Disclaimer: This is transcribed using AI. Expect (funny) errors.
Mindy Peterson: [00:00:00] I’m Mindy Peterson, and this is Enhance Life with Music, where we explore the ways music makes our lives better and spotlight the resources you can use to enhance your life with music. Out of well over 170 episodes, there have been just a handful of repeat guests on this show, and today’s guest is now one of them. Dr. Tasha Golden was on the show recently to discuss the arts on prescription model that she is at the forefront of here in the US. This model builds on the scientifically demonstrated health benefits of the arts and provides the infrastructure to allow arts activities, such as attending a concert to be prescribed by your health care provider as part of your wellness plan. If you haven’t yet listened to this episode, I highly recommend it. I’ll link to it in the show notes. In the process of preparing for that conversation with Dr. Golden, I discovered another significant area of her work and expertise that really caught my attention, and that is a mental wellness training that she’s developed called How We Human. It’s the first training of its kind designed specifically for people in creative professions. The training recognizes the potent intersection of creativity and mental health. Before we jump into the discussion, I’ll give a little more of an introduction of Dr. Golden. She is both an artist and public health scientist. She’s a career singer songwriter, director of research at Johns Hopkins University’s International Arts + Mind Lab, and adjunct faculty for the University of Florida’s Center for Arts and Medicine. Dr. Golden is an international speaker and consultant who helps leaders apply the science of creativity and well-being to grow their impact. Welcome back to Enhance Life with Music, Tasha.
Tasha Golden: [00:01:59] Oh, Mindy, it’s so nice to join you again. Thank you so much.
Mindy Peterson: [00:02:02] Of the many irons that you have in the fire. I know you are especially passionate about this one, the How We Human training. On your website, you say, “As a musician whose touring career was ended by major depression, I know what it’s like to have a dream and make a difference only to wind up depleted. If only I’d known then what I know now. I’ve created the training I wish I’d had all along.” Can you tell us a little bit, starting out here, about your background and what experiences led you to create this training?
Tasha Golden: [00:02:38] Yeah, thank you so much. Certainly the things that I’m doing now, while I love them very much, they were never the plan. You know, from the time I was a really little girl, I wanted to be a singer songwriter. I wanted to write songs and perform them. And I started doing that, you know, as a teenager. I did it full time right out of undergrad. It’s the only job that I thought that I would ever have. And, you know, from the outside, things look like they were going really well. You know, I had songs and, um, films and TV shows, and we were working with really amazing musicians and just a big honor of my life to play, um, to play for so many people around the world. But also at the same time, there were a couple of things happening, like there were songs about my own history of major depression, about my family’s history of domestic violence. And after shows. Those were always the songs that people wanted to stay afterwards and talk about, and that has meant so much to me over the course of my life. It literally changed the trajectory of my career. The fact that people shared with me things that they had never shared with anyone before. But what I didn’t realize in the midst of all of that, that was that I was trying to carry those stories and hold them and hold space for them without also having support for myself and and knowing how to care for myself.
Tasha Golden: [00:03:51] So that was going on. And then meanwhile, just the grind of the music industry, which we’ve, you know, come to find out, is really common. But at the time, I thought maybe I just wasn’t strong enough or I wasn’t doing it right or something, but it was really grinding me down. And I wound up in a pretty catastrophic burnout and major depression, couldn’t get out of bed for weeks, let alone play concerts, and had to reimagine who I was and what I was going to do with my life. I think probably the most devastating time of my life, because I was not only in depression, but I was. I felt like I was watching my dream crumble right in front of me. Right. And, um, I think after that, you know, in the midst of depression, when you can’t, like, find interest in things, you don’t know what you’re going to do. The question that kind of kept coming back to me was what was happening after these shows, when people felt like they could tell me something. They’d never told anybody else what was going on.
