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Peter Alsop's
SONGS TO CHEW
We have everything you need here, including Peter’s Electronic Press Kit, Testimonials, and Photos,
as well as favorite videos including Peter's Conference Keynote, Sculpting With People Workshop,
the Family Concert Video, and a Conference Introduction with Peter's bio.
Check out Peter's Otter Space Conference Center on the Klamath River in Northern California.
Some of Peter's past Presentations
Making Safe Places
Dr. Alsop examines how to create emotionally safe places for our children, students, clients, families and ourselves so we can grow and learn from each other. Using his humorous anecdotes and sing-alongs, he illustrates why awareness of our feelings is the key. When we ignore or medicate painful feelings, our bodies let us know. "Burn-out" does not exist for those who know how to take steps to change difficult situations.
Opening Doors
We can only help others achieve a level of clarity that we have about ourselves. With commitment to self-growth as our focus, Peter's delightful stories and humorous sing-alongs weave us through the lessons we learned from our families. We explore how family roles affect us; how work, sex and humor can act as medicators for pain, and how we can gently open old doors together, and rekindle the joy and playfulness inside each of us.
Filling Our Toolbox: Making Feelings and Ideas Real
Dr. Alsop demonstrates the powerful technique of "sculpting" with people; a practical experiential techniques that gets people involved. It helps us "realize" (make real) what's going on. He will discuss filling our toolboxes with useful tools such as music, humor, and the arts, and answer questions about why they are important in our own lives, as well as in our work with children and families.
How To Eat An Elephant: A Focus On Process
For teachers, parents and human service professionals, this presentation explores using music and humor for personal and social growth; the importance of self-esteem and process; understanding privilege and living with ambivalence. We may also learn to play the spoons and use other pocket instruments while we explore using humor and metaphor as effective methods for changing focus and direction.
The Art Of Humoring Parents
Collect valuable family survival tactics we can pass on to our children, instead of the many "uneven parenting techniques" we received. Peter explores alternatives with insightful sing-alongs, group discussion, tears, laughter and silliness.
Making Your Toolbox A Toybox
Playful sing-alongs, stories and strategies demonstrate how we can use music and laughter to help balance our own lives, and pass these techniques on in our work with children and families. DON'T MISS THIS ONE!
Family Community Concert
Fun-filled humor and insight for kids AND parents. Have a good time with songs, ideas and feelings, while singing along to some healthy parenting ideas. Don't be surprised if you find yourself giggling or humming these songs two weeks later.
Difficult Transitions: Sometimes It Hurts To Be A (Nurse, Teacher, Parent)
Our personal experience with loss and change colors the way we relate to death and dying in our professional life. This course provides a safe place to explore our thoughts and feelings about grief and loss, and presents opportunities to learn some strategies that can help others.
Turning Problems Into Puzzles
If we can view a difficult situation as a puzzle with a missing piece, rather than seeing it as a problem that keeps us stuck, we remove a major roadblock in our search to find solutions. Humor and creativity help us gain another perspective, reevaluate our resources, and find the missing pieces of our puzzle. Peter models this in his sculpting demonstrations and by using humorous sing-alongs to unlock our creative potential.
The Art Of Human Being: Therapeutic Uses Of Music And Humor
Dr. Peter Alsop provides a unique training opportunity for human service providers to learn about the role of humor and music in mental health. Through insightful sing-alongs and stories, participants experience the therapeutic benefits of being flexible enough to laugh at ourselves and at some of the difficult situations we face.
The Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, Santa, And God: Using Music, Humor & Story To Get Unstuck!
Humans used story, song and dance to find spiritual guidance when they were stuck, long before the first word was written. Our brains are designed to remember stories and make connections. Our beliefs carry great power to shape reality. When all human children feel safe to laugh and sing and tell their stories, our culture will be healed. Come and begin!
Teaching Between The Lesson Plans
Dr. Alsop models and discusses practical experiential techniques to help clarify the complicated social interactions that come up in classrooms. Some of the most important learning occurs before and after our lessons. When students face difficult situations, they draw on what they have seen modeled for them. Tools such as music, humor and "sculpting" can be used to clarify what is "really going on", and with them we can model coping with emotionally loaded subjects in ways that can be heard by even the most reticent student.
And...
- Using Metaphors To Heal: Experiential Therapies
- Feeling The Family Pulse
- Out Of Our Pigeon-Holes!
- Baby Don't Need No Silver Spoon
- Teaching Social Skills With Funny Songs
- Don't Put Your Hand In My Pants Just Cause We're In Love
- Prisoners Of Traditional Sex Roles
P O S S I B I L I T I E S
May 30, 2014 - 2:30pm
Peter Alsop
We know that music is a great way to pass on cultural norms to children. Our ethnic songs tell rich stories and carry the sounds and rhythms that cling like soil to our family’s roots. They enrich our lives by reminding us that we have come together from other countries, religions and races with rituals and customs often very different from the predominant culture in which we live. We also have new songs grown out of our current culture that pass on the unspoken biases and echo the morality of the norms that guide our daily lives. When we “swim” in a predominant culture, like fish who do not notice that they swim in water, we may not be aware of the powerful messages that we pass on in our songs.
Here’s an example. Remember that old Mother Goose nursery rhyme about little girls made of “sugar and spice and everything nice” and little boys made of “snakes and snails and puppy dog tails”? The musical lilt of the poem doesn’t hide the fact that two hundred years ago we trained children to abide by the strict limitations of the gender roles that were so entrenched at that time. Now we accept and delight in knowing that some little boys are sweet as sugar and spice, and some little girls are full of snails and puppy dog tails, (whatever that means!). When our possibilities are limited, our lives are diminished, and none of us want a diminished life.
