This is a fantastic article we came across, author unknown to us…  If you have any insight as to who wrote this, please let us know so we can credit them with this powerful piece!

Love and intimacy are the root of what makes us sick and what makes us unwell, what 

causes sadness and what brings happiness, what makes us suffer and what leads to 

healing…Dean Ornish 

 

 

There’s an old adage that says the most significant journey we’ll ever 

make in this life is when we travel the distance from our minds to the 

region of our hearts.  Throughout the world’s spiritual disciplines, 

deepening our relationship to the Heart, to the many expressions of 

Love, is considered the epicenter of all true healing. It is my belief that 

music, especially when played or created with an intent to soothe, 

inspire, and heal, has the power to awaken us to this inherent 

birthright we all share, this innate capacity to love and be loved. 

 

After nearly fifty years of creating music, I’d like to share a bit of what 

I’ve learned about the healing power of music, especially when serving 

as a catalyst for feelings associated with love, service, compassion, 

and gratefulness, to name a few – resulting in a palpable connection 

with ourselves and others in ways that can measurably accelerate 

healing on many levels. 

 

Of all the art forms, music is an astonishing emotional language that 

communicates to us in the most visceral and immediate of ways.  

Through powerful vibrational frequencies, timbres, harmonies, 

rhythms, and melodies, we respond to music innately, almost always 

before and apart from cognitive thought. From the Big Bang to the 

frequency of Earth to every sound and word we’ve ever heard or 

spoken, everything we are and everything we know is based on 

vibration.  Vibration is the common denominator of the universe.  

 

Therefore, I find it no mere coincidence that the very first sense 

humans develop in utero is hearing, and that the very last sense to go 

before we take our last breath is hearing, as well. This biological fact 

has always suggested to me that there is a primacy to listening, 

establishing this core way of experiencing life as a language all its 

own, essential when interfacing with the unseen worlds, with the Great 

Mystery, with Love itself.  

 

However, when you look at the contemporary modalities for healing, 

(conventional and integrative), specifically regarding proactive 

environmental strategies that have been shown to stimulate emotional 

states of contentment, connection, and relaxation, this component is 

most often completely ignored, or at best, taken for granted. Just a 

cursory look at the very design of most hospital rooms, with the 

ubiquitous television set protruding out of every wall, seems to make it 

clear what our priorities are.   

 

Our eyes, (in cahoots with the parts of our brain that process 

information), utilize 90% of our linear discriminative faculties by 

constantly seeking streaming data that funnels through our optic 

nerves, endlessly ravenous for stimulation. This constant obsession 

with our visual portals successfully distracts us from what we’re often 

feeling, preventing us from ever uncovering the partial truth that each 

of us are existentially alone, and that we are, in fact, going to die one 

day. Ironically, what this systemic bias also does is deprive us of the 

beauty of presence, of silence, of reverie, of wordless connection with 

others, and, with the remarkable atmospheric and emotional benefits 

of music, especially when the music is an evocation of love. Therefore, 

within healthcare, despite best intentions, very rarely are the 

emotional/spiritual dimension and its correlation to healing addressed 

in effective and meaningful ways.   

 

While there’s reams of evidence supporting the revelations of 

mind/body medicine, and of the importance of feeling connected to a 

force larger than ourselves, our cultures’ institutions have relegated 

these heretofore uncharted matters of the heart to the more analytical 

mental health fields, or to our faith-based institutions.  Historically, 

rarely have the twain  (the realms of healthcare and direct 

environmental modalities designed to inspire feelings of Love, 

meaning, and connection) formally intersected.  In fact, to think that 

any impedances to our ability to feel these expressions of Love could, 

in any way, influence our ability to favorably respond to healing 

protocols is often viewed with cynicism and derision.  

 

 

However, times are changing.  

 

A few years ago, I received a call from a man who had just lost his 

wife through a protracted illness and end of life process. It was a day 

after the memorial service, and from the sound of the elation in his 

voice, one would not have thought that this man had just lost his life 

partner of 50 years.  But he shared with me this deeply moving story. 