Tasha Golden: [00:04:45] How could I learn more about that? And I wound up following that question into eventually my PhD in public health, where I’m researching how the arts and creativity affect, um, affect health. And mental health in particular is a passion of mine. But. Also, it became really important to me to think back on how could I have been better prepared. And then, you know, what kinds of supports could have been useful to me? How could I offer those to other people in a similar situation, whatever their creative work might be? And I think I just need to say from the outset that there are so many people who work intensively with human beings all the time, including a lot of artists and performing artists, but we are not among the populations that people think of as needing or benefiting from trainings and mental health or trauma informed practice. And I think that’s a that’s a huge gap and a terribly confusing one to me. So it’s been important for me to think about what could I have used. And in learning from the work that I’ve done with, um, with working with incarcerated youth and with researching more about these intersections of mental health and the arts to develop something that’s really tuned in to creatives and to artists.
Mindy Peterson: [00:05:52] Wow, that’s beautiful to hear your story, and you do such a great job of pointing out on your website that arts based spaces are often seen and experienced as safe spaces, which is fantastic. The arts are also inherently expressive, so participants and audiences tend to open up about their lives in these spaces, and a lot of them look to art as a way to cope, which it is really helpful, uh, to be used that way. And because of those facts, artists do regularly engage with people who open up about their challenges, and it puts artists in a position to help and support mental health needs. But like you said, that’s not part of our training and equipping to know how to respond and how to respond safely and ethically above that, to some of the situations and the stories that we come into contact with. Uh, and you point out, we might also wonder how to stay healthy ourselves. So how do we care for yourselves? And I’m quoting from your website, you you asked these questions, so how do we care for ourselves and continue creating safe, effective spaces for connection and creativity? This training answers that question. So tell us a little bit more exactly who How We Human is designed for. I know it’s creatives, nonprofit organizations and you say change agents of all kinds. So can you expand a little on who the training is best tailored for?
Tasha Golden: [00:07:25] Oh yes. I’ve had such an honor to work with a lot of different types of organizations, but a lot of them are arts organizations or they’re arts educators, music educators, uh, performing artists that are, um, sometimes come together as collectives and are seeking, uh, some training for their work. And where this originated from was I founded a program called Project Uncaged. It’s a trauma informed creative writing program for girls that are incarcerated. And in establishing that program, it was incredibly important, as you might imagine, working with that kind of population to have some preparation and training in trauma informed practices, but also to bring in some of my training and research in critical pedagogy and power sharing, and how you amplify people’s voices and make sure that the work that you’re doing leads to equity and things like that. So as I developed that program, when I would have volunteers work with me, I developed a training for them to help them with these processes. And when the pandemic happened, some people had heard that I had some trainings related to this kind of work, trauma informed practice in the context of the arts. And I started hearing from arts organizations all over the country like Tasha. Our artists are really struggling themselves, but also at the same time, they are hearing from their communities, from their audiences, people who are just really having a hard time for a number of reasons, and we don’t know how to help them.
Tasha Golden: [00:08:45] How can we support our artists as they’re trying to support their communities, even while we are all kind of collectively suffering right now from this collective trauma? So that is when I developed this particular program, sort of drawing upon the work that I’ve done for years with Project Uncaged, and then expanding that to help artists of, you know, in any genre who are working, as I say, sometimes working intensively with humans or even, you know, just every now and then because like I say in, in my training and in my work, you know, it is just not possible to work with humans and not be encountering people who are having mental health struggles of some kind. And it is it’s not so much this idea of like, you better not as an artist, be working with people. Without this preparation, it’s more like you deserve support and preparation for that important role that you’re playing in the lives of your students, your audiences, your community. And how can we get you that preparation so that you can feel more confident and more cared for, and also just have some tools at your disposal for certain moments that might be especially difficult or stressful or challenging in some way for you or the person that you’re engaging with.
Mindy Peterson: [00:09:52] I remember having a guest on this show a quite a while back who was talking about some trauma informed music. Education principles, and I want to say that he said that of the US population, 1 in 6 of us have experienced significant trauma. And I imagine that statistic depends on exactly how you’re defining trauma. And if you’re just looking at a certain age group or whatever. But do you want to say anything? I know this wasn’t in my talking points, but it just kind of popped into my mind as you were talking. Do you have any other statistics that you want to share, just in terms of how prevalent trauma is in the U.S. or globally?
