music, therapy, and me

  I am exhausted...bone weary...getting crabby. Today was my cousin's memorial service. It was our job to meet my aunt at the church and basically keep her going and not falling completely apart as things did not come together as she had planned. The flowers were not what she had imagined. She had all sorts of timings off. She had family members telling her what to do which directly conflicted with what she needed to do at the moment for her own processing. My sister took the phone away from her at one point to stop my cousin from the pressure that he was putting on her. We are in a situation where there are too many chefs in the kitchen. There is so much frenetic energy and contradictory information and so many assumptions happening that no one seems to know what is happening at any time. I feel helpless because I know less than nothing about any of the plans. I'm not in the loop. I didn't know that we are not finished with this. We still have the internment to go on Monda...

Okay, this isn't too bad. I'm sitting in my hotel room, waiting for my sister and mom to wake up and get going. We made it to our final destination yesterday without too much hullabaloo and spent some time with family. I've already had some excitement. There was a fire alarm around 5am. I panicked a bit, deemed what was most necessary to grab and then made it to the door. The guy next door was less panicked than i. About then, the alarm stopped. I don't think my mom and sister even heard it. You know !e, though. Once I'm up, I'm up. So, now I am waiting for the west coasters to wake up and get going. I'm not really expecting them for several more hours. My cousin told us to arrive around lunchtime today, so we will try for that time... We are getting ready for the memorial service tomorrow. Apparently there will be cousins from the other side of my aunt's family. I have never met any of those family members before. My cousin-in-law and second cousins wil...

As of 3:05pm this afternoon, I will be on bereavement/personal leave and will be heading east towards my cousin's memorial service. I am both looking forward to being there and dreading it at the same time. There are way too many reasons to get into here, but this may be a difficult week for me. I am looking forward to my stay in various hotels as well as spending time with family members, but I am not happy about the fact that we are having to memorialize a family member. Visits centered around grief tend to be very wearing for me, so I am practicing my gracious escapes and breathing techniques to help me get through some of the more strenuous times ahead. The last part of our trip will be with the other side of the family and should be less emotionally charged.  I still have to get through two group sessions and observing my intern as she does three group sessions and an individual session. At that point, I am abandoning her to the responsibilities of an intern for seven work day...

As you know, I have a system for writing my therapeutic music experiences (TMEs). This system has many different parts and sequences that I go through to get from inspirational spark to finished TME, and I have been using this system, tweaking it, adapting it, and finding ways to make it more relevant for myself since before I graduated as an undergraduate decades ago. It is something that just plain old works for me. Now, this is not going to be yet another post about my system. You can find many of those types of posts on Tuesdays in the recent past. Today's post is going to be more about the ideas that I have and the ways I move those ideas from the ideas book to the TME book and into my database. My ideas book is nothing all that remarkable. It is just the latest effort of mine to contain my ideas into one place for me to act upon them in a way that keeps them present in my mind. So, I often have inspiration strike in strange places - driving to and from work, in the shower, as...

I am going to be gone from my computer most of this and next week, so do not be alarmed if blog posts become a bit less regular. My life now includes a memorial service for a cousin who died in July as well as time with her family and with my mother's family. We all decided to sacrifice our paid time off to head back to their homes to see them. We will be living in hotels and masking as much as necessary, so it should be a strange visit, but also it will be a good one. I have not taken this much time away from work without being sick in all the time I have worked at my facility. (At least, I don't think so...) For the first time ever, I have the tools that I need to provide digital resources to my clients while I am gone, so I am working on using my resources to provide alternative session options to just using the sub plan materials that I always have available for kids to use. I hope that my students will enjoy the information that I put together on different jobs and that te...

I had a bit of an adventurous day yesterday. I sat down with my journal to think about my current way of setting goals and not setting goals and wanting a bit more guidance than what I currently have available and realizing that my past ways of establishing goals have not helped me out at all and just generally thinking about lots of existential stuff. I think I have decided to do a different type of goal system - more task oriented and focused because I tend to do these types of things a bit more consistently than aspirational goals. So, I fell back into my habit of writing some goals, but I am hoping that I will be a bit more motivated to do some of these things with a different type of system and focus. We will see in three months... After I finished the journal work, I went out into the world to see another house. As I was waiting for my realtor to get the key out of the key box, I felt a sharp pain on my left upper arm. I whipped my head around to see a wasp-type thing flying off ...

I have been working on a stack of things to give away. As you know, being a reader of this particular blog, I love making things to use in my music therapy practice. One of the things that I really like is making things to send out into the world to have other people use them in their music therapy practices. I like making things and would really like to give them to other people more regularly. Today is the first day of my 2021 giveaway, and here are the details!! Read until the end to get the link to the entry form... So, I have made several of my generic file folders that I have used with my clients since I've developed them. There are things that can be used with clients from all age ranges, all goal areas, and all sorts of other types of situations. Each one of my original file folders includes either a therapeutic music experience to go along with it or an original song. All of these are included in the prize packet. There are eight file folder activities included in this pri...

