OM VARIATIONS
2026
This album is a musical trilogy using variations of the mantra OM.
It began back in 2017 on the farm in Independence, Oregon when I combined a classic chanting of OM with music. Sara and I tried it out with multiple audiences while touring in 2018/19 and I decided that a 60-minute version would anchor a new album.
The second track of the three-part collection would be the mantra OM Shanti OM, a prayer of peace. I wrote that tune while playing music for hospice patients in Portland.
The final piece, Om Namah Shivaya,was fine-tuned while I went through a series of medical issues. This ended up becoming the opening number of the trilogy, OM Variations.
TRACKS
1. OM Namah Shivaya 9:51
2. OM Shanti OM 6:20
3. OM 1:00:10
Om Namah Shivaya
This year I’ve had five visits to the hospital, three surgical procedures and I almost died a couple of times. Now I’m recovering and there’s nothing that rest and time won’t heal. Other than that, everything is great. How about you?
And if you’re wondering how all this ties in with a new song that’ll be clear in a moment, or two. But first I’ll start with a short recap of my recent medical mayhem.
A gall bladder attack: intense, unrelenting pain, put me in the ER. A shot of morphine got me relaxing and I was told that I needed a simple, routine surgery; I’d be home after a night’s stay in the hospital. I signed a bunch of forms, and a doctor knocked me out.
After the operation, in the recovery room, my surgeon was frowning; her eyes were heavy. Not a look you want to see while the anesthesia is still wearing off. You want to see that happy face that says, “everything went perfect. You’re all better now.”
“The operation took longer than usual,” she said in a weary voice. “It was much more difficult and dangerous than expected. Your gallbladder was dead.”
“Dead? What do you mean by dead?” I asked.
“Dead,” she repeated. “Gangrene, with damage to the liver and bile ducts. If your wife hadn’t brought you in and you had instead taken a pain killer to go to sleep you probably would have developed sepsis and never woken up. But your current emergency…”
Wait!!! What? There’s more?! I’m not going home as promised in brochure?
Oh, and this ISN’T going to be a short story, sorry. Or yay! If you like reading my stuff.
The surgeon continued, “The new, life-threatening issue we must address is the residual damage that needs to be corrected with another surgical procedure. There are risks but without it your outcome will most likely be fatal. Get some sleep and we’ll take the next step in the morning.”
I had never had any surgery in my life, never even stayed overnight in a hospital. It was all so overwhelming. I wanted to get up and leave but obviously that wasn’t a good plan since I was unable to walk or even stand up and I was plugged into beeping machines and hooked up to bags of fluid. They put me in a private room to rest and soon nightfall came.
As I lay in bed, I anticipated my “next step,” another surgery. But what came to mind was quite a big surprise: a prayer from my childhood. A prayer that I hated, hated, hated. It’s that one that starts with, “Now I lay me down to sleep…”
But why would I despise a seemingly innocent, 17th century, children’s rhyme? I’ll tell you why. I first heard it when I was very young, and it upset me deeply. I’ve loathed it my entire life. And many decades later I was still disturbed by it.
I learned it when I was four or five years old. My mom and I knelt at my bedside and she said, “This is how we pray before bed. Now I lay me down to sleep…”
Okay. Good so far. I am going to bed. Makes sense. I repeated the line, “Now I lay me down to sleep.”
She continued, “I pray the Lord my soul to keep…”
That was fine, too. God is supposed to be great…and good, too. We thank him for our food before dinner even though good and food don’t rhyme. But that’s another issue. The main point here being that I had no idea where I went when I slept, so if a God in the sky is keeping my soul safe that was reassuring.
Again, I repeated after my mom, “I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”
And then she dropped the bombshell. “If I should die before I wake…”
Whoa, whoa! My mind spun out. When I go to sleep, I can die? And never wake up! I had been enjoying sleep every night of my short life (plus naps) but until that moment no one informed my developing, little mind that dozing off could be permanent. And thus began a 65-year relationship with insomnia.
It took me a second to gather my composure. I spoke the frightening phrase, “If I should die before I wake.”
She concluded with, “I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
Huh? Not much of a consolation. If I died, I sure didn’t want to have to go live with some old man in the clouds. I liked my friends and cartoons and toys. But just to be safe I recited the closing line, “I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
Then my mom added, “Now we pray for all the people we love. God bless Grandma, etc. etc. etc.”
She finished with an “Amen” and tucked me in, alone in the dark.
