Month: October 2015

I highly recommend watching the documentary Alive Inside. For like a year, I have seen this documentary on Netflix and it was always calling me. Yet because I felt I already knew how healing music is and about human development, I kept scrolling by. But WOW! Even though it was a lot of what I know including brain development and how vital relationships and touch are for life and death, throughout the documentary, I felt elated and when I finished watching it, I was filled with tears of joy and goosebumps.

“One Good Thing About Music, When it Hits You Feel No Pain”- Bob Marley

The concept of music being healing was first validated for me when I read Deepak Chopra’s book, Timeless Body, Ageless Mind. He explained how your cells in your body will actually go back in time to feel how you actually felt during a specific time in your life dependent on the music playing at that stage. Thus, if you listen to your favorite music during your greatest times in life, then you will feel all those same feelings with the same intensity.

Since discovering, whenever someone is sick or sad, I ask them what their favorite music is and play it every time they are around me. When my father-in-law had lost his singing voice after a stroke and came to visit me, unbeknownst to him, I played his favorite music throughout his week-long visit and his voice strengthened. When my Dad was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer and I was living overseas, I created a YouTube station for him and sent him songs on a regular basis. Although he did die, his wife said he loved the songs and I know that I was able to give him pockets of joy in his last months.

What I also love about this documentary is it highlights how sick and depriving our systems are. Synchronously, I opened up Leo Buscaglia’s book Living, Loving, & Learning and this passage jumped at me:

“Every human being requires conversation and friendship. Why do we assume that the needs of older people stop there? The body may creak a little but there is no arteriosclerosis of emotions. Older people literally hunger for caring and affection and physical touching just like anybody.”

As a Marriage and Family Therapist, I have focused my profession on children, parenting, and relationships as I want to help rewrite the blueprints we have when the brain is most sensitive and receptive, conception to age 7, in order to best to cultivate a culture whose natural response is to nurture throughout all our stages, especially at times of grief, dis-ease, and stress. Here’s a quote that relates to this and has inspired me immensely:

“[Yet] our babies are starving. Oh they have plenty of food. Our children are starving for touch; they are starving for us. Our children are starving for human interaction and human relationships…We have become advanced in some ways but, at present, our culture is developmentally ignorant. We are a child illiterate culture. We think somehow that it is better for a child to learn letters and words from television than from a parent talking with their baby. We have lost our core child-rearing truths… And there is nothing more essential to a developing child than human touch, infants rarely touched can actually become ill and die.” -Dr Bruce Perry, excerpt from the preface of Move Baby Move by Sofie Foster and Jerome Hartigan

Here’s a description of Music Alive:

“… a joyous cinematic exploration of music’s capacity to reawaken our souls and uncover the deepest parts of our humanity… chronicles the astonishing experiences of individuals around the country who have been revitalized through the simple experience of listening to music… reveals the uniquely human connection we find in music and how its healing power can triumph where prescription medication falls short.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HLEr-zP3fc

http://www.aliveinside.us/#alive-inside-theater

Every day is a gift to open with joy and curiosity.

Please be a present to everyone you meet!

Let go, fear less, love more ~Debra