Boy, did I have plans for this week. I was going to be releasing a giveaway on Wednesday. I was going to be getting on top of some work for the Online Conference for Music Therapy. I was going to pack for my upcoming trip to see family for a memorial service. There was so much that I was going to do. Well, these things did not get finished this week because my body decided it was time to complicate matters with a migraine. This was a doozy of a migraine as well - flashing sparkles in my field of vision, extreme light sensitivity, nausea, stabbing headache, and an extremely low body temperature, and just not doing well at all. Add on a continuing asthma cycle, and that was my body this week. Once I regained my vision, I drove myself home, having to use 5 hours of my sacred sick time for this headache. I still had to log onto a Zoom meeting because it was my intern's turn to present. So, for the past three days, all I have done is cower in the corner of the music therapy room, wearin...

I cannot do it. I cannot write about how I am feeling today because I just can't handle the fact that I am not feeling well, that I am frustrated that I can't seem to do anything because I am constantly putting out fires, and all of that... So, it is time to figure out what I can write about here. My emotions are off the table. Oops, almost went into that thread again. Work is off the table since it seems to be the source of most of my current frustrations. What does that leave? Well, my giveaway! I have to get that launched tomorrow!! Eeps! I have put together six different file folders, several other resources, and all that, but I am not ready for marketing quite yet. That will need to be this evening's process - taking pictures and getting things ready for tomorrow's launch. One of my favorite things to do is to make visual aids. I have boxes and boxes of resources that I use with my clients, and I keep making more! There is nothing more satisfying to me than seeing ...

I have nothing new to talk about. Nothing new to look forward to or to try or get going. I keep waking up early, resisting the opportunity to get up and out of bed, and I still don't want to get to work. I am wiped out...and, I just remembered that it is a 44 hour work week. I have to work a 12-hour day on Wednesday. I am not looking forward to that at all. So, I am stuck in a time loop - at least, that's how it feels - doomed to repeat the same day over and over again until something new happens, or something like that. It is pretty funny that this is how I am at the moment - complaining about how static things are right now - I get up, I go to work, I come home - when I have spent most of the past year complaining about how much change has happened in my work situation. Perhaps this is the result of cumulative stress on me at the moment. We were talking about trauma and one of my co-workers popped off with, "This won't cause a trauma unless you let it." I hearti...

Psychophysiological Foundations of Music - page 97 of Emotional Processes in Music Therapy , by John Pellitteri. Please forgive me if this is a bit outline-ish rather than discourse. I am trying to get back into the habit of reading these music therapy texts so I can finish this particular one before the end of the year. (Remember my January goal of reading 13 music therapy texts this year??? What a silly MJ that was! If I finish this one, I will be finished with exactly 3 texts!) As a result of being a bit of a reading slacker, I am trying to get things going a bit more. So, I will probably be outlining rather than talking about what I am reading... P. 97 - " In clinical interventions the music therapist intervenes in a manner that impacts one or more of these psychophysiological processes." - yep. By the way, the pp processes that are referred to are physiological, cognitive, social, and behavioral. Changes in the processes bring about changes in emotions that can provide t...

I have been really using my work bullet journal lots and lots in the past several weeks. I have been setting up my day each morning and then checking things off as they happen. I have been using my ideas journal as a companion to the bullet journal. It has been very satisfying to check things off and see that I have accomplished tasks. My home bullet journal has been another story completely. Let me explain a bit more... I have a work journal and a home journal. I do this because I try my best to separate work from home as much as possible. Work things belong at work - so, work bullet journal. Home things belong at home - you get the idea. I bring my work journal home with me, but the home journal stays at home.  Here are some examples from a long time ago that show you my pages in my home journal. (Don't worry, there is nothing strange or overly personal in these pictures...) I do more decorations in my home journal than in my work journal, and I set up the planning part about thr...

I was unable to resist the itch yesterday and left around 6:15am instead of waiting until 6:30. Today, I didn't even open my eyes until 25 minutes after my alarm light turned on (I use a light instead of an audible alarm because I get startled by sounds in not good ways to start your day...). I took my shower, and then started my morning routine. It is now 5:30am. I will try my best to stay where I am until it is 6:30, but the itch is happening... Anyway, let's make this more about music therapy than about my current anxious itch. I am in the midst of developing my October theme digital offering for my clients. I will be taking a couple of days off for the AMTA National Conference (offered virtually) in October, so I want to have a file ready for those two days. The theme is Bullying, and I started off by finding some YouTube resources for my clients to access. I have a couple of original songs that need to be recorded, but I do not have a moment to myself these days, so I am r...