I was awake for quite a while, probably having a severe, post-traumatic reaction, to use current terminology. And for some reason that I still don’t understand I began to think about how many people on earth must had lived and died already. And how many were alive right at that moment. And how many more were still yet to be born. And that seemed like quite a lot of people…a lot of souls. And I felt like an irrelevant, insignificant speck.
Then to my astonishment my body became rigid and my breath slowed to almost a standstill. I felt myself, my awareness, lift up from my body: scary and exciting and kind of fun all at the same time. I floated into dark space and from that perspective I saw that we are all alike: irrelevant, insignificant, just drops in a vast sea of souls, all of us, me and all the people who had existed before me and all the people who were currently living and even more who were yet to come. I sensed a sameness. I felt connected with all of them. And it made it all okay. I could let go of my panic, if only for that instant.
Sorry for the long, but necessary, trip down memory lane. Back to the hospital room.
Alone in the dark, feeling vulnerable and defeated, that children’s prayer kept trying to surface in my thoughts. I resisted, but the opening line, now I lay me down to sleep, was persistent. Yet, I was reluctant, adamant even, to not let those words continue to completion in my mind. Did I mention that I hated, hated, hated that prayer?
Being too exhausted to keep up the struggle I let it play out in my head. And when I got to the end, I pray the Lord my soul to take, I thought, “Huh? that wasn’t so bad.”
And to my great surprise I immediately repeated the whole poem, out loud. And when I finished reciting it aloud my body went rigid and my breath became very still, and I felt my myself rise up, suspended in a vast, dark void. Any awareness of the room vanished as I floated away and I felt peaceful.
And then it got really weird.
Flying into my view from out of the murky darkness was a magical, fairy-like-being, about four feet tall; looking like a circus ringmaster. He was dressed in a purple top hat trimmed with gold braids and a matching tailcoat. He waved a wand; shimmering dust flew all around. After circling a few times, he floated right in front of me and spoke, “Everyone who cares about you, everyone who loves you, is coming tonight to prepare you for tomorrow’s surgery. Look…” He pointed into the darkness.
I saw a shadowy, unidentifiable crowd making their way towards me and wondered who they could be. Who loved and cared about me? The first person to step close enough for me to recognize was Sarah Nicholson-Lopez.
Sarah is the youngest of four children from the Nicholson clan, living two doors down from my childhood home in Michigan. I was very, very close with the older three Nicholson kids: they were like extended family. But Sarah was so much younger than all of us. She was a quiet, little kid and we interacted maybe once or twice, or never, in all those years of being neighbors.
I was puzzled as to why she would be present that night and asked her, “Why are you here? We didn’t even know each other.”
Sarah laughed and said, “Of course I know you. I watched everything that was going on. I might have been small, but I was always paying attention to all of you big kids.”
I said, “Are you by yourself?”
“No.” She laughed again and said, “All the Nicholsons are here, right behind me.”
But before I could interact with anyone else the ringmaster/fairy pulled me by the arm and said, “We have to get you ready,” and he quickly ushered me into a backstage, greenroom type scene. “You’ll hang out here until everyone arrives.”
As I attempted to make sense of the hazy, vague figures milling about the room Mick Jagger entered. Now I was even more confused.
I said, “I’ve been to a few of your shows, but we’ve never been introduced.”
Mick spoke in an offhand, cool, detached way, looking around and addressing the room as if a camera-crew was filming his entrance. “No, no. We all know Dr. Steve. He’s famous amongst us Brits. I wouldn’t be anywhere else tonight. This is the happening!”
In the rear of the greenroom, I could only recognize one face in the out-of-focus crowd. It was my old friend McKenzie Stott, sitting atop a large wooden cube, looking quite serious and concerned. She surveyed the room with soft eyes.
And then everything went black.
The next thing I knew I was again lying rigid on my hospital bed, breath at a minimum and I could tell it was morning.
The fairy/ringmaster appeared and said, “What a night! Everyone is leaving now.” He turned to the exiting masses and said, “That concludes Steve-a-palooza! Thank you all for coming.”
I found the name of the event very amusing but was sad that I had slept through it.
“What? Oh, no! I missed it all,” I said. “What happened?”
“They worked all night to prep your vital organs and vessels and smooth the way for the surgeon. Now you’re good to go.”
A nurse came into my room, disrupting my trance state.
“We’re ready for you,” she said. “This should take about 60 to 90 minutes.”
And off we went.
When I woke up in the recovery room a doctor was standing above me, smiling.
“I’ve never seen that procedure go so smoothly,” he said. “It was like magic. Only 15 minutes: in and out with no issues.”
