Look up Sacred Music Healing, Chant Healing, or Healing Traditions in any web search, book search, or scholarly search and you will find a plethora of sources speaking about "healing" as a wide range of different phenomenon. The vast majority of these sources approach "healing" from the perspective of either an outsider looking inward (scientist, researcher) or as some sort of expert. Missing almost entirely from this broad field is the experience of the healed themselves.


In our class, Sacred Music and Healing Traditions, we have carried out our background work in a reverse way, looking at ourselves first, and then expanding outward to experience music healing and related phenomenon from personal and communal experience. This gives our perspectives some grounding from which we can now view the variety of approaches that populate this field.

Ayahwasca? Peyote? Faith healing? Gospel music? Chant? Meditation? Improvisation? Healing hymn singing? Toning?

Is it all some sort of strange joke? Massed hysteria? A cultural value passed down without question? Or is the phenomenon of sacred music healing something real?

If so, how might it work? What is being healed? Why does it need healing?

Why is sacred music healing so pervasive today? It is literally everywhere we turn from dance clubs, to day spas, churches, chapels, coffee shops, etc. The only place where music and healing are not obvious is in traditional classical music circles. Why is that?

What do our reflections on these questions say about our communities, our societies?

The following slides contain some summarized views of sacred music healing from three dominant perspectives: Physicians and modern day psycho therapist, Wesfern anthropologists, and faith leaders (largely Christian) in North America.

Illness, Psychosis, Hallucination

The Physician and Phenomenology:

None of the previous perspectives
All of the perspectives