FINDING MY TECHNICOUR DREAMS.......
(embodying can be such fun!)
A couple
of years ago, inspired by the work of the psychiatrist, Bruce Perry, with
traumatised children, I set about trying
to implement some of his approach in my own life and on-going project of
de-traumatising my body. Bruce Perry’s approach is all about helping children
who have been abused and/or neglected to learn how to self-soothe and
self-regulate their hyper-reactive bodily response and to make this fun and
enjoyable.
So I
embarked on a three-fold approach, taking my guidelines from his suggestions of
massage, reiki and drumming, for start of life traumatisation healing. This blog is about the drumming or, rather,
what came out of the drumming for me…..
I
started off buying a drum and just doing it on my own but that very quickly
palled so then I tried having some sessions with a music therapist. What this
taught me was two things. The first was that, despite having studied music
including playing the piano, the clarinet and also singing, to the end of my
school days I “did” music from my head not my body!
The
second thing I learnt is that it is a lot cheaper if I listen to my gut
instinct – as soon as I saw this very kind and hardworking therapist I felt a
heaviness in me, that somehow she was not the right person for me. However I
ignored this feeling and it took me 8 months, and many sessions with her, for
me to decide to actually trust my instinct and stop seeing her!
Then
quite by chance (or by the universe being in synchronicity for me – depending
on your viewpoint) in March 2013 I discovered Ria Keen. She was and is a
completely different kettle of fish…..
Ria Keen -
www.riakeen.com
…..and I
discovered what fun it could be to actually live in and come from the centre of
my physical being.
I grew
up in a world where I did not live in my body at all, that was the only safe way
to survive. None of my family lived in their bodies, their chosen home was the left hemisphere of academia. Through the many years of therapy and treatment I have had an image
of my experiencing of my childhood and teenage years as being one of being the
viewer of an old black and white pathe news-reel, like I was the reporter and
reader of my life but I didn’t actually live in it and nor was there any colour
whatsoever.
The overall
emotional tone of my childhood was that of boredom interspersed with episodes
of chronic worry and anxiety. This was the “felt” experience of chronic
dissociation and as my life had always felt that way I did not know that most
people did not experience life in this way. And despite the best attempts of the music
therapist my experience of making music with her continued to be a black and
white "reported-about" event – I did not “feel” it in me.
Then
came Ria. As she opened the door on the first day we met my body came alive. My
body just knew she was someone who I could have a real fun with, that she was
the kind who would be the naughty girl at the back of the class and could
really be led astray, that what we would do would be entirely of our own
creation and not following any rules.
That in her world of music it was not about an in-the-head analysis but of movement and "being" the song the way it is just for the individual singing it.
With Ria I have discovered that within a year of starting to see her
that I have, moved from doing music from my head and my left brain (“oh look
this is a minor third apart here and its 6/8 time….”) to just my body knowing
how to produce sounds I never knew I had within me, to move with the music and
to look at a music score and not see the left-brain detail but the pattern and
flow of the melody and its rhythm.
My
relationship with music has gone from this….
……….to
this
Bruce
Perry is right – fun is such a great way to heal and rehabilitation does not
need to be the serious hard work slog that at times it can be. The group, Matchbox Twenty, in their song
“Black and White People” have two lines of the lyrics which epitomise my
experiencing of this metamorphosis that has taken place within me:
….the
technicolor dreams
Of black
and white people…
I have
gone from
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