Category: Feeling good

Music has power in our bodies, to the degree to which we permit it.

This is obvious but so much a part of everyday life that I suspect we ignore it.  We certainly don’t use it to our best advantage.  In fact, it may be used to influence our behaviour without our awareness.   Have you ever noticed the background music in restaurants or grocery stores?  You might wonder, actually, why on earth anyone bothers to have music in the grocery store.  But it is for a very clear reason:  people’s behavioural tempos are affected by the music in the background, even, or maybe especially, when you are not fully aware of what you are hearing.

I play music in my waiting room, and it is a particular, carefully chosen type of music.   I choose relaxing, non-challenging music for that space.  I don’t want music that is too hard to listen to, so I don’t include jazz or (much) classical music, because most people don’t feel comfortable with that music. And because the trajectory lines in that music are long…that is, in order to feel the whole pattern, you have to listen for several minutes, and that’s not always available in the waiting room.  Even with that, I don’t put Top 40 pop on my playlist because going to the therapist is NOT like going to the mall.  It is not a casual, no-big-deal sort of experience.   I look for fairly attractive, innocuous, relaxing music without obvious repetitive patterns.  In other words, New Age music which is often actually marketed for relaxation or to accompany massage, Reiki, or other calming modalities.

All of this actually is peripheral to my point, which I promise to get to…..we are affected, sometimes quite deeply, by the music and sounds around us, but we are often not mindful of these effects.  When you tune in to what you are hearing, you become part of the moment, part of what is going on.   You get to experience your own experience!   In a very clear way, you see yourself responding to the music, which otherwise you might consider background.  But background becomes foreground when we take a moment, breathe, listen, and feel.

This question of how music affects you can be an entire area for self-inquiry.   What kinds of music do you find energizing?   Enlivening? Relaxing and soothing?  What challenges you to pay attention?  What do you notice about yourself when you are challenged that way?    And of course, music will tap into memory systems.  So you might notice that songs from your youth generate some feelings that are like you might have felt years ago.   How can you put those bits together?

As you begin this practice, you may begin also to understand how you might have been triggered into a different mood state in the past.   Perhaps you came home from the store feeling really wonderful, bright, cheerful, alive….maybe you heard a song on the “background music” that reminded you of a wonderful memory.   Or perhaps you suddenly develop a dark, somber mood….what have you just been hearing?

If music can affect our mood without our awareness, can we harness that power to influence our moods purposefully?  I know that Bach has gotten me through some very difficult times.  When everything else in my life seems like it is falling apart, I can put on the some of the piano works and feel a shift.  Even though listening to Bach won’t fix my life, it can remind me that some things maintain their integrity and will stay stable even if I feel like I am coming unglued.   I also know that I have run some pretty long distances listening to even cheesy music like Tom Petty singing “I Won’t Back Down.”  Having a sound track for parts of your life can shift mood, support memory, and remind you that your life is bigger than the story you tell yourself. Check it out: notice music in your everyday world and see what it is doing to your inner space.  Then see how you can use that information consciously.

 

 

My life seems to be made up of little realizations.  That is, I keep finding myself suddenly seeing relationships and reasons for things that I either 1) never questioned or 2) had already relegated to the “clearly understood” pile.   So now I am left wondering if I am the only person who sees things in terms of my beliefs about that rather than what they ARE.   In this case, the belief is that eggshells are what holds eggs together.  T’aint so!  T’aint so, I tell ya.

So the story is this:  on the weekend, I had occasion to move my black plastic compost bin.  This was to make way for another backyard project, but I have to say that I wasn’t too excited about my task.   The bin has been the daily recipient of food waste from our kitchen.   That is, spoiled vegetables and limp fruit, the peels and ends of food that was on the menu, the left-over bits and pieces of kitchen, um, stuff.  Garbage, in some people’s language.   I snicker daily about putting food out on the raccoon buffet, because I know that my bin is visited nightly by assorted scavengers, and I am resigned and now somewhat amused by that fact.   I also knew that under this week’s and last week’s layers of kitchen waste, there was likely some pretty rich compost in this bin.  But to get to the compost and move the bin, I had to shovel through the recent additions.  In short, the rotting garbage.

Like most tasks I expect to be onerous, I tried to take a mindful approach;   noticing what was present, noticing my thoughts and how my thoughts tended to influence my ability to appreciate or tolerate the task, and trying to just be with the compost, the day, and the feeling of shoveling stuff into the wheel barrow and moving it.   So it turned out to be an okay job:  in fact, I had a sense that maybe I should be more aware of the waste that I generate anyway.    And the finished compost was a thing of beauty, at least to the gardener in me.   Gorgeous, dark, friable, filled with life, actually, much of which I couldn’t see, but some of which was visible and moving in my gloves…I ended up putting a lot of the lovely black stuff in the garden.

However, I noticed that even the finished compost was full of eggshells.    Okay, I’ll admit that I eat a lot of eggs.    Not just a lot, a lot by probably anyone’s standards…more than a dozen in a week, and that’s just me, not the rest of the family.   But I figured all those shells were breaking down in the compost bin, enriching the soil with calcium and whatever cool stuff they are made of.  Not so!   Those eggshells were just as intact in the bottom of the compost bin as the ones in the top.   So…eggshells don’t break down easily in compost.

I have been pondering this now for several days.   I want the good minerals from the eggshells in my compost.  What to do?   Crush the shells, to make things maybe work a little faster?   That won’t hurt, but I don’t know if it will help.   So I have started saving them to crush them before heading to the bin.   I have discovered that crushing eggshells isn’t as easy as it sounds.  The shell itself is just a casing for the real container for the egg itself.  The membrane of the egg is tough, flexible, and resilient.  It is living tissue, while the egg is alive, though the shell is not.   Egg shells, when the membrane is removed, are quite fragile and do crush easily.   The real protection for this egg cell, this part of a bird that can become another bird (given proper circumstances), comes from that membrane.

I have spent part of my day trying, unsuccessfully, to remove the membrane from the inside of my breakfast eggshells.    I am gobsmacked, once again, by my blindness.  I have always assumed that eggs were protected by their shells, and the hard, solid quality of that shell was what kept them safe, or relatively safe, except from predators like me.   But it seems that the hard, rigid, unyielding shell is a cover for the real protection, that membrane that flexes, bends, is resistant to tearing or breaking, and which is practically invisible.   I have been hoodwinked by eggs all this time.

Stories need a point; this one has both a metaphor and a moral.  The metaphor for me is the eggshell, representing our defenses in the world.   We can rigidify ourselves (many of us do this regularly), become firm and unyielding in our beliefs, our behaviours, our “shoulds.”     The more rigidly and tightly we hold ourselves, the more vulnerable we become to cracking and breaking.  What really and truly keeps us intact is something invisible, something that flows just beneath our tough outer shell, the sense of ourselves as organism, resilient and flexible.

So that’s the metaphor.  I like it.  It will make me think about breakfast in a different way.  The moral?   Well, that’s probably up to you.  Maybe it has something to do with finding out cool stuff even when you are shoveling garbage.  Or about garbage being in the eye of the beholder.  Or about how garbage can be transformed into insight if you look deeply.  Or something profound like that.

I’m going to continue to think about my layers;  my apparently tough but breakable outer shell, and my flexible resilient inner membrane.   I feel safer about letting go of the shell when I think of my other protection.