Tasha Golden: [00:10:37] Yeah. I mean, you know, in trauma is its own specific kind of thing that people can define in multiple in multiple ways. Sometimes it’s it’s a little bit easier to talk about mental health in general, because some people who are experiencing what I might define as trauma based on their research, they might not themselves report it as such because it maybe it’s like their common baseline and they’ve felt the same way for a long time, and it doesn’t strike them as, as trauma. You know, this is a very subjective sort of experience in many ways. But yeah, the who I think, um, back in 2008, a really old study at this point showed that like one in I think maybe 1 in 8 people had reported having a history of trauma. And I think we also know more broadly that in the music industry, as one example, 73% of people in the music industry reported a mental illness of some kind, and that’s way above the public average. We know from music majors that around the same percentage reported having depression. We know that the anxiety rates for music majors in particular, and I have to go back and look for like arts majors more generally. But for music majors, we’re seeing like anxiety at rates 20% higher than the average college student rates of anxiety. So it’s kind of like if you’re in this world working with human beings in general, you’re for sure going to be encountering people who have high stress, who have risk of burnout, who have anxiety and depression.
Tasha Golden: [00:12:00] You’re also incredibly likely to be encountering people who have complex PTSD or PTSD of some kind, some kind of trauma history. And for us, you know, for all of us ourselves, we probably ourselves have some kind of personal experience with that, either in our own lives or the lives of a loved one. And we know how that can affect us, how that can impede our ability to thrive. And some of us have some, you know, positive examples of what has helped us. And many of us have examples of things that have really burdened us. And if we can be a little bit more aware, not only the compassion that comes from being aware that a lot of people around us are struggling, but also the self-compassion that comes from understanding that our own suffering is a part of this unfortunately rather common experience, and that collectively, we can do a lot of work to help one another have a greater potential to be able to flourish. There actually is a lot that we can do together and learn learning from each other and learning from the research and just from the history of human beings addressing their suffering.
Mindy Peterson: [00:12:57] Sure, those statistics that you were mentioning with music majors and wow, that just I guess I haven’t heard that statistic. That kind of blows my mind and so definitely want to come back to that later in our conversation when we’re talking about what music department faculty members can sort of do with this information in this training. But one other thought I wanted to mention, too, is I’m guessing that you probably also see really great results, or could have a lot of demand with some other professions too, that also have pretty intense involvement with people who are sharing burdens. Because I think back to even a Dr. that I worked with and continue to work with a functional medicine Dr. who is just a brilliant and amazing. But I remember him mentioning to me that he sees the therapist because he works with so many people who are struggling with chronic illness and chronic conditions, and he’s hearing their their stories and their struggles, and it he takes that on himself. And so he really needs so so that population I think would really also benefit from this training.
Tasha Golden: [00:14:06] Oh absolutely. And what’s so fascinating to me is that I began developing this training for specifically like arts organizations and creatives that were reaching out to me, but since then have been able to offer it for a lots of different kinds of organizations or workplaces. And what’s so fascinating to me is that, you know, I have a performance history. I want the things that I do to be interesting and compelling and hold people’s interest. I have had to attend trainings in mental health and trauma informed practice that I just thought, this is such a this is such crucial information, and I feel like I’m about to fall asleep. Like, this doesn’t have to be boring. Number one.
Mindy Peterson: [00:14:41] There’s got to be a better way to present this information.
