Health is Harmony
Good health is our natural state, and results from being in harmony. When in harmony we’re happier, feel more joy and are healthier. Illness is being out of balance or not in harmony. It has long been accepted that music directly influences pulse, blood pressure, the electrical energy of the brain, muscles and our mood, creating inner harmony even though we might not be conscious of how this happened. Research is now providing concrete proof of the healing power of music. New technologies in neuroscience even allow us to see the living brain as people listen to, imagine, perform and compose music, making visible the power of harmony.
Disease is disharmony. Health is harmony. The well-documented placebo effect shows that the mind influences the body. If you believe something strongly, you can actually change your molecules and body chemistry. We are holistic beings and what goes on in the body also affects the brain and mind; the stomach is a good example. The vitamins, chemicals, minerals, food, medicine (whatever you put in your stomach) change the way all the organs of the body are operating, including the brain. Other things that enter the body also affect it, including sound. Eighty percent of bodily stimuli come through our ears, affecting the brain and the rest of the body. When you hear music that you like, the brain changes the emotion you feel into a chemical message composed of tiny matter. The message then goes to every cell in your body, producing all kinds of beneficial changes.
Another definition of health is: being in a condition of wholeness, freedom from defect or separation, being in balance. When we heal something, it means to bring back together or to make whole, to harmonize. What better way to do this than with music?
Boost your Immune System and Fortify Your Body with Music
Listen to your favorite music for at least 30 minutes a day to boost your immune system. Slow or moderate-tempo music is used to lower blood pressure, basal metabolism and respiration rates, and benefit the immune system. Music lowers the stress hormone cortisol by as much as 25 percent. Music increases endorphins in the brain, which makes you feel good and helps to reduce pain. Music also raises levels of immunoglobulin, which fortifies the immune system, speeds healing, reduces infection, and controls heart rate. This helps to reduce the chances of catching a cold or an upper respiratory infection. Music is sometimes used in drug and alcohol detoxification, and as an aid for those with learning disabilities. It has also been helpful with Alzheimer’s patients, as well as the chronically or temporarily ill, the injured and the dying.
Turn dissonance into harmony with music.
The most beautiful and healing music resolves dissonance into harmony. Choose beautiful harmonious music, if that’s your desired state of being. This is also a pattern in life—turn dissonance into harmony.
Why listen to irritating, dissonant, atonal music that will transfer to your energy? Instead, choosing music that’s harmonic and beautiful engenders harmony and good spirits affecting us positively in every way. In both life and music, we need harmony, a balancing of contrasts: yin-yang, feminine-masculine, major-minor, loud-soft, reflective-joyful, pleasure-pain, dissonance-harmony. Ideally, music will strike a balance between the head and the heart (intellect and emotion), as well.
I invite you to participate in an experiment; choose your music for one week according to how you want to feel. Let me know the music you chose and the results!
You can listen to samples of my harp music at www.heavenlyharpist.com/harp-cd. May it bring you much harmony!