 

This man, who I will call Bernie, had four sons, all embroiled in a nasty 

feud of such proportions that not one of his sons would tolerate being 

in each other’s presence, including in their mother’s hospital room, 

even though their mother, Sarah,  was seriously ill. This feud had been 

going on for years now, and I can only imagine the despair, frustration 

and exhaustion Bernie was going through. And there was his wife, sick 

with a life-challenging illness, probably on the threshold of an end of 

life process, while all of his sons remained staunchly committed to 

their anger, to their righteousness, and to their position of not ‘caving 

in’.  

 

Apparently, during this time, a dear friend came to the hospital room 

to visit while one of the sons was present.  This friend came in, turned 

off the television, and as luck would have it, brought with him a small 

CD player, on which he started playing the instrumental music from 

Graceful Passages, one of the projects for which I created the music 

specifically to assist people in soothing fears while traversing life’s 

transitions and challenges.   

 

After a few minutes of allowing the music to gently permeate the 

rooms ambience, something, barely perceptible, started to shift the 

room’s emotional tonality, subtly calling forth feelings from deep within 

the son who was present. He quietly started to cry, feeling the weight 

of his mother’s illness, perhaps for the first time. And then, something 

remarkable happened. He woke up to the horror of what he and his 

brothers were perpetuating by remaining out of contact with one 

another during this extraordinary time. Within a few hours, he 

summoned the courage to contact the one brother with which he had a 

tiny opening, asking him if he would be willing to just listen to some 

music together.  In a quiet room, for the first time in years, they sat 

together, and listened quietly to this music, and as they did, they 

mutually acknowledged the shifting tectonic plates within their hearts, 

gradually moving towards one another, in spite of themselves. 

 

According to Bernie, one by one, a different brother was invited to 

listen to this music together and it took all of 48 hours for each of the 

four sons to come home to their senses, get out of their petty 

positions in order to show up for an event in their family’s life that 

would be remembered forever. For the next month, they laughed 

together, cried together, forgave one another together, listened to 

music together, and most importantly, loved their mother together as 

she found her way home. 

 

While telling me this story on the phone, Bernie was now in tears. 

Tears of gratitude to me for creating this music that had become an 

indelible part of their journey, tears of joy for being a part of helping 

his family heal their wounds with one another, and tears of fulfillment 

for helping them all learn to be a family together again.  And I was in 

tears, not only because of the enormous honor he had bestowed upon 

me by sharing his story, but also for the extraordinary gift I’ve been 

given, to use music as a language for loving, for healing, and for 

supporting people to remember what matters most in this life. 

 

We live in a time where revelations that are being discovered in 

neuroscience, quantum physics, and molecular biology have simply not 

yet been integrated into the way we live and the way we approach 

healing. We now know that there are subtle yet significant and 

measurable factors that can affect how we think, feel, learn, grow, and 

relate with one another. However, we’ve lived in this Cartesian 

paradigm for so long (“I think, therefore I am”), that it’s still viewed 

with cavalier skepticism when suggested that our emotional and 

spiritual states can significantly influence our immune system’s 

capacities to recover from dis-ease. 

 

However, music is one of the most underestimated of healing 

modalities, especially when used subtly as an environmental support 

tool, the way that it a was used in Sarah’s hospital room.  When 

integrated sensitively, music could help us unravel our fears, soften 

our ability to feel again, and be open to looking at the glass half full for 

a change.  And as you’ve seen with Bernie’s family, it can induce 

emotional states of being that could dramatically and beneficially 

influence the outcome of seemingly intractable situations and 

circumstances.  

 

When you can use music, subliminally or overtly, in order to instill   

direct experiences of what cultural anthropologist Angeles Arrien calls 

“the Arms of Love” – Compassion, Service, Kindness, Appreciation, 

Forgiveness, and Presence, for example, – chances are you’ve 

increased the propensity for healing, if not of the body, then most 

assuredly of the heart and soul. 

 

Next time you find yourself in an environment where dis-ease is 

present, allow yourself to experiment with this phenomenon by 

integrating music that you truly love, however subtly, into the 

environment in some way. You’ll see that music can provide a powerful 

support tool for the healing journey, keeping us open, porous, 

humane, and grateful for being alive.