Tasha Golden: [00:14:44] I’ve got to be. Yes. And then also, I think that people really deserve and want some hope in the process. I think that a lot of people, when you might bring up the issue of like mental health and trauma, it is a difficult issue. It is really heavy. And then at the same time. I’m from my perspective. What I know is that the absence of that information is what caused the greatest, the greatest difficulty for me, the fact that I didn’t know what secondary trauma was, for example, to know that I was experiencing it, having heard all of these really, you know, incredibly difficult stories sometimes the fact that I didn’t know that there were resources for people like me, or that there were names for things that I was experiencing that I could have latched on to, even as somebody who is a writer and a and a wordsmith, having a name for something can give you so much capacity to narrate it differently to yourself. Anyway, that’s just to say that I think what I’ve seen in trainings is that they become a kind of fountain of creativity, because once you have some words for things and once you make a space to have a discussion around it, there’s a lot of opportunity to reimagine who you are and what you do in the context of like, okay, if this is kind of what the human experience includes and entails, this isn’t the suffering isn’t all that it is, but it does include suffering.
Tasha Golden: [00:15:58] If this is what we’re looking at and this is what we’re living, who am I and how can I imagine the work that I do as being part of a pathway for people to find themselves and find a way forward? So my favorite thing about talking about mental health or offering trainings is especially among people who are creative, whether they’re in a creative industry or not, but people who want to drive change, who want to, you know, work with people and create something that’s doing good in the world for those kind of people. They usually leave the trainings with lots of ideas of how they can enhance their work, or just feel more confident or create something new. And it’s not like, oh, I have these ideas, but now I’m going to need a ton of funding and I’m going to need a whole bunch of resources. It’s more like, how can we give you a lens to help you see your work a little bit differently, and then you have a lot of things that you can do with what you already have at hand. You just haven’t thought of how to use it, of what to do with it. So that’s my one of my greatest goals is to kind of get creative people off and running with some tools that will help them do even more great work in the world, I love that.
Mindy Peterson: [00:16:59] Well, and what you’re saying about having terms, having names, having words for things I think is very connecting because when you realize, oh, there’s a time for this, there’s a description, there’s a word for this, you realize that means I’m not the only one who experiences this. Like, this is this is common. This happens with a lot of people. I’m not alone in this. And also, I loved what you were saying about suffering is part of the human experience. And when you recognize that and find ways to describe it and articulate it and cope with it and manage it, it’s kind of like learning to ride the whitewater rapids. You know, it’s kind of cliche, but it’s kind of like you need the rain to have the rainbow. And if you can learn to work with that suffering and just helps give you a different perspective and one that really fosters resilience and connectivity with other people, I think.
Tasha Golden: [00:17:55] Yeah, I’m often saying that, you know, we can’t heal what we can’t talk about. And that was what was so, um, interesting to me about people sharing things with me as a musician after shows, because it was like something just happened here where something in your life that wasn’t talked about about five minutes ago is suddenly speakable to another human being. And we we can’t heal the things that we can’t talk about. But this just became talk about. And what does that mean? How can we dive into that? How can we use that to to make your life even better, which, you know, drove so much of my research that I do now, even with like arts and prescription or these other things. But, you know, in James Baldwin said, you know, nothing can be changed until it is faced. So, yeah. How do we make space for recognizing here is what is we don’t like it. We don’t like it. The world is the way that it is. But we can’t actually change it unless we accept that this is what it is right now. And then how can we have some honest conversations around what we can do with that, especially as creatives who are maybe better than other people at imagining how the world could or should be? Sometimes it makes it even harder for us to accept the world as it is right now. So how can we make room for one another to have that difficult experience, and then to have the imaginations that we have and know that we can do something about that? There are some steps that we can take.
Mindy Peterson: [00:19:12] Well, tell us some more about what it is. What is the training look like? What is the process look like?
Tasha Golden: [00:19:18] Oh well, it is has been so far two 90 minute sessions virtual on zoom. And of course, as you can imagine, it started that way because we were in the middle of a pandemic and everything was virtual. If you wanted to do anything, you were doing it virtually. But what I found, especially compared to other kinds of trainings and teachings that I’ve done in person, is that this is actually really perfect for this topic, because it can be a kind of intense topic. And even when you have a group of people who know each other, the fact that you can go off camera and go on mute, you can pet your animal, you can pace, you can fidget like I’m doing right now. And nobody has to know that you can cry and nobody’s next to you being like, are you okay? Like, maybe you’re fine and you just. Want to cry for a second like nobody’s going to bother you, you know? So we have kept it as a virtual experience even after people began doing it in person events again. So it’s two 90 minute sessions, and the first one is really covering some basics of what mental health is.
