music, therapy, and me

Recently, I have gone into a pattern of not writing ideas or songs down. This is great for my improvisational skills, but it is not great for my therapeutic music experience (TME) compendium. It is time to be a bit more intentional about my composition and TME development. If you have read any of my previous TME Tuesday posts, then you know that I have an organizational system for my ideas. I have a structure that really works well with my brain and my way of doing therapy. This system requires that I think through all sorts of musical and therapeutic elements to coordinate session strategies with specific clients. Now that I do not have clients, I have time to compose and write TMEs down again. My current focus is the two upcoming events through my company, musictherapyworks.com, LLC. One of them is a conference focused on working with adolescents and the other is a creative endeavour that includes making visuals for use in sessions with clients . These are both things that I enjoy c...

I spent most of the weekend getting things ready for my campers who are going to meet with me in a bit less than two weeks. It was a weekend tied to the computer, which is not always great, but it makes me think about how I create things for my clients. I hope that there will be some more folks sign up for camp, but the people who will be there will be fun to get to know. I am enjoying a bit of creativity when it comes to projects and how we will put things together. So, I have finished the lyric board, the game board pieces, the fill-in-the-blank songs, and the choice board. I still have the monster file to finish up before every project will be finished and ready to disseminate to my campers. OOOH! This is so much fun! This is something that I would LOVE to make an annual event. I did one of these back in 2015, and I wanted to do more, but life interfered. So, now that I have the time, I will work on making Creativity Camp a place where all music therapists can get together to make t...

It is Sunday again, and I am sitting here at my computer, trying my best to be interested in anything that I have to do today. I have slipped into a strange emotion of not wanting to do anything but feeling like I have to do something. I have not left my house for most of the week, but the heat and humidity that hurts my lungs and body is abating, so I will go out today and tomorrow to do some things outside.  Anyway... It is Sunday which means it is time to find a song for analysis and therapeutic music experience (TME) development. I have not been listening to music much this week, so I really don't have a song at the ready. When this happens, I go to my music library and find something to look at. Today, I went to my iTunes account, scrolled to the count of sixteen (why sixteen? No clue, just felt right), and then clicked on the album icon. Disney's Greatest Hits, Vol. 3 . Twenty songs. So, I then asked a random number generator to tell me which song to focus on, and I was t...

So, I have been officially "retired" from my full-time job for a week. During this week, I have been focusing on Creativity Camp 2026 ( details here ). I am about halfway finished with the task analyses, but I have to get things figured out and sent to participants. There is still time to enroll in a bit of creative CMTE fun, if you'd like! I am not really feeling the reality of what I have chosen to do with my life right now, but I will pretty soon. I do know that I have lots of stuff to move through and move on, but I haven't even started that process yet. I have been living on microwaved meals because the kitchen is overwhelming me right now. I haven't cooked anything in a week. I have assembled meals from what is in my fridge. I am feeling pretty overwhelmed, but I have my file folders to escape to which helps. I have been taking naps, but I have been having bad dreams during those naps. The theme has been my home and things happening around my home. I have do...

Two years ago, the plan for this summer was to be going to Italy for the World Congress of Music Therapy. Those plans fell through, so the plan shifted a bit to a trip to the East Coast of this country to see my mother's family and friends, but those plans also fell through. So, the plan for this summer is to stay home and figure out home things for the moment. Rest. Reset the brain and the body to figure out what comes next. I am thankful that I am not having to go anywhere this month. While going to the World Congress would be nice, I am happy not to go. I find that music therapy conferences are more geared towards academics these days than clinicians. I am fully a clinician, so having to choose between this one's dissertation and this one's is not relevant to my role in the music therapy world. I am afraid that the professional organizations in the world are becoming too research-focused at the expense of those of us who are in the day-to-day process of actually doing th...

Oh dear. It is starting to blur - the day, the week, the time that I have to spend doing things. It is horribly hot here (for me, at least), so I have no desire to go outside for anything - no shopping no movie, nothing outside my home. The biggest problem?? I don't want to do anything inside my house, either, but I am doing that inside stuff very slowly right now. I made my decision about health insurance, and I used some of my savings to cover the cost right now. I have to go six weeks between paychecks right now, so I am budgeting very strictly at the moment. I have a month to do before I get my first pension payment, and I am still not sure what that payment is going to be. Today is my first official day without a teaching contract. I am finished with all things that were part of my old job, and the space, the clients, the position is someone else's. Strange thoughts and feelings right now, but something anticipated and invigorating as well. One of the things that I have ma...