Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:03 Welcome to the doctors, which show where I show you how bad states of mind, difficult life issues. Aren't pathological, but rather signs of personal growth trying to happen. All right, let's get into it.
Speaker 1 00:00:27 Hey people, thank you so much for tuning in. I've got some really interesting stuff to talk to you about today. Up to now, my podcast has been mostly focused on psychology and processing problems. Today. I want to bring in the other love of my life, music and show you its connection to personal growth therapy and life. In general, I'll start by telling you about some strange bedfellows in my life. As far back as I can remember, I've been in love with both music and psychology as a child. I take time between singing songs with the radio to inexplicably, ask my parents things like why are some people happy and some sad, or why do people argue? When I got older, I took time between playing rock and roll shows to move to Zurich, Switzerland, and become a psychologist. When I was there, I split my days between working with clients in my private practice and a psychiatric clinic.
Speaker 1 00:01:31 Then in the evenings, I played intense rocket roll shows. After a while it started to stress me out. I didn't know who I was anymore. My identity was, I don't know, confused. I kept asking myself, what am I really? Am I a psychologist or a musician? I couldn't be both because inside of me, these two things were polar opposites. In my therapy practice. I felt like a compassionate scientist. And in my shows, I felt like some sort of crazy mystic poet, even though I was managing to live both of these parts of myself, I didn't feel fluid between them at all. I'd wake up every morning, identifying myself as a professional, who goes to work, offers his services gets paid and goes home. But as soon as my last client walked out the door at six or 7:00 PM, I'd pace around my office, shaking off the psychologist and morphing into the artist.
Speaker 1 00:02:35 I was like Clark Kent, going into the phone booth, putting on his costume and exiting a Superman. Although I never knew which part of me was Superman. They both felt great. The problem was the transition between them. Every night I had to kill the psychologist to let the artist in. Then the next morning I'd have to murder the musician to let in psychologist. It was an ongoing chore, but I didn't know what else to do. The dichotomy stayed with me for many years. I felt like two different people in one body. Of course I wasn't two different people, but I didn't yet have contact with a unifying element. I just couldn't see or feel the connection between the two things. My life started to change. When I realized that therapy and music are really the same thing. They both shake up your current state of mind, rattle things loose, and bring new feelings and awareness to the surface.
Speaker 1 00:03:40 They alter you. They change you. They can even make you stoned and it could way they make you feel. They make you see and they make, you know, things. They cut through your conscious reality and identity and get underneath to stir things up. Of course, it's up to you, what you do with this experience. Now this doesn't mean I do music therapy. That's a whole other thing, pretty interesting stuff, but it's not what I do at all. For me, music is therapy and therapy is music. They're just two different ways to hack into our minds and bodies and get the process moving. Now I live back in the U S where I coach clients and play music. And it all feels like one exciting project. I don't feel that old dichotomy anymore. I just feel like I'm following my process. Hmm. Speaking of following my process, sometimes when I think or talk about music, it sets off music in my head, and now I'm hearing a riff. I got to go play this or it'll bug me while I'm talking to you. It's distracting, uh, back in a minute,
Speaker 1 00:06:19 All right, I'm back. Now. I want to connect this music to psychotherapy and life coaching and problems and life in general, psychotherapy and life coaching. They're different from one another, but they both involve personal growth work where you explore the unknown in yourself, the parts that you marginalize or may not even know exist in this work, you can develop new awareness that frees you in a really powerful way. And when this happens, it feels like a weight is lifted off and you can fly like a bird, which is how I feel when I play music. And this is exactly what happens. When I write a song, I explore the unknown in myself by getting into an altered state and waiting for something to happen. A raw emotion, a mysterious image, a phrase out of left field, or an insight that surprises me. I don't sit down and decide what I'm going to write about or what colors the music should have.
Speaker 1 00:07:32 Just like I don't have preconceived theories about people's problems or pre-planned methods. I apply in my coaching practice. In both cases, I follow the process and let it show me the way the life directions you need to take are in you, not in a textbook or even in an expert's mind. Your process has its own intelligence that knows exactly what it needs. And it may or may not be the same as someone else's. My job is to facilitate this. Similarly, the music and words I need to connect with already exists somewhere in my subconscious, in the air, who knows, but my job is to uncover them. It's not an intentional process until afterwards. First you have to let the authentic content come to the surface. Only after that, should you apply specific methods for working with the material? Something I frequently tell my clients experience.
Speaker 1 00:08:39 First analysis. Second, to have a truly authentic transformation. You have to experience it, trying to figure it all out and decide what to do without this experiential component is putting the cart before the horse. When I work on myself or help a client, I don't have a program I follow because that would just be me super imposing my ideas over my own or the other person's process. Traditional psychology gives us the impression that it contains all the answers to your problems without a practitioner having even met you. The idea is that all the theories and interventions are mapped out beforehand, and you just need a psychologist to apply them, but you can't uncover your real process this way. You just follow someone else's instructions based on textbook generalizations, which may or may not have anything to do with you. This is similar to songwriters who rely mostly on craft.
