Using Music to Ease the Journey from Life to Death with Linda Bryce

Discover the power of music in end-of-life care, as Linda Bryce shares heartwarming stories of how songs have brought comfort to patients and staff. But what exactly makes music such an effective tool to ease the journey from life to death? Listen to find out. Show Notes | Transcript Music is vibration, right? Sound vibrations. Aren't we vibration, too? So vibrations affect us, and vibrations that are synchronous are beneficial and those that clash are not. - Linda Bryce Linda Bryce is an end-of-life care expert with a special focus on the healing power of music. Drawing from her experience with a Threshold Choir, Linda has sat by hundreds of bedsides, offering the comforting and consoling gift of song to patients and their families. With a background in teaching, Linda has also authored the award-winning book, The Courage to Care: Being Fully Present with the Dying, which emphasizes the transformative potential of music during difficult moments in life. Her passion for caring and connecting with those facing life's most critical transitions has made her an invaluable resource to caregivers and loved ones alike. In this episode, you will be able to: Uncover the connection between music and end-of-life care, highlighting the profound comfort it can provide during difficult times. Get a fascinating look at Threshold Choir’s mission to offer solace through song to those in need, impacting lives one melody at a time. Examine the proven healing effects of music on grief and explore how it supports individuals facing immense emotional challenges. Learn the significance of maintaining presence when comforting others, and how it deepens your connections. Related Live. Love. Engage. episodes you may enjoy: Why Hospice Care Matters with Ellen Long Stilwell Coping with a Loved One’s Dementia with Lisa Skinner Reconciling Grief and Happiness with Emily Thiroux Threatt Resources: Connect with Linda here Learn about Alive Inside here Join the Soulful Women's Network here Send me a message here ☕ Support the podcast here ❤ Love this episode? Leave us a review and rating here Connect with Gloria: LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 - Gloria Grace Rand You're listening to the Live Love Engage podcast on today's show, the importance of music for living and dying. Stay tuned. 00:00:14 - Gloria Grace Rand I am Gloria Grace Rand, founder of The Love Method and author of the number one Amazon bestseller, Live Love Engage How to Stop Doubting Yourself and Start Being Yourself. In this podcast, we share practical advice from a spiritual perspective on how to live fully, love deeply, and engage authentically so you can create a life and business with more impact, influence, and income. Welcome to live. Love Engage. 00:00:49 - Gloria Grace Rand Namaste. I am Gloria Grace Rand, and I am delighted to be with you today and to have a guest with us on the show. Always one of my favorite days when we are able to do interviews with wonderful, interesting people. And I met the lovely Linda Bryce here a little while ago, and I'm going to tell you all about her in a moment. But first, I want to welcome Linda to Live Love Engage. 00:01:17 - Linda Bryce Hello, everyone. I celebrate each of you. I greet you with an open and a joyful heart. Hello, everyone. I celebrate each of you. I greet you with a joyful heart. And that's for all of you listening. And for you, Gloria. 00:01:35 - Gloria Grace Rand Well, thank you so much. And if you couldn't tell, Linda is always singing. This is part of what she does, and that was what we really connected on. So let me tell you what she does. She leads a Threshold Choir and has sat at hundreds of bedsides singing, and we're going to talk more about that in a minute. She's also an award-winning author of The Courage to Care - Being Fully Present with the Dying, and she's a former teacher, and she also has a children's book called We're Never Far Apart, which follows the grief journey of a young girl whose best friend dies. When we met, I just thought it was so very cool that you do this work where you are part of sort of a hospice type of setting and that you wind up sitting at bedsides of folks who are either ill or possibly dying. And you can correct me on that and that you sing to them and there's this amazing healing energy with song. So I want to know more about that. Well, actually, why don't you tell us a little bit about that and then we'll go back in and talk about how you got into doing this type of work. So explain to our audience a little bit more about what is a Threshold Choir and what do you do? 00:03:07 - Linda Bryce Okay, starting from there. Women in ancient times sang at bedsides, right? Women were the caretakers from birth through life, through illness, through dying, after death. And part of that was singing acapella when individuals were ill and when they were dying. There