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.

Know Your Voice, Know Your Power

When I was in grammar school, I remember doing a science experiment with a prism, sunlight and a piece of paper. Our teacher told us that if we used the prism to reflect the sunlight onto the paper at the correct angle, we could harness the energy of the sun and burn a hole in the paper.

That sounded like fun and even magical to grammar school aged me. I remember trying to figure out what the correct angle might be. So many different possibilities existed, and many of them yielded no result. But after a lot of experimentation, I was overjoyed to find the right angle, and watch my prism bend the sun's light and burn a hole in my piece of paper. Once I found that right angle, I could repeat the process over and over again. And I felt like I had just been introduced to a super power!

As I grew into a singer/songwriter and even an author and public speaker, I realized the metaphor of the prism, the paper and the sunlight was a helpful one to explain and illustrate the power of voice. You may ask, "what is voice?" Voice is a very deeply rooted, innate sense of who we are. To connect with that innate sense of self requires not only introspection, but also embodied introspection. If we are not grounded, and feeling and sensing our somatic experience, it is hard to find that deep internal place that might be called essence or soul or spirit. That deep place is where we experience the part of us who just knows who we really are. When we find that place, voice gives us a way to direct our core energy through an expressive pathway and to create a mark in the world, however large or small.

Connecting with that core sense of self is a journey and a process. And even if we find our core sense of self deep in our heart or gut, being able to translate the felt sense into meaningful expression is a whole other process. I believe that human beings are innately creative, and finding a pathway to connect with and express our creative energy is important to health, well-being and joie de vivre. Our society is very verbal, so "voice" is often expected to be experienced and expressed in words. Words are certainly one form of expression for voice, but not the only one. Drawing, painting, taking photographs and other visual arts, dancing, just plain moving, singing, songwriting or any other form of musical composing or even acts of service towards others can also be expressions of voice. All of these forms can be very powerful both for the creator and the receiver.

What is most important is both the energy you direct and how you direct it. When the energy comes from your core, it can feel enlivening to channel it. Opening our creative channel to find an authentic expression of that energy, is a practice that can be enhanced by learning how to become present the moment, grounded in our felt experience and non-judgmental about what will come through, when and how. When an athlete is in the zone, they are likely connected to their felt sense of core energy, and channeling it through their physical art form. Finding our "zone" for living the dailiness of life as well as for creative endeavors helps us feel more powerful and authentic in our actions and interactions.

For women, the power of voice is even wired into our neurobiology. When a woman in stressed out, in order to decompress, she usually needs to write, vent, speak, or express herself in some meaningful way to another human being. If she is not allowed to express, she feels like she will implode. This is the equivalent of the way a man decompresses by sitting on the couch in front of the tv and channel surfing. Different neurobiologies is different genders lead to different needs for destressing and decompression.

Being able to express oneself to decompress and being able to express oneself to create or bring something into being through channeling one's energies are two very important examples of the power of voice.

Finding Your True Voice

We live in a culture that teaches us to be quiet and not speak up from an early age. Children are taught to "be seen but not heard." When a parent or teacher feels a child is taking up too much space, they are often told to be quiet or more crudely, to "shut up." These kinds of messages stifle our hearts and souls and keep us from growing and evolving into a true, purposeful and happy self.

In reality, not only do we need to find our voice to fully express and connect with self and others, but also others need to hear what we have to say to connect with self and others as well.

Here are 8 things we need to find our true voice:

1. Emotional safety: When emotional safety is present, we can feel and access our deeper sensations, emotions and thoughts. Emotional safety allows us to drop our defenses and dig deep into the root of who we are. When we are in touch with that deeper sense somatically and emotionally, voice, including words, follow.

2. Awareness that voice is a key capacity--something to find and have: Kids need to hear the message that voice is a critical capacity. Adult women and men need to be encouraged to find their voice and speak it out loud. Learning to find and use your voice is at least as important as learning to use a spreadsheet or read and write.

3. Patience: It takes time to find our voices and patience to be present with what is there. Patience creates spaciousness and relaxation which helps us feel our deeper thoughts and feelings.

4. Introspection: Learning to slow down, meditate, go inside, journal and reflect help us connect with our deeper self and what we really have to say.

5. A climate of non-judgment: When we judge ourselves or feel judged, we often censor our true feelings and thoughts. This leads to suppressing our true voice rather than expressing it.

6. Focusing on what you feel, not just what you think: Our deeper voice lies in the heart, including feelings, sensations and deeper experiences that the mind or brain may not be able to access.

7. Having permission to feel all your feelings, and embrace them as human: There are no "bad feelings" really. Anger, pain and fear are just as human as joy and happiness. If you suppress some of your feelings, including intense ones, it is hard to feel your wholeness as a human being.

8. Learning to trust your heart: Because our culture often lacks emotional safety, we often become afraid to listen and follow our hearts. It is actually the heart that helps us find our true voice and vision and therefore take meaningful action.

Being Gentle With Anger

"Anger is the roar of a lion, the cry of a universe longing to be born. It reminds you, when you have forgotten, that the power of life moves through you. That you have a voice."

--Jeff Foster

Anger often gets a bad rap. Sure, when a person acts out thoughtlessly from anger or impulsively without considering the impact of his/her actions on self or other, anger can be harmful personally and relationally. Becoming verbally or physically abusive is not okay. However, we often fail to make distinction between healthy, life promoting angry feelings and destructive expressions that may obscure deeper feelings and experiences underneath the anger.

