Music And Mental Health

As I prepared my set list to perform at a benefit concert for Tunefoolery this past Saturday, I found myself reflecting on the connection between music and mental health. My own two deepest life passions have been healing and music. And my experience is that both are sourced from the same creative well inside. Music and healing both are sourced from the heart, and both nourish and express our deeper, often non-verbal or voiceless parts in life affirming ways.

Being involved in organizations that integrate music and healing, whether it be performing at a benefit, singing with the Boston Minstrels at prisons, homeless shelters or VA hospitals, or singing as a singer-songwriter in mental health settings, assisted living facilities has always left me feeling emotionally and spiritually richer.

I found myself journaling about why music fosters mental health:

Music helps us find each of us find our voice. Voice is the expression of the soul. Voice is a sense of who we are and what we bring to the world. Voice helps us define our sense of self and show up in the world.

Music helps us express what is deeper than words. Much of our core humanity is experienced deeper than words. It is experienced in what we feel emotionally and somatically. It is experienced in felt sense, impulse, a momentary touch or glance. Music is a way to translate the non-verbal, with words and with melody, chords and sound.

Music touches the heart. Our world is not very emotionally safe. We need to defend and protect our hearts to keep safe. Behind our walls of protection, we may be safe at one level, but numb or alone. Music safely finds a way to reach through protective walls or defenses to reach the heart.

Music opens the heart. As the heart is touched by music, it often opens. Tears flow. Joy radiates. Anger may be safely felt. Vulnerability can also be safely felt. In these ways, music gives us the gift of emotional aliveness.

Music helps us feel connected and no alone. The stories expressed in songs are often our stories. Stories of love. Stories of loss. Lessons learned. Relationships with mothers and fathers and daughters and sons and friends and lovers. We recognize our own relationships, experiences and journeys and feel our interconnection.

Music bridges all divides. Music is not just words and notes. It is a vibration. It is energy. Is it emotion. And the notes, words, vibration, and energy reach through walls, across divides, and even beyond differences of culture and language.

Music is love energy in sound. The vibration and energy of music is love. Like Stevie Wonder writing music "in the key of life." Music from the heart reaches the heart. The heart recognizes the energy of love.

Music helps us feel and release what is locked up inside. What is locked up inside us is often at the root of what gets labelled as "mental illness." Anxiety. Depression. Trauma. Fear, pain, sadness, anger, aloneness all get locked inside us. It our spirit is weighted down. We numb. We freeze. We dissociate. If our feelings are locked up, we don't know how to find the key to release them...until music gives us that key.

Music touches the core of our humanity. I can not tell you how deeply I have been touched as I hear the talent and the heart of people who share their voice in song in prisons, in homeless shelters, in hospitals. People who feel lost and invisible command center stage. I have found my tears flowing freely, and shared tears with others also deeply touched.

Embodying Compassion

"The more you listen, the more you will hear. The more you hear, the more and more deeply You will understand." --Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

What keeps us separate from self and others? What leads us to put up shields or walls to defend ourselves from the deeper experiences of life, including not only pain but also joy? Yes, we have lost, we have suffered, we have been betrayed, we have been abandoned....but is not the price we pay for closing our hearts even greater than the other pain and loss we feel when our hearts are open to both our own struggles and the struggles of others in this world?

Embodying compassion means finding the internal strength and courage to hold ourselves and others with love and sacred respect, and to create the safety within and without to take down our masks. When we take down our masks we can see heart to heart, soul to soul. When we take down our masks we can both see others and be seen for who we truly are.

Authors Joel and Michelle Levey believe, "It takes courage to wake up, to open our wisdom eyes, look more deeply, see more clearly, and feel deeply into the subtle, complex, and profound interrelationships that weave the fabric of our lives and world."

They continue, "To the fainthearted, it may superficially seem easier to live in denial, mindless of the intensity of beauty, joy, and wonder, numbed to the sorrow, suffering, and pain in our lives and world. Aloof and semi-disembodied, we distance ourselves from the raw, vivid, intensity, and intimacy of our feelings and our visceral responses to the suffering of the world within and around us. Such self-protective strategies keep us distanced from our heart, our feelings, our loved, ones, yet sooner or later, most of us get cracked open, one way or another, by the raw intensity of the nature of our lives and world."

Joel and Michelle suggest that when we eat each day we have a perfect opportunity to bring together some of the qualities involved in embodying compassion: "gratitude, wisdom and dedication." If we eat three meals a day, then we can take a moment out of our busy lives three times each day to focus on embodying compassion.

