We all naturally tend to become aggravated by traffic, someone pulling out in front of your car, technology that seems to never worked right, people who hurt your feelings, or careers that just don’t seem to be going your way. I personally have been trying very hard over the last couple of years to stop going to negative thoughts. I have tried various meditations and I have made some progress, but some 60 year habits are extremely difficult to stop quickly. The one thing that does relax me, relieve anxiety or negativity is playing the piano. I will often go to the piano at home and just create and play anything that comes to mind. It does relax me and remove the feelings of stress. Music is a great healer.
We are living in unique times indeed! At the same time technology and social media are meant to bring us closer together by making it easier to connect with others, regardless of where we are located. However, they seems to actually be separating us more and more and our stress levels have become a major health issue, because stress weakens our immune system, making us more susceptible to diseases. There is an explosion of “self-help” books, websites and podcasts telling us how to lower our stress and find happiness!
The truth is that our Technological Age has given us all so much more time that we are literally “thinking too much, instead of doing”. Previously, people where basically farmers who worked from sun up to sun down and had little or no spare time. Then we moved to the Industrial Age, where again, they worked most of the time, just to provide for food and shelter, and again, had no spare time for thinking or wondering if they were “doing work that was fulfilling”. Now, as technology has given rise to less physical work, we find ourselves with all this “spare time”, to think, to travel, and to ponder about life and what we are her for. This spare time may seem like something most would say, “What spare time?”, but although we feel as if we are “busy”, we are not “physically busy working” all of the time. Advances in technology have made it possible to not only earn a living sitting down at desks at computers, but also to stay at home doing it! There was no need for shopping malls and vacation businesses for our grandparents and great grand-parents. They were just too damn tired to go anywhere and didn’t have the money to do it anyway!
So what can we do to deal with all of these things that are giving us stress and negativity? The first thing that comes to mind is to S L O W D O W N and take some time each day to “count our blessings”, to literally sit and think about all of the good things we have in our lives…the people we love, our health, our homes, whatever. This feeds positivity to our minds. It is a FACT that we are or become what we think and speak. If we spend hours each day speaking and thinking about all the things we don’t like, don’t have or wish we had, what is there to make us happy that day? The opposite is a FACT…if we spend more and more of each day thinking and speaking of positive things – “I’m so lucky to have my job, I am so fortunate to have people around me who love me, I am so blessed to be healthy and to be able to get up from a chair and walk to take out the garbage”….and on and on! These are the kind of words and thoughts that will add to our happiness.
Another thing that adds happiness to our lives is creativity. Creating something or a craft or painting a picture on canvas or playing a musical instrument…these feed the physical endorphins in our body that make us happy. All of us at David’s Music House are here to help with that. Even our teachers are happy to be earning a living, doing something that makes them happy, while teaching others to learn about this same enjoyment.
David’s Music House was never created just to start a business or to focus purely on earning money…it was created for a soulful purpose of having a place where families and people in the community can come to learn, to share and to create art and explore music and mostly to learn how to share and help others enjoy the same. This is THE reason our teachers get students on our own coffee house stage, often…to learn to ENJOY the music and to SHARE the music. All of this teaches young children to find what makes them happy and when they share this with people who listen, they learn about helping others feel good and to respect others feelings. Most of all, they learn that Music can heal yourself as well as everyone who listens.
“The Lesson Room is only the FIRST Step” – David
As always, thank each of you for reading, coming to David’s Music House and for spreading the good word about what we do here.
Peace & Love,
David