In Response to: "How Do We Nurture Ourselves?" by Dorit Amir

By Sarah Corbin, first year Music Therapy student at Lesley University, Cambridge, MA, USA. Email: scorbin@lesley.edu

How do we nurture ourselves? I think this is a question that most music therapists, including the students of music therapy, grapple with quite often. As the end of my first semester at Lesley draws near, I am finding that my time to nurture myself is one of the first things to get thrown out the window in favor of having that extra hour or two to finish a paper, work on a project, or maybe even sleep. But at the same time that I think using these extra hours to work on other things besides my own mental, physical, or spiritual health might be beneficial to my end of the semester grades, it could really be hurting my growth as a music therapist. I'm finding more and more that taking care of myself is a huge and inseparable part of becoming an effective music therapist. After all, if I haven't truly spent the time to nurture myself, how can I expect to help my clients to do so? Even as I participate in a yoga class once or twice a week, I frequently find my mind drifting away from breathing and being present to thoughts of papers, emails, and other little odds and ends that I must clear up before the end of the night. I momentarily lose sight of how good it feels to have my mind be completely still and peaceful for an hour, and how wonderful it is to take that peace and stillness into my work as a student of music therapy.

How do we as seemingly endlessly busy students, professionals, family members, friends, etc, carve out regular time in our schedules to breathe, comfort, and nurture ourselves? I don't think I have really found the answer to this question yet, but I did find this essay to be very inspiring in the search for an answer. Perhaps it is less about finding a totally separate time to devote to self care from the rest of daily life, and a little more about integrating the ways we care for ourselves into the spaces that we live and do our work. For the author of this essay it was in the form of adding another room very near to the studio in which clients were seen that existed solely for the purpose of self care. In that way the author was able to integrate the nurturing experience of spending time in Kauai with the experience of living and working as a music therapist in Israel. The author's experience left me with much food for thought as to how I could integrate even small moments of the musical, physical, and spiritual activities that I find nourishing to my soul into the spaces in which I do my daily living and working. Just taking five minutes before a session with a difficult client to breathe, stretch, or meditate could be incredibly beneficial in my being totally present and as helpful as possible for that client.

I'm certain there is no one answer to the question of how to nurture and take care of ourselves on a consistent basis, and there may not be an answer at all. Like many things I've experienced so far about becoming a music therapist, self care seems to be an ongoing process that evolves and changes into different spaces, activities, and amounts of time that I find I can devote to it. But I really appreciate the process that the author of this essay went through to find an adequate space for self care, and the integration of spiritual, musical, and mental nourishment into the daily act of being a music therapist. While it is obviously also important to find separate time and space to devote to self care that is far removed from the spaces in which we do our work, a Hawaiian island for instance, I think it is quite a wonderful concept to have spaces for self care in the places that we do our work as well, and to integrate these two parts of ourselves together in some way.