Abstract
Previous literature in music therapy suggests a need for greater clarity and insight concerning correlations between music and spirituality for the modern clinician. The purpose of this article is to provide a clear explanation of these correlations and some possible implications for the practice of music therapy. My method is one of ‘reflective synthesis’ – combining theoretical knowledge from several disciplines with my own, practical experience with clients – to bring forward key working, concepts. This will include (1) presenting a rationale for the therapist’s study of spirituality; (2) clarifying some basic terms; (3) asking three important questions concerning a human life and viewing them through the lens of spirituality and music; (4) linking the first of these questions to awareness of transcendence; (5) answering the second question in light of purpose and meaning; (6) explaining how spirituality provides connection to the other; (7) illustrating the correlations in a clinical vignette, and as a conclusion; (8) suggesting implications this may have for the music therapist; and (9) offering some reasonable cautions for integrating spirituality into a music therapy practice.
I have seen over and over again how music can enhance our present incarnate life, enrich it, and lead it in fulfilling spiritual directions.
The seed for this article was first planted in a university classroom. I was teaching a unit on music therapy in palliative care with a class of fourth-year music therapy students. I was explaining how in my 8 years of work on a palliative care unit I had witnessed over and again the existential anxiety of someone facing their own mortality. I commented on how an individual’s faith, and that faith’s teaching concerning the meaning of life and the possibility of an afterlife, can often be a great comfort to one in the end stages of life. But to my surprise, an invitation of ‘Let’s talk about spirituality and religion’ was met with a visceral reluctance by the students. I then steered the dialogue to ‘Let’s talk about why we can’t talk about spirituality and religion’. Interestingly, what emerged was a deep-seated unwillingness to be judged – whether as a believer or a non-believer. It may be the case that young adults, exposed to a more discordant discourse about spiritual matters, and a lack of public discussion or teaching of this topic, may not be confident in discussing this important dimension of human life.
Why is this topic important for the Music Therapist? Psychologist Pargament (2007) notes that ‘while 90% of the U.S. population reports belief in a personal God, only 24% of clinical and counseling psychologists indicate that religion is very important to them’ (p. 9).
This means that an individual who ‘sees religion as a salient part of his or her life is likely to work with a therapist who does not believe in a personal God and does not consider religion to be very important personally’ (p. 9). When an individual is in distress, religion and spirituality could potentially be part of the solution.
Important writing on music and spirituality has been undertaken by several music therapists (Abrams, 2013; Aigen, 2008; Aldridge, 2000, 2004, 2006; Ansdell, 2005; Bonny, 2002; Crowe, 2004; Kenny, 2006; Kirkland and McIlveen, 1999; Lee, 1995; Lipe, 2002; Magill, 2002, 2006; Munro, 1984; Potvin, 2013; Potvin and Argue, 2014; Tsiris, 2017). I have been particularly informed by Aldridge’s writings in choosing my focus on specific aspects of spirituality for this article.
Two recent surveys have examined music therapists’ perceptions of spirituality. Tsiris (2017) reports on his international survey (n = 358 therapists in 29 countries) of Music Therapists’ perceptions of spirituality in their training, practice and professional life, with results concerning dilemmas and suggestions for future action. He stresses that openness, as well as ‘constructive dialogue and research endeavours in this area can play a crucial role in identifying appropriate ways of integrating spirituality to the professional and disciplinary discourse of music therapy’ (p. 316). Potvin (2013) surveyed a random sample (n = 252) of American music therapists to determine whether spiritual beliefs served as predictors of theoretical orientation. He found no statistically significant predictive relationship, perhaps due to the small sample size. A descriptive analysis showed that limited training and education concerning spiritual issues and a lack of recognition as to when they manifest in clinical settings were factors in the result. Potvin suggested further study concerning ‘the need for continued exploration of music therapists’ self-awareness of spiritual issues and theoretical orientation’ (p. 1).
