Music Is My Thoughts Made Somatic

​Lately, I have been experimenting with Suno, an app that uses generative AI tools to help create music. I can upload my lyrics, describe the style and feeling I want, and even upload a recording of myself singing the melody, then Suno helps turn those pieces into a fully realized song. I think of it almost like working with a digital producer. I listen to what it creates, give it feedback and keep refining it: add more drums, make the bridge more dramatic, soften the vocals, make this version more soulful, try that section again. Sometimes it takes many different versions, but I keep directing and adjusting until the song coming through my speakers sounds the way it has sounded inside my head.
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I know people have very strong opinions about AI, and I certainly believe that, like everything else in life, it requires healthy boundaries around how it is used and careful consideration of the ethics involved. But for me, this technology has unlocked a part of myself that has been yearning to be seen for as long as I can remember. It has given me access to a form of expression I could always feel inside me but did not have the technical ability, instruments or production skills to bring fully to life. Whatever larger conversations we may need to have about AI, I cannot deny what this experience has given me: the ability to finally hear this part of myself out loud.

For as long as I can remember, I have been writing songs and poetry. 

That still feels strange to say. I have always loved music. I have sung for years, performed with choruses and quartets, and experienced that incredible feeling of standing inside a chord when it locks and suddenly the sound becomes larger than any one person creating it.

Music has always been part of my life, but writing my own songs has been different. Much more personal. Much more vulnerable. And, in a way I did not expect, much more healing.

The first time I listened to one of my songs fully realized, I had a reaction I could not quite explain. I was not simply excited that I had created something or impressed that words I had written had been turned into music. It was deeper than that. I kept listening over and over because something inside the song felt familiar, almost uncannily so, as though I were hearing a part of myself that I had always known was there but had never actually heard before.

I have spent most of my life thinking in metaphors, patterns and ideas. I see connections between things that may appear completely unrelated. Light and darkness. Water and healing. Stars and self-worth. Missing pieces and the spaces that allow light to shine through. These ideas live inside me constantly, and for years I have expressed them through writing, coaching, workshops, rituals and conversations.

I know how to explain what I believe. I know how to turn an abstract idea into language and help someone understand it intellectually.

But understanding something is not the same as experiencing it.

I know this because it is the foundation of the work I do. We can intellectually understand why we react the way we do. We can know where a belief came from, recognize the pattern it created and explain exactly how it continues to affect us, but the body may still be living inside the original experience. The mind says, “I understand.” The nervous system says, “That is lovely, but I am still figuring it out.”

Healing often happens in the space between those two things. It happens when something we have understood intellectually finally becomes real enough to be felt.

That is what music is doing for me.

When my thoughts exist as words on a page, I can read them. I can analyze them. I can edit them, rearrange them and decide whether they communicate what I intended. But when those same words are carried by melody, rhythm, harmony and breath, I experience them differently.

They are no longer sitting quietly in my mind waiting to be understood. They have movement. They have texture. They vibrate through my chest. They travel through the room and come back to me through my ears, and suddenly I am not merely thinking the thought anymore.

I am inside it.

The words “the water finds a way” mean something to me when I write them. They become something else when I hear them sung. The idea that the light I spent my whole life seeking was the light that carried me through is something I can understand as a beautiful metaphor, but hearing it surrounded by music allows my body to recognize the truth of it. Even the parts of me that cannot be reasoned with, the parts that do not speak in explanations or carefully structured arguments, seem to understand.

It is almost as though music closes the gap between my inner world and my physical one.

I have spent years helping other people bridge the gap between what they know in their heads and what they can feel in their bodies, and somehow I did not realize how much of my own internal world was still waiting for that same bridge.

I had already found the words. I had already made meaning from so much of what I had lived through. I had written the articles, taught the workshops, held the retreats and told the stories. I was not struggling to express myself.

But expression and embodiment are not the same thing.

Writing allows me to speak from a part of myself. Music allows me to meet her.

That may be the strangest and most beautiful part of this entire experience. The songs do not feel as though they are introducing me to someone new. They feel as though they are reflecting back someone I have known my entire life. Someone who has been present beneath every article I have written, every workshop I have taught, every moment I have spent helping another person find their way through the darkness. She was always there. I simply had never heard what she sounded like.

Now I can.

I can hear the searching and the questions. I can hear the stubborn hope that kept surviving even when I was certain I had lost it. I can hear the part of me that has always believed there is meaning hidden inside the mess, that nothing is wasted, that darkness is not the absence of light but one of the places we learn how to recognize it. I can hear the defiance in me, the softness, the grief, the wonder and the part that refuses to stop looking for beauty even when beauty seems impossible to find.

I have expressed all of those things before, but music lets me feel them happening.

Perhaps that is why people have always turned to music during the moments that language cannot hold. We play it at weddings and funerals, during celebrations, heartbreaks, protests and rituals. We reach for it when we are falling in love and when we are trying to survive losing someone. Music does not merely describe an experience. It enters the body and helps us experience it. It gives emotion somewhere to move, and sometimes it allows us to feel something before we have the language to explain what it is.

In my case, I already had the language. What I did not have was the sound.
And sure, it would be wonderful to one day produce and sing my own songs in an actual recording studio. But for now, I can still express that part of me, and in doing so, I have discovered a dream I did not even know I was allowed to have. I never would have entertained the idea of recording my own music before I had the chance to hear it out loud.
In that way, AI generative technology has allowed me to unlock something I never would have even known could be expressed. 

And maybe that is what creating these songs has really given me. It has not given me new thoughts or changed what I believe. It has taken the thoughts I have carried quietly for years and given them breath, rhythm, movement and form.

It has taken something that lived inside me and made it tangible enough to feel moving through my body.

My writing gives my thoughts language. My teaching gives them meaning. But music gives them a body.
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And for the first time, I can feel myself out loud.