Music as Medicine

This includes meditation practices as well as music, song, dance, poetry and laughter as medicine.

Music as Medicine

Postby Judith » Fri Oct 18, 2013 5:39 pm

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Music as medicine


Ah—music as medicine... while I’d known through experience about the power of music to change moods, it wasn’t till I was lying on the acupuncturist’s table and he was playing some sitar music that it really ‘came home’ as they say, to me. Suddenly as the music quickened my body seemed to wake up (I was still pretty stunned, truly ‘disheartened’, by diagnosis at that point)- ah—he said ‘music as medicine’.

Obviously there are countless different sorts of music and people respond in many different ways. The benefits of music therapy are well documented, and I particularly like the story of the little autistic boy who discovered he could tie his shoelaces if someone sang to him while he did it. Neuroscience is now making this new area plainer (though it has been known and used by ancient civilizations for thousands of years)- musical rhythms can re-pattern the brain, the nervous and the endocrine glands. Some would say that this corresponds to a re-energizing of the chakras. But you don’t have to make that link or go down that particular avenue to appreciate what music can do. It taps into less accessible parts of ourselves- the composer Stravinsky talked of music’s profound meaning ‘its essential aim is to promote a communion, a union of man with his fellow man and with the Supreme Being’.

Music, the mind and the body are intimately connected: listening or performing music causes increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortexes of the brain. Charles Limb, a neurosurgeon at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine,, studied the brains of jazz musicians and saw ‘the perfect storm of neural activation patterns by which people were uninhibited in themselves, expressed through music’. His research is now being used to explore helping people who have had traumatic experiences—cancer diagnosis and its consequences are certainly in this group.

As I found that day on the acupuncturist’s table, it’s a physical experience, you ‘feel with your body’—that’s why people go to live concerts even in this era of every sort of downloadable device for you to stream music from all over the place. We love to see the musicians move, and we may move with them, either in our minds or literally with our bodies. The neurologist Oliver Sachs said that ‘the therapeutic power of music is very remarkable’. I just want to quote one more sentence here from the psychoanalytically informed art teacher Anton Ehrenzweig: ‘music is a symbolic language of the unconscious mind whose symbolism we may never be able to fathom’.

I find Indian music to be extremely helpful and am putting a link here to the flute player Hari Prasad Charudasia — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwBxqWEG7cY
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also dancing to music is wonderful too and here’s a link to David Bowie’s Lets Dance-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxe-iylVQSY

—rock around your living room on your own if need be—it’s powerfully energizing and tells your body to wake up and flow.

And the day after the announcement that Bowie has died,(Jan 2016) here's another link with him and Jagger rocking around the streets-it's wonderful- let's join them--the dancing goes on...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G4jnaznUoQ

You can go onto YouTube and download any sort of music you fancy, and also when two or three are gathered together to make live music, drumming or paper comb or whatever, that’s where you can feel the power of energy to heal the body—and as Stravinsky suggested, link us with something higher than ourselves. I’m hoping people will add to this section so that others can share what they’ve found helpful--
November 2016: here is another link for relaxing music, helps inflammation too...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54PVuvL1H38

science catches up!!! http://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/neuro ... entalfloss causes 65% in overall anxiety - can't be bad for we cansurvivors!!
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Re: Music as Medicine

Postby Charles » Sun Nov 03, 2013 5:18 pm

Connecting with the source

The purpose of music is not communication, it started with meditation. In meditation there are several heights of enjoyment, emotions, love for each other... but the purpose of music is to take one into soundlessness, and when you are in soundlessness, meditation will automatically come.


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Shahid Parvez, sitar

and here is a wonderful reflective piece using the great sounding bell...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1ZwaEz ... ture=share
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Music and the way to Joy

Postby Judith » Thu Nov 14, 2013 7:34 pm

Music and the way to Joy:

In her book on Ecstasy, the writer Marghanita Laski revealed that respondents to a questionnaire she sent out who named one or other of the arts as triggers of ecstatic experience more often quoted MUSIC than any other art- -music ‘removes us from all our afflictions’ as Schopenhauer said.
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John Taverner died this week (November 2013): he was ill almost constantly for the last ten years of his life, and he became more and more interested in universal spiritual experience—when he was composing his piece The Beautiful Names he walked round and round his garden reciting the names of God in different languages and traditions… feeling them in his body and translating this into music. Here below is a link to his Eternity’s Sunrise, taken from William Blake’s words ’To see the world in a grain of sand/And heaven in a wild flower/...He who kisses joy as it flies/Lives in Eternity’s Sunrise..—good to meditate on…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9PAlIjl_pM&list=RDxT0MF4XNjkA
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Re: Silence as Medicine

