My name is Anthony Hall and I am a music therapist based in the UK. This is the story behind the Calming Down website.
After a few years of working as a school teacher, I followed an intuitive pull towards training in Music Therapy and got accepted onto a course at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff.
This place was deferred for one year which gave me a chance to travel to India to continue my training in yoga and meditation. This period of time opened my levels of awareness and gave me a glimpse into a different state of consciousness that was calm and deeply peaceful. One that I would not forget.
On my return to the UK, I completed the Music Therapy Diploma course at Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. Shortly after this, I also enrolled on a specialist 3 year course in Guided Imagery with Music and attained a Fellowship in this field. I ended up helping teach this on courses across the UK and within Europe and established a successful therapy business in Cardiff.
I was working clinically within the field of forensic psychiatry, mental health, and autism - and alongside this I was also a guest lecturer at several universities, and also started bringing some of the concepts from therapy and meditation together into training courses for large companies and businesses.
On a personal level, I noticed that the combination of yoga, meditation and therapy training had really helped my own mental and emotional health and given me tools to reduce anxiety, manage stress and dramatically improve my own well being.
At that point, my wife and I had two children so I applied for a local job working within a Hospice Care team as a therapist. After some years I moved upwards and now manage a larger team working within palliative care.
Following the Covid 19 pandemic, I wanted to offer help in some capacity so I volunteered for a charity that provide therapy for front line staff, some of whom were suffering with trauma. I noticed that the combination of the western therapeutic approach together with the deeper techniques from the eastern disciplines of yoga and meditation were a very powerful synthesis and helped many people learn how to relax. My clients started asking me to make these into an online course focussed on mental and emotional health - and that is exactly how the Find Your Calm course came into being!
As we move forward post-pandemic, I notice significantly increased levels of anxiety, stress, poor sleep and trauma in the world around us. It is my hope that the Calming Down online courses - integrating modern techniques from psychotherapy with ancient traditions such as meditation, explained in a clear and simple way, may be helpful at this time.
If you have any further questions, do have a look at the FAQ page and see if they are answered there or click on the link below to drop me an email.
Anthony Hall, a music therapist based in the UK, introduces two of the most popular courses on the Calming Down website.
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