In this article, I will be presenting an extended contextualization of spirituality in human life and the implications this may have for the practice of music therapy. These two aspects of human experience, music and spirituality, have been linked throughout human cultural history. This article is an attempt to bridge these two, in order to shed light on this important connection for the clinical Music Therapist working with those in need.
My approach to this topic is informed by several key periods in my life, including 6 years as a seminarian in a Christian religious order, studying both scholastic and modern approaches to theology. In addition, for a time I studied mindfulness, music and yoga practices while living in an urban Vedic ashram. I have explored the teachings on spirituality and music as found in the writings of the Baha’i Master, Abdu’l-Baha (Tuman, 1993) and those of Sufi Hazrat Inayat Khan (1979). I also have had the good fortune to deepen my understanding of this topic during several days of retreat with guidance from Helen Bonny, in many inspiring conversations with Clive Robbins and in sharing ideas in a friendship of many years with Carolyn Kenny. Considering my background, I do admit a certain level of advocacy for spirituality in music therapy practice. However, within the context of my own ongoing studies, my stance in this article is primarily explorative, appreciating that an approach able to include various perspectives, in breadth and depth, is preferable to one which does not.
I begin by clarifying some basic terms and then ask three questions concerning a human life: (Q1) Who and What am I? (Q2) Where am I going? (Q3) With whom am I going? To answer these questions, I link three aspects of a human life: our Levels of Being, our Life as a Journey and the Self as connected to the Other (Table 1). I then proceed by linking each question with three important spiritual aspects in human experience:
‘Awareness of Transcendence’ as related to our Levels of Being;
‘Meaning and Purpose’ as related to the Journey that is a human life;
‘Connections to the Other’ as related to Who We Encounter on the journey.
Life questions and aspects of spirituality.
Correlations are made between music and these aspects, presented within a timeline of past, present and future. Suggestions are given as to how this can be useful for the Music Therapist, illustrated by a clinical vignette.
Some basic terms
Spirituality
First, I differentiate between spirituality and religion. The word ‘spirit’ issues from the Latin spirare, meaning to breathe (genitive spiritus), the animating or vital principle, the breath of life. The term ‘religion’ is taken from the Latin religare (nominative religio) to bind fast, in the sense of placing an obligation on. Since the 14th century, it has come to mean a particular system of faith and worship. Aldridge (2006) explains that Spirituality in a late modern sense is used consistently throughout the literature related to medical practice as an ineffable dimension that is separate from religion itself. A person may regard herself as having a spiritual dimension but this may not be explored in any religious practice (p. 160) My position is that if spirituality is about the individual, ineffable and implicit, religion is about the social, spoken and explicit. (p. 163)
Another term in current practice is transpersonal, literally ‘beyond the person’. Transpersonal relates to a dimension beyond the merely personal, to the transcendent realm – a type of reality that is often spoken of in counterpoint to the immanent realm – an expression used to describe concrete material life here on earth.
The word faith is from the Latin ‘fides’, trust, belief. For this article, I will engage theologian Paul Tillich’s (1957) definition of faith as the state of being ‘ultimately concerned’ (p. 4) – in other words, my faith is that which is most important to me in my life, the source of my values.
Bonny (2002) asserts, ‘We are all spiritual. It’s the deepest part of ourselves’ (p. 177). I use spirituality as broadly referring to this deep dimension, including all notions of the transpersonal, as well as the contemplative, non-regulatory aspects of all world religions.
Music
As Potvin and Argue (2014) point out, ‘how music is defined has significant implications for how its relationship with spirituality is understood’ (p. 120). Concerning music, I offer that it is ‘sound as human play, time-ordered and trans-verbal’ (Lauzon, 2011: 1). In this working definition, sound is what is heard; human play is free action (considered as active spontaneity and reactivity); time is the ‘indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole’ (Pearsall and Trumble, 1996: 1509); ordered is methodical arrangement; trans is the going beyond, the travelling to the other side of verbal, the language of words.
