Category: music and healing

February 27, 2022: Music Matters: An Rx For Troubled Times

Published on by Sharon A. Bray, EdD1 Comment

“Music does a lot of things for a lot of people. It’s transporting… It can take you right back, years back, to the very moment certain things happened in your life. It’s uplifting, it’s encouraging, it’s strengthening.” — Aretha Franklin


I’ve mulled over a blog post for days, uninspired and struggling with the blank page staring back at me each morning.  I’ve blamed it on the lingering malaise from a prolonged pandemic, the political and economic unrest, news headlines I try to avoid, and a lack of inspiration.  Yesterday I realized the solution to my struggle had been close at hand all the time: my long-standing morning diet of classical music, playing softly as I write.  It’s been a lifetime source of comfort, contemplation, memories, even inspiration.  In the prolonged period of COVID’s continuing waves, necessary restrictions and isolation music has been the best medicine for my spirit.

As I began to write, I realized that music has played an important role in my life for a long time.  My father’s family loved to sing together at family gatherings.   My parents danced around our living room to the big band music of Tommy Dorsey and Glen Miller.  I showed “musical aptitude” in grade school and was soon enrolled in piano and violin lessons.   Any promise of a musical career, however, was short-lived.  Despite weekly lessons, my preference was to play popular tunes “by ear” on the piano rather than practice the assigned keyboard exercises.  I quit violin lessons, and my piano lessons soon met a similar fate.  For my final recital piece I chose Chopin’s somber “Funeral March,” signaling a conclusion to my piano career, despite the despair of my piano teacher.   I settled on the school band as my next musical challenge but I was assigned a French horn to learn to play, since, as the band director explained, the horn section needed “beefing” up.  My band experience may have permanently soured any inclination to pursue a musical career.

Our high school band was predominantly a marching band. The members were outfitted in uniforms reminiscent of toy soldiers—unattractive for any developing girl.  The band accompanied small-town parades and halftime entertainment during high school football season. Worse, the repertoire of marching music for French horns translated to little more than bruised lips bouncing against the brass mouthpiece and a monotonous succession of after beats, “te ta, te ta,”.  Only when football season ended, did we have an opportunity to play more engaging music. In the Spring of my senior year, our band leader chose Dvořák’s “The New World Symphony” to play for the regional competition.

When our semi-conductor
Raised his baton, we sat there
Gaping at Marche Militaire,
Our mouth-opening number.
It seemed faintly familiar
(We’d rehearsed it all that winter),
But we attacked in such a blur,
No army anywhere
On its stomach or all fours
Could have squeezed though our cross fire…

I like to believe our enthusiasm for leading with those first few opening measures of the symphony was entirely understandable.    Given the opportunity to finally “shine” in the opening measures of Dvorak’s symphony, we made certain we were heard, blasting out the opening notes with no attention to subtlety or modulation.  I still remember the look on our band leader’s face.

By the last lost chord, our director
Looked older and soberer.
No doubt, in mind’s ear
Some band somewhere
In some Music of some Sphere
Was striking a note as pure
As the wishes of Franz Schubert,
But meanwhile here we were:
A lesson in everything minor,
Decomposing our first composer.

From: “The Junior High School Band Concert,” by David Wagoner; Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems.  University of Illinois Press, 1999. 

I gave up French horn when I left for college, opting instead to sing in the college choir my first year.  Despite ultimately veering into psychology, my short-lived musical forays had lasting benefits, fostering a deep and lasting love of music. Many years later, as a young wife and mother living in a small university town in the Maritimes, music returned to my life, this time in the form of a recorder quintet with four friends.   We practiced diligently each week, even occasionally performing in our community.  The weekly practices were a source of happiness and temporarily took me out of my unhappiness.   

A few short years later, my first husband drowned, and again, I found comfort in music during the long nights of grief and sorrow.  I recorded a musical history of our marriage, comprised of songs from the 70s and 80s, listening to it until the tape was finally too stretched and worn to be played.  Many years later, by then remarried and living in Southern California, I enrolled in African drumming lessons, learning and playing West African rhythms on the djembe and dunun. Whatever pressures I felt during the week vanished in the drumming classes. Drumming together with others was an inspiring and joyful activity, one I still miss doing.

