Sounding where you are

A couple of weeks ago, as the pandemic was building in the United States, I set out to create a guided anxiety reduction video for my students, as well as anyone else I thought might benefit. However, I wasn't happy with the existing music selections in my library and decided to write my own. So one quiet morning in quarantine, a musical phrase came into my mind. I picked up my violin and started recording. Instead of the soothing and gentle tune I expected, however, something entirely different emerged. It was intense, emotional, and expansive. I found myself completely absorbed in each sound, layering melodies and harmonies line by line. It was instinctively satisfying, like drinking water on a sweltering day. After repeatedly playing, reworking, and listening to the symphony of strings that unfolded, a deep well of emotions washed over me. Finally words came. Anxiety, hope, grief, tragedy, heroism. (Listen to the recording here.)

I wasn't really surprised. Most people were indeed feeling anxious and grief-stricken about the state of the world. However, I had been so focused on my role as a music therapist and educator that I had not had a chance to tend to my own emotions. Before I could be in a place of calm and create peaceful music, I knew from past experience and training that it was important to express the feelings I was experiencing in the moment. I needed a place to safely express the grief, shock, and worry that I felt as I watched country after country report lives lost, fear, and chaos. Buddhist nun and teacher Pema Chodron describes this eloquently in her book Start Where You Are.

From a Buddhist perspective, in order to find balance and tranquility, we must accept exactly what we are feeling and experiencing, right in this moment, without pushing it away or craving for something else.

When we do so, a different kind of peace can arise, one that is not necessarily "happy" on the surface level. It is a sense of calm that is deeply accepting regardless of what may surround us, that can help us to be in sync with the laws of nature and the universe.

This is the magic of music, that every music therapist knows. The sounds we create, regardless of whether we have musical training or not, express everything and beyond that we hold deep in our hearts, creating a sound picture of our insides. And through this act of witnessing, creating, listening, of embracing the parts of ourselves that we are too afraid to see, we have the potential to become whole. The music has the capacity to connect us to humanity and create a bridge to a higher consciousness. No medicine can do this. No electronic device can do this. No social media account, money, house, material possession, or another person can do this for us.

Music and the arts, and our openness to them and each other, are one of the few ways to transform struggle, heartache, and tragedy into beauty.

Music can express the cry of the human spirit in aesthetics, timbre and tone, and understand exactly how we are feeling, even when we do not. A reverent relationship with music can help us start where we are, and through the journey it carries us on, end up where the deepest fibers of our being dream of. Indeed, in times of crisis, music is essential work.