Aspects of spirituality
Awareness of transcendence
One basic aspect of spirituality is awareness of transcendence, an understanding that there are levels of reality, beyond the everyday consciousness, not immediately apparent, things ‘not concerned with the material’ (Pearsall and Trumble, 1996: 1397). A person can gain this awareness of transcendence even without a belief in a Supreme Being. It should be noted that when Bonny (2002) speaks of spirituality as being the ‘deepest part of ourselves’ (p. 177), she is working with a concept of the human being as multidimensional, as having different levels of being.
For Bernard Lonergan (1992 [1957]) ‘ . . . transcendence is the elementary matter of raising further questions’ (p. 658). When theistic (God) traditions continue on the path of raising further questions, they generally answer that the ultimate transcendent would be the one, the simplest, the unconditioned, the all-inclusive, the creator. They understand each individual human being as having a unique, unifying and oftentimes undying essence called a soul.
Concerning the contemplative aspects of religion, some theologians identify the term God with the universe, with the ‘power and meaning of reality . . . with the creative nature, the creative ground of all natural objects’ (Tillich, 1967: II, 6). In this view, everything in the world of creation reflects an aspect of the Divine, all creatures sharing in the nature of the immanent creative God.
Music and transcendence
‘We, verily, have made music as a ladder for your souls, a means whereby they may be lifted up unto the realm on high’ (Baha’u’llah, 1992: paragraph 51).
I now explore how music, as experienced in spirituality, sheds light on question 1, Who and What am I? To begin, the aesthetic and the sacred functions of life both share music’s ability to lead the individual into an altered state of consciousness (Aldridge and Fachner, 2006). Many spiritual practices work to perfect an individual’s awareness of transcendence in a trance-inducing process of ‘rhythmic entrainment’ – explained by Ian Cross (2009) as involving ‘the organization of perception and behaviour around temporal regularities that are inferred (generally not consciously) from musical sounds and actions in the form of a periodic pulse or beat’ (p. 6). This is done universally by harnessing the physiological power of the breath – respiration being the one human system that is both involuntary and voluntary – enabling one to speed up or slow down the whole organism. In turn, meditation induces trance states by slowing the rhythms of thought. Personal prayer uses the rhythm of internal affirmations to consolidate heart, mind and spirit. A natural relational step is for the individual to join others in communal uses of musical resources as contained in melody, the prosody of sacred text, instruments and movement. There are public expressions of ritual found in many spiritual traditions (Beck, 2006): chants, hymns, antiphonal prayer, sacred dance, enactment of sacred stories – all based on a process of inducing an altered state of consciousness through rhythmic entrainment – often coupled with the power of the voice in melody, the revelatory word and oftentimes harmony.
A second intersection of music and transcendence brings me back to the concept of levels of being. In music, the fundamental tone replicates itself in an upwardly vibrating harmonic series. This is an invariant hierarchical law of nature; it happens every time. Within each acoustic tone, music is an experience of multiple levels (Tan et al., 2018: 10–18).
As Sylvan (2002) explains, Music is capable of functioning simultaneously at many different levels (physiological, psychological, sociocultural, semiotic, virtual, ritual, and spiritual) and integrating them into a coherent whole. So, for a complex multidimensional phenomenon like religion, which also functions simultaneously at multiple levels, the fact that music is capable of conveying all these levels of complexity in a compelling and integrated package makes it a vehicle par excellence to carry the religious impulse. (p. 6)
Purpose and meaning
For those of us who consider ourselves to be travellers, wanderers, itinerant seekers on a journey of life, a life can often feel fragmented, discontinuous – turning one from this to that, near and far, happy/sad, beginnings and endings, births and deaths, ageing. Religions and spiritual traditions are forms of culture within which people live meaningful lives, on a journey to a better place. ‘Sometimes this journey is conceptualized as a solitary, inner quest of the mystic, sometimes as a journey of an entire community or people’ (Culliford, 2011: 4). The goal of this life journey is a completion, a fulfilment that is variously defined in different spiritual traditions: heaven, heaven on earth, return to a spiritual home, awakening to a timeless truth in the here and now, sublime power, enlightenment and so on.