As I look back on my musical life, what emerges is not only love and interest in music but my understanding of how beneficial music has been in my life.  I understand why music had such an important role in medicine and healing throughout history. The ancient Greeks believed music could heal the body and the soul. Ancient Egyptians and indigenous peoples used singing and chanting in their healing rituals. After World War II, the U.S. Veterans Administration incorporated music as an adjunct therapy for shell-shocked soldiers. Today, music therapy is widely used to promote healing and enhance the quality of patients ’lives. 

The power of music to integrate and cure is quite fundamental. It is the profoundest non-chemical medication. — Dr. Oliver Sacks, neurologist and author of Awakenings

There are many ways in which music is good for us, something I’ve experienced many times in my life.    Music is beneficial to heart health, positively affecting blood pressure, heartbeat and breathing. Used with cancer patients, it helps to decrease anxiety and ease nausea and is also effective in pain management. Music helps us to relax, reduces fatigue, stress, and alleviates depression. Used during exercise, music can enhance physical performance and help us exercise more efficiently. 

I now appreciate that however undistinguished my musical achievement was in my teens, there were still benefits gained from my experiences.  Music has the potential to enhance youthful self-esteem and academic performance.  As we age, it helps to protect mental sharpness and brain functioning.  Among Alzheimer’s and dementia patients, music has been shown to play an important role in enhancing memory, triggering life stories and face-name recognition, something I witnessed in interactions with my mother in her final years as an Alzheimer’s patient.

Music continues to inhabit my daily life. It’s been an important source of comfort and solace during these many months of COVID, helping to diminish anxiety, stress, restless nights and even the doldrums.  It has been my most available and comforting balm in this prolonged pandemic.  

I think I should have no other mortal wants if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.

—George Bernard Shaw

Writing Suggestions:  How has music influenced your life?

  • Consider the role music has played in your life.  How has it been beneficial to you?
  • Was there particular music that helped you through treatment, recovery from surgical treatment or another difficult time?  Listen to it again, closing your eyes, and try to remember that time and how the music made you feel.
  • Recall a lullaby from childhood, a favorite song, a bit of classical music, or even the somewhat dissonant music from your high school band. What memories or stories does the music trigger?
  • Take any favorite musical recording and listen to it.  Keep your notebook nearby. Capture the random thoughts and associations that come to mind as you listen. Once the recording ends, begin freewriting. Re-read what you’ve written and underline one sentence that has power for you in some way.  Use that sentence to begin writing again on a fresh page. This time, set the timer for 15 minutes and see where your writing takes you.

February 6, 2022: When the Words Just Won’t Come

Published on by Sharon A. Bray, EdD2 Comments

“Writing about a writer’s block is better than not writing at all”
― Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems

I have a confession.  For the past three weeks, I’ve been trying to write a new post for this blog and, generally, failing.  I’ve gotten the mental affliction that is the result of  prolonged pandemic living.  Inspiration is hiding in some dark corner and I can’t seem to coax it out.  For someone who writes, that lack of inspiration can simply increase one’s stress and add to the blockage.

This strange existence of the past two years has finally gotten the better of me—or at least, my brain.  “I feel like I’m moving through sludge,” I remarked to a friend this past week.  She too admitted feeling effects of this prolonged pandemic.  In fact, it would be difficult to find anyone who hasn’t been experiencing similar frustration, lethargy, blues or just a lack of motivation for ordinary tasks.  Thankfully, Toronto is beginning to open up again, although I’m not rushing into so-called normal living just yet.

But while the prolonged nature of the COVID pandemic has been worrisome, it’s fueled divisiveness and protest that only add to this sense of spiritual malaise.  I shun the news reports and headlines–they just unsettle me more. Yet I am saddened by the conflict and aggression that has appeared in Ottawa and beyond in the past many days.  It all challenges my sense of what this country is and has been for me, and why I chose to become a Canadian citizen so many years ago.  I can only hope that the pandemic will not permanently rob us of our humanity to one another.

So I admit to “writer’s block.  The  words just won’t come, or any that do appear on my notebook pages seem heavy and leaden.  It’s the emotion I and so many others have felt like during this pandemic. To wit,  I’ve  found more than a few articles on the impact of the Corona virus on writers’ block!   