Tasha Golden: [00:20:15] Who is this for? Who do we think benefits from trauma informed practices? As a spoiler, you have to learn trauma informed practice for yourself before you can practice it on other people. Um, so we talk about that a lot in the first session. In the second session really gets into practical application for what does it actually look like to be trauma informed to, especially using creativity in the arts to bolster people’s mental health? And we also cover things that are so important that people don’t think about, like, how do you put boundaries in place, and how do you accept the fact that you might have needs yourself that keep you from doing all the different things that you might want to do for the people that you work with and serve? You can’t always say yes. So what are some boundaries and even scripts that you can put in place that could help you in those moments of high stress, when you know that there might be a tension between caring for yourself and caring for others. So we try to do it.
Mindy Peterson: [00:21:05] Sounds like great training for comprehensive and kids who are caregivers to their own parents. Great training for teachers in general. I mean, as you’re talking about what you’re discussing in these groups, I’m like, I don’t know if I can think of a population that wouldn’t benefit from that.
Tasha Golden: [00:21:24] It’s it’s true. I mean, so much of the, um, when I’ve been in trainings, it’s been interesting how much it can seem like this is something that we’re learning about for the people that we serve. And I love that. That’s beautiful. And it’s very, um, it’s it’s very generous of people to want those trainings to be like, how can I be better at serving my students or my community or my patients or whatever the case might be? But it’s also like we will be able to sustain our own work over time and be able to continue showing up for other people in the ways that we want to. Only if we know how to apply these same things to ourselves. And it also helps to break down some of that unintentional, I think savior complexes, or even just the way that we might inadvertently separate ourselves from people who have needs. We’re like, I’m fine, I’m going to help other people. But we don’t realize that that sort of mentality can affect the way that we treat other people like, oh, you’re somebody who has needs. I don’t have any, or I can ignore mine. And we don’t realize how that sort of, um, just very subtly affects how we connect with other people or don’t. And so embracing our own needs, including for compassion and for boundaries, is is so important. Make some space for that. You’ll actually be much more freed up to care for the other people in your life.
Mindy Peterson: [00:22:35] I know that you work pretty intentionally to help participants apply what you discuss and what they learn into their unique work. How big of a group do you typically work with? I mean, is this one on one? Is this you working with, say, all teachers who work in the same department? Or is it a pretty diverse group where you’re having ten participants from all over the globe, from the country, from different employers? How does that work?
Tasha Golden: [00:23:03] Oh, it has been kind of like all of these. Mindy, it’s so fun. You know, some of the groups that I’ve worked with have literally been a group almost exactly like you described ten people that are all part of the same group, but they’re all located kind of like around the world. And we find a zoom time where everybody can join at the same time, or some people are getting the recording of it instead. And then there’s also been times when I’ve worked with groups that are sort of like all of the arts educators for a school district, and that might be hundreds of people on at the same time, or, you know, groups of like 30 or 40 teaching artists that are engaged with a certain arts organization or things like that. So lots of different sizes of groups and lots of different ways that it gets configured. And we try to, um, you know, leave time for breakout groups when that’s applicable for lots of Q&A time, depending on the group and for people to be able to talk with one another when that’s applicable. Sometimes, especially for neurodivergent participants, they’re like, I just want to be able to come and learn, give me some time to debrief, and then I want to engage with my colleagues about this. Right. So, um, we try to make it really tailored to the group and what’s going to be most beneficial for them to really integrate what they’re learning.
Mindy Peterson: [00:24:07] Okay, I’m just going to read a few key takeaways from the training from your website. One is framework for trauma informed practice for a safe environment, better understanding of mental health and its relationship to trauma, tactics for boundary setting, self-care and preventing burnout. Tools for growing trust and collaboration. Insights into how creativity in the arts boosts collective healing and wellness. And it goes on and on. But those are just a few that I wanted to mention in my day job. As you know, I work a lot with college music department faculty members who are working with and shaping the next generation of creatives. I know that you were a music major undergrad yourself. You’ve been a touring musician and faculty member, so you really. Bring unique perspective to this population. What do you want music educators to know about this intersection of creativity and mental health, and how can they best utilize the How We Human training.
