Author: Holly Mae Haddock

Categories
Wellness

Meditation Tips for People Who don’t Like Meditating

I have a love-hate relationship with meditation. On the one hand, I have had so many positive experiences with it. On the other hand, many days when it’s time to meditate a part of me bolts for the hills like a half-tamed mare. 

It can be exasperating to witness how much bucking of the saddle lives on in me after all these years. I am not the elegant equestrian. I am the humbled rodeo clown, hat in hand. If you can relate, read on!

At this point my opinion is that as someone with tendencies towards addiction, maybe I can accept and validate this about myself rather than condemn it. Life is a little easier when I chuckle at my vivacious resistance, seeing it like a big, wet sandy dog who runs away from being washed after a walk on the beach, or a toddler who books it across the lawn because he knows I want to change his poopy diaper.

If you, like me, sometimes struggle to get yourself to meditate, here are some possibly-helpful tips. Shared with love and fondness for all within us that resists the bridle.

1. Understand the Role of Trauma

It took me a really long time to understand that part of why I struggle so much with meditation is that when I sit down and get in touch with my breath, I often encounter unprocessed trauma responses in the body. 

Unprocessed trauma responses in the body feel like death, literally, because it is the same energy and physiological messaging that your body has when you are actually dying. Given that I have a backlog of signals in the body saying “you’re not safe, you’re dying, you’re dying!”, it’s naturally challenging on some days. 

It’s true that eventually meditation helps with these things. But before you understand what’s going on, if you treat yourself like you’re bad for wanting to avoid that feeling, you can make it worse, because being bad is part of trauma. 

My suggestion: make kind recognition of trauma energies a deliberate part of the practice. Just as you may say to yourself, “Breathing in, I am aware that I am breathing in,”, you can also say, “This is a trauma response in the body. I am aware it is a trauma response in the body.”

2. Lower the Bar

A friend in Twelve Step once said, “If you must compare yourself, compare yourself to someone in your own weight class. Lightweights don’t fight heavyweights.” 

This was not meant offensively, but rather to say, understand the context of your consciousness, and lower the bar! If you are recovering from addiction, if you are still working out how to feel safe in your own skin, take that into account in your assessment of how well you are doing. 

There are differences in skill and capacity amongst us, no doubt. But there is no value difference between any of us because of that. We all contribute to God’s expanding consciousness, and are loved in equal measure just because. So make sure you are using a right-sized measuring stick.

3. Give the Inner Child Veto Power

I have a deal with my Inner Child that if the distress and discomfort becomes too overwhelming, she is allowed to say “time out” and I will honor it. Letting the Inner Child have veto power which she is allowed to use sometimes can create so much more safety around the practice. If there are days when you just can’t meditate, ok. There’s always tomorrow to try again. 

4. Don’t Make it an Ego Trip (or Notice When You Do)

One of the biggest pitfalls of course, is when we start thinking “Wow, I’m such a good meditator” or, conversely, “I’m such a terrible meditator! Oh no!” as if “a meditator” is an identity. 

This is the ego seeking shelter, once again, in making thingness out of something that’s not a thing, because ego likes stasis and to latch and grasp on. We can observe, laugh and marvel at ego’s tenacity, making that part of the practice too. “I see you, ego! Hi there!”

5. Turn it Over

Some days it’s honestly just: “Source, please make this meditation practice what you would have it be.” Because often enough it’s me, not spirit, who’s insisting on a particular idea of correct meditation. How long it should be, what it should be like. I may be meditating because I want to be victorious against my suffering, because I don’t want to experience my fear, because I want to feel like I was a good girl today. Spirit probably wants something else. So remember it’s always an option to say uncle and let the unconditioned space within you rise up to steer your practice.

Thanks for reading!

Categories
Wellness

Making Friends with Yourself

Human beings are made for friendship. The company of others makes our lives warmer, more light-filled, and resonant. 

Friends can surface qualities in us that otherwise stay submerged. They bring out our tenderness or our wit, maybe our rebelliousness and our generosity.  This harmonic resonance between compatible human beings is part of what makes friendship wonderful.

Some friends make us laugh – these friends are a treasure. Some friends give us room for the deeps inside, these being the ones who understand the inky waters of our hearts better than anyone else. 

Friends reflect to us pieces of our own nature, facets of the multidimensional jewel that every human being is. Knowing others, we know ourselves better. Each kaleidoscopic expression of a human soul helps us appreciate all humans. The fact that we are made like this is, in my mind, a cause for celebration, gratitude and joy. 

In order to have friends, we have to be friends, to activate the Friend Archetype inside. Just as only a Lover can be loved, only a Friend can be friends with another Friend. 

