Listen Deeply to Yourself. You Are Music. Your Life is Music I am MUSIC? My LIFE is MUSIC? Have you ever thought about yourself as a musical composition? What comes to mind when you think of yourself from this point of view? It can be a strange thing if you haven’t considered it before. You […]
Category Archives: Counseling
Music Therapy and Trauma
Everyone experiences challenges in life. Sometimes these challenges can provide us with great opportunities for personal growth. Yet sometimes these challenges can prove to be traumatic. If left untreated or unacknowledged, these experiences can lead to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). PTSD can be debilitating because it has a physiological, mental, emotional, and social impact on […]
The Magic of the Present Moment
Many times we find ourselves stuck in the past or anticipating the future. Living life in this way can result in our feeling ungrounded or distracted. It takes us away from the magic that is the present moment, wherein we can experience life fully as it is. There are a variety of reasons as to […]
Basic Goodness: A Mindful Approach to Life & Helping Others
More than anything else, I have found that my belief system and worldview about people are of greatest value to me as a therapist. My clinical training at Naropa University introduced me to mindfulness practice and Shambhala. Having trust in human dignity forms the basis of Shambhala, and one of the components to this is […]
Monkey Mind and Mindfulness
It seems fair to say that everyone has, at one point in their life, had an experience of “monkey mind” where their thoughts were frantically jumping from thought to thought. “Monkey Mind” is a term from Buddhism that describes that unsettling state of mind where our thoughts seem to be like a monkey swinging from […]
Examining a Transpersonal View of Aging
For the past month or so I’ve been gradually reading the latest issue of The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, which happens to be devoted to the concept of transpersonal gerontology. I’d never heard of this concept before, and it has been a slow and steady process going through the issue as I’ve been finding each […]
Inspiration in Solitude
Taking a Moment to Reflect How often do you feel alone? How often are you actually alone? When you feel alone, what do you do? When you are alone, how do you spend that time? I ask these questions simply to make a distinction between one’s sense of feeling alone, as opposed to being alone. […]
Finding Balance Within Resistance
Balance. For many people this seems to be ever elusive. What does it mean to have balance in one’s life when there are *so many things* to do? Between possible family responsibilities and professional obligations, how does one find time for themselves? And in those perhaps seemingly rare instances when one does find themselves with […]
The Quality of a Life Well-Lived
“Quality of Life” is a topic that is often on my mind as a result of the work I do in hospice. As a music therapist working with those who are at the end-of-life, I use music to provide physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual support to people during the last months, weeks, days… sometimes hours […]
Not Getting Stressed by Stress
Stress is a natural part of life. It is something that everyone experiences at times regardless of age. (Because even though they may not be able to articulate it, children feel stress too.) Stress is a normal response to situations that we, whether consciously or unconsciously, perceive to be threatening. The stress response is an […]