The expression ‘musical experience’ refers to more than listening to a piece of music. It also includes the listener’s response or reaction to a particular kind of music that he often comes across.
The Indian traditions affirm that music can change not only one’s moods but also one’s behaviour, which is governed by a certain attitude, provided one listens with the required devotion and concentration.
This is how a certain piece of music assumes its importance.
We all know that the Indian system of ragas is entirely based on the reflection of the human association. It is this involvement of emotion in raga music that makes it all the more an important tool in the process of healing the individual mind, which is wounded or diseased due to the compelling requirements to be adhered to by an individual in human society.
Let’s now see how feelings in a musical piece can be healing.
To understand this, we must also understand that the term ‘disease’ has originated by combining ‘dis’ and ‘ease’. It is the ‘uneasiness’ in one’s mind and the mood that causes what we call disease. This would mean that all the so-called ‘diseases’ that we create in our bodies are linked not only to our physical but also to our mental and emotional constitutions that have made us as a human organism. It is therefore relevant here to ask ourselves as to which are the beliefs and emotions that contribute to our healthy conditions and to go for developing them. There are various methods/schools available in the Indian, spiritual arena, which can help in cultivating such beliefs and emotions that calm down the troubles.
Primarily based on the mind, control techniques, the various schools of yoga have developed their own methodologies such as bhakti yoga, based on cultivating the habits of devotion and love without any pre-conditions, gyana yoga, the yoga of knowledge and wisdom, kriya yoga, the yoga that enables one to create the process or approach to life which is salubrious and also karma yoga, which enables one to cultivate the action and involvement with affairs with least expectations as to how the results would be.
Feelings in Music can Enhance the Emotional Healing
We have seen that human mind and emotions contribute towards one’s well-being and just not — repeat – just not the physical comforts as normally expected by the common man and the general public who always crave for wealth as an indicator of one’s well-being.
Whenever we consider ourselves sick; the emotional clues are the feelings that go hand in hand without symptoms. How the illness makes us feel — how the cold makes you feel sad or melancholic is essential while analyzing a diseased, unhealthy condition. It is here that it becomes quite valid to assume that some previously unexpressed sadness or melancholy has contributed towards creation of such a condition.
Based on this assumption, feelings in musical pieces can be manipulated in such a way that they show a healing impact on the minds and moods of the diseased and help the listener in achieving the desired end-results, namely overcoming the sadness and melancholy. In this context, it is worth mentioning here the recent research projects independently undertaken by the Chennai based voluntary organization, Nada Centre for Music Therapy. A new concept in the music therapy horizons has come to dawn with these experiments. Like thorn helps in eliminating’ the thorn and poison helps in killing the poison, the sadness or melancholy felt in a musical piece has helped many a listener overcoming the harbouring sadness in their mindscapes!
Based on this new-found theory, the Centre has now embarked on music reflecting anger, to eliminate anger in our minds and fear to eliminate fear in us! There is one exception to this golden hypothesis. Music that depicts joy and love work in a totally different manner: instead of eliminating the joy and love in us, it augments without any reservation! Just try this recipe and discover the mystery that is music!
This article was published in My Doctor Nov 2010 – Pages 37, 38
Edited by Geeta Shreedar, August 10, 2021