Music and Quality of Life
Music play a vital role in keeping our lives lively– no one can deny the fact. Balfour M. Mount, M.D of McGill University has written (very old yet beautiful) a post on The Healing Power of Music which I noticed a few days before. It’s interesting to see how he relates music with QOL.
The relationship of music to QOL and healing
Our QOL varies from moment to moment along a continuum that extends from suffering and anguish at one extreme to a sense of integrity and wholeness at the other. Healing involves a response shift toward the latter. What enables an experience of healing such as Anne’s? Wisdom traditions, depth psychology, and recent research suggest several factors. Healing occurs when we are drawn into the present moment and away from the ruminations about past and future that consistently dominate our lives. It requires a letting go of literal, rational, linear patterns of thought and an acceptance of an intuitive, imaginal, metaphoric way of experiencing reality (expressed in some traditions as a shift from head to heart). It is associated with a sense of enriched personal meaning and a sense of connectedness. We may experience these healing connections at four levels: at an inner level, between ego and “Self”/”Deep Centre”/the essential self (the “individuation” of Carl Jung); secondly, healing connections with others, in community (the I/thou relating of Martin Buber); thirdly, connectedness to the phenomenal world, as perceived through our senses — for example, in response to music, nature, long distance running, the creative arts; finally, through a sense of connection to ultimate meaning/God/”the More,” however that is perceived by the individual.
Music, when it is truly healing, may be acting through any or all of these four paths to cut through our carefully constructed defences, thus liberating a deeper appreciation and acceptance of mystery and the potential for healing that lies within. Newtonian physics told us that at base we are particulate; quantum physics, that we are vibratory. It seems that the reality is that we are not either/or, but both/and. Perhaps, in its vibratory nature, music opens us to a greater appreciation of our essential connectedness to the cosmos, our oneness with all that is.
Read the full post here.
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