Music Medicine Miracles

Amy Robertson has taken her experience of starting a music therapy program from scratch at the largest admitting hospital in America and provided step-by-step instructions on how others can do the same.

It is now an established fact that music helps all living creatures - from plants to birds and animals and man - to grow and rejuvenate. This book dwells heavily on the findings from ancient India and the masters of today who have made music therapy a viable healing alternative. It is the most comprehensive guide on the healing powers of sound & music.

Why are we able to recognize melodies in our first days of life? Why does making music actually switch off the genes that signal stress? It is because music is part of who we are at the deepest level—and we don't need any special talent or training to harness its power to enhance our lives. With Music Medicine, music therapist Christine Stevens presents an information-packed resource, filled with scientifically-based practices for accessing and attuning to the natural healing properties of music. Drawing from a wealth of research and her own pioneering healing work in some of the most challenging places around the world, Stevens invites you to discover: Accessing the four elements of music-rhythm as medicine for the body, melody for the heart, harmony for the soul, and silence for the mindConscious listening-how to open yourself fully to the healing potential that music offersYour musical self-accessing your voice, spirit, and inner music for healing and changeClinical research, case studies, and stories that reveal music's extraordinary capacity to reduce stress, prevent illness, and strengthen the immune systemHow music connects us to each other and creates community, even in places of war and conflictInspirational guidance on how to use music for spirituality, personal growth, and well-beingHealing playlists-each chapter features valuable download recommendations and links for selecting healing musicThe drum massage, creating your power song, full-body listening, and other effective and enjoyable practices “Music's medicine awaits your discovery,” says Christine Stevens. “I invite you to release any doubts that you are musical, and to realize the power of music to nourish your body, mind, heart, and soul.” With Music Medicine, she provides a thoroughly researched and practical guide for integrating the healing benefits of sound into your life—and discovering the extraordinary transformation that occurs when we liberate our own inner music. “Music can provide the support we need in life's challenging moments, and more importantly, music can become part of our daily routine for spirituality and health. Enjoy this powerful path for your own healing—through the joy, and the great peace, of music.” —Joan Borysenko, PhD, from the foreword of Music Medicine “Music Medicine brings home to our hearts the truth that music is an organic medicine. Christine Stevens reveals how the intricate beauty of harmony, rhythm, and song course through our veins, uniting us with the cosmic music of the universe.” —Michael Bernard Beckwith, author of Life Visioning and Spiritual Liberation “Music Medicine is an interstate of sound that awakens, soothes, dances, and silences us.” —Don Campbell, author of The Mozart Effect and The Harmony of Health “Each of Christine's lessons has helped me to become a musical instrument and a singer of my own song.” —Bernie Siegel, MD, author of Love, Medicine, and Miracles “In this book, Christine provides a powerful and educational curriculum for music therapists, musicians, and anyone interested in music wellness. Music becomes the language to unite and heal across the continents.” —Antoinette Follett, Editor-in-Chief, Making Music

This is the miraculous story of a music therapist who treats terminally ill and mentally handicapped patients with the medicine of music.

Personal testimony from researchers, healers, and musicians about how music can change lives.

Modern culture tends to separate medicine and miracles, but their histories are closely intertwined. The Roman Catholic Church recognizes saints through canonization based on evidence that they worked miracles, as signs of their proximity to God. Physicianhistorian Jacalyn Duffin has examined Vatican sources on 1400 miracles from six continents and spanning four centuries. Overwhelmingly the miracles cited in canonizations between 1588 and 1999 are healings, and the majority entail medical care and physician testimony. These remarkable records contain intimate stories of illness, prayer, and treatment, as told by people who rarely leave traces: peasants and illiterates, men and women, old and young. A woman's breast tumor melts away; a man's wounds knit; a lame girl suddenly walks; a dead baby revives. Suspicious of wishful thinking or na ve enthusiasm, skeptical clergy shaped the inquiries to identify recoveries that remain unexplained by the best doctors of the era. The tales of healing are supplemented with substantial testimony from these physicians. Some elements of the miracles change through time. Duffin shows that doctors increase in number; new technologies are embraced quickly; diagnoses shift with altered capabilities. But other aspects of the miracles are stable. The narratives follow a dramatic structure, shaped by the formal questions asked of each witness and by perennial reactions to illness and healing. In this history, medicine and religion emerge as parallel endeavors aimed at deriving meaningful signs from particular instances of human distress -- signs to explain, alleviate, and console in confrontation with suffering and mortality. A lively, sweeping analysis of a fascinating set of records, this book also poses an exciting methodological challenge to historians: miracle stories are a vital source not only on the thoughts and feelings of ordinary people, but also on medical science and its practitioners.

