Music Therapy

by Ingrid Naiman

It is unfortunately not convenient at this time for me to participate in person at the Congress on Cancer and Spirituality. However, I have been inwardly focused on the event as well as the presentation by my good friend Gail Barber.

Gail and I met in 1995 when I was beginning to rejoin society after a seemingly endless dark night of the soul. She asked me how much I would charge to sit with her while she channeled music for people in transition. I pinched myself to see if I had died and gone to Heaven. My luck was obviously changing: a world famous harpist was offering to pay me to listen to her play.

As it turned out, Gail did not move the direction she had initially intended. Instead, she immediately perceived the need to work with the inner child to support its need for recognition and healing and relationship to the conscious and superconscious dimensions of our being.

We developed a unique capacity to work together.

Shadows on the Soul

Twenty years ago, I wrote a book, still unpublished, called Shadows on the Soul. It was about the relationship of memory to illness. Though all the material in the book was elicited through a form of music therapy called the Well-Springs Technique, I went on to evolve my own methods that were less invasive and more rarefied. I don't know how to say this better. I did not feel that every detail of the unconscious has to be brought to the level of conscious recognition. It is sufficient that people discover their main themes and start integrating the pieces.

Shadows now seems like an old piece of work, probably because I went on and the world never got a chance a read this work though I continue to think the book is timeless. Several major realizations came about through the work I did on Shadows. First, while much of our conscious energy is involved in day-to-day living and the dramatic issues of birth, disease, and death, the unconscious is not affected by the interruptions of birth and death. It is circular rather than linear and it simply contains memory.

Memory

This said, it does not catalogue memories in a chronological or even logical order. It amalgamates memories into composites that suggest patterns rather than discrete events and histories. In objective terms, it is inherently unreliable because it merges similar emotional material into memory banks that are accessed through the power of association rather than calendars.

Associations are always emotional. In other words, "fear" might be a big label on one of the main vaults in the memory bank. Any frightening experience or reflection on such an experience creates a resonance that unlocks the vault and permits exploration of the other areas of that vault.

Memory works more or less like a computer. You have short-term memory that is similar to RAM. You dial a phone number, there is no answer. You try again later, but you have to look up the number because you didn't "save" the number in a permanent file. There are many such passing memories, but longer-term memory is more like a hard drive. All the information is there, but you can't see it all at once. You have to bring it up piece-by-piece and once in RAM, you can overwrite a file before saving it again. Emotional memories are like this, which is why some methods of recall tend to involve chaotic associations that may not be historically correct.

Music and Memory

There are several reasons that music helps to elicit these memories. First, music has patterns as do memories. At a certain point, there is a resonance and evocation and the vaults open. There are many types of music that work in such circumstances. Music that is hugely congenial to a person creates an immediate resonance. For example, Gail can play something for me in E-flat. In seconds, I become relaxed, at ease, more open, less agenda driven, and more "myself." Music can lure one into a trusting mood or it can challenge the walls that guard the memories. Volume, dissonance, rhythm, etc. can be used in intuitive combinations to unlock the mysteries of our psyches.

When it comes to soul qualities and spiritual insights, music plays an even more amazing role. To move from the personal to the transpersonal, one needs to touch into frequencies that are inspired. As an art form, music is perhaps one of the most inspired bodies of creation. I'm sure that those who prefer the visual arts or poetry would beg to differ, but in the beginning was the Word. God created with sound and we are all in existence because the sound projected us into being. When we are inspired, we are in resonance with the Divine and when we are not feeling the presence of God or sensing His Light and Plan, we feel cut off from the Divine. This is one reason that music can be so healing: it brings us back into alignment with God and the impulses that determine our essential nature.

Unlike certain sound therapies, music is not prescriptive. One cannot take a patient, have him say "ah," and then write six measures to make that "ah" sound better. My experience with music is that people hear different things at different times. For example, I have often used the Fauré Requiem in music therapy, but each person hears something different and what a single individual hears from one session to another is also different. One may, for example, hear the harmony of male and female voices and begin to resolve gender differences or one may hear those same voices as separated by an octave and therefore not of the same resonance.

A simply enormous range of music can be used therapeutically, but one should not expect the music to produce the experience. Music, believe it or not, is apparently not suggestive when the listener is in a mildly altered state of consciousness. In this altered state, hearing is improved and listening is greatly improved. By listening, the attention can be focused and directed, just as in guided visualization or other types of work that involve exploration of the psyche.

Rhythm is Feminine

What I personally feel as a result of my twenty years of involvement with music therapy is that those with a keen sense of rhythm, people who are rhythmic and who enjoy rhythm, are in touch with their feminine whereas those who are more sensitive to melody are more masculine. There are profound reasons beyond pure observation that have led me to these conclusions. First, I have noticed that some people really move their bodies rhythmically and they are likely to have similar movements to the rhythm regardless of the melody. More importantly, I have noticed that those whose sense of rhythm is very poor are the ones who do not believe that rhythm is important. They may even have intellectual explanations for why it is the concept rather than the execution that is important.

Though it is highly speculative on my part, I would like to suggest that God creates with a burst of inspiration that streams forth towards manifestation. The Mother energy of the Universe must receive, conceive if you will, the notes and organize them. She has to calibrate the expression of the Idea and release the Idea into actuality in an orderly, rhythmic fashion.

By working in a truly musical way, we can bring the masculine and feminine into harmony. This is why I personally prefer music with some degree of complexity. Tribal drumming may be very liberating or grounding or visceral, but Mozart bequeathed us a rich legacy of intricate music that involves our minds and spirits as well as emotions. I am not suggesting that one form of music is superior to another or even more complete, merely that the music used therapeutically needs to have a combination of many features, including ways of reconciling dissonance into consonance so that our souls are ushered into alignment with Divinity.

Copyright by Ingrid Naiman 2000