Wow! It was an honor just to be nominated!

A few weeks ago, a kind woman by the name of Rebecca from the Masters in Counseling website, sent me a note to tell me my blog had been nominated as one of 100 Best Resources for Counselors. Who knew?

And then, a short while later, she sent me a congratulatory note. How neat! And I'm in such fine company to boot. Thanks, Rebecca, and thanks to the kind folks who nominated me, and, mostly, thanks to you, you lovely readers you! I very much appreciate (and am humbled by) your willingness to slog through my commentary and carryings on about my music therapy experiences.

As it happens, a few other favorite bloggers are also on this list, so check them all out at some point.

Bringing it all back to "Do"

I live in New Jersey, and everywhere I went during the two weeks after mega storm Sandy (work, the grocery store, the library, the gas station), people asked me, "Did you lose power?" 

And I was struck by the metaphor contained in the question: "Did you lose power?" 

People in this area experienced, quite literally, being- let alone feeling- "powerless" (on a lot of different levels). They struggled through "power failure" and had to wait for their "power to be restored." 

Many of my students at Montclair experienced "loss of power", leaving them sounding  somewhat rattled when we returned to class. A music therapist I know described her disabled clients' distress as they coped with yet another storm requiring their temporary relocation to safer and warmer living quarters (we had Hurricane Irene last year, along with a freak snow storm at the end of October, both of which caused a lot of power outage and flooding). 

In pondering our collective experience, I got to thinking, as I tend to do, about how this connects to our work as music therapists- how we react to the unbalancing effect of going through a frightening experience such as a major hurricane (for example). 

As I played around in my mind with this idea of power loss and restoration, I thought about how we in music therapy are, essentially, working in a musical way to restore power, intra- and inter-personally. 

And, sure, this may be sort of a weird way to say it, but, if I were to say this using musical terms, I guess I'd be saying that in music therapy we're working toward "bring(ing) us back to 'Do'." 

[A special thank you to MJ Landaker for her recent post about the important connection between music theory and music therapy. It certainly helps to understand why music is so "powerful" (if you will).]