What is involved in being a friend? One way of thinking about it is that we must be available, adequately ready to share who we are with another. Our perspectives, our heart qualities, our instincts, must be accessible, relatively close to the surface. 

The only trouble with this is that to open ourselves to flow in an outward direction, sourcing from what’s inside us and heading to what looms out there, isn’t always easy. To open that gate requires some courage, some willingness to feel the waters of emotion flowing through us. 

Opening the gate also means that we open up to receiving, to potentially allowing another person’s energies to touch us, to interface with us, to change us. I don’t know about you, but I’m not always in the mood. Many days my trust is low and my expectations even lower. I don’t always have capacity. Sometimes I’m weary, recovering from the blows of life. 

But human beings are social animals, and we need to be among others of our own kind to feel complete. Mirror neurons show us that we are wired for empathy and to be attuned to the nervous systems of others. Our hardwiring for connection and communion in a tribal network of beings is an important aspect of the human experience. 

But we are also made for individuality, sovereignty, autonomy. To be always free in our own consciousness streams to choose the direction of our thoughts, feelings, and actions. To choose to merge in friendship from a place of loving communion is a choice.

There is wisdom in our psychological, physical distinctness from every other human. It’s what makes friendship possible, that we choose to come together and relate, and then choose to part again when the energies feel complete with that exchange. Psychological fusion with another is not the goal. 

On the painful side, our distinctness is why we can be lonely in our own skins, why merging with the essence of another through shared moments of understanding, prolonged eye contact, a shared funny bone, can feel rare.

Many of us also know what it feels like to be utterly isolated, fogged in, as though sealed into a weather system of our own misery, locked into a pocket of the universe where no light rays can find us. We can become as though fully disconnected and separate, and in this state we suffer immeasurably. 

In such times, where is friendship? Mystics from the Sufi tradition refer to God many times as “the Friend”, as one of the many names you can use to think about God. 

I love that idea, and it reflects my experience. In my most friendless times, I discovered the Friend within, both the one I am and the one that God is, and the fact that we are actually the same at some level of being. 

Loneliness gives us a reason to make friends with ourselves. If we want to experience true deep and loving friendship “out there”, then we need to also experience friendship internally, as our insides must match the outsides to be sustainable co-creators.

We are God in our innermost nature, and God is our Friend. So we are the Friend as well. When we choose friendship as a mode of relating, we both bring more friends into our own lives, and offer more of the vibration of friendship to the world.

And looking around the world today, it seems to me it sure could use a friend. 

Thanks for reading!

Categories
Therapy

Art Therapy for Connecting with a Higher Power

Higher Powers are meant to keep us sober, to give us direction, to hold us and help us cast our burdens off. Higher Powers are for finding solace and peace when faced with the more arduous sides of life.

Turning your understanding of your Higher Power into a visual art piece is a powerfully anchoring activity, that will make your relationship with the divine more real, practical, and embodied. The following Art Therapy Exercise is intended for that purpose. 

May the following Art Therapy Exercise for Connecting with a Higher Power be helpful for you on your path to a loving relationship with a truly helpful Higher Power! 

Make a Higher Power Niche

A niche is sort of like an altar. It’s a place where you can display an image of your Higher Power, and place offerings such as flowers, messages on scraps of paper, or little presents. In this exercise you make your own niche (small altar in a box) to honor your personal understanding of your own Higher Power. 

Materials you will need: 

  1. An open-faced box. The containers that blueberries & other fruit come in, tofu containers, and pasta boxes all make good niche boxes, as do small wooden crates if you can find one. The box will eventually be affixed to a wall, with the open side facing outwards so that the viewer looks in at it.
  2. Acrylic Paint (Poster Paint), markers, paint pens, sharpies – whatever you have on hand
  3. Scissors for cutting collage images from magazines
  4. Modge podge or glue
  5. Paintbrushes for using the paint and glue
  6. Magazines you will cut up, filled with images of things that seem beautiful to you. Gardening, science, nature, art and travel magazines are good for this.
  7. Thumbtacks for pinning your niche to the wall

Step One: The Box

Choose an open-faced box that feels like it is a size you can relate to comfortably.

Step Two: Base Coat

Give your box a base coat of paint in a color that makes you feel relaxed and safe.

Step Three: Select Images

While the base coat is drying, cut out images you will use in your collage portrait of your Higher Power. Give yourself a time box of at least 20 minutes for collecting images, going through and just choosing anything, intuitively, that feels soothing, powerful, or pretty. Pictures of animals, plants and flowers, landscapes, gems, or skies are typically helpful for summoning the feeling of a Higher Power, but anything goes.