I felt so relieved, yet I had no idea that later that night I would be visited by a several spirits and before their visit concluded I’d be standing at death’s door.
I spent the rest of that day in bed staring at the big screen on the wall. An artisanal craft show was on TV: only a pair of hands creating a cello. It began with harvesting of the wood and went through every step of the process, eventually playing a tune. Many months of work condensed into one hour, the same show repeating over and over, all day long. Wood and tools and sawdust and hands, no face, just the hands. If you ever need stringed instrument building tips let me know.
When nightfall returned, I wasn’t tired, just frazzled. And I thought, “Hmm? Maybe I should revisit that children’s bedtime prayer and see if something interesting happens again?”
I decided to give it a try and spoke aloud to the empty room, “Now I lay me down to sleep…”
When I finished the list of “God bless so and so, and so and so, etc., etc.” (and yes, if you’re reading this, of course I included you) my body again went rigid and my breathing was minimal. The astral trance, or shamanic journey, or sleep paralysis, or whatever it was had started again. But this time as I entered the dark void, I was more comfortable. I welcomed the experience.
I noticed an ancient, bearded man at my front left, his eyes closed, sitting silently. He wore a robe and had a maroon cloth wrapped tight around his disproportionately small head. Then movement from off in the distance caught my attention. Five hazy figures, side by side, slowly approached. I shuddered. Apocalyptic horsemen? Ghosts of holidays past? The Jackson Five?
My discomfort increased as they floated closer…and closer…and closer. I could see that they were elder females, faces still obscured. As they came near and into focus the old guy with the tiny head rose and motioned with his arm as if presenting them to me and said, “These are the five women who raised you.”
I was not expecting that!
In the center stood my mother. To her right was her mother and sister. To my mom’s left was my father’s mother and his sister. The five women who raised me: my mother, both grandmothers and two aunts. All deceased.
Over the next many minute or hours or I’m not sure how long, because time didn’t exist, we had the most amazing conversations. There was laughing and crying and a steady stream of heartwarming, tender exchanges that I don’t really feel like sharing publicly. Needless to say, but I’ll say it anyways, it was deeply meaningful and life altering. And if it was necessary to have all the pain and suffering of the health crisis for that opportunity it was “worth the price of admission.”
The old guy stepped up and led me away from my caregivers, taking me farther into the darkness. He told me his name was Pavan. I knew it as a Sanskrit word meaning wind or breeze. It also can refer to the breath of life, the life force energy, prana.
I was soon distracted by loud, intense, gasps of breathing and when I looked toward the source of the sound I saw my body in the hospital room. It was heaving up and down, just like what I witnessed my father go through during his final hours in hospice. This concerned me. Like…really, really concerned me.
I asked Pavan, (By now, I figured out that he must be some kind of spirit guide even though I really didn’t believe in spirit guides up until then) “Is that what my dad went through when he was dying? When he was convulsing and struggling to breathe was he actually in a calm and peaceful place like am now?”
“Yes,” he said. “The dying do not experience what we see in the material world.”
He led me deeper into the murky darkness. There was a door in front of me, not solid but fluttering, more like some kind of sci-fi energy portal. It had my full attention. I very fascinated about by what might be on the other side of that opening, but also not in a hurry to find out.
“Is that death?” I asked. “Am I going to go through there?”
Pavan said, “Yes, that is death’s door. But you’re not going there now.”
He yanked me away and led me back through the void to where my five relatives were waiting. The women who raised me and I spoke again at length. Then my mother put her arm around my shoulders and we walked off together. She led me back to the hospital bed where my exhausted form lay in stillness. We had some sweet, parting words and then she faded away.
I could feel myself grounded once again, in the physical world, in the room. I got out of bed and wrapped up in a blanket, cozy like a cocoon, and sat in the chair. I replayed the whole experience and all the conversations over and over until I fell asleep.
I awoke with a curious inspiration: that I should incorporate that bedtime prayer into the new song I was currently working on. I laughed it off but then wondered if by using it as part of a creative project I just might be able to reclaim the essence of it, the protective spirit that my mother intended to impart to me so long ago. And it felt important to face my fears of that prayer. Maybe I could own it rather than avoid it.
The new song I was producing just so happened to be all about accepting change and yielding to the inevitable end of our mortal existence. The main vocal line was planned out long before: the Sanskrit mantra Om Namah Shivayawhich translate as I surrender to death. It’s a light ditty with a fun message, LOL. And the now I lay me down to sleep prayer just might be the piece I’d been missing.
