music, therapy, and me

It is the start of the most difficult time of the year - Halloween week. Oh my goodness, there is so much excitement happening that you can cut it with a knife at my job. Kids are so excited. Staff are so excited. I am less than excited, but that's an entirely different post. From now until Winter break, we will all be in a state of emotion more than rational thought. Some of my clients will get to visit family members at least once during these months. Some of my clients will not. There will be lots of emotional outbursts, and there will be some hurt feelings. Excitement and anger will be around in equal helpings, and some of my clients will cycle between those emotions in seconds. I am already exhausted. So, what do you do when groups are full of hyper-emotional kids? You go back to the very basics of musicking. For the next several months, my therapeutic focus will be emotional catharsis and safe expression. We will do some of the things that people do during holiday seasons, bu...

My word for this year is "Deepen." I selected this word way back in December 2020, and it seems to encapsulate all of my intentions for the year of 2021 - it worked for me, and it still does. I am thinking I might want to keep the same word for 2022. For me, this word means to take what I know and learn more. It means to explore stronger relationships with my clients in and out of the music therapy session. It means to actively explore things that elude me and to seek out new opportunities. This past week, I have been taking some time to deepen my knowledge of Google Slides as a teaching mechanism. If you are new here, here is a bit of background for you. As a school-based music therapist in my particular job, I have done almost every role that others have done EXCEPT live telehealth situations. Many of my peers in our Monthly Music Therapy Meets have been doing sessions virtually with their clients. I have not had to do that, mainly because my facility does not have the tech...

It is almost the start of a new school year, one that brings with it a new boss, new focus on what we do as a faculty, and lots of new questions that don't have any answers as of yet. As always, this is the time when I start to think about goals and objectives for the next school year. The first thing that I try to do every year at this time is to read last year's post about goals and objectives. Last year's post was about not making goals for this year due to the uncertainties of the last school year. I guess my focus was more on survival than anything else at this time last year - rightfully so! Of the things that I have mentioned in this post from last year, I have a retirement plan in place (Hooray) and have not had an exhibit yet. I have sold more things this year than in any other year so far, but still have not had a table at an exhibit hall. I won't be doing this particular thing until early next year at the earliest. I wanted to start off by having an exhibit ...

It is time to catch up a bit on my music therapy reading. I set a goal for myself of getting through 13 music therapy texts in this year. I have finished two books - well, three if you count the book on American folk songs that I read the first part of and then realized that is was mainly descriptions of song origins and how the American versions differed from the other versions. I may never finish that one. So, I guess I am only two books into my stack. With the next 10 days of break ahead of me, I can probably make some inroads into that stack! I am currently working on reaching my Goodreads goal of 250 books this year by reading cozy mysteries on my Kindle. I am not where I want to be on that goal either, but I am confident that I can catch up pretty well. See, the simple fact is that I love reading. It has always been my leisure activity of choice - to sit down with a book and see what types of things I can glean from the pages. While I love to read, I have less motivation when it ...

I am doing it. I am taking two professional development days in the middle of this week to finish up some training that I have signed up for and have not been able to access because I just haven't had the timing right. My intern will be in training this week, so it is the perfect time to take two days off to do some of my own. This is a perk of my job. I get some days every year for professional development beyond the inservice training that the school offers and requires. It is nice to have some flexibility with my training days, and I am going to take Wednesday and Thursday to catch up with my training hours. My facility does not pay any of the fees associated with training access, but they do count my hours as work time, so I get paid for them. This year's professional focus is on telehealth. I am learning about what others can and cannot do as educators so I can enrich my clinical presence in this area. This has little relevance to how my primary job has been going in this ...

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and it is inauguration eve. These are two days that always inspire some reflection in me, and when they coincide, the reflections tend to be deeper than when they happen separately. This year, this reflection seems more important to me than any other time in my life so far. I try not to talk too much about politics on this blog because it is a topic that frustrates me deeply and that often has no influence on how I do the job that I want to do with my clients. I avoid arguments about politics because they are opinion-based rather than fact-based (often), and I believe that every person is entitled to have their own opinions about things (whether they are wrong === sarcasm!).  This year, however, the events that have happened in the political arena have spilled out of the container that I like to keep them in to permeate every part of our collectives lives. There is no hiding away from what has been happening to us all - the Black Lives Matter pr...

Today is the last Monday of 2020, and I am more than ready to say goodbye to this horrible year. Now, I don't believe that things will miraculously clear up at midnight on Friday, but I hope that something changes in this next journey around the sun. This year, my word for the year was "evolve." It was my goal to make my business ideas happen in ways that I could envision - mostly needing face-to-face interactions - and I was on my way until March. In March, as we all know, life as we knew it and as we planned it came to a screeching halt. All of my plans were shaken about, set on fire, and then left in the world of uncertainty that we now know is COVID-19. I was not able to get much of my plans accomplished, but I found other ways to evolve into the therapist and person that I am today. The word I have chosen for 2021 is "deepen." I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what I wanted from life last year, and I found that I am pretty much bored...