Step Four: Make a Silhouette of Your Higher Power

On the side of the box you will see when you look in at your niche, draw an outline that will be the outer containing line of your collage images. This is the main image of the box as you will look into the niche once it’s hung on a wall. In this area, draw the outline of a shape that makes you feel safe and contained. Circles are good for this, as are ovals, geometric and symmetrical forms, and faces, but do whatever feels right. 

Step Five: Collage

Using glue and a paintbrush, begin collaging and filling in the silhouette of your Higher Power with the magazine images you collected. In the end it will appear that your Higher Power is filled up with these things. For example, my Higher Power Niche shows a Higher Power that’s part lioness, part ocean, part pine forest. Follow your own intuitive sense to create an image that summons up the inner feeling of your Higher Power. Glue the images down flat and put an extra layer of glue or modge podge over the images to help affix. If desired, you can also paint or draw on top of these images now, adding painterly aspects. 

Step Six: Use Your Niche

Once your niche is dry, use the tacks to pin it on the wall. You can now start surrendering and dedicating topics to your Higher Power. Write your topics down on small pieces of paper and place the small papers inside the niche at the base of the image of your Higher Power. You may share something you’re worried about or some other burden you’re ready to cast off. Alternatively, you can write what you’re grateful for or name aspects of yourself you’re ready to consecrate to your spiritual path. By placing these little communications in the niche, you are symbolically letting yourself (and your Higher Power) know that you are willing to build relationship, to let go of the bindings of your life and to be supported at a greater and more powerful level by that which is truly on your side. 

Categories
General

Shame and Addiction: The Importance of Support and Connection During Recovery

Shame is at the core of addiction. As much as it can seem that our addiction is why we feel shame, in actuality shame almost always precedes addiction.

People with addictions tend to come from families soaked with toxic shame. There is such a thing as healthy shame, when it belongs to a specific event and can be completed and released. It’s ok to be ashamed of how you behaved once in a while. 

However, the shame most of us struggle with is chronic, ongoing, and unhealed- a wound that festers perennially inside our psyches. The problem with this kind of shame is that it connects into our sense of who we are. Toxic shame has a sense of “I am” in it.

Shame and Belonging

Shame is related to belonging. In order to feel all right psychologically, we need a good enough sense of belonging to the group of humans upon whom we depend for love and survival. 

The trouble is that our right to belonging can be threatened in a variety of ways – whenever banishment, exclusion, or rejection are on the table. It’s important to understand that loss of love and belonging signals death, and we feel it as a threat to our lives when our belonging is at stake.

Many of us underwent traumatic experiences that caused us to conclude something about us was so bad as to make us undeserving of the love and belonging that we need in order to survive. This places us under enormous strain. 

Shame Fosters Addiction

Shame pushes us to develop patterns of avoidance of reliving our intensely scary experiences. While understandable, avoidance also traps the shame energies in the body, and shame becomes a fetid, stagnant pool, never able to drain. 

The effect of this on the psyche is to haunt us – at any moment we can plunge fully into the experience of shame, feeling that badness, unworthiness, and disconnection from life. Shame is so overwhelming to the human psyche that when it’s globalized like that and it’s all we can feel, we’ll do almost anything to change that feeling state. This is where our drug of choice comes in to “help” us. 

The other thing to understand is that shame is a side-effect of trauma. If you have a lot of shame, that’s not because you’re actually especially shameful, but rather it means you have survived an above-average level of abuse.

Recovering from Shame

When we get into recovery, we have to heal our shame or we might not be able to stay sober. Left unhealed, shame binds us to the past, to bad behaviors, to situations and people who are not good for us. 

Healing shame, thank goodness, is totally possible. The solution to shame is other people. Safe, loving people who can hear what our shame tells us, who also know what shame is and what it feels like, and who can serve in the role of witness to us to hear our stories. People who can hear what it is that we believe makes us so terrible, and yet who do not buy into our stories of unworthiness. 

Typically when we are able to share our shame stories out loud with a loving other, we will start to feel better almost right away, as the healing light of another person’s safe loving presence will immediately begin to dry out the shame. In the presence of love, shame evaporates like a puddle of water in the sun. Shame is distilled, purified away, by the clean searing heat of neutral acceptance. 

Unconditional Acceptance as an Antidote to Shame

Through this process we discover that healing shame lies not in what exactly we did or did not do, but rather in the mindset shift that no matter what we do, nothing can make a human being worth less than the infinite preciousness that we are. This unconditionality, the truth that humans are not defined nor summed up by any experience we may have endured, is where the healing is.  

