After 20 years of exploring the relationship between sound and healing it is still difficult to write about it. Essentially, it is something to be experienced, like an early morning sunrise or a cool afternoon rain. The way music and sound promote healing is like opening the windows on a beautiful day and allowing fresh, cool, cleansing air into the house--like the greater forces that define our life moving into alignment--ultimately something organic that clears away that which has become stale and lifeless, while welcoming and inviting in fresh new feelings of being alive and full of possibility. These ‘healing moments’ are as individual and unique as each person. For some, healing comes in the form of listening to the NAF, to another playing, and to still another making them.

What I have also learned is that these "healing moments" can not be forced or invented, but like caring for a garden or dressing a wound, they can only be tended. With the right atmosphere, intention, feeling quality and care they can be invited, and then the grace of healing which playing the NAF may give us or other’s can be remarkably consistent. Just as germinating a seed, or growing a garden; although we are not the one’s making the seed germinate and grow, we can create the right conditions that make it almost a sure possibility.

I have been presenting workshops on sound and healing, particularly with the NAF now for a number of years and here are a few of the conditions I have found that help facilitate healing. (Please note this is primarily conditions that promote healing in playing for others, although they certainly can be adapted to find healing in playing for oneself. In fact, there is an old Taoist saying, “The healer must always go and find Tao himself, then he can bring the Tao to others.”) The idea here is that the best preparation for bringing a healing presence in your flute playing to those you play for is to have helped heal yourself through playing. If you go to the flute to "heal"’ after a hard day, or you play to rejuvenate or to release some pain or hurt inside, this is the best apprenticeship one could have to play for others.

Atmosphere:

Atmosphere is a wonderful word. Here I mean it in the sense of the surrounding spirit of a place, the general feeling tone of a particular setting. When playing for oneself or others, it is an often overlooked dimension, although it helps ‘align’ all of ones playing. It does not mean that you won’t play if you don’t have the right atmosphere, but you are attentive to the power and importance of atmosphere.

In our culture we tend to think of atmosphere as an unnecessary aesthetic luxury - nothing could be further from the truth. It is our western word for the ‘Spirit’ of a place and a setting. Even when I do a workshop my first goal is to ask "what is the spirit of this place?" If it’s not conducive to the flow of healing work, one must put some time and energy into creating more spirit. Whether it is the arrangement of chairs, the opening of a window, the dimming of lights, smudging. This will help you align with playing from that deep place inside that will help you with the next condition.

Intention:

Enough can ever be said about intention. Throughout all cultures and all traditions, there is one point everyone agrees with, and that is that nothing can happen without the proper intention. The problem I find most people have with this word is that they think about it as a set of thoughts. To say in one’s mind, “I intend to help promote and facilitate healing" can be helpful, but if it’s not emerging from a felt sense of heart within, it won’t have any effect. Healing is not a state of mind, but a state of being. That is to say, it is something that involves the whole self, and the center of that self is the heart, which brings in the next condition.

Heart:

I have variously used a number of words to describe this condition, but I am more and more finding myself using the word “heart” to describe this element that contributes to healing. When we discuss playing with and from the heart I am referring to the qualities of genuineness, sincerity, and wholeness. Intention is not sufficient, if that intention is not sincerely emerging from the depths of your own heart. We know people who are in touch with their feelings (the heart dimension) are able to identify, own and express their feelings as they grow. In psychology, we call this the felt sense. Unfortunately, today most people are so disconnected from their hearts they don’t even know what they feel. This is a common situation when people come into therapy or seek "healing." The NAF is such an incredible instrument because it helps people connect to their heart (the feeling dimension) in a powerful way - facilitating the acknowledgment of their feelings, the expression of them and the release of them.

The heart is the balancing point of heaven and earth: self and other, joy and sorrow, night and day. The heart is the organ of connection to what I have elsewhere called, “The Vital Connection”(DeMaria, 2001) - it is the connection to all-that-is. The flute being an instrument made out of wood (earth) and played with our breath (air), is a beautiful balancing of the parts of us that want to fly free and the parts of us that need to be grounded. The NAF is unique in its ability to balance both of these different dimensions of existence, and that is the deeper meaning of what I’m trying to express with the word heart. The NAF reminds us to get out of our heads and into our hearts. That is why it evokes emotion, by both bringing up the grief and simultaneously soothing it, like a warm compress bringing out the poison and cleansing the wound all at once.

The Cherokee say that "our first teacher is our own heart", but unfortunately in modern, Western culture we have left that teacher far behind. There is not the time or space to go into the "great heart split" that occurred in Western culture over the last 2000 years, but it suffices to say that it is rampant today - we have not lost our minds - it is our hearts we have lost. Thankfully, slowly but surely the renaissance of the Native American Flute is helping people rediscover their first teacher, one heart at a time.

There is much more to say on the subject, but this is a good beginning. One thing is for sure, if you simply apply these three elements to your playing you may not make the lame walk, but you can always rest assured that you have brought some peace and beauty into the world, and in a world full of torment and suffering this is much.

Dr. Michael DeMaria is a clinical psychologist, musician, author, speaker and founder and director of ONTOS a consulting firm dedicated to helping individuals live more creative, fulfilling and effective lives. He has 20 years of experience helping guide others on their life journeys and is the author of Ever Flowing On: on being and becoming oneself. His first CD The River, was released in 2003 to rave reviews. It is the first in a series on the Healing Sound Project label. His follow up CD OCEAN is due out in 2007. You can find out more about Michael and his work at [www.ontos.org] (http://www.ontos.org/)