There is wide experience from many world cultures on the healing influence of music.

Move # 5 – Harvesting Creative Genius in Music

(click above title to go to Laughing Heart website Move)

There is wide experience from many world cultures on the healing influence of music. The development of resilience is a subtheme. The work of Dr. Alfred A. Tomatis and The Mozart Effect, Dan Cohen’s project on Music and Memory, the data from Katrina in which a culture of music helped to heal and to restore resilience are a few examples of the evidence we have that music can offer temporary relief for a broad range of stress-based conditions. The important question is are music’s beneficial effects sustainable? A recent Harvard Medical School report notes music therapy can improves invasive procedures, restore lost speech, reduces side effects of cancer therapy, aids pain relief, improve quality of life for dementia patients.

BHI training can amplify the resilience-building potential of music. In the same way that John Muir discovered Goethe’s Golden Thread, the practice of BHI opens the Heart’s energy field to the original energy of the composers “eternally encoded” within the music itself. As described in greater detail in Laughing Heart, the secret is very similar: to forget ourselves, and listen not only with our ears and minds but also with our hearts. As the explorer of these realms Stephen Harrod Buhner suggests, you ask yourself this strange question: How does it feel? Not how do I feel, but it. This shift in reference recognizes that the music (or Nature) has its own separate dignity. It begins our journey of listening from the inside to how the music and its composer are truly expressing themselves less filtered by our biases and constraints.

Notes:

• What is the connection between music and resilience?
• Music and Resilience
• If resilience is the question, is music the answer?
• Culture and resilience: How music has fostered resilience in post-Katrina New Orleans
• Music and Memory Leadership
• Music, Stress, and Resilience
• Healing through music – Harvard Medical School
• Scientists tune into brain to uncover music’s healing power

Next: Move # 6—Connecting Laughing Heart with Everything by the Explorers Wheel