music, therapy, and me

The second ever (and hopefully, the first annual) Creativity Camp by musictherapyworks.com is now finished!! I am exhausted, but I feel good about what we accomplished this weekend. I have a BUNCH of new projects that are finished that I was able to complete in the 8 hours we were together, and the pile is growing as I get more inspiration from the campers' projects. That is the best thing about doing creative professional development workshops with and for music therapists - the expansion of ideas based on a similar format. I have done this type of workshop at regional conferences twice now, and this was the second online version of making things that I have finished. I think this will become a yearly workshop that I run from here at home. I have TONS of ideas that I enjoy sharing as starting points, so why not?? Currently, all of the cleaning that I did in preparation is in shambles. One of the problems that happens when creating is that there are messes that occur. While all of ...

It is early on Sunday morning, and it is the second day of Creativity Camp. As with camping outside my home, I am feeling tired and excited about what is yet to come, but also my head is spinning with possibilities and my to-do list. As a result, I am going to send you to a previous post today - it will show the entire process that takes place in my head as I go through my TME development system. Thanks for understanding that there are times when repeats are a good thing. Here's the post that I am talking about - Have a great week! I'm back to camp!! 

When I was a kid, one of my favorite things to do was to go to camp. I went to day camp, overnight camp, science camp, Bible camp, sports camp, horse camp - you name it! There was something quite nice about leaving home to spend time outside. I was a camper, but where I REALLY loved camping was when I was a camp aide or counselor. I loved the summer that I spent in the Ozarks, being a camp counselor. I would still be doing that during summers if I hadn't become really sick and unable to return due to a lung fungus (sounds fun, doesn't it?? It wasn't!). Anyway, I have often wanted to work at a camp of some sorts, but music therapy came up and took over my professional goals. This is kinda where the impetus is behind today's Creativity Camp - my desire to be camping and also being around people. Creativity Camp is the type of camping that I like the best now - inside and not in the lung fungus inducing humidity! Today, I will be meeting with some music therapists to make ...

This weekend is my second ever Creativity Camp designed to challenge my fellow music therapists to design and use visual aids to supplement client goals. This is a passion project for me - something that I have dreamed about for many years, tried out once, and now have the time to focus on more and more. So, I am trying this again - the second ever Creativity Camp by musictherapyworks.com! The best part about this camp is that it is something I can do here from my own home. No bugs. No heat emergencies (I'm prone). No humidity that just does not go away. I am looking forward to this weekend, but camp is not the only thing that I am creating these days. I have found several completed projects and other unfinished projects. Finding things that I have started spurs my creative impulses and makes me think about how to finish these projects and send them out into the world. I have some resources that were designed by others - mostly files from TPT - that I have songs to add to the visua...

My sister, a second grade teacher currently on summer break, is a great resource for all sorts of things. Currently, she is helping me come up with ideas for my upcoming Creativity Camp session. Her brain works from a different perspective than mine because she has different life experiences than I do. Her experiences at professional conferences is vastly different from mine. There are so many more education professionals, so their conferences are vast compared to our music therapy conferences. She has left conferences with iPods and enough dry erase boards to cover her bulletin boards. Her experience with what can happen at conferences or professional gatherings is different from my own, so her perspectives are valuable to me and challenge me to do things better than my experiences. I completed all of my projects, an errand to switch my retirement accounts over to a new IRA, and received my car registration in the mail. I still need to uncover my desk and get things ready for camp on ...

Wednesday is one day in the week where I write something not necessarily based on a theme. I give myself this time on Wednesdays and Saturdays to just write without the need to offer music therapy information. It is a bit like a timeline cleanse for me, and here goes today's effort in just being me. It has been three weeks since my last day of formal work outside my home. Since that time, I have tried my best to figure out what I want to do with my time and energy, and it is a continuing process. I am also starting to get an itch that I need to have a job. I am resisting that itch until September at the earliest because I need to be bored before I can start up again. Meanwhile, I am working on my own music therapy projects for my small business - conferences, services, website revamp, etc. It is strange to have only errands and appointments that take me out of my house these days. I was able to make an appointment at 9 am yesterday without having to submit a time off request. I wen...

One of the things that I wish I had learned way back when I was an undergraduate is the skill of thinking through therapeutic music experiences from an ergonomic perspective. Not just what will I do for my clients, but how will I preserve my joints and body as I am interacting with clients? This has become more of a consideration as I have aged, but it would have been good to be thinking about this more as a young music therapist so I could preserve my knees and back. I am a big fan of only taking in what I absolutely need in a session with multiple options for how to use those things in many different ways. Since this is something I think about, it has become a consideration when I am developing my session strategies. When I had a music therapy room where my clients came to me, this was less of a concern. Now, since I am no longer clinic-based, this will become more of a focus when I am designing sessions. Of course, I am not sure that I will be working with clients in my near future,...

