The Finding US in Music approach, demonstrates the potential role of music to accurately hold, mirror and give meaningful external expression to an individual’s inner world. When music combines with group engagement, the internal threads of an individual’s life – the gold, black, red, silver and the infinite range of colours and textures – become visible and then can be woven together more clearly in the intersubjective ‘we’ space.  Through music and storytelling people re-weave the meaning of their inner worlds and re-create the threads of a dynamic tapestry. Group members becomes co-creators and co-interpreters of words, stories and co-weavers of the whole. Music externalises what is in the individual interior, so that it becomes part of the collective interior and group awareness. The music itself becomes an integral and integrating force that makes the possible the connecting, the witnessing, the remembering of each human being in the group.

Integral philosophy and Ubuntu both foster an understanding of how everything is connected to everything else. But the main remedial and transformative gift that integral thinkers have given back to the world is in the power that they accord to the inner core – the intrapersonal parts of self. Bringing the richness of the interior core of each person, enlivens the individual, builds relationships within the team, enables greater interdependence of departments within an organisation.

This reflection comes from Barbara’s new chapter, Finding Us in Music: A Method for Deeper Group Engagement in Handbook on Individual and Organizational Transformation, edited by Judi Neale (Springer, 2018).

About Barbara

Barbara uses the power of music to help teams and individuals discover themselves and each other.

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