Rose Rising

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYVxHkpiUaA&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%     Above is a link to the Soundbath meditation video that I am referencing throughout this post.  This week’s topic of music therapy was one I have been really looking forward to. Music has played a major role in my life since childhood(my grandparents were music teachers.) In high school, I was in the marching band, where music consumed my every waking moment(and the asleep ones too). Playing the flute always came easy to me. Due to that, it never really took much thought on my part. Whenever I played I always felt like I left Earth and did not land back on my feet until the music stopped, I will never be able to describe what was going on in between, I just remember starting, floating, and then the music ends. The first reading for this week describes this phenomenon as a trance. More specifically the text states: "Music during trancing provides a vehicle by which trancing individual...

    For our last few classes, we have been working on a short film, which became a meditative film about finding your peace. My favorite part of this process was the day in class where we each got to list out to the class our examples of finding your peace, the whiteboard was completely filled with no space left to spare by the end of class. It was really rewarding to see. Everyone was so involved in the process and we each got to see that come to life. I really enjoyed getting to film clips on our own time, especially as it allowed us to use past video clips that made us feel at peace. I really enjoyed this project, it did not feel like we were doing research, it just felt like we were coming together as a class to do something that could help us and others. To add to our communal peace, I have attached a video of my cats sleeping, because for me at least that is the most peaceful thing there is.      The potential for this film is innumerable, especially due t...

            In class, we learned about liberation psychology. Liberation psychology is "raising critical consciousness about the harms of sociopolitical oppression and discovering avenues for empowerment and liberation"(Gupta, Lecture Eleven, 2023), to better understand this concept and how it connects to creativity, we were told to analyze/give our thoughts on the film we watched in class. The film was called "Back to Natural". It was a really moving film. Back to Natural is about the lived experiences of African Americans in connection to their natural hair. Through the film, you learn about how badly people of color are treated solely because of the hair that grows out of their heads.      The creator did such a beautiful job in helping people like myself who have never been through this horrific treatment truly understand what it is like. They are made to feel like they are not human beings, just because of their hair, one of many th...

     For this week, we did "automatic writing" which to put it simply is the activity of writing without thinking, in hopes of writing from within your unconscious. The idea of writing from your unconscious is sort of mad within itself. This leads to the topic of this week's class, creativity and madness. The reading from this week describes the idea of going into our most mad and manic state of being as a way of tapping into our non-rational minds and thus in a sense taking away all logic. Art and creativity are in a sense- the act of ignoring what seems logical and avoiding rational thinking. In the reading, the author explained this phenomenon:  "In order for far-flung or chaotic thoughts to be transformed into works of art, original and meaningful connections (linkings, in the Aristotelian sense of 'dissimilarity with similarity') must be made." (Jamison, 1993).        For my example, I am using the automatic writing we did in our last class o...