is a saying, it's attributed to anonymous, so I don't know from where it comes or for how long it's been around, but it's, For words and depths, for heights and depths no words can reach. Music is the soul's own speech. Music the speech of our souls. Perhaps that's why music has such a profound influence on our bodies, on our minds, on our spirits. About 22 years ago, and this now, I'm going to the modern or the more recent singing at bedsides. About 22 years ago, a woman named Kate was sitting in a hospital at the bedside of her friend who was dying, and her natural impulse was to begin singing. She had a song, she sang it. She sang that song over and over and over. His restlessness diminished and stopped. He quieted down. He seemed more at peace than he had been. She thought about this and the response, you know, that physically she could see in front of her eyes and she said, “Why don't we do this? Why doesn't everybody do this at the bedside?” So she initiated something called the Threshold Choir. And for your listeners, who would like more information, it’s Threshold Choir. All one word. Thresholdchoir.org. It was begun in California. There are now more than 200, 250 chapters across the country and in other parts of the world in the United States, most of the chapters are still sort of to the west, where it began. I'm out here in the east. But there was a woman who lived locally who would spend her winters in California, was introduced to Threshold Choir, brought the idea and the practice back here. And when I returned from sitting at the bedside of my dear aunt, I had driven from the middle of Pennsylvania up to Maine to be with her. I didn't ask, I just showed up, because I love that aunt and I'm very close, was with her and with those cousins. When I came home, there was an ad in the paper and it was looking for yes, I know, right. Divine placement. 00:06:13 - Gloria Grace Rand Yes, exactly. 00:06:16 - Linda Bryce Looking for singers, for a newly forming Threshold Choir to sing to individuals at the thresholds of life. That's how I came to it. And I must say that without knowing about bedside singing, it was also my natural impulse. The night that Aunt Lee was very nearing death, to just after prayers and after reading scripture from her Bible and so forth, to just begin singing. We don't go as a big group. You think of the word choir like, oh, we're going to have 20 voices coming to the bedside. No! One doesn't want to do that. And the person in the bed doesn't want to be overwhelmed with all of those people and that sound either. We typically sing in pairs, on occasion, trios, but that's so we can have harmony and that's, that's what it is. We go where we are invited. Our gift, our song is our gift. 00:07:21 - Gloria Grace Rand It is amazing, the power of music. And I was bringing to mind I had seen a LinkedIn post of someone I'm connected with, and he was talking about his father, I think, has Alzheimer's. And so, for whatever reason, all of a sudden, I don't know that he was singing, but I think he decided to put on, like, old Motown songs. And they started going through all of these, and he was just so amazed at the difference it made in his dad and just how he sort of came alive again hearing these old songs. But do you know any? Can you speak to maybe more about the power of music in that way and how it really seems to what is the expression, music soothes the savage beast. But I think it also soothes us as well. Right? 00:08:19 - Linda Bryce It does. I was listening to a TEDx Talk and I don't recall the gentleman who gave it, but who made the comment that music lights up more parts of our brain than absolutely anything else we experience. And I have heard and written about in my book, The Courage to Care as well about the effect of music on individuals. And yes, it's being used with individuals who have dementia. Alzheimer's is one type of dementia and I've even seen it, that individuals who have just stopped talking, they aren't talking anymore. But you either put a headset on them or you begin to play music that's generational, from their earlier years or something that's in their brain, that's from their experience. Yes, it's like music wakes them up and they begin singing along, maybe even tapping their toes or nodding their heads and for some of them even are able to then engage in some short conversations. There is an organization; here's, another resource for folks, because I love offering resources - Alive Inside. If you haven't seen the music, it is all about this, especially music and its effect on individuals with dementia. Music has also been helpful for stroke victims. That's been discovered. There's just so much I have a whole page full of benefits, of physical benefits, emotional benefits, mental benefits in the book, just there's been so much research and observation and study about the profound effect and influence that music can have on us s