In seeking to understand the journey of life, the notion of process within a structure of goals allows each person to understand his or her own progressions. Long-term memory tends to a view that life has stages. Erikson (1969), for example, applied his theory of eight psychological stages to identify and explain the origins of Mahatma Gandhi’s powerful approach of militant nonviolence by examining his early development.
Tillich sees meaning as connected to the spiritual life in creativity. In creativity, one may find meaning, connecting art, psyche and spirit.
Everyone who lives creatively in meanings affirms himself as a participant in these meanings. He affirms himself as receiving and transforming reality creatively. He loves himself as participating in the spiritual life and as loving its contents. He loves them because they are his own fulfillment and because they are actualized through him. (Tillich, 1952: 46)
Music as purpose and meaning
I will now consider how music as spirituality can assist in answering the second question, Where am I going? Music provides an aesthetic, formative dimension, a structural ground that allows for freedom and creativity. I live out the soundtrack of my life, listening, playing, singing. The song surrounds and shapes me. Aldridge (2000: 9–24) points out that on this journey, health itself is a performance. For Small (1998), ‘musicking’ is a verb meaning ‘to music’, ‘to take part, in any capacity in a musical performance’ (p. 9). This emphasis on music as action is how my own ‘musical being’ (Lauzon, 2011) appropriates the music, not as an object, but as a dynamic process of living engagement.
Second, music gives meaning and purpose to one’s personal vocation (L. vocare ‘to call’).
What then is a person called to do? Lonergan would argue that our deepest motivations are the unrestricted desires for knowledge and value (for truth, beauty, goodness, home). Yet these can be twisted by other less worthy biases, also very much part of the human condition. In finding my own voice (L. vox), I am empowered to sing out my vocation, to answer the call.
Third, the rhythmic entrainment of music is manifest as the ever-changing beats of both metrical and phrasing rhythm in everyday life. Cross (2009) explains that rhythmic entrainment ‘involves the organization of perception and behaviour around temporal regularities that are inferred (generally not consciously) from musical sounds and actions in the form of a periodic pulse or beat’ (p. 6). Musical rhythm interacts with a person’s innate biorhythms – in basic patterns of cohesion, sedation and stimulation. As well, music is a ‘real’ experience that only happens in the now; I never hear the whole song, I remember what has gone on before and anticipate what is to come. As a musical being, a person literally lives to the beat.
Fourth, there is meaning in musical expressiveness. Music and meaning is a well-travelled philosophical topic – ranging from the descriptive specificity of the referential viewpoint to the absolutist notion that meaning is contained in the music itself. For Suzanne Langer (1957), ‘music articulates forms which language cannot set forth’ (p. 233). She points out that musical forms bear a close meaningful resemblance to the forms of human feelings, ‘forms of growth and of attenuation, flowing and stowing, conflict and resolution, speed, arrest, terrific excitement, calm, or subtle activation and dreamy lapses’ (Langer, 1953: 27). Roger Scruton (1997) writes, The great triumphs of music . . . involve this synthesis, whereby a musical structure, moving according to its own logic, compels our feelings to move along with it, and so leads us to rehearse a feeling at which we would not otherwise arrive. (p. 359)
For Jeremy Begbie (2007: 278), we live out daily expressions in a musical system he calls equilibrium-tension-resolution (ETR), a sonic journey that moves to a richer, fuller outcome. ‘Relating this ETR profile to prominent patterns in Scripture is not hard: creation-fall-redemption, promised land-exile-return . . . the journey of the prodigal son to the far country and back again’ (p. 278).
Consider how a musical composition may be a journey where a person begins at home in the tonic. It continues through a creative sequence of moves to wander to the farthest place away, the dominant. On the way, perhaps modulating to another key, but somehow coming home again, back to the tonic. What is the dominant, and why do we always go there? Jung might say it is our shadow self. Each musical work is a journey where a story unfolds, a container for opposites, both real and symbolic, all the while engaging the self bodily in powerful resonant vibration. Music allows for self-affirmation through creativity, providing opportunity for deep interior resonance, akin to vocalizing the spiritual quest for meaning in a human life.
