healing your heart 91
and the music that can most help you tap into your emotional need
for healing.
Music and Its Effect on Life
Music correlates with life and deepens your life experience in many
ways, some yet to be discovered. A few interesting observations from
Daniel J. Levitin in This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a
Human Obsession include his thoughts on melody and pitch, among
others. He described melody as music that is based on a scale, such
as when we would say that the melody is in the key of C. He elabo-
rates that this means that the melody has a momentum to return to
the note C; it will not necessarily end on the note C but will have C
as the most prominent and focal note of the overall piece. Although
notes may temporarily be used outside of the C major scale , “ like a
quick edit in a movie to a parallel scene or a fl ashback, in which we
know that a return to the main plotline is imminent and inevitable, ”
we are confi dent in our soul that the composer will be taking us
home. When I read his description on melody, I was moved by how
much the melody of music refl ects our perspective on life, our para-
digms, and how we expect our future to refl ect our past — whether
we realize it or not. For instance, if we hear a song in the key of
C, we expect variations but are most comfortable if it stays or ends
near C, just as if we have habitually been raised in a positive family,
surrounded by empowering expectations, we are much more likely
to anticipate a future that fl ourishes and expands, than is someone
who was raised with negative infl uences and whose early life experi-
ences set up painfully limited intentions. But the good news is that
positivity can be developed and nurtured to grow; the new research
on music ’ s benefi ts is signifi cant and substantial.
Sandra ’ s Story
One of the most exciting breakthroughs that I ’ ve seen in a Ricer this
year was in Sandra, who had participated numerous times before