The Healing Power of Music!

The power of music is extraordinary.  Lyrically, it is an expression of people’s emotions.  It tells us if the lyricist was sad, hurt, angry, or even happy.  We all can relate emotionally to a story that has been told.  Musically, there are ways to emote our feelings.  You can demonstrate happiness, tell the story of turmoil, even have the ability to heal.

There are many uses today for music.  Composers are writing for films, drawing an audience in closer to the emotions that are portrayed through the film itself.  Singers and songwriters are writing to not only tell what is going on in their lives at that moment, but also what they are feeling.  Teachers use music to help students to learn.  Parents use it to connect with their children.  Today, healers are using to assist in reaching a patient, assisting in their healing process.

Karen Merzenich said, “we use music to make your life better.  Whether you need help socially, cognitively, physically, or developmentally, music can help you get better…and music therapists are well-trained on how to do that.” 

There is a natural rhythm to each and every one of us.  It starts as a heartbeat in the womb, and turns into a rhythm in our brains.  Using this, therapists can help people whom have had strokes relearn how to walk or talk again.  It can aide people with dementia to connect to memories.  This is a remarkable ability of music, and should start being used more.

In Robert Gupta’s TED talk, he talks about the story of Nathaniel Anthony Ayers.  Ayers, having trained at Julliard as a double bassist, had once had a very promising music career.  It was short lived, as he was afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia.  His life on the street, and his friendship with a man named Steve Lopez, is depicted in the movie The Soloist. 

Lopez developed a relationship with Ayers, and used his love of music to help bring him back from his episodes.  Gupta talks about meeting Ayers, and the ability of using music to relate to each other, and the influence that music had to break Ayers from the delusions he was having.

As Gupta said, “through playing music and talking about music, this man had transformed from the paranoid, disturbed man that had just come from walking the streets of downtown Los Angeles to the charming, erudite, brilliant, Julliard-trained musician.  Music is medicine.  Music changes us.  And for Nathaniel, music is sanity.  Because music allows him to take his thoughts and delusions and shape them through his imagination and his creativity, into reality.  And that is an escape from his tormented state.”  Imagine how many people could be helped if more people used this medium to r 

elate.

These stories about healing is very inspiring.  Knowing that you can reach people before they can talk, after they have lost the ability to communicate, or lost touch with reality is very encouraging.  It is this ability of music, and even film, that has made me love it.  Being able to reach people, and help them heal, that has motivated me to continue with my career in this field.

Gupta puts it best, “this was the very essence of art.  This was the very reason why we made music, that we take something that exists within all of us at our very fundamental core, our emotions, and through our artistic lens, through our creativity, we’re able to shape those emotions into reality.  And that reality of that expression reaches all of us and moves us, inspires and unites us.”