An Oliver Sacks Foundation Best Book of the Year Selection, Finalist for the Books for a Better Life "Best First Book” Award, and a People Magazine Pick in nonfiction. The astounding story of a critically ill musician who is saved by music and returns to the same hospital to help heal others Andrew Schulman, a fifty-seven-year-old professional guitarist, had a close brush with death on the night of July 16, 2009. Against the odds—and with the help of music—he survived: a medical miracle. Once fully recovered, Andrew resolved to use his musical gifts to help critically ill patients at Mount Sinai Beth Israel’s ICU. In Waking the Spirit, you’ll learn the astonishing stories of the people he’s met along the way—both patients and doctors—and see the incredible role music can play in a modern hospital setting. Schulman expertly weaves cutting-edge research on neuroscience and medicine, as well as what he’s learned as a professional musician, to explore the power of music to heal the body and awaken the spirit.

While the first healers were musicians who relied on rhythm and song to help cure the sick, over time Western thinkers and doctors lost touch with these traditions. In the West, for almost two millennia, the roles of the healer and the musician have been strictly separated. Until recently, that is. Over the past few decades there has been a resurgence of interest in healing music. In the midst of this nascent revival, Ted Gioia, a musician, composer, and widely praised author, offers the first detailed exploration of the uses of music for curative purposes from ancient times to the present. Gioia’s inquiry into the restorative powers of sound moves effortlessly from the history of shamanism to the role of Orpheus as a mythical figure linking Eastern and Western ideas about therapeutic music, and from Native American healing ceremonies to what clinical studies can reveal about the efficacy of contemporary methods of sonic healing. Gioia considers a broad range of therapies, providing a thoughtful, impartial guide to their histories and claims, their successes and failures. He examines a host of New Age practices, including toning, Cymatics, drumming circles, and the Tomatis method. And he explores how the medical establishment has begun to recognize and incorporate the therapeutic power of song. Acknowledging that the drumming circle will not—and should not—replace the emergency room, nor the shaman the cardiologist, Gioia suggests that the most promising path is one in which both the latest medical science and music—with its capacity to transform attitudes and bring people together—are brought to bear on the multifaceted healing process. In Healing Songs, as in its companion volume Work Songs, Gioia moves beyond studies of music centered on specific performers, time periods, or genres to illuminate how music enters into and transforms the experiences of everyday life.

Heartwarming and Heart-Opening Stories Gathered from Decades of Medical Practice Bernie Siegel first wrote about miracles when he was a practicing surgeon and founded Exceptional Cancer Patients, a groundbreaking synthesis of group, individual, dream, and art therapy that provided patients with a “carefrontation.” Compiled during his more than thirty years of practice, speaking, and teaching, the stories in these pages are riveting, warm, and belief expanding. Their subjects include a girl whose baby brother helped her overcome anorexia, a woman whose cancer helped her heal by teaching her to stand up for herself, and a family that was saved from a burning house by bats. Without diminishing the reality of pain and hardship, the stories show real people turning crisis into blessing by responding to adversity in ways that empower and heal. They demonstrate what we are capable of and show us that we can achieve miracles as we confront life’s difficulties.

Drawing on his clinical experience Dr Bernie Siegel shows how, by reaching out to others, people can alleviate stress and release the body's healing mechanism. He shows that when apparently terminal patients take control of their illness they can change, enrich and sometimes prolong their lives.