It is interesting how my life is repeating itself again which shouldn’t surprise me. In graduate school, we focused our attention on repeating issues, because my professors believed that they were the curriculum of life. In studying Spiritual Psychology the belief is that spiritually speaking, everything is happening in our life for a reason and it all is in regards to our growth and learning – at the level of our soul. The things that are happening, if we don’t process through them, will repeat over and over and over again. The professors asked: “How long do you want to face the same thing?” They even went on to comment that if we don’t face these issues in our current life, we will need to come back again through “reincarnation” and face that problem again and again until it is finally solved.

Fritz Perls, the innovator of Gestalt therapy wrote about unfinished business. He believed when a situation happens in our life that is overwhelming, we hide from it, psychologically. He believed it was important to look at a problem from as many angles as possible to see the whole picture. For example: my angle, another person’s angle, shoot, even the dog’s angle if that applies. In seeing the whole picture, he felt that people healed.

Developmentally speaking, if we don’t handle an issue in our life, it can lead to us being fixated at that developmental stage. Instead of being an adult about a situation, we react like a little child. To be honest, the wounds we suffered in our life don’t go away. They tend to get pushed down in our subconscious mind and fester there. That is why, when somebody does something that triggers an old wound, we react. Applying love to that core wound is the foundation of the Spiritual Psychology approach in hopes of healing an issue for the last time.

I have had an incomplete in my personal life that I didn’t realize I had. It came to the surface when I was playing guitar with an old friend at a mutual friend’s birthday party. Years ago I performed in a musical comedy group with Matt Lee. Yeah, this was the time when Weird Al came out with his crazy music and we had been doing the same thing in comedy clubs in Hollywood for years. We were known for our version of the “Stray Cat Strut”, though we performed “The Stray Trout Strut”. Matt loved the newer music I had created. Unbeknownst to me, he was a music producer and was starting his own record label.

You would think this was good news, but it brought up a lot of fear and doubt in me. I thought I had closed the door to my musical career a long time ago, but here was someone trying to pry it open, and along with that came all my excuses – which are too long to list in this article. When he asked me to send him some songs I sluffed it off, not wanting to give myself hope – or something like that. My delays didn’t stop my friend. Phone call after phone call, I realized that this thing wasn’t going away. I told my Doctor about this and she told me, to not make any commitments to myself, but to have my guitar next to me, just in case I wanted to play, and that was the spark I needed. Soon I found myself getting sucked back into the music, and song after song was igniting through my fingers that were better than ever! 

For the last few weeks, I have been sending Matt real masterpieces – If I must say so myself. New stuff, old stuff, and suddenly all the old forgotten songs came flooding back! So I did a rough recording of, up to now 13 songs. From heavy metal to jazz, to simple melodies, to a dance song, my first which really shocked me. I heard an interview with Carlos Santana, years ago where he talked about playing music as a spiritual endeavor. It was as if he was hearing the music in his head and would write it all down to save it. 

I remember reading a book by Wayne Dyer who said, “Don’t die with your music still inside of you.” I guess I’m not.

Upon hearing the music, Matt told me, he knew I was good, but this material was impressive, and Matt has been in the industry for 40 years and has produced music from some of the best. He already wants me to perform live, and I am in the process of adjusting to that. Yes, I would love my music out there, but to play it to a live audience myself? That is anxiety-provoking just thinking about it. 

Matt was our lead guitarist in the Comedy Group: We Love Us – and we have every right to. I had written the music to our silly songs while the group worked on the lyrics together and a few of them really rocked! I didn’t realize I had the ability to do something professional with it. 

From a Doctor of Clinical Psychology to a musician. This is going to be quite a stretch for me. You have to understand I have been a therapist for 29 years and it only took me 40 years to get my musical break.

Combining music and psychology has been a lot of fun. For example, I have written, “Codependence”, “Projections”, “Running Running,” and “I’ve Got the Blues” to name a few. I might as well throw in psychological topics.