Before we live what’s next, it always seems like there is some answer we need to arrive at. But daring to enter, we are humbled to discover, again and again, that the act of living itself unravels both the answer and the question. When we watch, we remain riddles to be solved. when we enter, we become songs to be sung.
Mark Nepo – The Book of Awakening – for 3 March
There’s a special form of intuition that comes through music and the lyrics of songs that is there if you listen.
Lines of music in the night
Recently, this intuition has been speaking to me through lines of music in the night. It’s more than just remembered music, the lines stuck in your head. It comes as random lines, perhaps from something I’ve been listening to but sometimes it’s a song I haven’t listened to for a while. This intuitive messaging via lyrics, song and music is marked by the qualities of being:
- random
- meaningful
- repeated
- a direct message
- sometimes almost painstakingly pointed, sometimes a little more oblique
- insistent enough to wake you night after night.
It’s a strange phenomenon. I’ve always been a lover of music, lyrics and the poetry of songs but it’s only lately that I can remember waking up with insistent and direct musical messages coming to me.
The most recent experience has been hearing the lines of ‘New York’ by Alicia Keys coming to me in my own voice. And it’s a specific set of lines that keeps coming to me in the night over and over:
Concrete jungle where dreams are made of
There’s nothing you can’t do
Now you’re in New York
These streets will make you feel brand new…
Read more: Alicia Keys – New York Lyrics | MetroLyrics
I haven’t listened to this song for ages and I’ve never been to New York but I understand its symbolism.
The main message for me is the inspiring words: ‘There’s nothing you can’t do’. It seems like an intuitive message from spirit, from angels, from ancestors. I don’t really know who it’s from, but it’s a message of encouragement from my intuition, just as rainbows appear in my life at key points. It’s saying that I’m on the right track, able to do much, and to tap into a collective creative spirit such as New York as a city might symbolise.
Intuition, symbols and learning to listen
Personality types for whom introverted intuition is a dominant or auxiliary function are the ones most likely to be finding this type of intuition coming to them. MBTI types who tend to rely on or experience this type of visionary insight are: INFJ, INTJ, ENFJ and ENTJ. People with these personality types can find that answers come from an interior intuitive kind of knowing. This can be via symbolic ways such as images, metaphors, lines of songs, words and dreams. And all people can learn to strengthen this type of intuitive insight whatever their type.
It tends to come as a whole piece that summarises the answer, feeling or thought succinctly in a kind of code you can hear or read if you learn to listen. It’s similar to how we can learn the language and symbolism of dreams. But like dreams, you almost have to go through an education or opening to its wisdom which is collective in nature but individual in context and application.
Intuitive Friday and intuitive music
I launched a hashtag project a while ago called #intuitivefriday about taking time to celebrate intuition in a mindful and deep way on Friday.
@todorf shared a particularly beautiful piece on considering intuition from the perspective of lyrics that move you, the poetry in compositions and people’s stories of lives changed by a piece of music or song:
Have you ever had a song that gets stuck in your head?
On an #IntuitiveFriday consider intuitions from lyrics that move you.
20 Pieces of Music That Changed the World is the most amazing series on music and influence and its impact to make change from an interior to a wider world. It is about “feelings which coalesced in music first then moved out into the rest of society”. I am so thankful to @todorf (nod) for sharing this.
I was struck by the comments in the introduction to the first episode by Robert Harris about music as an “emotional package”, which has the “ability to crystallise emotional states”. He talks about how music:
has the power to show us a future that we only dimly understand intellectually but understand emotionally.
Music is unmediated and “beyond the power of words” but “our brains understand it instantly.”
Lyrics and intuition
So lyrics, lines of songs, coming to me in this way unmediated in the middle of night, through words somehow beyond the power of words, is a kind of intuition.
When I wake in the middle of the night, I get up to capture the words in my notebook in the dark because I know I will lose them if I don’t. They are a knowing without knowing, words beyond words, and a dialogue with spirit that I need to heed and listen to. They are messages from beyond that we need to get in some way though we do not always fully understand.