They suggest four levels of awareness to focus on:

1. Set the intention to be mindful and compassionate as you eat. When we set an intention, we focus on mind, our energy and our heart. When we are conscious of bringing compassion to our meals, to our food, to each bite we take and to each moment, our energy flows accordingly. Compassion helps nourish us as we digest our food, and compassion emanates from us as the food becomes part of us.

2. From a place of compassion, think about where your food came from and what that means. The Leveys invite you to consider where your food came from, how wholesome that environment might be, how the food got to you from its place of origin and how those involved in getting the food to you were treated--be they plants, animals or people involved in farming or food production. The more consciousness involved in the created, harvesting and distribution of food, the more compassionate energy accompanies the food we bring to our table.

3. Consider your own food choices if compassion were a screen through which you would make choices. Is the food you are eating now the food you would choose if you looked at your choices through the eyes of compassion? Would you consider more vegetables and grains? Do you know how humanely any fish or animals you eat were treated? How pure are the foods you eat? Processed? Organic? GMO free? Does reflecting on these questions inspire you to take an action step today?

4. If you were to eat in a way that truly embodies compassion, what would that mean? Would you make more choices that are life sustaining and health promoting? Would you share this consciousness with friends, family and loved ones? Would this consciousness move beyond food alone and into other products you purchase or create?

Since we literally become what we eat, food becomes a great laboratory for embodying compassion!

Dancing With Life: I Hope You'll Dance

"I hope you never lose your sense of wonder. You get your fill to eat but always keep that hunger. May you never take one single breath for granted. God forbid love ever leave you empty handed. I hope you feel small when you stand beside the ocean. Whenever one door closes I hope one more opens. Promise me that you'll give faith a fighting chance. And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance. I hope you dance."

--Lee Ann Womack

As a little girl, I was always moved to dance. When my family went on vacation to the Cape, if we drove by a "sock hop," I would always ask my parents to pull over so I could go inside. My parents told me I was a little girl, and that I would not be allowed inside. But I asked and asked and asked every single time we passed a "sock hop" sign for months on end. And one day, perhaps realizing I just was not going to stop asking, they let me go inside. Child or not, I jumped right in and danced. And I connected with a very deep impulse in me that has always moved me, carried me and expressed me.

I learned that dance is really a wonderful metaphor for life. And while it was a sad occasion, the funeral of a teenage boy from the Boys to Men program's father's sudden and unexpected death, that reconnected me with Lee Ann Womack's poignant song, "I Hope You Dance," I am grateful to have her words reintroduced to my heart and mind. When given the choice to sit it out or dance, I always DANCE.

Dance is like love: each moment invites you to a constant opening, to be present, to use all of your senses, to let yourself move with what moves you. Dance, like love, invites you to let go of self-judgment, judgment of others and other inhibitions, and let yourself be moved from the inside out. Dance, like love, is, in the words of Kim Anami, "a constant choice to be loving, to be kind, generous and to take the high road in everything. To see the best in those around you." And to let your spirit guide your every move.

To dance with life is to be both receptive and co-creative. By being open and receptive to all of life's currents, and to what stirs your own heart and soul, allows you to not only tap your own internal creative well, but to join forces collaboratively with other people, spirit and the flow of life moment to moment and over time. Dancing with life allows you to fully embrace possibility, and opportunity. Dancing with life allows you to integrate vision and action.

In life, just like on the dance floor, there are many moods and tempos and beats. And some are slow. Others are fast. Some are happy. Some are sad. But it is the fullness and wholeness and variety and authenticity that brings the richness of the experience home. To be fully alive, we feel everything--dark and light. Our culture tends to value "positive" experiences and devalue or even reject what gets labelled as "negative" experiences. Realistically, some experiences feel better than others. But they are all essential, valuable and life enriching experiences. Some of us prefer a Latin beat. Others like hip hop. Or rock and roll. Or jazz. Or R&B. All genres are, as Stevie Wonder so aptly wrote, "Songs in the key of life."

The price of sitting out is high. Lee Ann Womack says, "Never settle for the path of least resistance. Living might mean takin' chances but they are worth takin'. Lovin' might be a mistake but it's worth makin,' Don't let some hell bent heart leave you bitter, When you come close to selling' out reconsider." Dancing with life may not always be easy. In fact, sometimes it might be just plain hard or painful. Yet, if we can be present with hard and painful, we also have the capacity to be present will easy, and joyful. An open heart feels all there is to feel. And what more complete experience is there than to fully dance!!!