listening

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I Got Life! – Being fully alive in the aesthetic experience

January 13, 2012 in Uncategorized | 2 comments

Nina Simone – Ain’t Got No…I’ve Got Life – YouTube.

I haven’t been able to get this song out of head since watching this video over the New Year. It’s originally from the musical, “Hair”, and Nina Simone sang and recorded this song many times in her career, each time switching up the words to fit the moment.

I love watching her sing this in this video – the ease in her body, her effortlessness, her musical instincts so spontaneous and artful. And the song itself is such a fantastic reminder to come back to the body, and recognize one’s aliveness, no matter what else is going on.

“I got life!”, she sings. And I, too, feel alive. It reminds me of another video I watched – a TED talk given by the Brit, Sir. Ken Robinson. I quote:

The arts especially address the idea of aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak; when you’re present in the current moment; when you’re resonating with the excitement of this thing that you’re experiencing; when you are fully alive.

Wow. What a great definition of the aesthetic experience. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the power of the creative arts therapies, right? If you can be fully alive in the therapeutic process, then there is tremendous potential for real transformation. So, what has this got to do with Nina Simone singing this song? Listen to it – the beginning lyrics are like the list of sufferings that our clients come in with. And, the work of the therapy can be to bring them back into contact with their inestimable selves, like the second half of this song does – their bodies, their creativity, their beauty. To experience being fully alive, even when they are feeling at a loss.

 

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A vacation for the ears

December 1, 2011 in Uncategorized | No comments

On our June vacation last year,  to the Pacific Northwest coast of the US, and a weekend spent in Massachusetts, I was delightfully thrown into nature. On a walk through the Hoh Rainforest (part of the Olympic National Forest), I was struck both by the silence and the sounds. The coast gave me the roar of water. The trees brought the sound of birds, and leaves being blown like the sound of a blustering river. And I became aware of the huffing and puffing of my breathing as a struggled up a hill, and the floating voices ahead of me and behind me, being carried by the wind.

This trip was like a vacation for my ears – on my return, I could hear everything anew again. The sounds of nature have a way of re-setting our senses, readying us for our return to human-made sounds. John Cage has written about his experiences of listening after sitting in meditation. He has explained how meditative states can help us to stop reacting in our usual way to sounds, and just listen. With this fresh hearing, even the sound of a car alarm can become like a sound sculpture to our ears.

There is inspiration for me as a therapist in this reflection about Thich Nhat Hanh, the famous Vietnamese Buddhist monk : “Even under the sound of helicopters – and this is a man who buried many children in Vietnam to the roar of helicopters and bombs – he can say, ‘Listen, listen; this sound brings me back to my true self’” (Nachmanovitch, 1990, p. 93).

When I am with my clients, I am listening as deeply as I would as for the sound of a rare bird in the forest. I am listening as deeply as I would for the buzzing of an insect in the night air. I am listening as fully as when I lie down in the dark and take in the roar of the ocean. Even the most traumatized sounds can be sculptures of sound. When was the last time you were listened to as if you were that bird? As if you were the ocean? Don’t we all deserve to be heard as if our sounds were works of art? The sounds we make – our voices, our music, our words – are as precious as those sounds that fill our natural world.

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