As I finish this piece, the lyrics singing out in the room from my own Spotify playlist are from The Stranglers’ ‘Skin Deep’:
Some days there’s things on your mind you should keep
Sometimes, it’s tougher to look than to leap
better watch out for the skin deep…
It’s a song I have listened to over and over, nodding and smiling, watching out for the skin deep, going deeper, leaping rather than looking and understanding that some days there truly are things on my mind I should pay close quiet attention to.
That power of music, lyrics, songs to reach from the beyond – or into the future – has a magical ability to make you smile, understand or get a sense of something.
Every life is a language no one knows. With every heart-break, discovery and unexpected moment of joy, with every lift of music that touches us where we didn’t think we could be touched, with every experience, another letter in our alphabet is decoded. Take a step; learn a word. Feel a feeling; decode a sign. Accept a truth; translate a piece of mystery written in your heart.
Mark Nepo – The Book of Awakening – for 3 March
Thought pieces
Love to hear your thoughts on music and intuition:
- When has a song or music come to you in the night? What did it say and what does it mean to you?
- When have you sung words, listened to lyrics knowing they deliver something deeper that you don’t as yet understand ?
- What music, songs, lyrics takes you back to a special moment you can hardly put into words? One that enables you to be able to capture exactly where you were, what you felt: the tears, the laughter, the grief, the purest emotion that you could not put into words if you tried?
- What song has changed the world for you?
- What’s your favourite song and you don’t even really know why?
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Thanks for another inspirational post Terri. When my husband was dying of cancer, the lyrics of Leonard Cohen became an important crutch that allowed me to go on being a strong. I was his carer for 2 years and towards the end, I was merely running on adrenaline. When I should be sleeping, and when he was finally sleeping, I’d pour myself a glass of wine and crank up Leonard Cohen. I’d sit long into the night coming to terms with my pain and Leonard Cohen’s lyrics were always there to catch me, to allow me to be with my pain and know that I would eventually heal from it.
I am so grateful to have had the chance to see him perform live when he came all the way to Cairns a few years ago. It was like meeting an old friend. Cohen was the most gracious and generous performer I’ve ever seen. Even though his lyrics are now associated with painful memories, I still listen to Leonard Cohen often. I do so with gratitude for having been my nightly companion in the darkest nights.
Thanks for allowing me to share this powerful association with music.
Thank you for your feedback and your beautiful thoughts Kerstin. Music helps us negotiate the toughest of times. I can relate to your experiences as I am currently caring for my mother who has cancer. I so understand those feelings of ‘running on adrenaline’ – there’s so much going on with emotions and thoughts. Music is helping me navigate this time now as it always has.
I love how you describe Leonard Cohen’s music as catching you and enabling you to be with the pain. It’s often a time when we are alone and music is a wise and open companion for us in those moments when it’s just us, raw with our grief and pain. It helps us heal and get those emotions out, in my experience. I also love the gratitude that you feel – that’s a very important reminder. Thanks so much for reading and for your thoughtful and sensitive words that mean so much to me.
Yes! To all of this! 🙂 Music has literally been a soundtrack (pardon the pun!) through my whole life, from the nursery rhymes and songs I learned at school, the classic rock music my Dad would play at home, learning to play instruments as a teenager, certain tracks that take me right back to the nightclub at university and having the best times with my friends, the song I listened to over and over again when an ex broke up with me, to the songs I now sing with my choir every week – and some of these have had a huge impact on me. It’s incredible that we remember lyrics from long-ago songs as fresh as anything – there’s one particular song that is special to me that I must have learned at about 8 years old, and despite ‘losing’ it for a number of years, I can now remember every single word, and how it makes me feel is definitely a message from somewhere. Gosh, I could go on about music for ages, but I won’t! Thank you as always Terri for writing so beautifully, sharing so honestly, and provoking so much thought and reflection xx
Thanks for your thoughts Jennifer – I am with you on all the soundtracks that music provides. I love your reminiscences and wish we could sit and chat over a cup of tea about all of this and so much more! One day – until then, thanks as always for our connection and your beautiful comments on music and its influences xx