healing healing healing
why listening to the same song ruined my Spotify, but let me breathe easier
I just returned from Witchcamp, and I’m already breaking my first rule: don’t talk about camp until things settle. But my heart is bursting, and my insides are reorganizing, and I want to make sense of it.
I won’t. But I still try.
I know that a song in my Spotify favorites is on repeat. I’ve listened to it at least 10 times as of this moment. And it will disrupt my carefully curated On Repeat playlist, knocking Taylor Swift from the top, I’m sure.
Because I will listen to this song many more times today. Not because it’s true. Not because it says what is real now.
(My literal neurodivergent self won’t share the song name because it’s not ‘perfect’ nor about anyone or anything right now.)
But the song feels like something I need.
Music to My Ears
Maybe it’s a blanket.
Maybe it’s a place where I can be so very sad. And it will make sense. And it will be safe enough to be sad.
And I will sit with it until I cry it out of my bones.
And I will take a shower and calm down, knowing I have made it through that hard moment. A moment I have cultivated and crafted and called into my heart.
Because nothing is wrong, but feelings are feelings that come when they come.
They come when they are called.
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I call my healing forward and send my (apparently) forced stability away when I listen to music that evokes deep sadness. The kind that doesn’t have a name or a story. It might not be in my scrapbook or a photo memory slideshow.
It might not exist. It might not be real. (Whatever that means.)
But it feels closer than close. It feels as real as anything. As any morning or any moment when I turn to an empty chair or pillow. As any night when I want to hear a voice I haven’t heard in years.
And I guess I think I’m all right, enough. Until the landslide travels the roundness of my over-the-ear headphones, the kind that shut out the background noises.
Enough.
A Spell of Safety
I can’t remember where I heard about this first, but I learned that music offers us a place to be safe with strong and unexplainable emotions. It can offer those of us who are ‘dramatic’ and ‘emotional’ a place to experience the hard stuff.
Music is a place where I can feel and feel out loud. I can sing along, even if I don’t understand the ‘why.’ I do know what it feels like to be sad and mournful. I know what it’s like to have someone walk away. I know what it’s like to be confused about what happened, and I know what it’s like to be obsessive about figuring it all out.
I know what disappointment feels like. And, if I’m being honest, it’s easier to feel it for someone else than it is to feel it for myself. I can peer into a song and sing as though it were a spell of commiseration. I can nod and droop my eyes. I can move my body in recognition.
I can feel what I have been trying to keep WAY OUT THERE.
I can feel it. I can relate. I can let the waves of knowing wash over me until the song becomes background noise, less of words, and more of the corner of a room I haven’t left yet.
What I read/heard is that songs allow for a safe space to feel things we may not have experienced. Music offers a space of preparation, like the days or hours (or minutes) before a ritual. I get quiet and try to find an empty room. I pace around to step into the magick already here but also coming.
I step outside of who I am and into what I want to evoke and invoke and call into the room or the field or the stones.
And all of this happens within me, with me, while I understand and misunderstand again and again. While I try to ‘get’ it and figure it out to guarantee my safety and preparedness. Like necessities to put in the car when wildfires are too close.
Like gathering up the memory so I can sit in the depths of unknowable pain and survive. Resilience training with a soundtrack.
This is the place where I want to make it simple and step-by-step.
Sit with the song that feels right.
Stay as long as you can. Or set a timer to fit it in between capitalism and bedtime.
Write, make art, dance, sculpt, sob.
Repeat until it’s done.
Let the silence arrive when the song has finally said it the way you need to hear it.
And hold that heart of yours. Praise it for its willingness to be with __________.
Celebrate its ability to sit across from the mirror that bent every sunbeam onto your skin, warming and burning the space between heart and bone.
Healing isn’t the bandaid; often blisters are made into calluses.
Not that you need to harden.
(Or not that you will forever. But maybe a little trip to toughness is safer now.)
I know I have needed a layer that touches the earth and keeps the sharp from breaking me into bleeding. And eventually, I walked across coals that hurt with every step, but I made it across.
Music was there.
So, today, in the way that re-entry from teaching and magick does, I have softened a bit, and I am letting something move through me.
So I can breathe a little easier.
And I invite it in.
With a song.
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Here’s where you can learn about more of my work: www.irisanyamoon.com.
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Music is truly a magical thing, isn't it? 😍 Thanks for this blog.