Connection with others
Humans are relational beings; there would be no self to distinguish without the presence of the other. For Martin Buber (1958), a person has a twofold attitude to the other, ‘in accordance with the twofold nature of the primary words he speaks’ (p. 19). These primary words are the combinations I-Thou and I-It. They ‘do not signify things, but they intimate relations’ – as subject to subject in the former, or subject to object in the latter.
On thinking of Self in an I-Thou interaction, I include (variations on Hatcher, 1998: 44–45),
Self with the Divine,
Self with the Self,
Self with another human subject,
Self with collections of human subjects and
Self with an individual (or collection) of another living species.
As Self in an I-It interaction I include,
Self with concrete objects (perceptible by the senses),
Self with abstract objects,
Self with systems (collections of objects) and
Self with mixed environment (objects and subjects).
In the circle of relations, the purposeful self looks to radiate outwards in an unrestricted desire for knowledge and value beyond the self.
Concerning human relations, roles are defined by boundaries of family, work, country, geography, society and culture in endless variety. For example, the main schools of modern psychology are all distinguished with a specific pathway to the interpersonal therapeutic relationship based on the salient goals as set out by each theory.
A person has the continual presence of all natural forms on earth: the geosphere, biosphere, atmosphere, mind-sphere. We are interdependent with all flora and fauna, with all living species which surround us, including our own human species, and the new science of bio-acoustics reveals our sonic connections with the natural world (Krause, 2012).
What of our transcendent relations? George Steiner (1989) asserts that . . . any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God’s presence . . . the experience of aesthetic meaning in particular, that of literature, of the arts, of musical form, infers the necessary possibility of this ‘real presence’. (p. 3)
I suggest that each of us has the twofold capacity to develop awareness through contemplation and to then communicate the riches of those contemplations to others. The personal and the social meet in unfolding symbols of culture, often shared in the evolving communal experience of ritual/liturgy. In so doing, we connect with others in our quest for transcendence.
Music and spiritual connection to the other
Ian Cross (2009) outlines three ways in which music has proved to be of essential importance in the evolution of humankind: as rhythmic entrainment, as a trans-verbal means of communication he calls ‘floating intentionality’ and as a stimulus to group coordination. Music therapy literature is rich in describing the function of music as a process of communicative relationship, such as in this brief sample of works outlining relations in one clinical approach, musical improvisation (Bruscia, 1987; Carroll and Levebvre, 2013; Lauzon, 2006; Nordoff and Robbins, 1977; Wigram, 2004).
How then does music as spirituality give clarity to question 3, With whom am I going? In the first place, music helps to engage each individual to the other, as when ritual as liturgy provides a vessel of meaning, particularly in times of significant life transition – birth, coming into adulthood, marriage, death (times when individuals tend to turn to spirituality and ritual). As well, ritual as prayer helps to connect us to the other in the everyday challenges we face. (A client’s experience with musical ritual is a resource that he or she may contextualize in both individual or group work in a music therapy session.)
Second, music provides for a potentially altered reality where eternity unites with human time. Music is only experienced as a real experience in the now. Music is a powerful reminder that all is now, that a person lives each actual occasion in the present – a foundational principle of practices of ‘mindfulness’, bolstered as they are by ancient teachings and modern psychology. In mindfulness practices an analogy that is sometimes used is that the right amount of effort is like tuning a guitar string, not too tight so the note is too high in pitch, not too loose so the note is too low in pitch. (Feldman and Kuyken, 2019: 15)
Third, by engaging awareness of transcendence, music serves as a carrying wave that joins individual purpose and meaning with the living music of all our relations. In other words, the higher viewpoint of music as spirituality brings one together with the other in what Turner (1969) calls communitas.
Religious music . . . through a controlled use of sounds and silences reveals a unifying, focussed, transcending power – a flexible, conserving free being which is vitally present in us, in the music, and in the Existence beyond both us and the music. (Weiss, 1963: 77)
Finally, spiritual traditions historically have developed specific rituals to express communal connection to the sacred. The expressive range of sacred music is a field of aesthetic play (Kenny, 2006) akin to how one may live a life, with others, through time. Music has a flexibility and range of techniques conducive to building community – consonance and dissonance, multiple levels of rhythm, modulation, song forms – to name a few.
