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Alchemica

Optimising the Music Therapist for Spiritual Emergence or Psychedelic Therapy

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While I'm not playing with psychedelics, spiritual experiences through 'milder' plant medicines, or endogenous, can be of similar intensity. Lately I've been having a pleasant, peaceful spiritual emergence. 
 

"...the next dimension of our BEing is ushered in from the wings and we feel the call to move into another phase, leaving what was ‘less’ behind and embracing the new ‘more’. Our messes bring us order through feeling our inner chaos. The clouds part, the seas calm, the wind ebbs, and we are shifted lovingly into our reborn state, to continue finding our courage and love, our sacred aspects that bring us into wholeness and Oneness again and again, more and more, one step, one trip at a time."

How a Spiritual Awakening Lifted My Depression and Anxiety
 

"Until I let myself experience emotions in their entirety, I believe I never fully understood what they were and how exactly they ruled my life.
 

For me, experiencing anxiety entirely-through opened the door to seeing all emotions in their complete definition. The separation between my compassionate, loving self and what was once perceived as a different outside world, ceased to exist anymore. I now saw the oneness in everything. As a human, I see two paths to dealing with emotion. I keep myself from experiencing it fully and thus get the illusion of separation or an illusion of an Other.

 

The second and only other path to handling emotion is to allow myself to experience it entirely to create the space for love, compassion and non-judgment to understand the oneness. I now understand happiness and sadness, calm and chaos, as I perceive light or sound, and it has lifted me from my struggle.
 

The experience of depression is quite paradoxical. It’s a solitary experience that only allowed me to gain the awareness which reconnected me with people and the surrounding world. So… what in the world do I do with this now? I’ve learned that we cannot make each other see no matter how much we try. We must spread love to give each other the space to feel comfortable enough to take the painful dive inward. For it is dealing with inner turmoil that I now believe can lift us to a place of pure equality, full of love and compassion we all seek. It is a love and compassion that I rediscovered in myself and I believe we are all gifted with from the beginning."
 

The quality of the altered state predicts treatment outcomes in treatment resistant depression ( the quality of the experience—in particular, mystical traits such as “oceanic boundlessness”—correlates strongly with a decline in depression). I've been requiring a good music therapist. I'm having some experiences of unity, spiritual experience, bliss, insightfulness, meaning etc. Music is helping me.
 

What music are you therapeutically journeying to in life these days? Without things to to facilitate personally meaningful experiences that can lead to sustained changes in behaviour and outlook, particularly for isolated people who might be journeying more solo, you get really stuck.
 

We need to learn good structure of music therapy - first establishing calm and safety, heading towards onset and building towards peak experiences - grouped together as ascent, and re-entry was named descent. Music with strong evocative emotional sentiments was only played during peak, on the assumption that an important pre-requisite is for the individual to first feel calm and safe and that more evocative music would enable an activation of autobiographical and therapeutically significant when played at peak
 

We need some good spirited playlists that are humanly emotionally evocative, open you to new worlds, supportive and guiding (maybe some thought provoking stuff in it), and promote empathetic mental imagery. Your 'psytrance' isn't therapeutically good IMO, neither are any of the classical music playlists tailored to psychedelic therapy I've heard. While several of the musical works originally included in playlists for therapy are very familiar today. Examples include Samuel Barber—Adagio for strings and Beethoven—Piano Concerto 5. These personally aren't desirable. Thankfully they're shifting more to predominantly contemporary music such as the ambient, neoclassical, contemporary classical, as well as traditional/ethnic music styles which I think is more suitable.
 

Psychedelics and spiritual experiences significantly modulate music-evoked emotion, music-evoked mental imagery, and perceived personal meaningfulness of music
 

"...music had both "welcome" and "unwelcome" influences on patients' subjective experiences. Welcome influences included the evocation of personally meaningful and therapeutically useful emotion and mental imagery, a sense of guidance, openness, and the promotion of calm and a sense of safety. Conversely, unwelcome influences included the evocation of unpleasant emotion and imagery, a sense of being misguided and resistance. Correlation analyses showed that patients' experience of the music was associated with the occurrence of "mystical experiences" and "insightfulness." Crucially, the nature of the music experience was significantly predictive of reductions in depression 1 week after psilocybin, whereas general drug intensity was not."

The hidden therapist: evidence for a central role of music in psychedelic therapy.

http://sci-hub.tw/10.1007/s00213-017-4820-5

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Alchemica, your posts are always so good! I really enjoy the work and insight you share. I completely agree with the avenues to feeling emotions and their use in our personal evolution. Our emotions are our compass and teacher.

 

Music is my medicine. I make music for the purpose of healing, but its not wanky new-age stuff, its banging dancefloor orientated. I incorporate frequency activations, binaural beats, ethnomusicology, tribal polyrhythms and instrumentation, and I write in 432hz. I haven't released anything from this project yet, i'm just finishing up the debut EP, but if you swing me your email in a PM I can send some to you for a listen...

 

Trance music definitely has the ability to be medicinal music, its just that for many producers it hasn't been created with the intention to heal. There are few artists that I am aware of that consciously write "good" music for this purpose. I highly recommend Merkaba (https://merkabamusic.bandcamp.com/album/as-earth-to-sky-96khz-24bit), and some stuff on his label Merkaba Music. Also Shanti Planti and Desert Trax (both are labels) are definitely worth having a listen to... 

 

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 @MountainGoat thank you kindly for your lovely offer. I'll shoot you a PM, much gratitude. Keep up the music work, sounds awesome.

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For me i cant go past the late, great Jerry Garcia as someone whos guitar work conveyed the psychedelic experience better than anyone else ive heard.  While not to everybodys taste or maybe an acquired taste.  His work is broad from Jazz to Psych to folk and prolific. Robert Hunters lyrics still relevant, evocative and potent.  Check him out if you havent already.

 

https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description&q=http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2FGLV9GarciaSaunders&redir_token=973Q6_kVN_1IPSc0aNM65C-jWF58MTUzMTY0MzQxMUAxNTMxNTU3MDEx&v=RHhcdIBsyck

 

 

 

 

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