As “singer-songwriter-storytellers” we have the ability to lift others who feel diminished. We can expand possibilities and avoid limitations that our culture imbues within us about our gender, our values, honesty, self-worth, playfulness and treatment of one another. It’s both an opportunity and a responsibility, but in order to do this, we must first be aware of what needs to change. It requires a clarity about the cultural messages carried in our songs and stories. Do our messages, like Mother Goose, limit today’s children? When we discover a “hidden message” in a song, do we throw it away or change it? Perhaps we explain to our audience why we changed it, so they can raise their awareness as well. As we gain clarity about our cultural biases, all of us move closer to being a more reasonable, sustainable and caring species on this planet.
Let’s take a look at a few of our commonly accepted cultural messages.
ADULTS KNOW BEST
Imagine you are invited to have your own television show. Every Saturday morning you could sing new songs and bring new possibilities into the living rooms of millions of homes. Your television producers however, aren’t comfortable with you as a ‘real person’, so they’ve developed a Daisy the Dinosaur suit they’d like you to wear. Mattel will manufacture little plastic Daisys and toy sales will help fund your show. So you sign on the dotted line and the next morning they want you to sing a song called “Grown-ups Know Best!” And you suddenly remember the Little Golden Book about Tootle, the little engine that didn’t want to stay on the tracks. He would run with his buddy the horse out in the meadow, and come back to the station happy and covered with mud. Well, Engineer Bill and all the townspeople knew what was best. Tootle’s behavior had to be stopped, so they hid behind bushes in the field and waved red flags at him whenever he got off the tracks, and Tootle learned that he had to “stay on the tracks, no matter what!”
You loved that book as a child, but you now think, “That’s not a message I want to give to kids! Kids need to take chances and explore new possibilities, to think for themselves and pay attention to their feelings, not just believe everything adults tell them.” So you refuse to sing the song, and the producers say. “See? This is why we didn’t want a ‘real person’! Pick up your pay check on the way out. Hey Charlie! You want to be in the Dinosaur suit today?” And we see that going against predominant cultural views can be financially costly for us, which brings up another hidden message.
EVERYTHING HAS A PRICE
Instead of firing you, the producers might offer you more money to do their song, because our current culture taught them that everything (and everybody) has a price. I loved talking to my old friend Utah Phillips about how everything we touch gets passed through ‘the cash nexus’.
“They think that if something costs more, it’s better!” Utah would grumble, “but how about ‘time’ and ‘space’? Parents who spend time with their kids instead of money, have happier kids. I gave my son Brendan some space in the empty bottom drawer of my bureau as a gift one Christmas. He thought I was cheap, but I told him he could put anything in it that he wanted! It didn’t cost me anything, but it was worth a lot to him. And I had to remember that it was his space, and not tell him how to use it or organize it. Good lesson!”
If we honestly investigate why we place value on certain things around us, we can pass that clarity on in our songs. I wanted to give my kids an allowance, and my wife questioned me, saying that our kids could get funds from us if they really needed something. I held on to the allowance concept until I realized that my hidden reason for giving them an allowance was so I could cut them off if they didn’t do what I wanted! I caught myself limiting their possibilities, but I got a great song out of it.
A feminist economist told me that our values go off the tracks (like Tootle the train) when economics thinks of itself as a pure science. In reality, our culture consists of the rules of economics as they operate within social and environmental contexts, and these contexts need to be considered before we take action. Of course we want Daisy the Dinosaur to make a profit, but what’s the point of doing the show if Daisy doesn’t encourage kids and families to find other caring ways to interact socially or to care about the physical environment of the community in which we all live? We want Daisy to help kids learn “how to think, not just what to think”. (The same struggle teachers face, working in schools that focus on test scores instead of on the development of a whole child.)
Money is not the only “bottom line”. Social and environmental contexts have “bottom lines” too. As singers and songwriters we can use our songs to model other diverse ways to value things in our lives, instead of passing everything through “the cash nexus”. Families need our help to do this, because what we have now is not sustainable. Can we play with that hidden message?
THIS IS SERIOUS, IT’S NO TIME TO PLAY
“If you play around, you never accomplish anything!” When little kids play, accomplishment is not their goal. “Playing around” means you are trying out possibilities. Football “players”, on the other hand “play” football, but it’s more about winning than playing. Earth Ball is about playing, not winning. It consists of a huge canvas ball in the middle of a field. Players form two teams. Each team tries to roll the ball over other team’s goal line, but you can change teams anytime you want, so as long as people want to keep playing, the game goes on. Life is a game like that. Most of us want to keep playing (sustainable) but there are others who believe they can only play to win, and like most games, when someone wins, the game ends.
A interviewer asked one of the young women protesters at Occupy Wall Street about the lack of clear demands from the protesters. She answered eloquently.
“First, making a demand would mean we don’t have the ability to make changes happen ourselves, when we actually have great power to make changes, so we don’t need to ask others to make changes for us. Second, a demand might temporarily be responded to, but as long as the same system stays in place, things eventually return to what we have now. And third, we are here learning and educating each other. Us younger folks need to create a world with more possibilities and hope for us and everyone else, including the police, the bankers and the 1%.”
THOUGHTS TO CHEW
Fortunately chewing is a process, not a result, so we don’t need all the answers, maybe just some song revisions. We are the bearers of the stories and songs of childhood culture. As we build our own awareness about how best to shepherd in new visions and possibilities for the adults of the future, we help create a world with more hope.
Reprinted from Children's Music Network - Pass It On! Magazine - Peter Alsop's "Thoughts To Chew" column - Spring, 2012
"AMY GOODMAN: Making Serious People Laugh!"
To Reach Peter:
peter@peteralsop.com / P.O. Box 960, Topanga, CA 90290