This Friday (June 10), acclaimed musician Doe Paoro (born Sonia Kreitzer) will release Divine Surrendering. A healing ceremony in EP form, the project takes Paoro and the listener to restorative worlds beyond, after having spent much of the last year exploring ways that music could activate deeper consciousness. Ahead of the release, today Paoro shares the final offering with “All My Life is a Ceremony.” Fueled by the understanding that nothing stays still forever and that the spirit of nature grows upward towards something greater, the song explores Paoro’s practice of ceremony in her day to day life. 

The track builds from softly fingerpicked acoustic guitar and harmonium chords to a waltzing sweetness. With the resonatively repetitive “the one,” the mantra cleverly burrows and blurs the concept of an individual self with something greater. Paoro expands, “This was from something I heard an elder friend of mine share in an ayahuasca ceremony about ten years ago that stayed with me all this time. ‘I am learning that this entire life, every moment, every birth and every death, is somehow a ceremony.’ So much of my personal yearning has been to reintegrate this lost sense of the sacred into my daily life, searching for ritual.”

By deepening her connection with rituals like sound baths, psilocybin ceremonies, and the healing power of music, Paoro’s latest work allowed her to entrust in music’s potential to be a wellspring of uplift in the midst of gossamer beauty. Like the rebirth Paoro experienced in her own journey, the EP finds comfort in a constant sense of newness, growth, and transformation. Throughout Divine Surrendering, Paoro returns to grand humility, harnessing her strength by losing the self, tapping into something immense and drawing the listener to that same place. “It’s all about learning to trust life, to trust the medicine of life, to remember that we really don’t know anything!” she says. While her music had always incorporated an ethereal, transcendental quality, Divine Surrendering owns up to its title, pushing past the personal and into an immeasurable depth. 

Photo Courtesy: Lonnie Dean