200 - The Music of Connection

Secular Buddhism

Noah Rasheta

Spirituality, Buddhism, Mindfulness, Society & Culture, Meditation, Secular, Religion & Spirituality, Philosophy

4.8 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 15 March 2025

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode of The Secular Buddhism Podcast, I reflect on an experience at a dance competition that led me to deeply consider connection, perception, and the way we assign meaning to our experiences. As I watched dancers perform to carefully chosen songs, I found myself drawn into the emotions conveyed in the lyrics—emotions that felt strikingly familiar, even though they were someone else’s words, someone else’s story.

This realization sparked a deeper exploration of Buddhist teachings on interdependence (pratītyasamutpāda), impermanence (anicca), and feeling tones (vedanā)—all of which play a role in how we connect to art, music, and each other. How is it that a song written by a stranger can make us feel understood in our most personal moments of joy or sorrow? What does this teach us about the shared human experience?

Join me as we explore the ways in which our lives, like music, are constantly unfolding—sometimes melancholic, sometimes joyful, always moving. And just as we don’t cling to a single note in a song, we can learn to embrace the impermanence of life with greater ease.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to another episode of the Secular Buddhism podcast.
0:04.0	I am your host, Noah Rochetta. This is episode number 200, and today I wanted to share an experience
0:12.0	that led me to reflect deeply on connection, perception, and the way we assign meaning to our experiences.
0:35.6	As always, keep in mind, you don't need to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist.
0:38.4	You can use what you learn to be a better whatever you already are. This experience took place at a dance competition. I actually just got
0:45.2	home from the dance competition today. My wife runs this dance competition and I help manage the
0:52.8	technical equipment that the judges use to score each
0:55.8	performance. This allows me to watch every routine, and over the past couple of days, I've seen
1:02.8	well over 100 dances and listened to approximately seven hours of music. And I had this profound experience that I came home and wanted to
1:13.7	share my thoughts on it. Dancers, their parents, coaches, and choreographers put a lot of thought
1:21.5	into selecting the perfect song for their performance. And I always enjoy the wide variety of music that comes through at these
1:31.5	events. While I was watching and listening, I began to pay close attention to the lyrics of certain songs.
1:39.9	There was one song in particular that caught my attention.
1:50.3	As the dancer moved gracefully across the stage to a song with lyrics that spoke of heartbreak,
1:56.8	loss, and eventual healing, and as I sat there watching, I found myself deeply moved, not just by the dance, but by how familiar those emotions felt to me.
2:02.5	The songwriter's words written perhaps years ago about maybe their own personal experience,
2:09.7	but in that moment, listening somehow, they perfectly captured feelings that I've had in my own life.
2:16.7	It was very moving. And from that moment on,
2:19.7	I found myself listening a little bit more intently, trying to take in each word, noticing
2:26.1	the emotions that certain songs evoked in me, and reflecting on why certain lyrics resonated so deeply. Some of the songs carried emotions that
2:37.8	felt really familiar, even though they were written by someone else, they were someone else's
2:44.1	words, someone else's story, and yet in many of those lyrics, I recognized pieces of my own lived experiences.
	...

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