The good news in all of this is that the path of recovery will gradually lead us to reclaim our inherent innocence and worth, as we cast off the burdens we have been carrying. The secrets of our wounded families, of the ways we were treated, of what we accepted because we had to in order to get the love we needed to survive, how we replicated those patterns with others, the way abuse lived on in us helplessly – all of these fall away as shame is healed. 

When we can at last deeply forgive ourselves, once and for all, we become grateful for the funny, bittersweet role that addiction has played in restoring us to ourselves. And in leading us first to our shame, addiction ultimately leads us home. 

Categories
Therapy

The Personal Benefits of Expressive Arts Therapy Activities

In other posts on Writing, Music, Art, and Dance Therapy activities, I write about how each of these art channels can be helpful in recovery. 

While each of these creative healing disciplines exists all on their own, there is also a special modality called Expressive Arts Therapy which is based on weaving all the arts together. 

Using all the arts together, we move from modality to modality, starting out in one art discipline, then shifting into another and then another and another. 

For example you might start out doing a drama therapy activity (such as improvising a monologue), then decide to switch channels and do a drawing about that same topic, then switch again to dance movement. And so on!

The purpose and benefit of changing between disciplines as you follow the unfolding process live is that our soul’s information can be understood differently through different channels. By translating a soul signal back and forth between different modalities, there is a way to glean more information, depth, meaning and context than if we simply use one art practice alone. 

If you want to try Expressive Arts Therapy right now, here is an exercise for exploring what it’s like to switch between arts disciplines as a way of deepening your soul work. I do recommend it to anyone on the journey of recovery!

Expressive Arts Therapy: the Intermodal Weave

1. Decide What You’re Working On

Identify a specific thing you want to work on, what you would call “a problem” you’re curious about. For example, if you are struggling with feeling low self-esteem, you would set the intention to explore the problem of your low self-esteem.

2. Express The Problem Visually as Art

Start in the visual arts channel with some free form scribbling or intuitive mark making (so, not drawing anything specific per se, more like letting the movement of your hand around the page make an abstract piece). Although you are working with a specific theme, the suggestion is to not overly think about it, nor to try to make symbolic representations, rather just let yourself loosely muse on the topic while your hand moves around capturing the feeling tones, the qualities, and the general vibe of the topic. It’s very important that you don’t judge, and you remind yourself you are capturing the qualities of the issue’s feeling, how it feels to you, and not “making art”. 

3. Reflect on What You Drew

When you feel that you are complete with making a visual expression of how you feel, set the drawing you made a little bit away from yourself, at some distance, perhaps half way across the room, and look at it for a while. From a distance, see if there is a portion of the drawing that you are especially interested in. A specific wavelet in a specific color, such as a spiral of pink at the bottom right of your drawing, might capture your attention. 

4. Move What You See in Your Drawing

Now allow yourself to ease into the movement channel, and see if you can catch the dynamics of the pink spiral in a dance, allowing your body to explore the motion and direction captured in your drawing. You may find your body also making a kind of spiral motion, like a leaf falling in the wind, and an image such as that may come into your mind as you do.

5. Capture Your Dance In Words

After a few minutes of exploring in movement, allow your body to come to completion and rest, and shift into the writing channel to describe what you just experienced in your dance. For example, you might start writing, with a poetic feeling to it: I saw a leaf falling, dancing the spiral of falling from the tree. I felt how lonely, how dried out and sad I am. Allow yourself to write for a good while about anything that felt meaningful, being as poetic and colorful in your language as feels right for you today.

6. Synthesize 

Through working with your topic from many different angles, you end up with a lot of information you can synthesize together. For example, you may realize that your feeling of low self-esteem is something like the feeling of a dead leaf falling from a tree, feeling lonely and sad and a bit disconnected from life. Through this you may realize that you are also the tree, looking at the leaf and allowing it to fall, letting it go, and you may identify more with the tree than the leaf. Whatever happens, if this process works for you, you’ll come to a new place through it, and may find yourself standing at a vista that’s helpful, healing and integrating.

Happy exploring!

Categories
Therapy

5 Dance Movement Therapy Activities For People in Recovery

Dance therapy is a holistic treatment modality within the expressive arts that relies on the power of movement to bring healing, peace and well-being to body, mind and spirit. It is used effectively with a variety of ills, including substance abuse, to bring wholeness back into people’s lives. 

Humans are born with the instinct, capacity and gift for dance. All cultures have dance of some form. Dance is about more than having fun, letting off steam, and expressing yourself amongst friends, though it can serve all of those purposes too. Dance is also a way of integrating somatically, taking experiences that are currently set aside in a separate stream of sensations, and giving these distinct energy packets a way to merge with the larger energy of your body. 

