The Power of Music in Changing Your Life

I have recently been reminded about the power of music in the process of bringing about change in our lives. I have always been told that to produce a desired change in my life, I would have to have the picture of what I want go from my head to my heart. I never quite knew what they meant except that I understood that for real change or progress, or acquisition of any goal, there has to be some emotion behind it.

Well, change has been slow for me over the years, until fairly recently when I discovered one of several mechanisms that can be employed to facilitate the change I sought. I had learned that if I wanted something I did not have, I should get a picture of it and keep it in front of me, which I have done over the years to little avail. Then I ran across a concept called Mind Movies recently created formally by an Australian company, that put together a kit and sold it for a modest sum that allows a person to do what I discovered a free program called MovieMaker does.

It allows you to combine images, words and music tracks into a video that can be played on your computer, and it became so much clearer to me what had been missing. Music is a powerful way to get images burned into the psyche, into our soul, as can easily be attested by some very repeatable phenomena.

To this day, whenever I hear "Wish upon a Star" by Rose Royce, I am taken back to a very special moment when I had just graduated from High School and was at my Disneyland Grad Night, looking out over Pirate Island as Rose Royce played live, yes, this like 1979, so yeah, live, but the point is that moment was burned into my heart, not just my memory, and all the feelings of newfound freedom come rushing back as I listen to that song.

Another example, my wife and I have a song, "When I Looked at Him" by Expose, that she heard in her car right after she and I had just met and spent hours in a chilly parking lot talking to each other and finally holding each other as the chill set in, after meeting at a Single Parent Support group sponsored by our church. The song burned in for her and after she revealed to me later that night, in my heart also, the power and warmth of the moments we had just spent bonding in that parking lot. To this day, hearing that song, brings back a rush of the feeling of the newness of that night.

So, I decided to pick a song by Kenny Loggins "The Unimaginable Life" that inspires me greatly and I created my mind movie of some things that I want to happen in my life over the next few years. I am finding it is also best to do this for the short run, as it allows not only for us to change our daily focus to higher thoughts of what we want to accomplish, it ties those images, and words, to the emotional bonding strength of music. Music has a way of slipping words and images right past all of our normal defenses, straight into the soul, which is what must happen for us to have those images mean anything thing more than just something that would be nice to have. We need to picture them and feel gratitude for them as if they are an accomplished fact, and our internal mechanisms move to make them real, by inspiring us, and helping us to see things around us that will help us.

Music is a powerful mechanism, because it speaks not only to our ears, but to our hearts, and so can be used to convey images and thoughts to the heart in a way that words alone cannot do. Try it and you will see the truth of it.