Speaker 1 00:09:43 They intentionally arrange melodies, harmonies and rhythms in a certain way. Often the criteria is what will sell. They base their work on the sounds and hooks that are currently popular. Others like me use craft. After the fact, the meat of the song comes from this unknown place. And then once your antenna has picked up these raw elements, you use craft to complete the song. Now music is so subjective that you can't really say which kind of songwriting is better, but I can tell you for sure that it's more effective and real to process your problems in a way that uncovers what's really trying to happen. As opposed to following a theory, a program or a rule, someone tells you about that approach is always going to be hit and miss. If it happens to click with your process, you're in luck, but oftentimes it's just the practitioner putting their own ideas onto you, or you putting your own ideas onto yourself.
Speaker 1 00:10:49 The way I work on a problem and write a song is the same. I explore amplify and unfold. The process I'd begin by admitting I don't know anything. The more preconceived notions I have about a particular kind of problem or certain kind of song I want to write. The more I miss the true process, I have to be open to solutions and directions that organically arise from experience, not from what I think someone should feel or do or what I think my song should sound like. In both instances, I have to get out of the way and let nature show me the way. When I work on myself or with a client, I use specific tools to follow the process, and it always leads to some kind of transformative experience, song writing, however, isn't as a shirt of a thing, just because I feel like writing a song doesn't mean that one wants to be written.
Speaker 1 00:11:56 It's not up to me. When I sit down with my guitar and a pen and paper, it's like a fishing expedition into the unknown. And I return home with either nothing or a nice catch. When the latter happens, I feel like I just had a therapy session with the great guru, except it's just me, my guitar and the sound waves. You might have a similar experience when you listen to your favorite song, great songs make you feel and think in a way that connects you to something deeper truer, more real, and more ecstatic than your usual experience of life. That's the power of music. It's a super highway into your subconscious where hidden feelings, thoughts, and ways of being reside in you, but only as potentials, not as lived realities, listening to an awesome song is like a three minute therapy session. The only thing missing is being able to integrate the experience into your life.
Speaker 1 00:13:00 Music is a potent magic that connects you to a deep place without you knowing how this happens, processing your problems does the same thing, but it makes you conscious in a way that enables you to use what you learn in your everyday life. Okay? Now let's get more precise about the connection between processing problems and music. When I lived in Zurich and felt like two different people in one body, I couldn't yet identify the decisive element that unified these two parts of myself. Now I know it's one word process. Now what exactly do I mean by the word process? A process is the opposite of a state. A process is a continual unfolding of events. Whereas a state, for example, a state of mind is a static condition. It doesn't move change or go anywhere. It just sits there like a bump on a log.
Speaker 1 00:14:05 Even though we try our best to achieve one stable state of mind. Our true nature is to always be in process. Nothing is ever still and static. Not you or me are even the whole universe. We've live according to our intentions of how we want our lives to be. And this usually involves an image of an unchanging condition. We strive after, be it happy, whatever that is, financially, stable, healthy, et cetera. But these ideals are always threatened by what you could call anti intentions, life problems, pain obstacles, no matter how hard you try to create one static situation or state of mind, you'll always have something trying to upset this condition. Say you managed to achieve the perfect life balance or are somehow able to Zen out all your problems. Well, something strange happens. You unintentionally marginalize and repress your deeper processes of natural change.
Speaker 1 00:15:17 Sometimes that's exactly what's called for, but oftentimes problems happen for a reason. They're trying to wake you up in some way. This ongoing dynamic between intention and anti intention, success and failure, happiness and sadness, health and illness, getting what you want and not getting what you want being this way or that way. Identifying with one thing versus another thing. This is process. I call these two living, breathing parts of ourselves first mind. And second mind. My first mind is who I think I am, what I think I want. And so on. It's my whole identity. My second mind is everything I don't know yet about who I am and what I want. It's what's unconscious in me. These unconscious elements often first present themselves to us through our problems, without the right tools to process them. They just feel like unfair, random curses on your life.
Speaker 1 00:16:31 Processing them reveals their transformative messages. What initially manifests as a disturbance to your first mind, pain, disappointment, failure, confusion, et cetera. Turns out to be a message of change. It's your second mind telling your first mind that it needs to wake up about something, change something grow in some way in music. First mind refers to what I was saying about using craft intention, trying to force the creation of a song. Second mind consists of the melodies, harmonies, rhythms, and words. That just happen. They just come to you like a sudden revelation. They pop into your ears out of nowhere. You also get some pretty awesome second mind music moments. Oh, how's that for an alliteration. When you make mistakes, there you go. Some of my best expressions have happened as writing, singing, or recording errors. You listen back. And at first you're like, whoa, that's wrong.
