Hi Pogue,

How are you enjoying the new idea, the music posts? I met Carole the other evening and she was telling me how she had enjoyed the first few. She was really enthusiastic about the blog. Made me smile. Strange how I post you these letters and so many others read them, regularly. But I suppose if they’re liking them, makes them smile, we can let it go.

Now that’s the thing about music, it reaches people and invites them to participate with it. Sometimes so subtly that they don’t even realise they’re tapping a foot or drumming their fingers and sometimes, confrontationally and the music can’t be avoided. A slow growing feeling seeping through our bodies and piloting our mood or an in your face, foot stomping, body swaying, head bobbing engagement. And of course, everything in between. It can talk to us fluently despite our language differences. It can talk to us wherever we happen to find ourselves and in doing so, endorse our mood or change it completely, better than any therapist. It can enable us to build a dream be it a captivating melody or honest lyrics.

melomanie – an excessive abnormal love and deep attraction to music and melody

Indeed, if we are mindful and clever you and I can use music as a powerful tool to the betterment of our days. I often go to Napster (old school, and I know you use Spotify) to select a playlist for a certain mood. Doesn’t that speak volumes? That a commercial website enables us to guide our feelings and emotions. It can determine your mood and its waiting there to be used.

It can also record our history in a way no journal will ever do. What do I mean?

Well, think, have you ever heard a song and immediately been transported to another time and place in your mind or your emotions. Yes it can cause us to revisit feelings. To replay an experience or a time in our life. Something is triggered by a song. A reminder of a person…a particular moment…a summer…my first car when I played the songs loudly with the windows wound down (fortunately for the neighbours I grew up. At least I’m pretending real good). It’s better than a history book, a secret diary, because it isn’t just words. No, it’s a different kind of energy able to touch the mind, turns on appropriate (or inappropriate) feelings and do magical things.

If I show you my music, the playlists that keep my heart beating and my outlook bright, I’m sharing with you part of my deepest secret inner world and have found you worthy to peer into my very being.

Anon

And, I don’t know about you, but an evening with just me and music is a good time and now I’m thinking about it, its an evening when I create the past, the future, magical moments, all by selectively listening to songs. Do you do that? Bet you do. It’s just, most of us don’t realise what we are actually doing.

So, if such a powerful form of therapy exists, if such a verdant path to creativity presents itself asking ‘play me, play me’ should we not take time to learn to use it? Are you and I missing a trick by the way we treat music so casually? Could we make it more useful to us?

Could we deliberately put together playlists to enhance or create predetermined moods. Or put together music according to the year to produce a real soul touching diary of our lives? Can lyrics be collected to empower our imagination and give our soul freedom?

Sometimes the best therapy is good coffee in your own space with good good music.

Wic

In previous letters you and I have discussed the concept of everything being energy and so vibrating at certain frequencies. We’ve talked about the difference between high and low frequencies, that certain moods, characteristics, emotions calibrate at low frequencies, such as guilt, remorse and others such as love, courage calibrate high. The questions then is, if we listen to songs about hate, anger, are we taking on board and succumbing to frequencies that will lower our situation, or, feed and endorse the anger and hate we may be trying to move away from. Remember, what we feed, what we persistently think, we become. Likewise with music. What we persistently hear we become. That which we give ourselves over to invades our being and we programme ourselves accordingly.

The father of every action is a thought and what a most powerful way to touch, to effect, to direct our thoughts music is. What a voice in our ear (literally when you have your earbuds in). I think we could do far worse than taking time to harness the potential that music offers us. And, hey, wouldn’t that be a fun thing to do, because don’t we both enjoy music a great deal. If you come to my house isn’t it usually playing in the back ground? Isn’t meal preparation always accompanied by someone’s playlist? Car journeys are made according to the artist or artists that have my attention at that moment.

Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought.

Orchestra Central

Now think. What if all the songs I listen to were focused on a theme, say songs that affirm me as a person or songs that talk about being relaxed. If I give myself that message in numerous, tunefully memorable ways. And if I’m driving or cooking, a lot of what I hear is going to my subconscious so being deeply absorbed. Over and over I’m being positively affirmed. Now what would be the result of that? Good or what? And, if I have tunes I can hum back to myself when I need a little pick-me-up? I once had a difficult exam and read all the key facts over a favourite tune. Then in the exam, I replayed the tune in my head and, voila, there were the answers. It worked, but I never took it any further.

So, I think I’m now going to play with my music while I continue to enjoy it deeply. Think about how you can play.

Enough for now. The playlist needs changing. I think I’ll play the one that reminds me what a wonderful human being I am….

Yours, lost in music,

Wic