Dance therapy, when used with intention and awareness, can be a great aid in addiction recovery for this reason, in addition to all of the benefits it provides in terms of simply releasing tensions from the physiology. For people in recovery, dance is a joyful, free, liberating practice. I recommend it to everyone!

Here are my tips for trying out dance therapy at home.

1. Free Dance

The most familiar way into using dance for your recovery will be to free dance, which as the name indicates, means consciously dedicating a time period to dance freely in whatever way comes most naturally to you. It’s important to remember that dance includes stillness and also that there is no right or wrong way to move. If you’re doing it at all, you’re doing it right. 

Pick a long song or create a playlist of multiple songs so that you have about 20 minutes of continuous music. Set the intention that you will dance the whole entire time, remembering at the same time that stopping to rest and doing smaller, less effortful moves can also be part of the dance (you don’t have to always be at high energy). 

2. Authentic Movement

Authentic movement is a meditative, mindfulness-based movement practice, which brings soothing and harmony into the body. Authentic movement is done without music. You begin and end in stillness, just taking a posture of stillness as a starting point. 

Begin by waiting, unhurriedly, until an urge to move arises. When a movement wants to happen in you, allow it to. Follow the movement until it feels to have completed itself, that the urge to make that particular movement is complete. Repeat or evolve the movement for as long as it feels like it needs to be done, then go back to waiting. 

Give yourself a time box, something like 12 minutes, and allow all that wants to happen authentically, to do so. 

3. Dance What You Want

Dance What You Want is a powerful process for bringing joy, hope, and a sense of future to yourself. The frame is very simple – identify something you want and then dance the dance of that desired thing. For example, if you would like to experience more joy in your life, you would dedicate yourself to exploring a dance that responds to, plays within, and captures the feeling of joy. You would choose music that matches that feeling and let your body really get ahold of the experience from within. Manifestation will follow such a dance in some form or another!  

4. Shadowdancing

Shadowdancing is the opposite of Dance What you Want. In Shadowdancing you deliberately allow yourself to go into the energy and feeling of something that’s bothering you. For example, if you’ve been struggling with feeling insecure at work, you would deliberately summon up that insecure feeling and then give yourself a chance to express it in movement. It’s important with shadowdancing not to force anything. You need to be quiet and receptive, sort of like in meditation, perhaps trying on the idea of letting yourself be danced, rather than you doing the dancing.   

5. Dancing Transformations

In this frame you allow yourself to explore a process from the natural world, such as “the dance of the seed” – in which you might start out curled up like a seed lying on the ground, then slowly work through the stages of becoming a full tree. An alternative could be to do the dance of the butterfly, or any other aspect of nature (an ocean storm, for example), that has a lot of dynamics and in some way helps you access the experience of transformation and change, and the ways that energy systems move and change. 

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When you consciously dedicate a dance practice to your healing and recovery, you are engaging a deep and natural pathway to wellbeing and balance. This will help you get to where you want to go in a more grounded and embodied way. Getting fit and feeling the flow of endorphins are added boons. Have fun!

Categories
Personal Development

Self-care and Addiction Recovery: 3 Tips to Help You Along Your Journey

Human beings are precious. Every single one of us matters in life. We have the misfortune of not being able to understand that about ourselves and, often, other people.

And while we are resilient and able to endure and recover from the most mind-boggling array of assaults on human consciousness, we are not immune to the ravages and damages of long-term maltreatment in the form of self-neglect.

Even though we cannot always recognize and validate that we treat ourselves relatively poorly, because to us it’s just how it’s always been (water to the fish), the atrophy to our health is real when we withhold love from ourselves. 

Many of us treat ourselves with shocking contempt and utter ignorance of true human needs, essentially carrying on the abuse we grew up with.

Those of us with a tendency towards addiction are guilty of deep self-rejection of our real self and what it needs to thrive. Not only have we abused our physical bodies through repeated destructive behavior, but we have also deprived and mistreated our emotions and denied the soul’s needs. 

Many people end up with addiction problems because they don’t know how to care for themselves, treat themselves with love, respect, tenderness, self-support, and so on. Many of us are essentially feral before we learn otherwise, like animals that grew up on the streets and have no idea what it would be like to be genuinely wanted, cherished, and valued. 

We replaced actual care of ourselves with addiction, relying on substances to manage our symptoms of emotional pain, our varying states and moods, to get the many jobs of life done. 

When we get into recovery many of us learn how to care for human life for the first time, perhaps by watching those around us who have more sobriety under their belt. Healthy meals, sleep, exercise, mutual love, and friendship are new, learned behaviors for us. We gradually realize that much of what we lived without for so long, in terms of emotional support and self-care, is necessary to live soberly.