 I know this siege of my  “writer’s block” will end or at least, be tempered as my expressive writing workshops begin.  Other’s stories, written and  shared, are uplifting in their honesty and humanness. Even though participants are writing out of life-threatening illness, their honesty and openness are the stuff of courage and hope.  I am always humbled and inspired by the experiences and stories shared with others in the writing groups. 

For the moment, however,  I am trying to honor the need to be more reflective in my daily writing practice, to let the approaching start dates for my workshops be my focus and spark my  inspiration.  I am also taking the advice offered by so many writers in the world to those  of us who write and sometimes face these empty periods.  So if, by chance,  you’re feeling a bit stuck too, I will share that advice to those of you who read this blog.  What is it my mother often said in the midst of any upsetting event?  “This too will pass.”  We can only hope.

Suggestions for re-igniting your writing:

  • Meditation or breathwork can be useful.  I use a short deep breathing exercise each morning before I open my notebook, letting my mind go where it goes as I concentrate on the breath.  It helps my focus and lightens my mood.
  • Music can be calming—and it can also be inspiring.  I have taken to writing with classical music playing very softly in the background.  It helps me settle down and focus.
  • When your worry or dampened spirits take over, name them.  Write them on the page of your notebook as a practice of releasing them.
  • Write about what’s troubling you—and why.  Invariably that leads to other topics, other experiences.  When something feels insistent for me or seems to need exploration,  I tag my notebook page so I can return to it.
  • READ.  A writer writes, but a writer also reads.  I have a steady diet of novels, essays about writing, articles of interest in healthcare, and daily, poetry.  Poetry is a balm, an inspiring and moving experience for me. 
  • Keep writing, but leave the worry behind about not “producing.” It’s not uncommon that you’ll write your way into something new you want to explore further.  My writing, in recent weeks, has been free-wheeling, sometimes reflective, sometimes all over the map, but among all the disconnected paragraphs, an idea or two comes out of nowhere that warrants pursuing.

March 18, 2020: A Practice of Managing Fear and Anxiety

Published on by Sharon A. Bray, EdD6 Comments

                   …Then what I am afraid of comes. I live for a while in its sight.”                           —Wendell Berry (in: This Day:  Sabbath Poems, Collected and New, 1979-2013 )

(To my readers:  I wrote this and posted it this morning on my blog about heart failure, but worry and anxiety has us all in its grip during this crisis, so I am posting it here too, for those of you living with cancer–Sharon Bray).

I admit it.  The corona virus has me on edge.  Since age and heart failure put me in the “greater risk” population, it may be part of the reason I awaken with the shadow of fear or worry close behind me.  The thing is, I know fear and anxiety are not good for my heart.  It’s a bit ironic, a kind of catch-22, because a diagnosis of heart failure is anxiety producing itself, and it’s progressive, so the undercurrent of unease never quite disappears.

The thing is, I know fear and anxiety are not good for my heart. The irony is a bit of a catch-22, because a diagnosis of heart failure or cardiac disease is anxiety producing itself.  And when we’re anxious, it puts extra strain on our hearts, like increasing blood pressure, making us short of breath,  and in more serious cases, interfering with the heart’s normal functioning…nothing anyone living with heart failure or other cardiac conditions needs.

In Japanese, “the kanji (Japanese character) for fear, , shows a leaking heart, for fear drains our spirit.

—Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, PhD, From Mindfulness to Heartfulness, 2018

According to Orly Vardeny, Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Minnesota, “The corona virus’s main target is the lungs. But that could affect the heart, especially a diseased heart, which has to work harder to get oxygenated blood throughout the body…In general, you can think of it as something that is taxing the system as a whole.”  For someone who lives with heart failure, that’s a worry, because my heart doesn’t pump as efficiently as it once did.

Fear, anxiety and worry all take their toll on my emotional and physical well-being.  While we are in the midst of this pandemic, I have to consciously work to  manage my fearful feelings. I follow all the basic health suggestions:  handwashing, sanitizing, staying away from social encounters, diet, exercise and necessary sleep.  But still, keeping my fear and worry in check requires a bit more self-discipline. Here are some of the things that have been helping me manage my level of anxiety and worry.

I’m limiting my exposure to the constant “buzz” and barrage of reports on social media and in the daily news.  Too much information increases worry, and that can result in panic.  It’s important to be in the know, yes, but as psychologists tell us, there’s a point at which information has the unintended effect of increasing your fear.

