Music will be your guiding light

I didn’t spend 16 years as a music therapist not to de register once I realised a regulating body is not what serves me as an individual.

I didn’t spend 20 years learning the craft of music (via lessons) not to ditch them when I realised I was conforming to colonial constructs.

I didn’t spend a lifetime of using music as a regulatory tool to perpetuate performance and music education as the pinnacle of musical expression.

I didn’t spend all those years being comfortable with the external validation ‘being musical’ brought me to not move to the uncomfortable stage of expressing my musicality in ways that don’t receive external validation.

Using music as a guiding force throughout my entire life has led me all sorts of places.

I have strived to be ‘good enough’ and basked in the external validation received when I met the expectations of others and finally became ‘talented musician’.

While I was in that space I recognised that meeting the external standards meant perpetuating the colonisation of music, being good enough meant I was playing someone else’s music and external validation took from internal truth.

These days, I use music as a means of true expression.

I am guided by internal needs which allow me to express my musicality without breathing ‘properly’, supporting my voice ‘properly’, being co-dependent on my instrument. I can be pitchy, wobbly, scratchy, quiet, simple.

Music has led me to a place of deeper connection to myself, a place free of musical shame and attempts to improve.

All the training and professional accolades in the world could not have helped me with that. In fact it’s been in the shedding that music has become purest.

To be human is to be musical. There is not a single person reading this now who isn’t musical. We are all bursting from the seams with music.

Don’t let striving to ‘better your craft’ blind you to what you already possess. Don’t let anyone tell you that lessons or learning are what make a person musical.

Don’t let the external validation be your guide.

Music is the guide. And it’s alive and pure and ready to take you to a depth of personal fulfilment so far beyond what you know now.