In April of 2014, I was accepted to do a TEDx talk in Valencia, Spain. When I arrived at the venue, there was naturally a great deal of nervousness and excitement amongst the speakers and the organizers. As a therapist, I could sense it and it was beginning to unnerve me. So I left the venue and went to another part of the Oceanogràfic. I found refuge in the benches around a dolphin pool. There was no show on so I was able to sit in relative solitude with the sun shining on my face. There I listened to my favorite sedative and relaxing music tracks -

Years ago, I became interested in the biology of stress. It was catalyzed by a desire to live my life with the highest quality of well-being that I could achieve. My curiosity was met with an important resource from our local library. That resource was a film called ‘Killer Stress.’ It was produced by National Geographic and features the amazing work of Dr. Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University and other researchers in the field of stress biology. What I would learn from this film and the subsequent readings would change my life, the content that I teach and the way I teach.

Howard Benson of the Benson-Henry Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital has said that up to 90% of all medical office visits in this country are stress-related or stress-exacerbated (https://www.bensonhenryinstitute.org/mission-history/). This is indeed a public health crisis. Since the statistics come from so many different reporting groups (cardiology, oncology, gynecology/obstetrics, urology, neurology), we don’t see what is central to all of these patients - the way stress works in modern life.

At the beginning of the virus shelter in, the circle of my life shrunk to one small corner of one small room in my home. There, I did embroidery and watched British TV. It was all I could do.

I just spoke with a dynamic woman who founded and runs an organization called the Modern Widows Club (www.modernwidowsclub.com). The group’s mission is to “serve the empower widows to lean into life, build resilience and release their potential to make a positive difference in society.” She somehow heard about music therapy and intuitively thought there was something there to support her mission. And there is.