I take a few breaks during the day to simply be quiet.  There’s a feature on my Apple watch that I now use regularly.  Every few hours, it prompts me to do a minute of deep breathing.  I pause, get quiet, and let the exercise of deep breathing for a few minutes lead me into a short period of meditation, freeing my mind of busy brain or any worrisome thoughts.  Simply be quiet, focusing on the here and now is wonderfully calming and relaxing.

There’s a sense of calm in keeping a regular routine, and my morning routine has become even more important to me as a way to quiet any worrisome or fearful thoughts. I’m up early, before my husband awakens, to claim the hour or so of solitude and quiet I crave–and need-for my writing practice.  It’s a ritual of sorts, freshly ground and brewed coffee, my open notebook, my pen moving across the page.

I place no requirements on this time, but write freely.  Whatever emerges on the page hardly matters—sometimes I vent, other times I write poetry or just write freely, staying open to whatever appears on the page.  What matters most is that it is restorative time for me. I watch the sun rise over Lake Ontario on clearer days, or simply notice life on the street below.  Sometimes nature offers a special gift, like the two Canadian geese, honking and waddling about on the rooftop next door, momentarily lost from their flock.  In those moments, I find gratitude—remembering just how lucky I am in so many ways.  And it calms me.

Today I am fortunate

 to have woken up

I am alive.

I have a precious human life.

I am not going to waste it…

I am going to …

expand my heart out to others…

(From:  “A Precious Human Life,” a prayer by His Holiness, the Dalai Lama)

I’ve found that reaching out to and connecting with family and friends here, in Canada, Japan and the US has also helped to calm my fears.  While I have discovered that  mindfulness helps me to calm, focus, and reduce stress, so does honoring matters of the heart—connecting with people.  As Dr. Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu demonstrates in his book, From Mindfulness to Heartfulness (2018), in worrisome times, our connection to and with one another are even more important to what we call “enlightenment.”  The kanji (Japanese character) for mindfulness, Murphy-Shigematsu explains, consists of two parts, the top part meaning “now,” and the bottom part meaning “heart.”

All of us share in this worry over the impact of the corona virus, but the simple act of connection, whether online, by telephone, letters or a note written on a  greeting card, serves as a reminder that none of us are alone in our concerns or feelings.  As for my health concerns, I’m lucky to be use Medley, the smart phone app that records my weight, blood pressure, heart rate, and symptoms daily, which is monitored by my healthcare team at Toronto General’s Peter Munk Cardiac Center. This too, provides some solace, a sense of being connected to the people who provide my cardiac care.

Music is a big part of my life, especially classical, and is a necessary ingredient in self-care and inspiration.  It calms, inspires, and reminds me of the beauty and creative spirit that is part of being human.  I’ve also been moved by the inspirational You Tube videos of people in Italy, Spain and Israel, isolated in their apartment buildings because of the impact of the corona virus, playing and singing together from their balconies.  Last week, I discovered cellist Yo Yo Ma has released a series of videotapes on Facebook, the first “song of comfort” he offered was  Dvořák’s “Going Home”  Ma explained:  “In these days of anxiety, I wanted to find a way to continue to share some of the music that gives me comfort.” Yesterday’s  offering was  Sarabande from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 3, which he dedicated to the healthcare workers on the front lines.

So, we all ride it out, taking the necessary precautions, finding ways to stay connected, keep our fear in check, and weather this crisis, alone and together.  I’ve been thinking of my mother, whose admonitions and homespun prescriptions sometimes made my siblings and me giggle behind her back, but she’d suffered more than a little hardship in her younger life, and looking back, I realize her many “mantras” was her way of coping and getting through tough times.  We were too young to understand it then, but we suffered from pain, illness or even an adolescent broken heart, her mantra was repeated again and again:  This too shall pass, she’d say.   And yes, so will this crisis, but for now, my task is to do all I can do to remain healthy and not be swept up in panic or fear. And that requires a little practice every single day.

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

(“The Peace of Wild Things,” by Wendell Berry, in:  Selected Poems, 1998)

For Readers:

What is helping you get through this time?  How are you managing your worry or fears?   What resources or suggestions can you offer to others?  Feel free to comment on this post with some of your suggestions.   For now, stay safe; stay well.