Meditation, Intimacy And Community: Jason Garner Talks Love4Live

It all started three or four weeks ago, I was on the phone with Jared Braverman at Live Nation and one of the major agencies had just announced another round of layoffs. Jared said to me “I’m just so worried about everyone’s mental health.”

When he said that, it just dawned on me, I thought ‘I can help.’ This is something that I went through myself. The difference is when I stepped away from the industry I had resources to go out and look for teachers to go on a decade-long journey of self-discovery and meditative-discovery. So I sat down and got to work, I called all of my teachers and started recording conversations with them, I started building a website, and we built this platform called Love4Live. It brings together my two great passions in life: live music and meditation. 

It tries to make available to everybody all the benefits and resources of meditation I have been lucky enough to come across over the last decade. … I funded it with the belief it should just be free for everyone, so cost is one less barrier for people to think about right now, in caring for themselves.

Well I don’t know if in our business we’ve ever been through this type of mass shutdown. Everybody is suffering. Some people have lost their jobs. Nobody is able to do their job, concerts completely went away on March 13, literally the unthinkable happened for all of us, the industry was completely shut down.

If you go back to previous crises in our industry, whether it was 9/11, the various recessions, live music was one of the things that kept going and people were able to unify around. So you have all these people in our industry that have dedicated their lives to sharing the joy and connection of the live music experience, while also experiencing that joy and connection, and then suddenly it’s gone, overnight. I think the difference in this situation is the widespread nature of every single person in our business being affected.

If you lost your job, that’s horrible. Some people are sick, some people are having to make the decisions to do the layoffs, and that’s horrible. None of us are at concerts, artists are stuck at home with their creativity pent up inside them. People who have spent decades associating with one another backstage at concerts now, in many instances, cannot even go outside to each others’ houses.

So everything is not for everybody. This is a resource, and some people won’t identify with it, and that’s cool. Lots of people are doing lots of things to try to help out. I don’t have any evangelical aspirations around meditation, I just want to share what I’ve learned. 

If you look at what we do in our business, we are very outwardly focused all the time. We take a show and we put immense amounts of dedication, awareness, time, work, effort into this thing called a concert and the artist on the stage. One of the ways we can look at meditation, very simply, is taking that awareness and attention, and turning it inward. Your eyes, instead of looking outward, start to look inward and take that same care, passion, dedication that we spend our lives applying to superstars onstage, we start to apply that to our own heart. 

You can call that spirituality but it’s actually intimacy. For most of us it’s probably the first time starting to get intimate with our own heart, our own thoughts, our own experience of being alive. Through that – like all intimacy in life – comes love, healing and all these things we are familiar with when we apply ourselves to things outside and we start to receive those benefits inside. 

And when we do that together, we start to receive the benefits of community as well. One of the big things I think is impacting a lot of people in the business right now is our community has been taken away. While meditation often is done alone on a cushion, in these classes we hold twice a week, we won’t be backstage at MSG but we will have this opportunity to tend to our broken hearts because so many people are sad, isolated, and feel alone. When we meditate together, all those things I talked about happen, but we also have that together. So while we might still suffer, we don’t have to suffer alone.

Insight LA Meditation Center was a big support for me. Trudy Goodman – one of the teachers for Love4Live – is the founder of that center. The teacher who is leading the weekly classes, Thomas Davis, leads the People of Color meditation group at Insight LA. They were a big resource in helping me put this together. And all the teachers, they are all going through their own shutdowns. In a matter of a few weeks getting them to clear up time on their schedules and come participate, it was touching and I’m really grateful.

Yes. Our industry is going through this whole experience: how do we have in-person connection, whether it’s in our zoom meetings or artists doing concerts from their living rooms. Meditation is no different, perhaps it is further along in sharing because they are teachers who often share via video. 

I’m a huge believer in live and I don’t believe video ever replaces being able to hug another human being, but this is what we’ve got right now. Also, for all of us in the business, it’s an opportunity because if we weren’t limited in this way, a lot of us wouldn’t make the time to do something like this. Unfortunately we have a lot of time on our hands right now. At the end of three months, people can have taken two meditation classes a week, listened to expert conversations, gone to this retreat and when we come out of this can be in a different place as far as their inner life.

From what I understand, you kind of went off the grid after leaving Live Nation, but with this initiative you seem to be making the point that you have kept your love of live music alive.

I don’t think we have to go away and live in caves. In fact, while that’s some peoples’ paths, that can’t be most peoples’ paths. 

Really, what this is about is trying to maintain the flow of different parts of us at all times. Where I was at a decade ago, my whole life was built around my job. 

I think over the last decade the world has learned a lot about – I don’t like the word balance because it implies tension between different parts of our life – but it’s about flow. In the course of working, being involved in live music, can we not choke off our heart, our spirituality? 

I love live music, I love artists, and at this stage of my life I love them with a different sensitivity. I’m finding really meaningful connections with artists and through music. For a while, as a part of my own journey I felt compelled to go away, I needed that break to learn about myself, almost the way we might do a detox. But what I learned over that time is that meditation and spirituality is never about pushing life away, it’s just about how we relate to it. 

I used to go to work every day inside feeling I wasn’t very good or valuable, trying desperately to get outward validation. Over the last decade I’ve become very comfortable with this Jason that is however he is. Now, being back involved in the business, there is this beautiful flow between meditation, my spirituality, my practice, and live music, artists and business, and there is a place for all of it when we allow all of it to be present.  

I consult with a small roster of artists on the alchemy of art, business, and spirit. What does that mean? We’re trying to make as much money as we can on the artist-side while making sure art is still present and their hearts are tended to.

Even just asking: “Why are we touring?” Asking how many nights a week feels good on their body to work? How does it feel when we do an extra night? At the end of the day we’re all humans. It gets wrapped up words like industry, business, artist: these are terms we use to not address each other as human beings. 

That’s one of the interesting things going on right now: As this pandemic has really taken hold in our industry, I’ve watched as feelings of “that person works at that company,” or “that person does that job” have faded away and there’s just compassion for everybody in our business being affected.

When we come at each other remembering we’re all humans – executives at companies are making really tough decisions right now and they are humans; The artist right now is at home and they are human; All the people who have various functions, different stars at different points in the night are all human – that’s the genesis of this program, asking can we all come together and explore our inner life as human beings? Forgetting what company we work for or used to work for, what hierarchical position we have in the industry, we’re all getting hit by the same pandemic, by depression and isolation, so we have an opportunity just to come together as human beings. 

I just want to reiterate that there’s no pressure, come as you are, it’s 100% free, there are no expectations, you don’t have to do anything that you don’t want to do. It’s literally just click a button and watch some conversations, click another button and attend a meditation class, click another button in December to go a bit deeper together in a meditation retreat. 

People can show up when they want to, participate in the pieces that resonate with them, it’s really just an effort to show people that they are not alone, they matter, and that there still is a community within our business. We may have to connect in ways that we haven’t in the past but there is this community here.