Tasha Golden: [00:25:13] Hmm’hmm music educators? I think when I talk with them, they are. So, uh, for anybody listening, you are so attuned, like you know what you’re seeing in your students. You you know, that you’re seeing probably increasing rates of, of mental health concerns and students who are struggling. And what’s beautiful for me, having a history of being, you know, a music major, like my music professors were the people that I felt most known by most, most by the people who I was probably most likely to go to if I was having a personal issue that I, you know, needed a trusted adult to talk to. And that continues to be the case for a lot of students. So I would, you know, I would say to the extent that that’s challenging, that it’s difficult to see students struggling so much and to not know what to say or do for them, to the extent that that might be what you’re experiencing. Um, that is normal. That is really common in the kind of work that you do, and you do need and deserve support for the role that you’re playing in these students lives. And it doesn’t have to be, you know, become a licensed therapist.
Tasha Golden: [00:26:14] You don’t have to go back and get another degree or something like that. It can be as simple as getting some some tools and then understanding some ways that you can care for yourself. Of course, a lot of music faculty have been through the process of being a music major themselves, or a musician performing, or they’re still doing that. And, you know, the kind of stresses that can come with that. I think having an opportunity to get honest about it, not necessarily like you have to be transparent and vulnerable with your colleagues or with me or with anybody else, but a chance to be honest with yourself about what you’re experiencing and having some words to put to it, and some tools to think through how you might approach that work more intentionally and more mindfully, with more tools and kind of like research backed opportunities at your disposal. There’s opportunity for this to become even more, even more helpful for your students, but also for you yourself to be able to sustain the work that you hope to do and are already doing.
Mindy Peterson: [00:27:07] Well. I think it would be so fantastic if music educators were able to get this training, and I’m sure they would leave, inspired to incorporate it into their curriculum so that they can equip their students to the next music educators and the next music performers and creatives of our future to have these tools in their tool set. And then, like you said it, it also gives the music, today’s music educators, sort of that oxygen mask to put on themselves so that they can then help others put that oxygen mask on. To use that metaphor from the the airplanes, do you have many students like, say, college students create in creative fields or others? But do you have many college students taking this training or is it more geared toward their educators? Do you have administrators who take the training?
Tasha Golden: [00:27:58] Definitely administrators. Educators, K-12 and higher education, you know, faculty, things like that. I think I would love to see this kind of training more available for students themselves. I think unless they’re part of an organization that has booked the training, there’s not necessarily a lot of ways for them to get involved. But but I also love the idea of more universities or more places providing the training. You know, together there are things that if faculty is taking the training just by themselves, there’s conversations they can have that could be fruitful. And certainly students, if they’re taking it by themselves, there’s conversations that might not emerge if they were with faculty, but also when you combine them, especially if it’s a field specific situation like, you know, music majors and their faculty together. I can imagine that being really generative for conversations around how music affects us. And, and, you know, just as a quick example, we know from studies of music majors that the combination of how emotional music is like, in order to perform it well, you have to pour yourself into it emotionally. That is really exhausting. And in some cases, you know, for some people that I work with, I would say contraindicated to ask somebody to be incredibly emotional because they might be calling up something that could be ruminative for them or difficult for them.
Tasha Golden: [00:29:09] Right? But regardless, if you’re if you’re training to be a performer, you kind of know going into it or you should somebody should give you this heads up that this is really difficult and exhausting and can be very depleting to pour yourself into your music, for example, or into your art of any kind. And to the extent that faculty can be just a more a little bit more aware of that, that when I ask my students who pour themselves into this in order to get a better performance, I am asking them to call upon their sort of like very human, emotional sort of soul self. And that is not unrelated to the rest of their lives. Like digging into that is something that can positively, but also negatively affect those depths of us that we’re calling up in order to perform well. And so when we have some awareness around that, when we can know, like, okay, I’m going to choose to do this because I want to be a better performer. So I’m going to choose to sort. You know, you can use the word like dredge this up or, you know, pull this out of myself.
