Every illness is a musical problem.
Its cure, a musical solution. – Novalis
Sometimes life is just plain sexy.
Things are good. Like seriously-rockin’-and-rollin’ good.
You’re totally in your groove, feeling the flow. The volume is turned way up on the awesome. Cool stuff is happening. Things just fall together in a way that almost looks like magic. And you’ve got a metric megaton of energy.
Generally speaking, you’ve got your mojo workin’ and life is looking all kinds of gorgeous. It’s like there’s a rhythm – a pulse, a beat, a song – underlying everything, and you’re surfing this rad rhythm like a rockstar.
Then there are the other times.
When there’s absolutely zero flow. And no awesome or magic or mojo anywhere in sight. Trying to get even the smallest, simplest thing done feels like a frakking tug-of-war match. And your energy? Yeah, pretty much non-existent.
Basically you feel like you’re feasting on a diet of crap sandwiches. And either the aforementioned rhythm of grooviness has stopped. Or maybe you just can’t hear it over the sound of you dry heaving thanks to all the ack.
When you’re seated next to the buffet o’ crap, you can bet that it’s due to one of two things.
Static. Or gaps.
See, there are infinite flavors of stuck and struggle. So they can show up wearing wildly different faces. But every stuck, no matter how it shows up, is either caused by static or gaps.
Beware of falling tuba players
This brings us back to that whole rhythm thing.
When you’re plugged into the right rhythm for your life, things are awesome. Because that rhythm is kind of like the conductor of an orchestra, making sweet music at the energy level.
And since everything starts as energy, when stuff is sweet there, it’s sweet everywhere.
But when you lose touch with that rhythm-that-makes-stuff-sweet, suddenly the tuba player falls into the woodwinds section, causing them to crash into the herd of cellists, who knock the flautists off the stage.
Which means that your sweet music just turned into a great big pile of suck.
Kshhhhh. You’re breaking up
Sometimes the rhythm gets lost because of static.
It’s like you’re listening to your favorite Pat Benatar marathon on the radio and then kshhhh… static strikes.
We are young,
Heartache to heartache we… kshhhh,
No promises,
No… kshhhh,
Love is a… kshhhh.
Ugh.
Static happens when life piles clutter on top of the rhythm of radness. So it gets covered up, and muffled. And way harder to hear.
And dude, this totally breaks your groove.
One minute you’re waltzing with awesome. And the next you’re all herky-jerky. The coolness that was flowing just a second ago is all twisted up with static.
Sometimes the static takes off on its own and things get back to awesome by themselves. And sometimes the static gets really obnoxious and drowns out the rhythm completely.
If you hang out in that herky-jerky state for too long, stuck swoops in to request the next dance.
Suck.
Plus no more Pat Benatar.
Double suck.
An example of static-ey stuck
I recently worked with someone who’s been a super passionate sculptor pretty much forever. It was totally normal for them to spend hours and hours a day in their studio, totally lost in the process of doing their gorgeous art.
And then they got sick. And had money problems. And started to feel crazy stressed.
Which created a bunch of static.
So even after they were feeling better, they couldn’t get back to their art. No matter how much they wanted to. No matter how hard they tried. No matter how many times they said tomorrow was the day they’d pick it back up.
It just wasn’t happening.
Because of the static.
We did one session to clear the static-ey stuff and to get them reconnected to what they love most – sculpting! And we did one session because that was all it took.
Almost a week after their session I got a note from them saying it took so long to write because they’d been sculpting all week!
Static gone. Rhythm found. Woohoo!
Gaps! Gaps! Ack!
Sometimes stuck happens when the groovy rhythm not only stops being groovy, but just stops altogether.
Wha?
Yeah, it goes a little something like this.
Life is pretty rock and roll. You’re solidly in your groove. Breaking open bottles of awesomesauce left and right. Rolling in gorgeousness. This rhythm thing is really working for you.
And then it doesn’t.
You notice that today is a little less awesome than yesterday. And tomorrow feels even less awesome than today. The cool stuff isn’t showing up as much. And the booyah kind of excitement slows to a meh. It’s like the river of awesome just starts drying up.
The rhythm that used to really work for you isn’t working so well anymore. Each day the mojo fades a little more. Until it finally just goes poof.
But there’s one big problem.
The new rhythm hasn’t shown up yet.
So now there’s a gap. And then there’s the stuck.
Because without that new rhythm, there’s not much flow. And if that gap is big enough, or hangs around long enough, not much flow can turn into great big stagnation with the quickness.
So sometimes stuck created by these gaps can be really big stuck. At the extreme end, they can turn into huge existential kind of stuck.
You can usually tell when this caused-by-a-gap stuck shows up because you feel lost, disconnected, disillusioned, disinterested, unmotivated or completely and totally panicked. You can’t get focused and no matter how much coffee you drink, you have no energy at all.
This rhythm doesn’t just provide the flow. It also provides the foundation. And when it’s not there, you feel like you’re left dangling. And that can be all kinds of scary.
An example of gap-ey stuck
I did a series of sessions for a really cool couple that were basically making plans to get a divorce. Things had been really hard for a long time and whatever connection they felt had pretty much vanished.
They got in touch with me as a kind of a what-the-hell-why-not? sort of thing. They figured they didn’t have much to lose, so why not try sacred sound before they told their friends and family about their plans to split.
During their first session it became really clear that the rhythm that initially created the sparks and that delicious swoon-ey-weak-in-the-knees feeling had headed for the hills. And a new rhythm never showed up.
So I wasn’t even a little surprised to hear how they were feeling about each other and their relationship.
After session number two there were definite signs of improvement.
Less fighting.
More talking.
Lots more laughter.
After the third session they totally shelved the idea of getting a divorce. And by the fifth session they were making plans to go to Maui together.
Maui! Woot!
So, yeah, finding a new rhythm that rocks and closing the gaps that let stuck in can be all kinds of awesome. And fix all kinds of stuck. Even stuck that looks totally unfixable.
It’s all about the rhythm. You can rock it. And there’s hope.
Life is a rhythm. And when you’re plugged into a rhythm that rocks, your life blows up with gorgeousness.
And when you’re not, if you remember that it’s all about the rhythm, you can work on plugging back in. So there is less static. And fewer gaps. And way more awesome.
One of the reasons that I love what I do so much is because I get to watch people get their groove back. And reconnect to the rhythm that really rocks their world. And make plans for Maui.
But, beyond that, I get to watch people find hope. Because they realize that they weren’t lost or broken or doomed after all.
They just lost the rhythm for a second.