But what does it feel like...? Liquid Listening Marketing and Communications Manager Alice Walton describes experiencing Musical Hydrotherapy for the first time

 

Float, listen, relax. Deep listening. Deep release. Deep calm.

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One of the hardest things about communicating the value of Musical Hydrotherapy to children and adults with complex needs is that the actual experience is so hard to put into words. When we talk about Liquid Listening – online, to schools, to parents, to funders - we use imagery and filmed footage a lot. We use testimonials from participants – teachers who have experienced it as part of their training courses with us, and who have then held and supported children that they know well as they experience it in the water too. Those teachers tell us extraordinary stories: of agitated children that calm or even fall asleep in their arms in the water; of children locked in by their rigid muscle spasm that release and cry out with joy; of anxious children who smile and vocalise. They tell us about their own first experiences of the underwater sound and vibration, and of being held in the water by a colleague: of how emotional it makes them feel, how unprepared they were for the depth of their reaction to the therapy. How that experience helps them to become the person that their pupils will need to trust to support and hold and guide them in the water.

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The images and the testimonials tell a very compelling story. But what does Musical Hydrotherapy actually feel like? Can underwater sound and vibration, combined with support from another adult and guided movement, really be so different than – say – a bit of mindfulness or a warm bath at home?

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I’ve worked part-time for Liquid Listening for almost three years now and because my role is focused on communications, I’ve thought a lot about how to capture what makes the therapy so special in words and images. I’ve also witnessed both adults and children in special schools experiencing it for the first time and have felt the quiet, extraordinary magic that happens in those moments. That’s always been a privilege and has often felt very intimate: powerful and moving. But until last week, when I joined the lovely group of teachers being trained at Shenstone School in Crayford, I’d never experienced Musical Hydrotherapy for myself.

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When Liquid Listening goes into residence in a special school to train groups of their teachers and teaching assistants, the course runs over 5 days. For the first two days, the adults work peer to peer in the pool. There are many, many fundamentals to cover: grounding yourself in the water so that you are calm and ready to support a partner and listen to their needs; how to hold, cradle and gently move a partner in the water so that they feel completely trusting in your support; how to find the tension in their body and how to release that tension; how to build trust with children who may be anxious or agitated or in pain. But it’s also a foundation stone of the training that the adults should experience the therapy as participants as well as leaders, that they should understand what their pupils will be experiencing, and experience what it feels like to put all your trust in the person holding you in the water.

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I joined the Shenstone School teachers on Day 2, as they were learning the different holds and movements and practising them with a partner. Techniques for supporting children with particular needs were being introduced and demonstrated. What if you have a child that has a lot of arm movement? What is the best way to hold a child that is anxious or even distressed? The staff were engaged and focused, thinking about particular named pupils in their care and quietly discussing how they might approach a session with them. Talking to them in the pool as they took a break before the second half of the morning, they were evangelical about their first experiences of Musical Hydrotherapy, and particularly about how it had felt to be supported in the water themselves.

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My initiation into Musical Hydrotherapy was in the extremely capable hands of Liquid Listening specialist aquatic practitioner Kamila Janiak, who was leading the Shenstone training course. I joined her and the group in the warm bath of the school hydrotherapy pool and she asked me if I had any specific pain (no) or tension (yes, plenty, after a foggy drive around the M25 and a busy week). With floating aids around my knees, Kamila gently held me in the water, turning me from my front to my back and, supporting my head and shoulders, then laid me down slowly into the water.

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It’s only once your ears are submerged that any sound becomes audible – and I say audible, but the extraordinary thing is that the sound was something that I *felt* deep inside me and nowhere near my head or ears. The sensation of the sound somehow focused my whole body. My eyes closed and I was aware, at times, of being moved slowly through the water, of Kamila’s hands easing my muscles and moving my limbs. At other times I couldn’t have said whether I was moving or not, but I know now that in fact I was in constant movement, not all of it registering. But it was as if all these things were happening to someone else. Time passed, but I couldn’t have said whether it was 2 minutes or 20. I felt completely “other”, in a form of suspended animation. “Release”, which is one of the words that I use a lot when I write about Musical Hydrotherapy, felt exactly right, although I couldn’t define exactly what was releasing. “Deep” (deep listening, deep relaxation, deep calm) also felt right. I felt like I was a long way away from my life and myself – but in a good way. I can honestly say that I have never felt anything like it. When my session ended and I was – again slowly, gently – encouraged to move my legs back to a standing position, I felt deeply, deeply exhausted, but also like I was emerging from a long sleep. The little twist of anxious tension that always sits, lodged, in my gut, like an annoying friend, was strangely absent.

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We talk a lot about trust in Musical Hydrotherapy. For children – or adults – to allow themselves to let go of as much of their inner tension that they need to if they’re to experience that “release”, requires an extraordinary level of trust in the person supporting them in the water. I was surprised how readily I entered that state. It made me think a lot about the children with complex needs who are the most important beneficiaries of Liquid Listening’s work, and how important it is that our training courses for their teachers place so much emphasis on establishing that trust, then fostering it, during every moment of every session in the water, with every child. Some children that arrive in the pool area will be deeply anxious, fearful. Others will be over-excited. Many, especially those with PMLD, will be frustrated, fed up of being handled, manipulated, hoisted, manoeuvred. All of them can benefit so very much from that release from their inner noise, from the pressures of the rest of school life. So too their teachers, who quite simply have to slow themselves down, ground, listen, relax themselves so that they can interpret what the child’s body needs, right here and right now, in the water.

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I can recommend the experience of Musical Hydrotherapy, loudly and without question, to absolutely anyone. In many of our partner schools, the teachers that have been trained and know its benefit, are now offering twilight or INSET wellbeing sessions for their colleagues in addition to the regular programme of timetabled sessions for pupils. Others are inviting pupils’ families to out of hours or weekend/holiday sessions, where parents and siblings can all experience it together with their child, genuine relaxation for all and a rare chance to share an activity on equal terms.

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In a noisy, chaotic, fast and stressful world, I quite honestly never imagined that I was capable of letting absolutely everything go, thinking of nothing, releasing my entire mental load. I was just about safe driving home around the M25 afterwards, despite feeling so very relaxed and, like many of our special school pupils, I also slept better than I ever usually sleep that night. I long to feel that same release again. How wonderful that in more schools every year, thanks to our direct funders and those within our partner schools too, children with complex needs are able to do just that.