Musings of a music therapist
My dear friend and fellow-trainee in Guided Imagery and Music, Erin Montgomery, has interviewed our trainer, Dr. Lisa Summer. Click here to read the excellent interview. It is really a very clear and concise summary of the incredible clinical work that Lisa has pioneered and developed, and the clinical focus that we, her trainees, are inheriting. A big thank you to Erin for sharing this with our community.
For more information on Lisa Summer’s training in Massachusetts click here.
John Carpente invited me to write a blog posting. Check it out here:
I’m sitting here, processing in music and art, the passing of Clive Robbins. I am more deeply affected by his passing than I might have imagined. He was my teacher for a semester at NYU. He was also a colleague – I stood in and lectured for him at Nordoff-Robbins once, in the same lecture series that I’d once sat as a student. But I didn’t know him socially, and am not sure that he could have remembered my name had he bumped into me. However, whether he ever knew it, his life and work has touched my own beyond what words can possibly say.
I am spending some time in music, contemplating his indelible mark on me and the profession of music therapy, and the world in general. As I contemplate him, I can’t help but see his spirit, emanating in yellow rays against a bright blue sky. And as I think on both him, and Helen Bonny who passed away last year, I realize why I am so moved by the work that they both pioneered: they were deeply spiritual people and this showed in their work. This is so clear in Clive’s autobiographical writing, Journey into creative music therapy. And was clear to anyone who met him. Why is it that we have so abandoned the transpersonal in music therapy, for the safety of the biological, measurable, quantifiable? There is nothing easy or safe about exploring the transpersonal aspects of music therapy. Every movement into the transpersonal creates more questions than answers, but Helen and Clive dared to do this.
At a presentation Clive gave a few years ago, with Paul Nolan, Clive talked about “committing to beauty”. I find this brings tears to my eyes as I write the words. What a call to action! Commit to Beauty! Wow – it gets me every time. I hear Clive asking this of all of us, not just as therapists, but as human beings. Clive embodied beauty – he was beautiful in his words, in his passion, in his commitment and generosity, in his focus, in his humor, in his innocence and fearlessness. He was a magical teacher, someone who helped me commit to this work and all the depth of experience it brings.
As I have been sitting here, I am struck by the realization that Clive’s influence runs deeper in my life than I had previously made conscious. He changed my life about 20 years ago – in high school I learned about Nordoff-Robbins’ music therapy through a news segment. That news segment inspired my dream of being a music therapist all those years ago, leading me eventually to study at NYU and be taught by the man himself. It never occurred to me to go anywhere else. Clive is why I came to this field, and the reason I studied in New York. I’m just sad that I’ll have to continue my journey knowing he is no longer in the physical world.
I remember him as being so emotionally alive. I carry that image in my mind, and hope to emulate his emotional-availability and willingness to be moved by life. Thank you Clive.
Tags: beauty, Clive Robbins, music, music therapy, Paul Nordoff
Next time you sit down at a piano or pick up an instrument or open your mouth to sing, try this:
This approach to making music is really about giving yourself permission to to be transformed by it. It’s about deepening your relationship to yourself through the music. Have fun playing!
Tags: beauty, feelings, immediacy, music, transformation
Helen Bonny died on May 25th, 2010. She was a pioneer in the field of music therapy, leading the way in using western classical music to expand explorations of consciousness, through developing Guided Imagery and Music. She was a wonderful example to us all, whatever our calling – following her bliss, unafraid of criticism, and using her love for music in service of others. I am deeply honored to be a second-generation student, studying under Helen’s own student and friend, Lisa Summer. And I feel Helen Bonny’s legacy in all that I do, re-discovering her brilliance as I experience more and more of the power of her music programs, for myself and for my clients.