In the following vignette from my work in a palliative care setting, a familiar folk song (described in Lauzon, 2017) serves as a pathway to awareness of transcendence, life purpose and connection to the community of others.
Clinical vignette: Rachel
In her 96th year, Rachel was a single occupant in the palliative care unit of a general hospital. As music therapist on this unit, I made daily visits to Rachel’s bedside. Her heart was at risk, her body weakening, severe swelling in her lower limbs and kidneys. She was fighting pneumonia, her breathing laboured, in spite of the oxygen tube. She knew that she was in her last days. Her condition had been deteriorating for the past 3 years. She had lost her mobility and was in need of full medical care on this unit. Her appetite gone, she did not want to eat. She admitted her fear of the possible pain of dying. She identified as a dedicated and practicing Roman Catholic. From her earliest childhood in Montreal, she had been involved in her faith, praying daily, attending weekly Mass and confession, and celebrating the major feast days with friends and family. Her life was marked by sacramental events – first communion, confirmation, marriage, funerals and most recently, the last rites, with her children surrounding the bed. Her faith kept her buoyant and full of hope, full of care and concern for others. This particular day, she asked that we sing a favourite song of her homeland, Quebec – a song her father used to sing. It’s the story of a young man who was upset because his lover was disappointed that he’d forgotten to bring her roses. Rachel explained that this was a sacred song for her – that every believer is like that young man, and he must never forget to bring roses, the best of what you have, to the Divine Lover. Rachel expressed a profound insight – an awareness of the sacred in the everyday. The words and music of this secular song created a world of connection, a familiar world of song, bringing her to a place of culmination, of receptiveness to beauty and love, of transcendence, of coming home. She died that very night.
Verse #1:
À la claire fontaine By the clear running stream
M’en allant promener I strayed one summer day
J’ai trouvé l’eau si belle The water looked so cooling
Que je m’y suis baigné I bathed without delay
Refrain:
Lui ya longtemps que je t’aime Many long years have I loved you
Jamais je ne to’oublierai Ever in my heart you’ll stay
Verse #4:
J’ai perdu ma maîtresse For I have lost my loved one
Sans l’avoir mérité In such a senseless way
Pour un bouquet de roses She wanted some red roses
Que je lui refusai But I rudely delayed
Music provided Rachel with a means of mediating the mystery of transcendence. As Flood (2012) observes, The strangeness of the world especially takes focus in the extreme situations of life, notably death and bereavement but also love, where religions come into their own as resources for mediating these encounters and allowing us to deal with life in suitably expressive ways. (p. 8).
Her lifelong connection to music helps to consolidate her purpose in life. As Tillich (1952) has made clear, the anxiety of meaninglessness breaks down in the spiritual self-affirmation that creativity brings. As well, music connects Rachel to her community of faith, both living and deceased, and supports her passage through the profound existential situation in which she finds herself.
Implications for music therapy
I have been exploring the nature of music and spirituality individually and the connections of each to the other through filters of transcendence, meaning and connection. I now bring therapy, the third field of concern, into the mix. Each of these disciplines works towards specific goals: in music, one is working towards aesthetic mastery, in response and expression; in spirit, one is moving towards salvation, a conversion to transcendence; the ultimate goal of therapy is increased health, often understood as balance. As a natural system, each individual person is a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. These aspects of a human being all work to enrich the other, to fulfil a lifetime’s journey of mastery, salvation and health. I concur with Aigen (2008) when he asserts that ‘the human propensity to use music for transcendent purposes is not rendered inactive just because it may not be an overt clinical focus of music therapists’ (p. 30).