Postby barganews » Fri Nov 15, 2013 12:47 am

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One of the reasons people enjoy coming and visiting this area is that the speed of life here is so much slower than elsewhere in this busy, busy world.
We have all become so used to being constantly connected via the Internet that just to stop and slow down sometimes is actually a very difficult thing to do.
So how about a little test ?
Have you got a minute free just to sit and listen to the world around you?
Turn up the volume of your speakers or headphones and just listen for one minute and 23 seconds of “silence” recorded two weeks ago up in the mountains around Barga.
The first thing you’ll notice is there is no such thing as “silence” – the recording is full of sound.
The sound of insects, the rustling of the wind in the trees and the sound of sheep and goat bells further down in the valley and there is even the sound of a buzzard crying overhead.
Slow down people, slow down.

https://audioboo.fm/boos/1665331-the-sound-in-the-valley-garfagnana.mp3

two more sound of silence recordings can be found here:http://www.barganews.com/2013/11/12/the-sound-of-silence-is-attracting-a-lot-of-interest/
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Re: Music as Medicine

Postby Rosa_M » Sun Nov 17, 2013 10:06 am

http://www.last.fm/music/Tinariwen

I went to see tinariwen last year at union chapel near highbury corner. It's a great music venue and its still a working chapel.
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I always love to hear about music recommendations so post any here if you have them.
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Re: Music as Medicine

Postby Rachael Henry » Fri Dec 20, 2013 11:11 pm

What a fabulous website and great ideas! Singing and dancing are such fundamental expressions going back to earliest times, they seem to me now vital to incorporate in everyday life - at least once body and soul are starting to recover from trauma and to feel a little less fragile and a bit stronger.
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A pregnant woman who suffered a threatened early birth used to sing to her agitated baby and the baby would stop her restless activity. Not only did she seem to be listening and responding in a quiet way to her mother , she would then start to move and only stop when her mother took up singing again

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- in the little dance that developed between them she also seemed to be training her mother to keep it up. Babies are born with perfect pitch but normally with a few exceptions lose it around 12 months. Classical music has also been shown to be enjoyed by and benefit old people with dementia.

My old choir director used to dance the music - 9 and a half months pregnant - to communicate to us its rhythmic physicality . And gathering up potential young choristers from far flung Australian outback schools, in her quest to bring music to country kids, she believed she could tell the moment she walked through the school gates whether there was any music going on in the school. Great musicians are strikingly noticeable the way they seem to use their whole bodies . Well, choirs are making a comeback and dancing is still the go - and it is great for liberating all those Anglo Celtic inhibitions and conflicts about responsibility - you can't really feel self conscious about making a fool of yourself in the general hilarity of flinging yourself into Scottish country dancing! And people are kind and nice so if you feel up to it, it can be a gentle way to get back a bit of physical and social fitness.
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Re: Music as Medicine

Postby anth » Fri Jan 24, 2014 7:15 pm

Would recommend looking at Paul Robertson's website; musicmindspirit.org Lots of interesting links there. Paul Robertson is a violinist in the Medici Quartet and collaborated with John Tavener on his piece'Towards Silence' After suffering a dangerous illness Roberston set up this trust exploring music and healing.The 'Retreat' house was the Shelley's family home for three or four generations..looks wonderful...
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http://www.musicmindspirit.org/musicalbrain.html
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Live acoustic music as shamanistic medicine

Postby Charles » Thu Sep 10, 2015 12:42 pm

Here's a short piece of music of the type I've started doing as the sarod meditation (ie played on sarod, a stringed instrument used to play N indian classical muusic, in August at a yoga centre, with people meditating).
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It's based on a N Indian raag (Sreeranjani), but with a more Western emtemporisation. I'll do my best to post other pieces, as and when.

Just enter the https in your browser, which takes you to soundcloud:

https://soundcloud.com/charles-gate/ala ... th-tanpura
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