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: Mental Health
Blog posts related to mental health, including specific conditions
Music Therapy and Trauma
Everyone experiences challenges in life because life isn’t easy. Sometimes these challenges benefit us because they 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 challenging to treat. This […]
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 […]
Creativity: Why It Matters and Tips to Help You Reclaim Yours
Creativity is a word often associated today with artists and musicians. Those “other” people who have “special” artistic talents that allow them to create works of art. The fact of the matter is that everyone of us is a creative being, although it can be easy to lose sight of this as we go about […]