How the Playlist Changed Everything

I teach music — ear training, theory, composition — at a community college. I've always related to music analytically. I hear structure, harmonic function, counterpoint. This has been useful professionally and limiting personally.

I came to psilocybin therapy for anxiety related to a health scare that turned out to be benign but left me in a sustained state of vigilance I couldn't shake.

Within the first hour, a piece of music — Arvo Part's 'Spiegel im Spiegel' — dissolved the layer of analysis I normally apply. I didn't hear the tintinnabuli technique, the A major tonality, the structural simplicity. I heard grief. Specifically, I heard something that sounded like what it felt like to be alone and afraid and also somehow held.

I cried for twenty minutes. Not from sadness — from recognition.

The rest of the session the music felt like a companion rather than an object. A later Beethoven quartet produced something close to ecstasy. A field recording of rain produced complete silence in my mind — the first time in years I'd experienced a total absence of anxious chatter.

Since the session I've returned to the same pieces several times. The analytical layer is back — I hear the structure again — but now there's something underneath it, a doorway I know exists.