Here are three self-care and addiction recovery tips to help you along your journey.

1. Accept your Needs

Practice the point of view that human needs are neither good nor bad, they just are. Plants need sunlight, soil, water, and that is not a moral issue, it is simply what it takes for plants to thrive. 

We human beings need a lot of forms of nourishment – nutrients for every layer of our being. Since we are not only physical beings, but also emotional, mental, and spiritual ones, we have many different kinds of needs. And that’s ok. 

Rather than drawing up a balance sheet in your mind of which of your needs you do or do not deserve to have met, consider that all needs can be accepted, just as they are, whether or not they’re being met at the moment. Declare full amnesty for all sides of your humanity.   

2. Get to Know Your Needs

With the understanding that needs are neither good nor bad, just a fact of life, write out all the things you need, whether or not you are able to have them in your life at this time. 

Don’t be conservative, but rather generous with this list. Try not to worry about how you might meet those needs, focusing instead on merely naming what they are. For example, I need affection, attention, support, people to listen to me, people to have fun with, creative outlets. And more.   

For inspiration, you can look at the following list of universal human needs: https://www.cnvc.org/training/resource/needs-inventory. Perhaps there’s something on this list you didn’t know you were allowed to want. You are!

3. Put Your Needs on the Schedule

Using your generous list of needs, make a sample self-care schedule, starting with all the needs of the body (healthy food, exercise, sleep, physical affection, etc), and gradually adding needs of the other layers of your being. What emotional needs do you also need to regularly meet? What mental, spiritual, sexual, relationship, friendship, or creative needs do you have? 

It can be helpful when doing the exercise to do two versions of the schedule: one is a realistic, grounded schedule based on your life as it is right now, in which you envision how you might meet your needs given your current circumstances. The second exercise is to allow your imagination to run wild with picturing all the beautiful ways these needs could get met, in an alternate reality free of restrictions. Using your creative imagination to fantasize about meeting your needs will help you experience these needs being met in the real world.  

Good luck!

Categories
Therapy

6 Music Therapy Activities to Try At Home

Did you know there are music therapy activities you can try at home? 

You probably already know that music is a powerful medium. You can deliberately harness that power to help yourself live a more meaningful, connected life. For people in addiction recovery, music is a special gift that inspires a sober life. 

Music Therapy has many different approaches and activities, ranging from listening to making music yourself. Whether you’re just listening or whether you’re also making some sounds yourself, music therapy does the following things: 

  1. Music Therapy regulates the nervous system creating deep feelings of wellbeing, health, and relaxation 
  2. Music Therapy accesses the part of you that feels unconditional peace, harmony, and connection to something bigger
  3. Music Therapy allows you to express your inner experiences and to find your inner world mirrored in the expressions of others

Here are 6 easy Music Therapy Activities that you can try right away. Have fun!

1. Playlists

You’ve probably made a playlist of songs before. What if you did it with the extra intention of creating a specific therapeutic effect for you? Making playlists for yourself can be a deeply caring activity. 

Some playlists you might like to make for yourself include the following: Soothing Songs, Songs for Falling Asleep at Night, Songs with an Uplifting Positive Outlook, Songs that Make Me Feel Understood. 

If you have a therapist, a fellow in recovery, or a friend to share your playlist with, that often makes the experience more complete. 

Whatever you do, I think every person should make themselves a playlist of songs that make them want to sing along at the top of their lungs. (I call mine “Belters”). Singing your heart out is one of the healthiest things you can do, for your heart, your body, and of course, your soul.

2. Song Journal

Choose a song that you love and relate to very much. Copy the lyrics out into your journal. Now write for a few pages about why you love it so much. What do you connect with, why do you think this song speaks to you? If you keep digging, you may find that a lot of your life pattern can be understood through the songs that you love. What you value, what you need and long for, can be discerned in the songs you love. The loving universe can speak to us through musicians.

3. Affirmation Songs

Singing is a powerful anchor for making things real. When we sing, we experience the meaning of the words we’re saying at a deep and cellular level far longer than just speaking them out loud. So consider making yourself some Personal Affirmation Songs (could also be called Mantras or Chants). 

Start with writing an affirmation that feels good to you. One of mine is “I am always Worthy, I am always Protected, I am always Loved”. 

Now put that phrase to a melody (it can be one you create or one borrowed from a song you like) and sing the phrase over and over again (try for 15 minutes). Repetitive singing, aside from raising mood, purifying the body, and making you generally feel better about life, helps these words sink into your soul.

4. Drum Along

When we are out of balance emotionally, this is reflected in our biology as disturbed biorhythms and irregular brainwaves. We can balance our bodily systems (and hence our emotions) via music. 