It is Monday again, and I am sitting here, looking around my messy office space, and wondering what I will write about today. I didn't make much this weekend, but I did continue working on current projects. I have stitched in the signatures to the winter and turtle books (somewhat crookedly, to be sure - have to disguise/camouflage that in some way) and am starting to put in the signatures to the Christmas book. It is time to decorate books now, so I am going to look around for some turtley things. I already have plenty of winter stuff and Christmas stuff is always easily found. I did make a shelf. I am a fan of all things Disney, and one of the ways that has manifested is purchasing Doorables. If you don't know what I'm talking about - just look at the photo here. They are small characters in a particular style, and I love them! I had them in a small wooden house that I have had in my home for many years, but it was difficult to see them as they were all crammed together. ...

  As I go through my stuff here at home, I am reminded of the things that I have done with various instruments, materials, music. I remember specific clients who loved certain songs or certain instruments. I have the opportunity to find old things that have gone out of style with current clients, and I get to figure out new ways to use familiar objects. It is an interesting thing to revisit what has been important in your therapy life, and this is a season where I am doing just that. I started being interested in the ways we adapt music and musical elements during my graduate studies. In discussions with my fellow students, we determined that we did not often think about how we were changing the music to match our clients - we just did it. It seemed that we were missing out on opportunities by not really thinking about how we were using our primary therapeutic tool - the music. The fellow student that I talked to about this topic focused on the research to demonstrate how the eleme...

Next week, at this time, I will be up early and stressing about hosting my second ever Creativity Camp. This is a passion project of mine - something that I have long wanted to do and FINALLY have the time, energy, and motivation to pursue. Thank goodness for being able to retire with my full pension after 30 years of working as a full-time music therapist!! So, here comes Creativity Camp!! You may be wondering about this entire thing and why this is what I am doing right now, so here comes an explanation... Growing up, my family was comfortable. My mom was a stay-at-home mom until I was 11. My dad was a plant manager for several plastics companies in the 70s and 80s. We had stable housing and enough to eat, wear, and do. We were not rich, but we were stable.  As kids, we did not get everything that we wanted when we wanted it. We had less "things" than many of our friends, but again, our family was stable. Mom and Dad were together, and it was a safe upbringing. My mother wa...

It is 6:38 am, and there is a bird chirping loudly and repetitively outside my home. We had a thunderstorm this morning, so everything is wet and somewhat cool outside. There may be more storms in the near future, so I guess the bird is just communicating as much as possible before the next round shows up. I am feeling like I am being a slacker right now, not working, and trying my best not to engage in these feelings of uselessness and FOMO. I want to spend some time upstairs today, sorting through and cleaning up my stuff. I have storage items coming tomorrow to help with that process. I want to be able to walk around my upstairs without having to step over things. I also need to spend some time on marketing and printing out materials for Creativity Camp which will happen next weekend. I also need to take a shower and make my bed with clean sheets. Lots of things I need to do. We will see how much I actually get done today. Yesterday was spent mostly in napping. I worked a bit on one...

It is thundering this morning, and I am glad. I like storms as long as they don't come along with tornadoes, and this one seems to be just a regular storm. I am guessing that my mowers won't be coming today, but I will put their check on the door as usual, just in case.  I am experiencing some issues surrounding the fact that I am not at work while all my co-workers are working right now, but I am also enjoying my time alone. This changes from moment to moment. My life has changed significantly in the past two weeks. I no longer sing for adolescents. I sit at a computer and try to make things for music therapists to use and sing with their adolescents. I miss the human interaction, but not enough to consider going back. I felt a creative itch last night. I wanted to make something, but I had some decision fatigue and avoidance coming on, so I asked my mom and sister for some themes. I ended up being challenged to make a winter themed journal and a turtle themed journal. I put...

It is day 13 of my retirement journey, and I looked at job opportunities this morning. I didn't do anything other than look, but I was feeling the itch of "you're not doing anything." I am trying my best to not do much as far as employment goes for the next six weeks before looking seriously. The root of this itch is having to pay for tires yesterday (my car needs EXPENSIVE tires).  I didn't think about my former job until 3pm yesterday, but I woke up thinking about it all. I am curious about who is there now, but I don't want to be creepy about it all. I also am happy to be at home at the moment, but I want to also be around people doing something useful. It is strange being able to do what I want when I want. It is also strange to not be making music in the company of other humans right now. I have found that I am enjoying listening to music a bit more than I did before. I have put my stereo on CD rather than on my Kindle because trips do not take as much ti...

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...