music for healing


cathy b's offer was timely: she's been studying spiritual healing and wanted a practice body to work on. I remembered the last time (the only time) I'd experienced this, so didn't hesitate.

she worked on me for about forty minutes, a week last Sunday - eight days ago. knowing that she'd probably like to have some specific 'targets', I'd selected from my various pains the most intrusive - right shoulder, right knee, left ankle, and that pesky point between the shoulder blades that's been my achilles heel (strange but true) for a long, long time.

well, gentle reader, I don't know how to break this - but, since you're asking - nop, no more pain. now, of course I know that, except in chronic conditions, minor injuries that incur pains like that are self-limiting, and that there have been other contributory factors - I've not been taking my daily climb up the Tor for the last week, for instance, and mel and the boys have been away since last Wednesday, so it's been very relaxed here. but still (quick real-time self-diagnostic - right shoulder - aches, but not badly; right knee - painless; left ankle - painless; back - painless) a recovery's a recovery, and I have no doubt the cathy effect played a significant part.

I shall beg for more - and this time maybe I'll direct her towards the deeper psychic anguish (on second thoughts, I don't want to be responsible for the effects of the corrosive feedback from all that).

one tiny problem: how, discreetly, and without offence, to persuade her that that CD of appalling pastiche Chopin (edited and 'improved' by The Tranquil Hippy™) has to go!?

its teeth-grinding inanity acted like a tethered deranged madman throughout, so that one part of my consciousness was constantly engaged in trying to filter it out. I saw her (too late!) take it out of a jewel case entitled 'Music for Healing' and began to scream.

silently.

wrong! how can they get it so wrong?

am I utterly mistaken in supposing that people who are attuned to the chakras and the delicate equilibrium of the cosmos and who can sense others' imbalances through their fingertips and assist them towards health and at-oneness with the universe with a discreet psychic nudge here, a gentle thought there, ought to be able to distinguish between, on the one hand, music, and on the other, excruciating bilge!? I mean, silence would have been fine, sigur rós good, labradford acceptable. but the endless, endlessly tacky drivellings of that moron-on-a-stick with his tacky piano and tackier synth - just what is this? it's some patronising fuckwit capitalising on a culture infested with patronising fuckwits who have no more sense of aesthetic discrimination than the parasites on an axolotl's turd, that's what it is.

healers of the world unite!

you don't have to buy in to the package - the kit they flog at those psychic trade fairs where wafty hippies drift around in a haze of patchouli and the dominant colours are all Steiner-approved. your gift is your own - it doesn't have to be supported by anything other than your own confidence, and the trust you engender in your patients. there are some, doubtless, for whom 'Music for Healing' works - it will insulate them from the buzz of their lives and memories for a while, whilst your sensitive hands hover over their bruised auras. but these are injured people - their antennae have been damaged in the maelstrom of life - to them, anything you provide is good. you, therefore, have an obligation to provide good, nourishing music - if you feel that 'background music' is necessary at all - rather than this pulped cardboard.

music, after all, is a healer of itself - a very effective one.

'Music for Healing' is neither.