Music with a strong beat is especially good for this. If you drum along (even just tapping your own body with your fingers) to very rhythmic music, it strengthens and stabilizes your nerves, leading gradually to feelings of liveliness and harmony. This happens by way of bilateral movement and rhythmic stimulation, entraining your body to a balanced state.

5. Make Your Own Power Song

Using a song that makes you feel wonderful, capable, and strong, replace some of the lyrics to make the song even more your own. 

Start by removing a few words from every line, and then replacing them to make them slightly more your own, to hear the words you need to hear. This works especially well in songs that have an easy, repetitive structure, like Amazing Grace. 

I once was lost but now I’m found
was bound but now I’m free

can be altered to give you a chance to express your own experiences like so:
I once was ______ but now I’m ______
was ______ but now I’m _______

If you want to sing it to yourself, try finding the karaoke backing track version of your song and sing your new song over it, or you can just sing your new version over the original. There is a special power to songs that we sing to and for ourselves. Just as babies are soothed by mother’s voice, we are soothed by our own loving tones. 

6. Record Something

Allow yourself to make an expressive sound piece of just 3-4 minutes in length, recording it on your phone and then listening back. During the 3-4 minutes, anything goes: you can record the sound of the wind, pour water back and forth into a glass, or sing and play and instrument, it doesn’t matter at all. What matters is giving yourself a container to express yourself into using sound. Just using your ears and your inborn musicality will brighten your soul and give you an infusion of natural happiness. 

Categories
Therapy

Two Art Therapy Exercises for Feeling Hopeful in Tough Times

One of the troubles we face in recovery is when we lose sight of hope. It happens from time to time that we lose the ability to see that our lives have a path we can believe in, that we have a future worth believing in. 

The following two Art Therapy exercises are for helping picture our lives, to remember and conceive that our lives have purpose and direction.

Like a bird who flies far above the problem situation, you can take the eagle’s perch view of your life and it can help you have the strength and hope to move on. 

These exercises can both be done just with markers or pencils and paper, or you can also use paint and other materials. 

Gifting Hands

Part 1: Trace Your Hands

On a sheet of paper that’s big enough to trace both of your hands, trace your left hand onto the left side of the paper, and trace your right hand onto the right side of your paper.

Part 2: What You Want to Receive

Inside the outlines of the left hand, write and/or draw symbols of all the things that you would like to receive. 

If you could have everything you want, what would you like life to bring to you? It’s ok to put material things in there, but also consider other aspects. You may want things like courage, solace, or joy. 

Part 3: What You Want to Give

Within the outlines of the right hand, write or draw symbols of the things that you would give to the world if you were able. Things like “shelter for all”, or intangibles like “inspiration” and “self-confidence” go here. 

Part 4: Reflect

Looking at the two hands, how do you feel? If the exercise has worked for you, you may feel lighter and more connected to an expansive energy, a life flow, care for other human beings.

Maps 

The following exercise takes three sheets of paper.

You are going to draw three maps, each one looking a little bit like an old-timey treasure map or a fantasy map of an imaginary country. You’ll draw a trail as though making a guide for another, while also loosely indicating the major landmarks of the symbolic terrain. 

Part 1: Where You’ve Been

On the first sheet of paper, mark an X to mean where your life began. From there, start to draw out the winding path of your life. Alongside the path, draw symbols and write down words that come to mind when you consider the questions, “Where I have been? What’s behind me on this path of life? What kinds of spaces have I already moved through?” 

You might identify specific things that happened in your past (“moved to Kentucky”), or general phrases like “misunderstood at school” or “addicted”. Feel free to be playful and metaphorical with how you describe what you’ve been through, such as drawing the “swamps of despair” or “cliffs of isolation”.

When you have expressed everything you have to say about the terrain you have lived through already in your life, good bad and ugly, set the paper aside and start the second paper. 

Part 2: Where You’re Going

The second map is where you’re heading, if all things go well. Where are you off to, ideally? Do the same thing as on the first paper, except this time describe the terrain you would like to walk in your future. 

This map should feel bright and wonderful, picturing all the things that would mean a good life to you. “Adopt a pet”, “fall in love”, “community” or “exciting career” – whatever you would love to have in your future. Keep working on the drawing until it feels full of light, positive indications of your future. 

Part 3: What Connects the Two? 

Finally, draw the third map on the third paper – the connector map or bridge. This sheet of paper shows how you would get from the first one (where you’re coming from), to the second one (where you’re going). This last map is meant to be fitted between the other two and is a transitional piece that connects the two others.

