Last week I wrote about mindfulness, and how being mindful includes noticing, acknowledging, and feeling not only the beautiful and joyful things in life, but also the unpleasant, uncomfortable, and sorrowful.
I stand by that statement, but I would like to add that acknowledging an unpleasant emotion does not mean wallowing in it. We are not our emotions, but there are times when we feed the challenging ones to the point that they become out of control, sometimes dangerously so. As someone who’s lived with self-harming impulses for decades, I know this all too well.
I’ve already mentioned that I went through two years of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), and a large part of that therapy included emotion regulation. One of my absolute favorite skills for emotional regulation is called “Opposite-to-Emotion Action,” and I’m convinced I appreciate this skill more than other ones because I’m a musician. There is such a breadth of music to choose from when we are wallowing in suffering and need to change our emotion.
However, opposite-to-emotion actions do not come naturally to us, in music or in anything else. When I’m depressed or hopeless or angry, I want to listen to the slow movements of Mahler’s Fourth or Beethoven’s Seventh (which my three-year-old daughter calls “The Music of Anger”), painfully nostalgic music like Bruce Springsteen, Wilco, or Lucius, or if I’m really feeling down, Sufjan Stevens’s hopelessly dark album Carrie and Lowell (yikes). I love all of that music by the way, it’s just not the stuff to listen to when one needs soothing rather than catharsis. To force myself to listen to an opposite-to-emotion piece is challenging, but it always pays off. Here are three of my favorites.
Arcangelo Corelli: Concerto in D Major, Op. 6 No. 4
I love this one because the music is serene, then lively, then placid, then…you get the idea. All pleasant things. But more than that, I watch this for Elizabeth Blumenstock, the violinist second from the end in the first row, who is clearly having the time of her life.
That sort of music works when my mood is agitated or angry. When my body is calm but I’m wallowing in self pity, shame, or black depression, I turn to this scat battle between Ella Fitzgerald and Mel Torme. This is so amazing as to require no explanation,
And if all else fails, there’s always Yakety Sax.
Be well, everybody.
Brian De Young 