Anger is a natural response to someone crossing your boundary in a way that is not okay for you, imposing their will on yours, treating you unfairly, breaking an agreement or breaking your trust. In these circumstances, your anger says, "what you are doing is not okay for me." "I matter." "I have rights and needs." Anger allows you to stand in your truth and your worth. And it tells the other person that what they have done is not okay.

If you fail to honor your anger in these kinds of circumstances--pushing it away, labeling it as "bad" or "negative," you do your heart and soul a disservice. On the other hand, if you act out from the anger, you may do yourself a disservice as well, and make the situation worse. Being able to "be with" anger--feeling its intensity, its power, and often the pain underneath it, allows you to stand in the value of your own experience.

Poet Jeff Foster writes, "Feel its pounding, its vibrations, its longing to be acknowledged, held. At its burning core, discover courage. The courage to be yourself. To hold your path fearlessly. To speak for those without a voice…. To roar with love."

Anger can be an affirmation of life. Anger can be an act of love for others or self-love. If we don't care, we don't get anger. What we do with anger is a choice and learning how to respond rather than react is an important skills and lesson.

If we suppress anger, it does not go away. Anger holds a lot of energy. It can eat away at us deep inside. It can haunt us. And it might pop up down the road when something unfair, or confrontational happens again. A woman I know noted that she became like a feral cat as a child to respond to feelings of unfairness and invisibility. Her power was in her anger, like a cat growling and swatting with her claws. So, when something felt unfair, she would get angry and confrontational. There was no room for her hurt and her pain. And sadly, there were things she needed then and now which required vulnerability that she could not access because anger had become her shield. She had never really gotten comforted when she needed comforting. And she had also never been able to express her anger in a way that felt healing, where she got heard. She found herself getting stuff in the growling, when she needed to find comfort. Learning how to hold her anger and pursue what she needed was a critical learning.

Even the worst criminals who act out of anger in unfathomable ways often have a painful context that fuels their unfathomable actions. I read an article in the Boston Globe today about the history of a man who shot a Boston Police Officer. What he did was horrible, for sure. But the author of the article asked, "what kind of life had this 41 year old man had that could have led him to do such a horrible thing?" It turns out that the shooter had a 23 year record with the law, including having been shot 13 times on two occasions himself. One time when he was being arrested, he told the arresting officer, "It's okay, just shoot me." The author of the article noted that this was not a normal response, but instead reflected the level of violence this man lived in and around since childhood. He posed the question: how scary must it have been to live in this kind of environment, and to have a gun in your possession at all times as a first line of self-defense against others with guns?

There is no arguing that shooting the police officer was wrong. And yet, recognizing the humanity in the "criminal" and what led him to behave the way he did is critical. If we found ways to intervene with compassion first, perhaps those most wounded could learn to be more gentle with their anger. And perhaps the difference between being with anger in a healthy embodied way and acting out of anger in a way that is destructive to self and others would be more commonly understood.

Alexythymia: No Words For Feelings

Feelings and emotions are important because they give a language to our experience where mind and body meet, according to Living In Balance authors Joel and Michelle Levey. Our feelings and emotions help us know what is true for us, and provide guidance both for our own self-care and well-being, and also for our work, relationships and overall health.

Many people suffer, often unknowingly, from an ailment called alexythymia, in which there are no words for feelings. Have you ever found yourself having a strong feeling, yet been at a loss for words? Or is it difficult, in general, to find words for what you feel? Many people who have experienced great stress or trauma struggle to find words for feelings. And many people have never had the opportunity to learn how to translate their feelings into language at all.

Even if it is hard to get in touch with our feelings or find words for feelings, we are still impacted by the waves of life. When experiences impact us strongly at the emotional level, and we have no means of expression, we can feel trapped in an emotional prison, that causes great internal stress.

Creating emotional safety is often a first step in learning to connect with our emotions and feelings, and learning to notice the sensations and energy currents that run through our body when we feel sad, happy, angry, scared, disappointed, or anxious. Our bodies often communicate through physical sensations: knots in the stomach, lumps in the throat, tightness in the chest, headache that won't go away.... We have learned to label these experiences as symptoms, which are "bad," and we are supposed to make "go away," rather than understanding that this is our body's way of trying to get our attention to learn what we feel and what we really need. Underneath most physical "symptoms" are emotions and feelings, which when accessed and expressed, help us learn about what is true for us and what we really need.

How do you begin to connect with your feelings to find the voice they invite you to discover? Slow down, sit in a chair, take some deep breaths, and focus on getting grounded. As you inhale, feel the physical contact of your back with the back of the chair, of your pelvis and tailbone with the seat of the chair and of your feet with the floor or rug. Breathe in the physical sensation of the chair and the floor supporting you. Exhale any tension, any stress, any strain in your body and mind. Invite your inner observer to notice any passing thoughts, simply noting them, and inviting them to melt away with your exhale.

As you slow down, relax, quiet and ground, the sensations and feelings in your body and heart are more likely to be noticeable. Invite them to speak to you, letting go of the need to analyze or judge what you find. Write in your journal. Type into your computer. Just notice what you experience and record it.

Initially, you might not notice anything. That is okay. There is a power in just slowing down, getting grounded and creating a space to listen. In time, your body and heart are likely to communicate with you. And as you listen to what your body and heart have to say, you will gain information that will help you put your felt experience into words. Once you can do this, you can choose what to share with friends and loved ones and deepen your connection and communication.

You may even find yourself able to write a "dictionary," translating common feelings, emotions and body sensations into the messages they contain. Giving voice to your body and feelings will reduce your internal stress level and improve your communication with others!