As we approach Veterans Day, many Americans feel divided, distracted, and seemingly caught in an uncomfortable historical current. This current tosses us about, mixing our priorities, elevating politics over people, and often causing us to forget the neighbor to whom we owe so much. That neighbor—the combat veteran—sacrificed peace of mind and sound body for us, yet we often forget. We do not mean to, but we do. So today, we must remember.
And more than remember, we must act. One new group has emerged who deserves notice. This group is restoring dignity and offering veterans a reservoir of hope, new joy, and high purpose. The group, called amplifi, is allowing veterans to express and amplify their voice, spirit, and distant hopes through an unlikely means—through music. Already, the group has helped Massachusetts veterans confronting post-traumatic stress and vexing personal trauma, unshakable memories and hopelessness, to rediscover hope.
By composing and performing music, and using music in ways not formerly conceived—as redemptive, consoling, expressive, and therapeutic expression—amplify helps veterans create shafts of light where there was formerly only darkness. I know, because it has been my great honor to help these combat veterans find a path out of the darkness, with music. For three weeks in July, I saw glimpses of emerging recovery, inner peace, and rediscovered joy among ailing combat veterans associated with Crescent House Transitional Residence Program in Lowell, MA. We now need to redouble the use of this healing tool, and remember how needed we really are, as well as how much we owe to those we owe so much.
After myriad clinical appointments and treatments, and often-successive diagnoses, veterans suffering an enduring impact from combat often feel at a dead end. They suffer loss after loss when family, job, productivity, and even the simple ability to sleep slip away from them. They try to protect those they love, but often at enormous cost. Sometimes their desperation ends in a long slide toward anger and addiction, jail stints, struggles with rehabilitation, and the darkest depths of despair.
Granted, not every veteran confronts these ghosts, but far too many do—and they often carry these burdens for us in silence. Now, I have had the joy of seeing this cycle stopped and reversed. This past July, the veterans from Crescent House broke their decades-long cycles of suppression and inner distress to confront the past and begin healing through this music expression. If it sounds trite or transient, it is neither: it was transformative, for them and for me.
As a lifelong musician, I have seen music’s unique effect on people. Music accesses emotions that are often locked in a part of the mind for which there is no key. Yet unlocked, unpacked, and worked through the medium of music, healing begins. The epiphany here is that the process is powerful, the healing effects are enduring, restorative, and redemptive, and the program’s outcomes are, in my view, undeniable.
I have devoted significant part of my musical career to working with trauma survivors and creating healing programs through songwriting. Now, on a much larger scale, amplifi has stepped up the game and is poised to reach many more veterans than was formerly possible. I had the honor to lead amplifi’s very first trauma-informed veteran’s songwriting workshop in Massachusetts, and it was one of the most hopeful events I have ever experienced.
The goal for that workshop was two-fold. First, to help participants get in touch with and express feelings so often suppressed by trauma, and to find their lost voice while regaining confidence, validation, and acceptance; and second, to graduate to a new level personal empowerment by experiencing the joy and therapeutic effects of expression through music. The outcome of amplifi’s program was remarkable, delivering what so many combat veterans so desperately need—a route to peace, and peace of mind. These veterans’ willingness to share their story, set experience to lyrics, all wrapped in original music, and recorded by veterans to be shared with society at large, should be viewed as a gift.
At the end of our workshop, we found a common story emerged from a shared experience—that turmoil and strife, life’s interference with our plan, and the tendency to seek answers or assign blame, all obscure a deeper, timeless fact: hope for recovery and new purpose are possible, and can be achieved through song. The opportunity for healing and for helping our neighbor, to whom we are most indebted, is both real and available to us today.
To see what I’ve seen—to see the light at the end of the tunnel—go to this site on YouTube, and see the results of this workshop. And then, as the spirit moves you, consider new ways to honor your neighbor the combat veteran, and his or her unique experiences and sacrifice, on this Veteran’s Day. Amplifi is helping veterans re-shape, redefine and re-purpose their future, and for such initiatives, I, for one, am grateful.
Robin Lane is a lead amplifi practitioner and trainer, and a world-renowned musician who debuted with Neil Young and later formed her own successful band, Robin Lane & The Chartbusters. Robin is also the founding director of the nonprofit SongbirdSings.
