Music Therapy with Pip Reid

My guest in this episode is a very old friend of mine Pip Reid who is a music therapist and one of my heroes. Which I know sounds very corny but I’ll explain. She is someone who shares my enthusiasm for well almost everything and is a big feeling type of person. When I met her I instantly felt like I’d met someone who was a kindred spirit who lived with their inside on their outsides. Who got what it’s like to be joyful as a state of being and who feels things deeply in her bones. Pip is also a musician and her love of music resonates so much with me. She is a qualified music therapist who has also been a primary school teacher and has worked for a company called Very Special Kids using music to support children providing holistic palliative care for children and young people across Victoria. I am in awe of the strength, courage, compassion and empathy that it takes to work with families going through such huge trauma and grief. What Pip does with her music is to bring joy and light and play in the darkest of times. She is honestly a ray of sunshine to be around and a reminder for me of the power of music to shift and change us at a cellular level. Pip now runs her own business called Using Music while also being a busy mum to two little humans. Using Music works with educators and parents teaching them how to bring music into the lives of the children in their care. She runs workshops and webinairs doing work that I think is so incredibly important. As Pip says in this interview due to Covid in Victoria singing was banned in early childhood kinders and schools settings (actually everywhere) and the flow on effect for children, their teachers and their families has meant that there has been less music taught and shared within school programs. This as Pip will talk about today is a huge loss because of the enormous benefits of music for our brains as music can bring well being, improve relationships, help memory, build engagement and generally give kids space and time to move and play. I know for us in lockdown especially music became a lifeline for our family, when nothing else helped putting on a song and having a dance as a family made the mundane of the everyday joyful and silly and dare I say it fun!! Pip’s videos that she made raising money for the Very Special Kids 24 day challenge and then what became Pip’s piano bar where she would sit at her old piano with a candle and sing old favourites were I know so loved by so many in our community during Melbourne’s long days of lockdowns over the past 2 years. I really encourage you to go and follow Pip on Instagram she will make you remember things that I think we all know deep down – that we all more the same than we are different and that music has the ability to cut to the very heart of things and as she says in this episode a song can be a friend in times when we feel alone.

Here she is the bubble of joy that is Pip Reid.