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Posts Tagged ‘Music’
Posted on Thursday, August 18th, 2011
Tags: Appreciation, Awareness, Coaching, Discovery, Generosity, Listening, Music, Perception, Purpose, Relationship, Transition
Categories: Awareness, Balance, Change, Coaching, Discovery, Listening, Music, Perception, Relationship
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 A couple of years ago, someone gave me a copy of Victor Wooten’s then new book, The Music Lesson. It went to the top of the stack of “to be read” books and slowly made its way down to the stack’s midsection, lost in clutter of more recent acquisitions. One of the ways that I get to books that likely won’t require my highlighting and annotation is to acquire them in the audio book format. Recently I was pleased to find The Music Lesson on an MP3 disc, narrated by Victor.
Expecting that most of you will not recognize Victor’s name or work, he is one of the most sought after bass playing, session musicians in Nashville. The youngest of five brothers, all of whom are well known on the Nashville music scene, Victor rose to prominence as one of the founding members of the Grammy award-winning group, Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. This link drops you into a taste of Victor’s musical genius -Victor\’s Amazing Grace. Keep Reading »
Posted on Tuesday, May 31st, 2011
Tags: Appreciation, Awareness, Change, Curiosity, Discovery, Generosity, Happiness, Listening, Love, Music, Perception, Purpose, Relationship, Transition
Categories: Awareness, Balance, Change, Curiosity, Discovery, Generosity, Happiness, Listening, Love, Perception, Purpose, Relationship, Trust
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 Tonight, as a part of our book group, I will speaking with John McKnight and Peter Block, co-authors of The Abundant Community- Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhood. I enjoyed their book. It contains great food for thought about “community making” and how our “consumer society,” through its materialism, deprives us of many of the benefits of “community.” It is a bit of a polemic. If you understand that going in, it is possible to take what is valuable from its content without being distracted by its advocacy.
Community and family have been on my mind lately. I marvel at how much better supported we are when in community and a part of family, how they provide us space to realize and give our gifts to others, how they promote for our health and well-being, yet how remarkably diverse and overlapping our communities and families may be. Keep Reading »
Posted on Tuesday, March 29th, 2011
Tags: Awareness, Body / Mind, Discovery, Fear, Forgiveness, Music, Perception
Categories: Body/Mind, Discovery, Fear, Forgiveness, Happiness
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 In order to train in forgiveness, you have to begin at its source – anger. Anger arises from a perception of interference with something that you are doing, feeling or expecting. There is a frustration. Something happened that you did not intend to happen or something did not happen which you had him intended to occur. There are times when anger has its place. It is a reminder of a problem that needs attention. But the number of situations in which it is warranted are few. And, anger itself rarely resolves the problem which anger brought to your attention. Anger often leads to an inappropriate response to the triggering event. And, if anger becomes habitual, it presents not only long-term problems for your happiness, but for your physical health.
Anger covers a wide range of experiences. There is indignation, which is self-righteous. There is sulking, which is passive and withdrawn. There is exasperation, which arises when your patience has been tried to excess. There is resentment, when you have become preoccupied over a perceived offense. There is hatred, which arises from an intense preoccupation over a person perceived to have harmed you. Keep Reading »
Posted on Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011
Tags: Appreciation, Balance, Body / Mind, Coaching, Happiness, Listening, Meditation, Music, Narrative, Perception, Purpose, Relationship, Spirituality
Categories: Awareness, Balance, Coaching, Happiness, Listening, Perception, Purpose, Relationship
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Something quite amazing happened Tuesday, yet it almost escaped my attention. I just passed the anniversary mark at Coach’s Corner and published my 100th post! When I originally designed coachingcounsel.com, I really wasn’t familiar with blogging and thought that I might postpone adding a blog here to a later date. Keep Reading »
Posted on Monday, February 21st, 2011
Tags: Awareness, Curiosity, Discovery, Music, Perception
Categories: Awareness, Curiosity, Discovery, Music, Perception
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 Dmitri Tymoczko ( tim-OSS-ko) is a Princeton University music theorist and composer. His father, Thomas, was a well-known philosopher of mathematics at Smith College. His sister, Juliana, is a mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry at the University of Iowa. Thus, it may come as no surprise that Dmitri discovered the fundamental geometric shape of musical chord structures. But, the way all this came about is illustrative of the values that we continue to explore – awareness, curiosity and discovery.
Dmitri entered Harvard to study music, but was frustrated by the then popular emphasis on atonal structures. He switched to philosophy, studying it as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He then enrolled in music graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. He became interested in the mathematics of music because he wanted his compositions to sound better. Keep Reading »
 One of my clients was kind enough to send me a “compilation” of songs that constituted her current life perspective. She accompanied the CD with a explanation of why she had chosen each song and how it was representative of her narrative. As the compilation arrived unexpectedly, I put it aside until the weekend, when I generally have more time for listening.
I didn’t fully realize the precious gift that had been bestowed upon me, until during my usual Saturday pilgrimage south to visit my father, I had an opportunity to listen to the songs. First, I just plain loved the music. Some tunes were entirely new to me (my client is considerably younger), and I had never heard of several of the artists. Some songs were new arrangements of material from the late 60’s and early 70’s, made fresh and new by a succeeding generation. And, because this compilation was intended as a communication, I paid careful attention to the lyrics, which, in many instances, were stunningly compassionate and open hearted.
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 One of the things that happens to you when your life is “out of balance,” is that the things you love to do undergo a type of compression in order to fit them into your unprioritized stack of daily duties. In the course of that compression, the joy of the activity often is stripped away or, worse yet, subordinated to a third party standard of performance to which you never intended to subscribe. A case in point for me is music. All the way through college, I played music because I loved it. I spent 15 years getting to be a “passable” trumpet player. Somewhere in there, I began playing guitar, which became my preferred instrument. I had instructors, I had peers from whom I learned and I just “figured stuff out.”Â
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In our hospice training, we are taught to meet the resident, for whom we are caring, right where they are, at that very moment. Whatever thoughts you may have had about the resident’s condition from the prior week – their mood, their emotions, their physical state – likely will have changed in the ensuing week, day, or hour.Â
The end of life is a period of accelerated change. It can confound the resident as well as the caregiver. By seeing the resident where he/she is at the moment, you serve the current need. You do so without comparing it to the past or without concern for the uncertain future.
When I first decided to bring my ukulele to the hospice ward at Laguna Honda Hospital, I didn’t know if anyone would be interested in my playing or singing. I describe myself as “mediocre amateur” but I can get my way through all sorts of blues, folk, country and jazz standards.Â
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