How Music Builds Community

One of my delightful musical colleagues, Dale LePage often says something I believe to be true, "music is magic." I have felt its magic since I was very young, both for the way music lives inside of me, and for the way it touches others and brings people together in a deep, tangible way, often much deeper than words can express.

When I have led weekend retreats or extended personal growth workshops, I have always brought along a wide variety of music, knowing that moments might arise where a particular song or piece of music might capture or frame the moment, or be exactly what someone needs to hear to heal or open their heart.

One thing that struck me as I played the song that captured the moment was that not only did the person who was doing the healing turn benefit from the music, but also so did all the other people in the group and in the room. A song that captured the moment also captured and connected the hearts of all the people sharing the moment.

I have had the same experience both as a singer performing and as an audience member taking in live music. Through putting together a program, and choosing the songs, reflections to share in between songs, and even the instruments for a particular arrangement of a song, I feel like I am working in a special medium--like an artist working with clay that can be sculpted into all kinds of emotional possibility.

As I share a song, the subtext, the story and the feeling of the song translate well beyond the words. My heart can share time and space with the energy of other people's hearts. Whether on the giving or receiving end of this musical heart energy, I can feel people coming together as community in a listening room.

Here are some of the ways music builds community:

Music speaks to the common ground of our human experience

The themes and stories one finds in songs cover the full emotional gamut of the human experience: love found, love lost, hopes and dreams, relationships with children, parents, friends and lovers, nature, the world around us, special places, special moments, and how each of these makes us feel. We can all agree "What the world needs now is love."

Music is a universal language

While there are many styles of music, some unique to individual cultures, that most all cultures have music is universal. We don't need to be from one culture to be moved by the sounds of another culture's music. There is something about music itself that reaches beyond words. And words too may be part of the spirit and emotion expressed through a song or other piece of music.

Music has a vibration that resonates with our bodies and hearts

We are electromagnetic energy beings. Our bodies feel vibrations and can attune or align with them. Different pitches resonate with different energy centers in the body. And different qualities of sound touch us in different ways. We are touched at the vibrational level as well as the emotional level.

Music allows us to join our voices and hearts

When people play or sing together, there is a communion or joining of hearts and spirits through shared playing or singing. If we sing in harmony with others, we feel our place within the harmony and we hear and feel the different sounds above and below ours. In this sense we become part of a musical fabric, one that connects and expresses our hearts and soul.

Shared music becomes its own common language

Whether a television show has a theme song, a country has a national anthem or a high school reunion DJ plays songs from the years everyone was in school together, hearing this music is a common language that is recognizable, evokes memories and images, and holds shared experience. Songs represent social movements, like "We shall overcome." They represent a coming together in good times or tough times, like "We are the world."

Music can be created or experienced alone or with others, but its power to bring us together or feel connected carries through however we experience it! Music really can bridge most all divides and strengthen most any connection.

The Power of the Heart and Neural Buddhism

Today, I chaperoned my 14 year old son, Alex's, Coming of Age class on a field trip to the Shambhala Meditation Center in Brookline, MA. In the Coming of Age program, the kids spend a year doing community service, learning about different faiths and belief systems, take a class about relationships, love, intimacy and sexuality, work with a same gender mentor, and write a statement of their own beliefs and values (a credo) for the graduation ceremony at the end of the year. Today's field trip was a journey into Buddhist practice.

In an interesting confluence of events (or what we can call synchronicity), my friend Steven Otero asked me if I had heard of "neurobuddhism." My response was initially, "no," but within a matter of moments, I had googled the term and quickly started getting up to speed about this interesting thread that might be injecting some spirituality into the hard core materialism of brain science.

I was fortunate enough to come across a wonderful essay by NY Times Op-Ed columnist, David Brooks, dated May 13 2008 and entitled, "The Neural Buddhists." One section of the article grabbed my attention. Having been a vocal advocate and educator for the literal power of the heart, since the heart generates the strongest electromagnetic field in the body, and heart waves can entrain brain waves, some of the sentiments of neurobuddhism, as Brooks explained it, seem to speak of properties I associate with "the power of the heart."

Brooks writes, "First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships."
In a workshop, a support group or even a business meeting, our heart fields reflect a dance of "the dynamic process of relationships," even without our conscious knowledge that this is actually taking place. In spite of the many way we feel isolated in today's compartmentalized world, when we are to face with others, our hearts are wired to participate in a dynamic relational dance. Even if intellectually, we may feel alone, when gathered in a real-time group, our hearts know we are interconnected and not alone.

"Second," continues Brooks, "underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions." Qualities of heart transcend culture, geography and religion. What the heart knows to be true is very basic and human. Loving one another, respecting the natural world and caring for our children are core to our cardiac fiber and our emotional DNA. While religions can get us into political battles, heart-deep values can bridge most any divide.

"Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when the transcend boundaries and overflow with love," adds Brooks. This is the very experience I create in heart-based workshops, be they "healing the traumatized heart," "healing and nurturing the heart," "keeping the vital heart" or even "integrating sexuality and spirituality.
When our heartfields interact, we create a profound, deep and powerful container, where healing is exponential to what we could do just 1-on-1.

When we learn to slow down and focus through the heart (which is its own form of meditation, and perhaps a variation of the Buddhist practice we were guided through today), we are present to ourselves and others, and the moment's experiences and sensations flow through us with ease.
We lose the limitations of our often-busy and ever-thinking mind. We feel the energy of those gathered around us. There is a spiritual richness in the air that we can both breathe in and often touch.

If we proceed to Brooks' fourth point, "God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is," we could say that journeying deep into the heart allows us a sacred, God-full experience, and a sense of interconnection with all that is.
The nature of the heart is pure, spiritual and sacred. The energy of love is universal energy generated and received by the heart.

Often, people have asked me if my work as a heart-centered body psychotherapist wears me out. I have always answered, "No!" Working from a heart space is actually nourishing, enlivening and inspiring. Call it a kind of living meditation-- a relational meditation in the moment and over time. Even when someone's heart space is blocked or inaccessible due to trauma and the anger or wall that often protect the traumatized heart, the act of creating the emotional safety to let the person open and heal, is itself a sacred act.

I would be willing to bet that is a research scientist studied the brain wave patterns that took place between therapist and client doing heart work, they would find some very interesting data that helped bridge the gap between science and spirituality.