Express Yourself Journey

Take time to express yourself through music, art, and writing.

🎨Everyone expresses themselves differently, and as a musician, I know how helpful it can be to be creative.

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

It’s always good to release your emotions into creating something.

Something permanent that you can always go back to and experience fully.

Release your emotions into creating something; sing along to the radio, dance your heart out.

You know, I’ve played a lot of emotional music, but I find myself feeling those emotions while listening to them because I can hear the kind of mindset I was in when I performed that particular song.

How do you express yourself?

Is it through playing/listening to music? Dancing to the beat of a drum? Playing Drums? Dancing? Writing? Painting? Drawing? Crafting?

Whatever it is be sure you are able to identify how you express yourself.

If you have multiple ways, great. If you can’t think of one, think to your past.

Something you enjoyed and want to repeat the outcome in creating something you can hold onto or share if you want to.

I remember the moments that led me to perform a particular song in that particular way.

Whether it was sadness, happiness, etc… your body talks and the emotion shines through in different ways depending on what you choose to do with these emotions.

There is way more to this than meets the eye, though.

Specific scales and notes can actually elicit different emotions using something called Motifs (unconscious responses from programming over our lifespan.

There are all different types but one thing I’ve found works is to find all my favorite movie soundtrack music.

Some of my favorites are John Williams, Hans Zimmer, etc., and using the playlist to elicit a sense of wonder, positivity, magic, or other emotions.

Think the Interstellar soundtrack. What do you think makes a movie good? The acting? The visuals? I believe it all comes down to the music.

🎶Cue Interstellar Theme – Hans Zimmer

There are specific tonal patterns that can be used to elicit certain responses in it’s audience.

These are called motifs and is the reason why we feel things when we listen to specific musical notes in combination.

Ask the Chat about motifs and Sunny will give you the information.

There’s also something called a modality that is a specific chord progression that elicits different emotional responses depending on the dissonance between notes.

Think Harry Potter magic scenes, do you ever wonder why you feel like you’re in the movie experiencing the magic?

That’s a mixolydian modality, and it brings about feelings of overcoming fierce monsters, and magical emotions all in the chord progression itself.

These have been programmed into us since birth, through television and movies.

Composers use these scales to elicit specific responses in our emotions based on a combination of all the data.

They’re literally making us feel based on specific responses programmed into us for a long time.

This has been developed over years and years of creation. TV “Programs”, Movie “Programs”, and Radio “Programs”

📺Really think about that word… “Programming.”

You know how some songs make you feel a certain way?

Pop music elicits emotions and sometimes, the people who understand these specific tonal patterns and what sounds “good” to the ear can create tunes that really resonate hard with their audience.

That being said, most of the time the human emotion shines through, but be careful of lyrics. Sometimes the can make you feel things about yourself almost like the programmed feelings engage that side of you.

“A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words.”

-Shania Twain

Nice to know there’s actual data as to why you’re feeling that same feeling listening to a song or show you’ve been watching for years.

I often believe that most popular music is happy sounding, with a sad message.

Go over some of the lyrics of your favorite songs and see what I mean. Really think about what the words are saying.

The music we listen to in certain periods of our lives can help you with studying (focus music), epic-ness (hero music) and some specific notes in combination creates a response that often times will make you feel these things and you’ll wind up actually FEELING the music.

Can you picture what music would be playing here? If you can, you’re beginning to understand the meaning behind my words.

There’s so much stuff out there that makes us into feeling machines, but sometimes, it’s not for the right purposes.

In fact, sometimes they make you feel drawn to specific lower thought processes and behaviors.

Music can bring out these emotional behaviors and draw us into a specific action or purpose even though it didn’t originate from our own minds.

Be aware of the influences of social media, and realize that a lot of the time the moral sensibilities are covered up.

This glorifies these things and even though we know that sometimes, it isn’t always the best thing for us, we do them anyway simply because we’re programmed to.

🖌️”Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”

-Scott Adams

We are feeling machines, and when you learn how to elicit your own responses in a way that makes sense for you, based on how YOU want to feel, we can use this knowledge to retrain your brain into thinking positively.

The superman theme song is a great example of major (ionian) modality, that elicits the hero moving forward.

Specific patterns like the jump between specific notes makes us feel like we are overcoming challenges.

There are so many ways to program our subconscious mind that there isn’t any reason why we shouldn’t be able to program it, ourselves.

Don’t let your mind control you, control your mind.

🎧One track I would suggest to start on this journey is the “Rocky” training song, Listen to that on repeat and try and tell me your life wasn’t suddenly and irrevocably more epic as long as it plays.

You can even use music to make you feel better if you’re having a bad day. Sometimes sitting in the pain with painful music helps us feel better. Sometimes switching to more positive tracks with more positive messages can make all the difference.

Remember that everyone may not see things you create in the same way that you do. Some people will try and convince you that something is blue when it is clearly green to you.

Don’t let that stop you, and accept that not everyone will understand the way you see things, and that they may interpret your creative abilities in a way that is different from the way you interpret them.

Rest assured there are some people out there going through similar struggles and some people will “get” it while others won’t.

Also, it’s a sad fact to state, but.. not everyone is going to like it.

Roll with the punches the universe throws at you, and know that sometimes it takes a few “no’s” to get to the “yes.”

This is true for most things we want in life, and everything takes effort.

If you want more, you have to pursue more.

Remember that sometimes when you want certain doors to open, you just have to knock.🔓🌱