Some reasonable cautions
I’ve been presenting the positive aspects of spirituality for music therapy. In the spirit of dialectic, it is important to acknowledge the potentially destructive uses, the documented ‘dark side’ of both music and spirituality. For example, music has been used as a component of physical and psychological torture at US-run detention centres, such as those in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan (Cusick and Joseph, 2011). For Suzanne Cusick, the use of music in torture, as acoustic bombardment, is the ultimate degradation of the Western cultural idea of music as ‘an experience that gives human beings access to the sublime and to an experience of transcendence’ (p. 12). She explains that the simple bombardment of a human body with acoustical energy will change that body . . . you feel as though you’ve been beaten with a hammer . . . forced to become creatures of a culture [you] did not choose. That, I think, is profoundly violating. (p. 13)
Consider the individual steeped in Islamic aesthetics where ‘access to the divine comes from listening to devotional poetry produced by human voices’ (p. 16), how this person is imprisoned and variously tortured, then made to listen to the lyrics of heavy metal, country, punk and other Western pop songs at ear-splitting intensities for weeks on end. These violations are physical, cultural, spiritual – profoundly personal.
Concerning spirituality, the violations generally manifest in the context of culture-bound religions. Horrors inflicted in the name of ‘religion’ fill the pages of history books and the screens of our modern world. The claim that religion has a dangerous tendency to promote violence has emerged as conventional wisdom in Western societies (Juergensmeyer, 2000). There are those who differ; Cavanaugh (2007) challenges this claim and asserts that ‘the myth of religious violence helps create a blind spot about the violence of the putatively secular nation-state’ (p. 1). This remains a controversial and complex topic.
How is the Music Therapist intent on integrating spirituality into the fullness of his or her practice able to guard against the possible harms? I offer these suggestions:
Respect the person. This basic first principle of a professional code of ethics (Canadian Association for Music Therapy (CAMT), 1999) prompts the therapist (1) to see the individual as an agent whose inner worth is a key element in their journey of self-determination, (2) to acknowledge both the actual and the potential person and (3) to show readiness in considering another person’s rules, that he or she is able to act because they can see good reasons for their actions. When a core ethical principle such as this is correlated with the therapist’s own inner belief system, the therapist is actually bringing his or her belief system into the workplace. An ethical music therapist acts with conviction, with awareness of their own ‘utmost concern’.
Engage the culture. I support Ken Bruscia’s call for a constructive dialogue between those who focus on spirituality and those who focus on culture. ‘Transpersonalists will have to see that their very notions of spirituality are culture-bound; conceptions of consciousness, divinity, energy, and ultimate power differ not only from one individual to another, but also one community and culture to the next’. Conversely, ‘Culture-centered thinkers have to somehow deal with the reality that most, if not all cultures recognize or construct a spirit as part of their belief system’ (Bruscia, 2002: xvii).
Honour the music. As I have articulated throughout this article, music and spirituality are each an important multidimensional sphere of recurrence in human experience, and have a natural expressive connection. In music, there is power and potential for effectiveness; I experience it daily in my work as a Music Therapist.
Clarify your role. Ultimately, each therapist works from their own inner core in understanding the true nature of their therapeutic relationship with the client(s). How I define and refine this can only benefit from a contemplation of my own inner beliefs, as they will surely manifest in my deepest work.
Embrace the unknown. Developing an awareness of the spiritual dimension is an ongoing process for the Music Therapist, one of openness and nurtured commitment. At times, I bring daylight into dark places; other times I am able to encourage myself, and the other, into a higher viewpoint of the horizon.
I come back full circle to Helen Bonny’s (2002) words: ‘I have seen over and over again how music can enhance our present incarnate life, enrich it, and lead it in fulfilling spiritual directions’ (p. 179). In this article, I have suggested that music particularly partners with three aspects of spirituality and has potential to enrich each human life as an answer to the questions:
Who or what am I? Awareness of Transcendence
Where am I going? Purpose and Meaning
With whom am I going? Connections to the Other
It is my hope that this article will continue this process of understanding and guidance for the clinical Music Therapist, as they provide a ‘real presence’ for those who share their journey, and find themselves in need of inspiration, encouragement, insight and support such as music and spirituality can offer.
