Toward a Sociology of Music Therapy: Musicking As a Cultural Immunogen by Ruud Even;

Author:Ruud, Even;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Music Therapy
Publisher: Barcelona Publishers
Published: 2020-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

Frame 12

Transpersonal Experiences Through Music

One of my very first experiences with the BMGIM gave me an experience that could easily be placed under the category of a transcending or spiritual experience. The setting was quite exceptional. Attending a workshop (organized by music therapists Barbara Hesser and Carolyn Kenny) in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York, I was offered a trial session of GIM. I had tried a full session the year before, with some remarkable experiences, although at the outset I had been quite skeptical due to some previous group experiences with the method. However, in the year before, I had experienced some pivotal moments in my life passing by at high speed in this first session, so much of my skepticism had gone away.

This next summer, Helen Bonny was herself attending the workshop. She suggested me that I try again. She gave her then-assistant, leading GIM therapist Lisa Summer, the responsibility of guiding me through the session, and this time the experience went really deep. I can’t remember which program or piece of music I listened to, but almost as soon as the music started, I took off, imagining myself flying in the air above a valley. I was fully able to locate a specific landscape outside Oslo where I had spent all my happy summers as a child. At the end of this valley, there is a churchyard where my father had been buried just a few months before. When I passed his grave, a kind of ghostlike figure sprang up from the grave and started to move with me in the air. To my astonishment, I sensed this as being my father and took the opportunity to say farewell to him.

At the time of his actual death, I had had responsibilities in taking care of the burial and I had been too busy to take the time to grieve. The GIM experience became a virtual happening that served the important function of allowing me to let go of my kind and loving father. The experience was quite emotional. Tears were running down my face, and the session was instrumental in my choice to later become a GIM therapist myself.

This experience may easily be categorized as transcendental or as a spiritual experience. Against a religious background, it could have been natural to find a theological explanation to contextualize what happened. People within the religion of Spiritualism (see MacKian, 2019) might have taken this as proof of the existence of a kind of mediumship—talking with the dead. However, since I am an atheist, I need to find other explanations or simply let the experience stand as some sort of inexplicable experience in the domain of spirituality. This is a reality that goes beyond my intellectual framework. I like to keep it as a meaningful experience and as an example of how virtual experiences may have effects that sometimes transcend reality. As Sara MacKian observes: “Though numerous scholars and practitioners have tried to define it, classify it, pin it down, and mark its territory, it will always inevitably remain somewhere just out of reach.

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