I was able to accomplish yesterday's goal of arriving at work exactly on time - I was on the property, parking the car at 7:14 am! I did not allow any sort of anxiety reaction take over - I had to tell myself quite frequently that it would be fine (especially when I got stuck behind one slow school bus) if I was a couple of minutes late. I always stay later than I have to, so there is no reason why I should be feeling any sort of guilt that I am not at work enough for what they pay me. I am, and more than! I am repeating the process today. I have less responsibilities than usual today because we have closed a classroom due to a COVID outbreak. So, my third class of the day has been cancelled because we have no new students. I have almost an entire afternoon to work on my digital resources for my students. I need to buckle down on that project for October - I've decided to do a presentation about bullying. We spend lots of time with kids on how to identify bullies, and not as mu...

I did not want to get up this morning, so I laid in bed for an extra hour and thought about sleeping all day. It was a nice thought, but the reality is that sleeping in all day is not realistic when you have a week of bereavement leave coming up at the beginning of the contract year. I am going to blow through my entire stash of days off to go to the East Coast for a memorial service for my cousin. We are also going to spend some time with other family members, so it will be a combination of mourning and visiting. So, the time off will be well spent, but it is happening, so I can't really take days off to just sleep.  I was talking to an Introduction to Music Therapy student last night about the life of a music therapist. One of the questions this student asked was how I avoided burnout. I liked that question because it is something I think about...lots of the time! My answer included many of the things that I talk about on this blog - things like knowing yourself, finding a suppor...

For some reason, I didn't sleep much last night, so I am already a bit scatterbrained, but I am still going to post a TME Tuesday post since I took yesterday off from blogging. I am in a stage of relatively static creativity - as defined by me, this means that I am not as creative as I like to be, but I am still able to finish things up. This is when my ideas book comes in handy - the original creative process is already finished. All I have to do is transcribe things and finish the process of formalizing my songs or ideas, but when I am not feeling all that excited about writing something, I can dive into my ideas book to find some half-formed ideas to finish. Here are the things that I have recently found and placed into my book - a 12-bar blues closing song - It's time to go back to class...; a song about mandalas piggybacked to Lean On Me; When I Go To Work - an original song for the end of this month when I am gone on bereavement leave; A Garden of Manners - reinforcing th...

I have decided that it may be best to make my "What I'm Reading" posts every other week instead of every week since I can't seem to bring myself to read every week these days. So, here is a "Not What I'm Reading" type post that still has something to do with music therapy. My current intern is very good at taking music and adapting it to what she needs in the moment. She has introduced my clients to many different melodies and harmonic progressions that have never occurred to me as options for TMEs. It's been fun to learn these songs along with my clients, and she has inspired me to head back into my music library to use the resources that I have and to find more. I have been looking at fake books on Amazon recently. I love fake books and have gone through several of them in my career. I have the bits and pieces of several of them floating around my house, so it is time to get a new set of fake books. Right now, the most popular one is the Disney Fak...

For some time now, I have been wanting to give some things away to the music therapy community. I have decided that next month is THE month for my giveaway, and I am getting things put together to announce in about a week and a half. I am making things, collecting my items in one place, and am making all sorts of plans for this thing. A past giveaway - this one will be different. One of my passions is to make things that I use with my clients in music therapy. There is no better way to spend a rainy Saturday than to sit down and use my cardstock, file folders, computer, stickers, and laminator to make something new. I love figuring out how to use materials in music therapy experiences and interventions to supplement what the music does. I love trying new things and then sharing those new things with others! Some of the best presentations I have ever done (from my perspective) have been the Make and Take presentations that I have shared with other music therapists. There is something so...

Yep, this is another time management post from me because I am still figuring out how to manage my time at work. I've pretty much given up on the idea of managing my time at home because I am just tired all the time so planning tasks for a future me is a complete waste of time! At work, though, I am using some time management strategies that seem to work at the moment. I am feeling more productive, but who knows if I actually am more productive. As I am sitting here writing this, I am remembering that I did not do Wednesday's documentation, so I have behind. So much for feeling like I have everything finished. Maybe this topic isn't the best one to be doing after all. I will continue, however, because I am feeling more productive these days than I have in a long time. I finished my first interactive presentation for my clients yesterday. My original goal was to finish this presentation by the 31st of August, so I only went two days past my original goal. Hooray! This was no...

I was talking to a co-worker yesterday about the extreme fatigue and feelings of frustration, overwhelmedness, and exhaustion that seem to be overcoming our entire workplace. She said something about this pandemic going on for over 600 days now, and I started wondering about how we were going to be working through the effects of this pandemic once we finally get to the point where it is no longer a big, new thing but is just one of those things that happens to us - like influenza. This led me down a rabbit hole of looking for information on the internet. Now, I did not just go with anything that I saw - I think I am so-so at identifying good sources rather than propaganda, but I learned some things about myself and others during this brief dip into the information pool. First of all, it has been 602 days since January 9, 2020, when the WHO announced the presence of this virus (https://www.ajmc.com/view/a-timeline-of-covid19-developments-in-2020). That is all. It has been 538 days since...