How can meditation practice and theory shine light on the encounter between client and music therapist?

Abstract

As a music therapist who regularly meditates, I will be exploring how meditation, with its roots in Buddhist philosophy, can shine a light on the therapeutic relationship as a whole, and also how it influences my own perspective within the dyad. I will view my clinical work, which took place as part of a counselling service offered to teenagers in high schools, through the lens that meditation offers. My method, which resonates with auto-ethnographic and phenomenological approaches, involved looking through my reflective notes from my sessions with clients and identifying moments that relate to my understanding of meditation. I identified four key themes which I will present. Examples from my clinical practice will be interwoven throughout my narrative with insights from literature and my meditation practice. I will begin with an examination of mindfulness, which fosters a nonjudgemental acceptance of events and helps me to be conscious of countertransference reactions. I will then examine attentive presence, which involves deeply listening to whatever arises implicitly within the intersubjective exchange, and not rushing to impose ideas. With enough discernment we discover sunyata, the emptiness of the self when it is freed from conditioned habit patterns and defences. This involves embracing vulnerability and a mutual willingness to enter a third space where the participants surrender to a new, co-created pattern within the music. This grounds us as persons, connected to one another in an interdependent web, and has implications for the assumed power dynamics within the therapeutic dyad. In summary, I found that music therapy, and meditation, can allow the individual's habit of mind to change, so that he can relate to internal conflict in a new way, with a wider understanding of self.