Recently, my book club discussed Helen Bonny’s article entitled “The Language of Immediacy”. As she understood it, music brings us, with immediacy, into the present moment. It is a language which is experienced in the now – a language which integrates the past and the future in this moment. And it speaks so much to what I experience with my adult clients in psychotherapy work. I am learning that the integrative healing happens when a person is helped to slow down, supported in deepening their awareness of their feelings in the moment, and guided to an increased level of consciousness in the here-and-now. Music can be a powerful key in bringing a client into this type of experience. Music is immediate in a way that few experiences are.
And what is the healing potential of the immediacy of music? Ken Wilber writes in his 2001 book, No Boundary, about eliminating the self-imposed boundary between the hearer and what is heard. I think this has implications for the experience of music in music therapy:
“Close your eyes and attend to the actual process of hearing. Notice all the odd sounds floating around – birds singing, cars rumbling, crickets chirping…But with all those sounds, notice that there is one thing which you cannot hear, no matter how carefully you attend to every sound. You cannot hear the hearer…You can’t hear a hearer because there isn’t one. What you have been taught to call a ‘hearer’ is actually just he experience of hearing itself, and you don’t hear hearing…There is no boundary here…
If you let the sensation of being a ‘hearer’ inside the skull dissolve into hearing itself, you might find your ‘self’ merging with the entire world of ‘outside sounds.’ As one Zen Master exclaimed upon his enlightenment, ‘When I heard the temple bell ring, suddenly there was no bell and no I, just the ringing’…When you try to hear the subjective hearer, all you find are objective sounds. And that means that you do not hear sounds, you are those sounds. The hearer is every sound which is heard…” (pp. 46-47)
This is not unlike T.S. Eliot’s famous line in The Four Quartets which nests in the these lines –
“…For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts…”
In one of my most recent personal experiences in my own GIM therapy, I experienced the truly transformative power of music – the experience of being one with the music. There was no me as hearer – the music was inside of me, and I inside of it. This deeply felt and real-time experience of music is able to transform a person, forever. In one short piece of the music program, I was able to experience myself in a completely new way. And the music didn’t just bring a new part of myself to my awareness – I was the music – the music offered me a lived experience of this, previously hidden, part of myself. The music brought me fully into the living, feeling, breathing, present moment. What was previously an unconscious part of me, is now a constant here-and-now experience.
Thank you, Helen, for being so open to the transformative, transpersonal aspects of music and finding a way to share it with the world and me. May we all have the courage to do what we are called to do in this lifetime, as you did.
For those who are interested, there is a new edition of Voices online, commemorating Helen Bonny: https://normt.uib.no/index.php/voices/issue/current
Tags: Buddhism, GIM, Helen Bonny, immediacy, Ken Wilbur, music, music therapy, T.S. Eliot, transformation
Last year, whilst in Edinburgh, I had the good fortune to go hear a bunch of fine musicians in the space of about 3 days. (They included Emily Scott, Teitur, Benni Hemm Hemm, Withered Hand, and Alasdair Roberts). Those few days still stand out in my mind – the music connected me to parts of myself that had been a little lost. The music reminded me that those parts still existed and there was some ineffable experience that occurred, best described (though difficult to put into words) as “wholeing”. I was made more more wholly me by the experience.
As I wrote in a previous post about beauty, I find that health (or wholeness) is evidenced by one’s ability to experience beauty (fully feeling the music, or enjoying art, or appreciating the beauty of a sunset). And that we can often see when a person is “out of health” or disintegrated, or “not whole” when we see them not being able to listen to, enjoy, feel, or fully immerse themselves in the music they play or hear.
That is not to say that all music is “beautiful” to all people. Of course it’s not. But I do think that one person’s tastes versus another person’s tastes speaks also to the integration or lack of integration of certain parts of the self. For example, for the longest time I couldn’t listen to rap music (this was before I studied to be a music therapist). OK – you could say that the facts that I was born in Scotland, I studied classical music from a young age, and I wasn’t terribly exposed to popular music, contributed to this “taste”. Of course. But, it’s not just these environmental factors. Something in me was under-developed, or lost, or disconnected.
