Born in 1948, Raphael Sharpe was an only child who grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His father was a ragtime piano player who played at seedy bars and was also an excellent businessman. Although Raphael has likened his youngest years to “Leave it to Beaver,” he had a harrowing experience as a young child: “My Mom had a heart attack when I was five and she took me with her to the spirit world,” Raphael recalled. “I came back and saw her gasping for air.” Raphael called the operator for help, and an ambulance arrived in time to save her.

Growing up, Raphael’s mother was often sick and he was raised in part by Benedictine nuns at Catholic school as well as an Indian chief named Bushy Head. He witnessed one of the nuns playing a Bach fugue and “discovered authenticity”. After that, he was constantly practicing any instrument he could get his hands on. 

Starting in 1968, Raphael attended college at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for two years,  preferring real world experience to the likes of  institutional, such as working as a church choir director and playing in rock and roll bands. A few years later, Raphael met Gabrielle Roth, a dancer who worked as a masseuse and dance teacher at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur.  She convinced Raphael to join her there in 1972, where he stayed for 12 years as the main musician to accompany her shamanic dances.  At Esalen, Raphael started teaching his own workshops, conducting weekly romantic chamber concerts, and performing psychic readings set to music, which he called “musical portraits” of the guests, eventually performing over a thousand of these.

At Esalen, Raphael met many of the major new age thinkers of the day, like Joseph Campbell, Wayne Dyer, John C. Lilly and Dr. Emmett Miller. Raphael would go on to provide music for various guided meditations by Miller and others. In 1985, Raphael put out an early version of *Music to Disappear In* which would soon far outsell any other release he’d done before. “So many people have come up and told me that one of their family members died while listening to it,” mentioned Raphael, “the Death and Dying Institute use it a lot too.” The tape was extremely popular, eventually moving 500,000 copies, enough to make it one of the best-selling new age releases of the decade.

In 1989, Raphael married the Swiss-born Kutira Decosterd, a tantra teacher. She influenced Raphael to start doing healing work of his own, and the two moved to Hawaii in 1990 to start their own eco retreat, Maui Eco Retreat. They released a [documentary] (https://www.thedanceofearthandspirit.com/) in 2012 called *The Dance of Earth and Spirit* about the origins of Maui Eco Retreat and the Kahua Institute, an organic farm and sustainably constructed eco retreat. The couple currently lives on Maui.