On this map you will indicate the path of recovery you will need to walk, what you will need to move through, what type of terrain you need to face, to get to where you want to be. This is where your intuition will speak to you about what needs to be done in order to change your life for the better. Things like “grieve the past and let go of it” or “build friendships in AA” may be placed here.  

Part 4: Take it All In

When you’re done, put the three maps all together, with the bridge map in the middle connecting your past to your future. Take a look at the whole story, starting from where you began, then passing through the bridge, ending up in your positive future.

What can you learn from what you intuitively sense and know about your journey, now reflected back to you in your art? Journal about your insights. 

Thanks for reading!

Categories
Personal Development

Why Do We Self-sabotage (And How to Stop the Cycle)

The Saboteur Inside You

If you’re like me, there’s a side of you that’s problematic, a bit troublesome. Someone tucked away within who does not fully serve your highest wishes and intentions. 

This is the Inner Saboteur. 

We all have different sides to us, facets that seem more socially acceptable, wholesome and life-affirming, and others that are more violent, dark-hearted, and mysterious. It is the nature of humans to be somewhat shadow-bound, our souls dappled with places that have not touched the light in a long time. 

These areas, as frightening or repellent as they may be to us (and others), have a lot of power over our lives. Typically much more than we realize. Saboteur comes from these realms. 

Signs of Self-Sabotage

We can detect a Saboteur at work when we behave in ways that contradict our stated goals. 

For an easy example – we think we want to be happy, but we behave in ways that make happiness inaccessible to us. A great example of this is when we have addictions and can’t seem to shake them. At the conscious personality level we want to be free and happy, but apparently another portion of us wants us to stay ill and bound.

Saboteur wants destruction, death, to feed rather than quash our misery. This shadow version of us can create a lot of trouble for us, wrecking our well-laid plans, giving off energies that propel away the cooperation of others, hijacking and spoiling our intentions for higher good. 

Having an inner Saboteur inside is much more common than we may realize, and is a reason for deep self-compassion. Good news is that it’s not a death sentence, rather just one of those cryptic soul signals calling us to a deeper, wider life than we have yet lived. 

The Silver Lining

Like all of the “bad things in life”, the Saboteur, brutal as she can be for us, is actually a doorway into a greater experience of aliveness than we could have imagined for ourselves had she not torn the walls down for us. 

All of that said, it’s important to get to know the Saboteur within us or we can be worn down by the struggle against her. 

So, why do we self-sabotage?

Here are some tips for understanding why we self-sabotage and how to stop the cycle of self-sabotage.

Step 1: Acknowledge your Saboteur

The pathway out of self-sabotage starts, like most things, with first acknowledging the truth of the problem. Part of us does not want to be happy and free, and this part is working against us to destroy our progress towards health and wellbeing. OK. This is our Saboteur.

Step 2: Befriend your Saboteur

Having accepted that we have a side of us that destroys us in lesser or greater ways on the regular, we’re off to a great start. Once we accept that this is so, we can get to know this inner character and befriend her. 

It might seem frightening at first, but this person is only a version of us, and we need not be afraid of our own selves. When we remember that we get to be in charge of our own selves, that we ultimately have the power to retrieve our own life energies out of shadow-bindings, we can have the courage to make friends. 

Make friends as you would with anyone else: be nice, ask questions, approach gently and with curiosity and kindness.  

Step 3: Understand Your Saboteur’s Motivation

Once we’ve established a basic friendship with our Saboteur, by acknowledging her presence without aggression, she can tell us what’s really been going on for her there, deep in the shadows of our being. What emerges will be meaningful: there is always a reason that we self-sabotage which makes sense within the dream-like logic of the psyche. 

If you’re puzzled, look for some way in which self-sabotage has actually served your physiological survival. Perhaps sabotaging yourself fulfilled a need for self-punishment, for example, which was necessary to keep the love of a caregiver or to protect someone else within the family system from taking responsibility for themselves and their own pain. Look for child-logic and magical thinking. At some point you’ll have an a-ha moment about why the behavior of self-destruction makes sense in its own way.  

Step 4: Ask for Your Saboteur’s Cooperation

When you’ve spent a good amount of time understanding, accepting and recognizing your Saboteur for the ways she is actually trying to keep you safe and alive, you might get to the point where you can tell her that you would like to try to be happy now, and see if there’s anything you could do to gain her support. 

Many times the Saboteur is willing to stop hijacking your journey if she feels like she had a chance to air her concerns about the direction you are heading (or more likely, where you’ve been in the past, that she’s afraid you’ll return to). She will also feel much more at peace when she feels you safely in charge of the kingdom of your psyche, and will be more cooperative than you might expect.

With the power of the Saboteur working on your side, you will have new reserves of energy to help you move towards life in ways you could not have imagined previously.    

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