Speaker 1 00:17:45 Then a minute later, you're like, holy crap. That's awesome. I could have never thought of that or played that or sung that speaking of mistakes, think of your problems as meaningful mistakes. Instead of viewing them as meaning less mistakes like random errors or garbage to throw out, think of them as your deeper process, trying to upset your status quo in order to get your attention onto your true path. Contrary to conventional wisdom, human problems are not pathological. Even though they cause pain. They're meaningful processes designed to force you to grow at a deep level. We're so used to thinking of trouble in our lives as something wrong. We look for quick fixes and distractions in our attempt to get away from what's bothering us. But this attitude is counterproductive. It's one of the reasons people suffer from the same issues for years, decades, or even whole lifetimes problems. Aren't bad and wrong that your medicine, your personal growth, trying to happen. The pain they induce is the pain that comes with any birth. If you don't unfold, the process, you just stay in the pain and prevent the new change from being born. Ask yourself this. Why do you listen to music? What does it do to you? Why is it so important? So many people's lives and why? In some countries like America is so omnipresent.
Speaker 1 00:19:28 Music amplifies your process. You may not realize it, but it brings out whatever's hiding in the shadows of your psyche. You're drawn to certain music because it gives you an experience you need more of in your life. It makes you feel things that are already within you, but you don't have access to until you hear your favorite song, one song can literally change how you feel. It can change your mood, your attitude, your energy, even your beliefs sound like psychotherapy or life coaching. Pretty close. Of course, working on your issues offers you the chance to actually integrate your second mind processes. Whereas music is more of a momentary experience. Still. They both alter your state of mind and uncover feelings and thoughts that may otherwise be inaccessible. These hidden processes are the solution to your problems. That is if you consciously work on them now, how does traditional psychology look at this?
Speaker 1 00:20:40 It doesn't view your mind as a purposeful process. Instead it views the mind as if it's a computer over the last hundred years, psychologists have put forth a lot of different theories to try to understand the human mind. They've used things like clocks, looms, and telephone switchboards, to try to illustrate how the mind works. The most current theories draw on computer science. There are a lot of ideas within this approach, but they're all flawed in some way. They view the mind as a static entity, like a machine run by software that sometimes malfunctions a personal problem is seen as a software glitch. You have to fix the fault with this way of thinking is that human experience is based on what things mean to us. Whereas computer language is simply a series of zeros and ones that don't relate to meaning at all our computer doesn't find one piece of information, any more meaningful than another. I know we love our computer analogies, but the mind simply doesn't adhere to this kind of mechanistic model because it's not a static entity, a thing with a fixed set of instructions. It's a fluid process driven by meaning a more accurate model of the mind is wait. I got to get to my drums.
Speaker 1 00:22:44 All right. Music, music is built on processes. The dynamic relationships between notes, melodies, harmonies, and rhythms. It has no absolute fixed elements, nothing that exists in and of itself as a permanent entity. Now you might be thinking, but wait, isn't a musical note, such an entity. Yes, but one note is not music. Music is created by how notes and other musical elements interact with each other. It's made up of unfolding relationships that create meaning on an emotional level, not of set components. Wait a minute. I want to get my guitar. And I want you to listen to this.
Speaker 1 00:23:58 That's a C major scale. The notes go from a low C to a high C, but guess what? There isn't even really such a thing as a C major scale. That's just one of infinite number of ways, the human mind can arrange an endless number of notes. Now, this leads to the question, is music human made or is it independent of the human mind? Something that preexists humanity like something out there in the universe. This is the same question. Scientists debate about mathematics. Did we invent math or did we discover it since music is based on mathematics and I'm using music as a model of the mind, these questions are relevant because inventing ourselves is a very different notion from discovering ourselves. The answer is that music and math exist independently of us, but they also don't. Wow. Okay. Check it out. We didn't invent the symmetry and dynamics of the universe, nor did we invent sound.
Speaker 1 00:25:12 But the way these things manifest is determined by how we experience and interpret them. They're created and limited by how our nervous systems and our consciousness interact with them. Did you know that music is just vibrating molecules? There's no actual sound out there. There isn't even any pitch. You need a human or animal brain to map pitches. The experience of music happens in our brains and minds. The same is true for everything we perceive. For example, what you see, isn't actually out there, all that's out. There are light waves. What you see is a private inner experience created by how your eyes and brain interact with and interpret these light waves, animals with different kinds of nervous systems perceive a totally different universe from ours. Imagine being a dog inundated with smells and able to hear way outside the human range. The point is our lives are created by interaction processes.