In the case of rap music, there can be a driving rhythm, a strong bass line, minimal melodic lines, repetitive harmonies. When one really takes all these elements in, on a sensory level, they can awaken sensual, grounded, physical sensations in a person. It was a disconnection to my body that I now realize I was experiencing.When I connected to the music in a sensory way, taking in the elements, listening on a deeper level, I could experience the “disconnected” part of myself. I could become more “whole”, and healthier.
Through my training as a music therapist, and my need to open myself and my ears to many types of music, and the many musics of my clients, I also opened myself to the many forgotten/lost/disassociated parts of myself. As a music therapist, we can guide a client in knowing and accepting the many aspects of themselves, through knowing and owning the many sounds that they make, and the many musics that they listen to. Thoughts anyone?
Tags: aesthetics, alasdair roberts, art, beauty, benni hemm hemm, emily scott, health, music, music therapy, performance, scotland, wholeness, withered hand
Being a therapist is humbling – I love and am challenged daily by the work of being a therapist. No matter how much one thinks one knows from books, training, and mentors, it is only in the doing that one learns. The art of timing the therapeutic intervention is incredibly nuanced. I was reminded of this, and deeply moved by a passage in a novel I’m reading, The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley (thanks to my husband for this recommendation – what a good feminist!).
For those who haven’t heard of this book, it is a re-telling of the epic story of King Arthur, but through the eyes of a woman. A woman priestess of the old Goddess religons. It is a beautiful story of the moment in history when both Christianity and the old Pagan beliefs co-existed. And how the Goddess faiths were eventually subsumed by Christianity, and with that, the Goddess Herself.
The main protagonist in the story, Morgaine, is training to be a Priestess:
It was the small magics which came hardest, forcing the mind first to walk in unaccustomed paths. To call the fire and raise it at command, to call the mists to bring rain – all these were simple, but to know when to bring rain or mist and when to leave it in the hands of the Gods, that was not so simple.(Zimmer Bradley, 1982, p. 137)
This is so much like therapy – learning how to intervene in a supportive way is the easy part. Knowing the timing for such an intervention is more difficult. When do we leave it in the hands of the client, trusting their innate drive toward health? And when do they need our interventions? These are the subtleties of the work that come through self-reflection, experience, and many many trials and errors. One thing I do know – we only have to be good enough, not perfect. What a relief!
Tags: goddess, interventions, marion zimmer bradley, music therapy, myth, women
Who knew that a visit to the local Jiffy Lube on the busiest weekend of the year would yield such an energizing meeting with a stranger? I sat in the dingy waiting room with an older, full-statured woman with a walking stick leaning against her chair. We began to make small talk about how seemingly single woman getting oil changes have to be particularly strong at a Jiffy Lube in terms of turning down all the sell-ups from the management. The conversation morphed into a discussion of food, family, literature, and travel.
This woman had been a single mom of two children, and had worked for 40 years in NYC public schools, specializing in working with adolescents. “Adolescents are all hormones, and I really relate to that!” she said with a cackle. Every so often she would use curse words to great effect – “it’s not fucking bad” (about retirement); “that’s fucking bullshit” (in regard to asking a woman if she’s going to have children any time soon). She held herself with great command, despite her obesity and her shuffling walk – a kind of solidity that told me that this woman was comfortable in her skin. The fact that she cursed with abandon was encouraging – the words were beautiful to me. They only emphasized her wisdom and sense of empowerment.
I really felt appreciative of this obscure meeting while I waited for my oil change. Here, of all places, she was my connection to the Goddess mother Demeter. And even to the wise old crone. I felt enlivened and brighter for meeting her.
(I’ve been reading a fabulous book, which allows me to imagine Goddesses in Jiffy Lubes – It’s called “Life’s Daughter / Death’s Bride – Inner Transformations through the Goddess Demeter / Persephone” by Kathie Carlson. Also see “Women who run with the wolves” by Clarissa Pinkola Estes for connection to wise-woman myths.)
Tags: beauty, clarissa pinkola estes, Demeter, jiffy lube, kathie carlson, myth, wisdom, women