I am obsessed with making pictures based on mental images that come from inside. The images that we birth from scratch have always made me feel like I had a special power of creation. Now I use fractals instead of polygons because fractals are infinitely complex. And when they move to my music, they become organic, biological, sometimes even cosmic.

The music itself is performed live, with the electronic effects operating in real time. Afterwards, I listen to what emerged while exploring mathematical forms using JWildfire Swan’s optimized fractal code, which supports real-time previews thanks to the M5 chip. Playing with hundreds of mathematical parameters while watching the imagery evolve in response to my decisions and the music is unbelievably fun.

BEYOND PROCESS


Still pushing

For a long time, I simply accepted my powerful need to keep moving into unfamiliar territory as part of my personality.

But lately I’ve started to wonder if something else is involved.

I’ve lived with a strong awareness of mortality for all of my life because of the body I was given: born without a spleen, debilitating autoimmune disorders from childhood, cancer in my 20s, and multiple heart attacks and strokes in my 30s.

Now at 67, I’ve begun to recognize a feeling that if I stop pushing the boundaries of what I know and what I can do, I might somehow just stop.

Not literally, of course.

But stopping can feel like dying.

Maybe my lifelong creative urgency formed as a way of responding to that awareness. I don’t know whether that’s the complete explanation, and I don’t particularly need it to be.

But it helps me understand why I continue to take on projects that are well beyond what I already know how to do, even now.

What’s changed isn’t the intensity of that drive. In many ways, my current musical work is more complex than anything I attempted during the B3 years.

But I’m sleeping very well.

Beyond Handpan is the closest I’ve come to touching something I can’t put into words, and I get to do it almost every day. Watts was in the business of effing the ineffable. Apparently I’m in it now too.

That doesn’t mean the old pressure has disappeared entirely.

In June of 2026, I performed in a concert called Haiku & Handpans, collaborating with Chuck Brickley, a poet and friend, on a live mix of spoken haiku and improvised music.

It was the best lesson I’ve had yet in giving space, opening space and filling space, but I noticed something familiar.

My hands weren’t sweating anymore, but I still felt pressure to get it right.

The presence of an audience brought back some of the expectations I’d experienced years earlier. And I spent an entire day on each side of the show breaking down, packing, hauling, and setting up an elaborate electronic rig, which meant I was already worn out even before starting the performance.

For now, I’ve decided to step back from performing for audiences and concentrate on playing for myself.

I can continue exploring as intensely as I want without requiring that every exploration become a performance, a recording, or an accomplishment.

And if something beautiful shows up, I can decide afterwards whether I want to share it.


At the bottom of a wave

When I improvise these days, I rarely know where the music will go.

I find myself gravitating towards contrasts between groove and space.

I love playing with the Hologram Microcosm’s glitch modes, then adding Chase Bliss Big Time delays, sending my rhythm back to me. At the start of the “Beyond Process” piece I used the Digitakt to bring in a sample of coyotes that I recorded on Mt. Tam.

The synths and devices listen to what I’ve played and transform it in ways that I sometimes just stop and marvel at.

The music continues without my hands.

Then I bring the effects down, introduce a new groove or melody, and begin building another layer, maybe this time on the Eventide H90.

The intensity rises and falls. It’s a series of waves.

I don’t have to know what the next wave will be because I can discover it as I go.

And eventually, I reach the bottom of one of those waves. The rhythm has subsided. The electronic sounds are becoming quieter and more spacious. There’s a feeling that the music is trailing away toward nothingness.

That’s usually when I stop.

Four years ago, I wrote an Editor’s Note encouraging readers to invent their own tools for communicating with the unconscious.

I thought I was offering them a way to become more present.

Only afterwards did I realize that I was offering myself the same invitation.

Now, I witness myself standing quietly with a handpan in front of me, listening as the last sounds of an improvisation fade away.

And when the music has nothing more to say, I can let it end.