Speaker 1 00:26:24 These processes in yourself and in the world originate independent of your consciousness. But that's only part of the story in order to consciously experience them, you have to download them and doing this requires that you create what you perceive your nervous system and psychological filters determine what you experience. You know the saying it takes two to tango. Well, yeah, everything is a relationship process. It's the relationship between you and whatever you take in through your filters, the human mind has to dance with music or math or any type of information in order for these realities to manifest. And they manifest only according to how we tango with them, how we interact, not according to how they really are. This is because there is no how they really are. There's only the relationship between us and them. That's creation. That's life that's process. There's no music without us.
Speaker 1 00:27:34 There's no math without us, but get ready. My friend, because here's where we take the leap. There's no anything without us. And if this is true, there's no us without anything else. Okay. Let me freak out on a tangent for a minute. And I promise to bring it all back down to earth, to psychotherapy to music in the early 19 hundreds. Quantum physicists discovered that in the subatomic realm, which is the most fundamental level of the universe, reality exists only in terms of the specific ways we measure it. If we change how we measure it, subatomic particles behave completely differently. The inescapable conclusion is that the core of the universe doesn't exist as a set of concrete facts that can be observed in an objective way. It exists only in terms of the way in which we choose to observe it. Your life is exactly the same.
Speaker 1 00:28:39 It's a completely interactional process and evolving series of relationships between you and your inner parts and you and your environment, whatever you experience is a result of these dynamics. We think we stand outside life and download it as it really is. But this is an illusion. We actually co-create everything that happens. We're part and parcel with everything we experience the beautiful symmetry and the C major scale doesn't exist on its own. It exists as a set of sound intervals. The Western mind finds pleasing and is therefore identified set in stone and named listen to Eastern music and you'll hear totally different kinds of scales. The notes of the scale are just the raw materials for the musical process. It's the musical creator that determines which notes are used by choosing certain notes, melodies, harmonies, and rhythms. The musician makes music. She collapses an infinite number of possibilities into a few select ones.
Speaker 1 00:29:53 She chooses it's the same as a quantum physicist, selecting a specific experimental setup, thereby canceling out all other possible ways of observing subatomic events. If you look at the history of music or a physics or of anything else, you'll see an evolution for more constrained selections to more diverse ones. For example, in the last few hundred years, music has evolved from a few specific genres to a multitude of cross pollinated genres. The more we limit our selections, the more we limit what we're able to perceive. And as humans, we constantly evolve, okay, here's the $64,000 question for the day in music, physics, math, or psychology, the elements we don't consciously select or know about yet remain dormant as potentials for future discovery. But what happens to them when we de-select them meaning avoid marginalize repress, or simply don't know they exist? Do they just sit there waiting to be discovered?
Speaker 1 00:31:09 Well, that could happen, but what's more common is that they manifest as problems in music, physics, and math. These problems are simply the unknowns that create obstacles to understanding and expression, but in psychology, personal growth therapy life, they manifest as personal problems. Say, for example, you're a sensitive person, but everyone says you shouldn't be that way. So you repress your feelings and act like everything's always, okay. Where does the information, the sensory data of your sensitivity go? It doesn't just wait in no man's land like an undiscovered scientific fact. It manifests as symptoms, which could be anything from physical to mental, to emotional, to addictions, to accidents. The whole gamut. Your sensitivity becomes your second bind. You can repress it, but you can't kill it. It's going to make itself known one way or the other. A life problem is like an ugly melody inserting itself into your existence.
Speaker 1 00:32:28 You try to select the melody you want and the part of yourself that needs your awareness, but you don't select because you avoid it or marginalize it or repress it, or just don't know about it plays a disgustingly gross symphony over your nice song. Your task is to work with the bad notes until you discover the beautiful melody hidden within them. Or think of your problem as a neglected child, he's going to throw in irrational tantrum until you get the message, your depression, anxiety, or relationship issue. Isn't wrong. It isn't a malfunction in a static mind machine, like a software error and a computer. It isn't like a broken piece of an engine, a mistake, a mental illness, a disease that exists independent of who you are. You aren't simply an unlucky soul visited by a random problem. To the contrary. Your problem is a process co-created by you.
Speaker 1 00:33:36 And it presents you with the raw materials for your growth and transformation. This doesn't mean you did something wrong. It means you have a growth process. Your difficulty is a song, an emotional communication with a message that which causes you pain contains the hidden music of your personal growth. Psychotherapy is a process, not an intervention that fixes you. A problem is a process to not a sign that something is broken and music is a process. Not just a bunch of sounds set in stone. All of this leads back to when I used to feel split between my inner scientist and artist. Now I don't see myself as a psychologist in Zurich or a life coach in the U S or a singer songwriter or anything else. I'm just a process. I'll see you next time. Stay aware. You can follow me on social media at Dr. Suede, and you can sign up on the mailing list at doctor's wake.com, where you'll receive discounts on private coaching events and merchandise starting in 2021 weekly personal growth tips and lots more B well.