Tasha Golden: [00:30:03] I’m going to choose to do that knowing that it can have effects on me, mental and emotionally. That’s different than somebody just asking you and asking you and asking you to do that over and over again without necessarily a respect or a mindfulness of how that might affect you. And I think faculty being aware of that so that they can help their students understand that, but also faculty being aware of that for themselves, that you too, when you’re sort of like, you know, in the middle of a lesson with somebody or in the middle of work, like for yourself, calling all of that up out of you and you say like, oh, that’s what you have to do to be a great performer. Yes, it is. And that does have effects on your life and on your psyche and on your emotions. And that’s not necessarily that’s not bad news or anything, but we have to look at it in order to be able to take care of it. Right. We have to know that it’s there so that we can be prepared to to do our best with it and be able to sustain our health over the long terme.
Mindy Peterson: [00:30:53] Hmm. Where’s the best place for listeners to go to learn more about the How We Human training?
Tasha Golden: [00:30:59] Oh thank you. I have created a custom site for listeners of this show is Tasha golden.com/enhance Life. And if you go there you can definitely get information about the training. Click on that. Learn all about it. Send me a message if you have any questions. And then there’s also just as in addition, a free resource there that I created for creatives and artists about depletion in some ways that you can take care of yourself, a little workbook that you can get for free. So go ahead and snag that if you would like it.
Mindy Peterson: [00:31:28] Oh, fabulous. Thank you so much. Well, before I have you close things out with a coda, is there anything else you want to just quick squeeze in that we didn’t already get to that you just want to make sure that listeners are aware of.
Tasha Golden: [00:31:40] I think I would just say that there is so much hope and opportunity when we can collectively talk about the things that make life difficult. And if we can say, like this is going on, you know, in my work with Arts on Prescription, a lot of times the conversation can get so heavy into the health benefits of the arts that it can start to sound like, oh, the people who make art the most are going to be the healthiest among us. And for me, as a career artist who, you know, my career was destroyed by a lack of healthiness, right? Sometimes I can feel a little bit excluded by those conversations. I’m like, hey, hold on a second. There are people who are creating the art that is benefiting the health of so many people, and what are we doing for them? How are we caring for them? So I have no illusions that simply making art or being exposed to art is going to be some kind of panacea that, you know, protects us from everything. What I want to see is just a really honest conversation around like, can the arts? Can creativity benefit our health and well-being? Absolutely. And also, do we need to be mindful and honest and just open with each other, willing to create spaces for conversations around our well-being and how we care for the creatives that are caring for so many of us, that’s also so essential. And it’s possible. And there’s so much hope and creativity that occurs when we when we open up that space and meet each other where we actually are, which is often, you know, trying to navigate a complex human experience. That’s where creativity really shines. But we have to make the space for it.
Mindy Peterson: [00:33:15] Great points. Well, thank you so much for telling us about this training. It sounds absolutely fantastic. And I love the title How We Human. It’s just yes, yes. Um, as you know, Tasha, I ask all my guests to close out our conversation with a musical ending a coda by sharing a song or story about a moment that music enhanced your life. Is there a song or story that you can share with us today? In closing.
Tasha Golden: [00:33:43] Yeah, there’s a song called Lay Your Head Down that I wrote many years ago as a kind of lullaby for myself and for people that I loved who were going through a hard time. You know, we think about lullabies as something for children and as somebody who has dealt with depression for much of my life, who has been surrounded by other people who were going through hard times. You know, I really felt like sometimes we need a moment for ourselves where we can lean into a little bit of, um, compassion and recognize our own need for rest. So I wrote this song called Lay Your Head Down that came out several years ago and would love to would love to leave you all with that.
Transcribed by Sonix.ai