Primordial Sound Meditation: Antidote for Pandemic

Primordial Sound Meditation: Antidote for Pandemic

What do we do when our world has spun out of control? When it seems that all traces of personal power are shredded? How do we manage and even spread joy to those around us? What is primordial sound and how do we evoke it?

Music has always held a place in Mom’s heart. From an early age, she sang, played piano, and later sang in the church choir. Most of us took music lessons and participated in school music programs. She and her sister Gert would take me and my cousin Jude to youth orchestra concerts. Advanced dementia has robbed Mom of her ability to express thoughts, yet music can comfort where words can’t reach.

The long-term-care home where she lives has been under a COVID outbreak for three weeks. She’s been isolated in her room for most of that time and will be there for at least two more weeks until the outbreak clears. We are grateful for the excellent care she receives. She’s remained COVID-free, and had her first vaccination administered last week.

Residents in any care home, especially those who are immobile, are beyond vulnerable. They’re defenseless and at the mercy and discretion of caregivers, volunteers, and visitors.

Mom’s up all day in a wheelchair, leaving it only with a lift to use the toilet. She sits where the wheelchair gets pushed. During winter that’s either in the dining room, where someone feeds her, or in the resident lounge. She listens to whatever’s going on, watches whatever movie’s playing, or whoever catches her eye walking by. Most of the time she’s in good spirits and smiles often.

I’ve often wondered how much she absorbs when we FaceTime with her. Although she’s included in the chatter, the threads elude her until a fragment surfaces and she chips into the conversation. Usually, the words that escape don’t make sense to us, although they may to her.

Throughout her life she’s exemplified self-sufficiency, beneficence, and resilience. What must it be like to be totally dependent on others for all, even her most intimate needs? To have no recognition of surroundings or the people in them? That’s even before masks, face shields, gloves, and gowns. Now she’s at the receiving end of the care she supervised in this home a mere thirty years ago,

She’s more content alone in her room, away from the kitchen clatter and the incessant noise from movie reruns or gospel singing. Even when they lived on the farm, she made Dad buy a wireless headset so she didn’t have to hear the television. She’s also out of earshot of other residents calling out. Her nurse’s training has never left her and when she hears someone call “nurse”, she feels obliged to respond.

She misses Dad and doesn’t understand where he is. Dementia has robbed her concept of time so an absence of five minutes might as well be five days or five years. Loneliness becomes a constant companion. She doesn’t know Gert, her only surviving sibling, passed away two months ago, one floor above her. Perhaps she picks up on the chaotic pandemic energy swirling around her but she doesn’t let on. It weighs very heavily on us, her family, and her caregivers.

Mom always accepted an invitation to prayer. As her dementia deepened, I observed with fascination that in contrast to other times, she seemed lucid when speaking with God. That is a place she can go where dementia can’t reach and she can be at peace. Recently she’s tended to go there even during a conversation.

A few days ago, one of the care-givers texted to say she’d gone into Mom’s room and found her singing. Singing! I have no idea what songs emerged but can only imagine they were hymns of nature, likely praise, and gratitude to God. Maybe even in German, her first language. Singing, a primordial force that dementia can’t touch, may go even deeper than her faith in connecting her with God.

When it feels like we’ve lost everything, that sacred, unlimited power is available for free access. A direct line to our Creator. Primordial sound expressed through music. All we need to do is allow it expression. It reminds us that the creative force we share with all other beings is readily available to bring comfort and grace in times of need.