Being a year behind on my own self-imposed schedule, I felt the need to make a final decision and move on. But the new direction left me feeling very uncomfortable. I wondered if I might be going a bit too far. But then again, anyone who knows me would say, “Yep, that’s Steve, or Akal, or Dr. Chaka or whatever alias he’s using at the time. His epitaph could read He always took it a bit too far!” So of course, I chose to experiment and put the prayer into the mix. I could always hit delete. In the end I like how it came out; maybe you will, too.
The song, titled Om Namah Shivaya, (no surprises there) is the final piece of a musical trilogy using variations of the mantra Om. The first two parts are complete and available on all the streaming services: the first, titled OM, is a 60-minute chanting of Om (again, no surprises) with musical interludes. The second track, OM Shanti OM, is a prayer of peace. I wrote that one while playing music for hospice patients. Hmm? Death seems to be a recurring theme here. And now the third part, Om Namah Shivaya, is complete. So, on to the next adventure!
CREDITS
Sara Wiseman | Vocals
Steve Koc | Rhythm guitar, bass, keyboards, vocals
Aaron Overstreet | Lead guitar
Joe Fajen | Trombone
Mark Powers | Drums
OM Shanti OM
I’ve been spending some time playing music at a residential hospice center. One afternoon last spring I was strumming my guitar in the lobby. The sound carried down the hallway to all the rooms. A little, old, Italian lady came out and sat beside me. She listened for a while and then we chatted, her in broken English, me in broken Italian and soon she returned to her room to rest.
Over the next few days, I attempted to learn some Italian folk music to play for her and failed miserably at that… but that exploration led to writing a brand-new song. When I visited again, she was no longer ambulatory and had requested that I play by her bedside. I went and found her in her room.
“Ciao bella,” I said. “Comestai?”
“No bene,” she replied.
I gave an understanding nod and asked, “Has anyone ever written a song for you?”
She shook her head side to side.
“Well, I did. Do you want to hear it?”
Her face softened into a gentle smile. She laid her head back on a stack of pillows, closed her eyes and I played my new tune.
The next day I received a call that she was in her last hours/minutes of life, and her family had asked if “that guy who plays the music she enjoys” was available. It's believed that the sense of hearing is the last to go. Even if we appear non-responsive when death is near, we may still be aware of the sounds around us.
I rushed over and joined the vigil in a courtyard garden where the staff had wheeled her bed. It was sunny with a gentle breeze tolling the chimes that dangled in the trees. I played music for a while and, well, I’ll end this story here. I’m sure you can imagine how it goes.
A few days later I shared the song (and the story) with my music collaborators, and they suggested, or more like, insisted that we do a “real” recording with full instrumentation. So, now many months later the song and video are complete. The vocal line “Om Shanti Om” is a Sanskrit mantra which is a prayer for deep peace.
CREDITS
Sara Wiseman | Vocals
Aaron Overstreet | Lead guitar
Steve Koc | Rhythm guitar, bass, keyboards
Joe Fajen | Tablas
Mark Powers | Percussion
OM
In 2018 I had the idea of an hour-long song that incorporates sound healing, energy medicine and basic music principles so that just hearing it will stabilize your nervous system, release good chemicals in the brain and melt away tension while also being enjoyable to listen to. Something you can let play while watching the sunset, doing yoga, getting/giving a massage, or falling asleep.
It took a while for paths to align so I could meet and collaborate with everyone involved, especially the brilliantly, amazing musicians Aaron Overstreet and Joe Fajen And now, here it is!
The piece is one hour of dreamy, luscious music supporting three 11-minute segments of a subtle chanting of the universal mantra Om. There are two versions: the 60 minute “single”, all one track. And the “album” which is the same hour-long song but divided into seven individual tracks so you can add your favorite sections to a playlist.
CREDITS
Aaron Overstreet | Lead guitar
Steve Koc | Rhythm guitar, bass, keyboards, vocals
Joe Fajen | Rhodes Piano
Mark Powers | Percussion
Eternal thanks and praises for all those who helped create this album: the advisors, technicians, teachers, consultants and beta-test listeners. Thank you Jason Carter, Tom Nunes, John Doan, Steven Gray, Maria Williquette, Mindy Meyers, Linda Coons, Giana Marie and especially Decibel Sound & Drink!
All tracks composed, produced, and mixed by Dr. Steve Koc
Recorded at Chaka Groove Studio
Mastering - Wavelength Studios
Publisher - Chaka Groove 2026