D’Ann Katsu Davis
Let the beauty that you love, be what you do.
Bio
D’Ann Katsu Davis, is a musician and author with a lifelong interest in ancient ceremonial instruments. D’Ann plays her crystal bowl like she is stirring a cauldron; until a voice beyond gender, culture, and even specie arises. She spent years of getting out of the way, to allow this ancient voice of humanity to arise. She lifts her voice to lift all voices. She express her voice to help you express your own.
Playing Mantis music is for listening to your self. There is no clapping at the end of a Playing Mantis concert–only a vast silence, where the gifts of clarity and insight arise. This state of deep silence in part, is created by Nada Sounds. For years D’Ann has practiced Nada Yoga to become quiet and still enough to hear the inner nada sounds.
It can take years to hear the nada sounds under the din of one’s own chattering mind. And under each Nada sound is another beneath it–deeper and deeper into the mysteries one may travel, unearthing one sound under another and another. Each sound is the sound track of an attendant dimension of ones own being, of reality itself. 
D’Ann says the years of a Nada Yoga practice served her spiritual expansion, and also benefited her mental health immeasurably. She was also motivated to hear the Nada sounds so she could recreate them, and include them in her Playing Mantis, sound medicine journeys.
She plays Nada sounds not for entertainment, but for entrainment. Her intent is that you entrain (fall in synchronic rhythm with) these deep inner Nada Sounds to assist you in the exploration of your own inner landscapes. She plays them to assist your own resonance into higher states of reality and spiritual connection.
With the genius help of Heather Perkins at Water Dog studios, D’Ann was able to technically recreate these ethereal tinkles and impossibly deep binary beats. These Nada sounds are favorites in the compositions. These sounds really do help us explore our inner mythic landscapes, and find our own inner treasures.
“Have you ever noticed how little space we have in our brains?
It is cluttered up,
full with so many thousands of things
it has very little space
If you take a journey into yourself
empty all the contents you have collected
and go very, very deeply
the there is a vast space–
that so-called emptiness
that is full of energy
and in that state alone
there is that which is most sacred
–Krishnamurti
D’Ann also spent years in Native ceremony, questing for her sacred songs. A Song Quest ceremony has the same elements as a Vision Quest ceremony, except in a Song Quest ceremony a person quests for their sacred songs, instead of receiving their sacred vision–but both come in either ceremony.
In the deep wilderness, across several mountains of the West, D’Ann sat high “on the hill” in a circle she built over the preceding year–and from that circle she did not leave; inside it she did not eat or drink.
With nothing going in, nothing came out. So even the distraction of elimination was eliminated. This, so she could contend with herself directly. So she could clear, and receive her lessons from within, nature, and the divine.
D’Ann’s music came to express the seasons of the day, the seasons of life, and the seasons of the Earth. Like D’Ann’s medicine teacher, Misa, Playing Mantis music does not attempt to teach anything to anyone, but instead helps you connect to spirit for your own direct lessons, learning; and to feel your feelings, to move emotional density and make room for the spiritual.
A Playing Mantis sound journey can put you to sleep and wake you up—or both together. While residing in the deep epic stillness of the seventh direction, Within, one may meet their dearly departed on the other side, or experience the lucid awake dreaming of the dreamtime–an hour can feel like a handful of minutes.
In a Playing Mantis sound journey, together we uncover the divine love that is always and already there.
With an unchained human voice, Playing Mantis sound journey connect, cleanse, and clarify. Sounds that catalyzes creativity and allow listeners to move stuck emotional energies to receive true divine inspiration, nurturing, and insight from the farthest reaches of their most inner selves Pure sound allows what is already there—the transpersonal joy and peace of divinity residing in us all beings, and all life.
From years of reckoning, and from her decades spent in Native ceremonies, D’Ann knows well the emotional and spiritual topography of her own inner landscape, and honors all life–her relatives– held in the sacred hoop of the medicine wheel.
The Playing Mantis sound medicine journey and the Playing Mantis novel are her Give-Aways.