Healing through music and the arts — a holistic perspective

Author Peggy Leyva Conley, a member of the National League of American Pen Women (Nashville Branch), writes on the role of art, music, and writing in education and personal well-being. The organization, founded in 1897 and headquartered in Washington, DC, supports artistic disciplines across 133 branches nationwide. Conley argues that programs in the arts — at elementary, college, and private levels — are rewarding, enriching, beneficial, and essential not just in America but around the world.

Energy fields, vibration, and frequency patterns

At the dawn of the Earth, the atmosphere consisted of layered vibration and frequency patterns. Vibration generates sound waves — a form of energy that, when in harmony with natural law, can help heal the universe. This harmony traces back to a principle known as Alpha, a Greek term from the beginning of time.

Distorting energy fields with negative forces creates vibrations that fall out of sync with the natural frequencies of the atmosphere. The issue goes beyond pollution, waste, or environmental damage — it touches the very air we breathe and the water we drink. Water, essential for renewal and growth, nourishes plant life through seasonal cycles. When humans alter water from its pure state, we put ourselves at risk.

The kind of energy a person projects into the energy field affects the entire essence of life on Earth — including matter, plants, nature, people, and animals. Every individual must take responsibility for what they send into this field, which shapes the vibration of the surrounding atmosphere. Conley holds that the Earth possesses a consciousness, on par with all living organisms, created through divine design.

In early times, both men and women lived off the land and respected animals as a source of food. Nature provided timber for shelter, shielding humans from rain, snow, storms, and heat in climates around the world.

Freedom of expression in art

Humanity has expressed itself through art ever since the Earth formed. Evidence from the prehistoric Mesozoic era — including cave drawings and rock engravings — supports this claim. Archeologists and anthropologists have studied these early works, and similar discoveries appear in remote locations worldwide.

Art cultures across the world

Artifacts from Mesopotamian culture reveal stone carvings and writings from the Bronze Age, produced by the Babylonian and Assyrian empires. Around 500 AD, during early Christian times, many artistic works faced religious criticism for being pagan — especially graven images and carvings used in worship. Some early writings adorned with art were considered illuminated manuscripts. Traces of such works from 400 AD onward survive in regions of the Roman and Greek empires and from the Renaissance. Evidence also shows up in pottery, sculpture, and pyramids among indigenous peoples of Mexico and South America.

During a genealogical trip to Santa Rosalía, Ciudad Camargo, Chihuahua, Mexico, Conley studied the artistic and musical influences of the area. These included Spanish, Mexican, Basque, Portuguese, German, Mennonite, French, and Indian groups — notably the Conchos and Tarahumara (Rerámuri). The Tarahumara, who come down from the Sierra Madre Mountains, sell woven baskets and artifacts to locals and tourists. They have long practiced shamanistic spiritual healing, using peyote from the cactus plant for trance meditation and vision quests.

The Aztecs left wood-carved and stone figures. Art remains from Costa Rica show carvings and figures, and Native Alaskan tribes painted and carved totem poles that still stand. In Egypt, the pyramids contain tombs with early drawings, paintings, and writings. Egyptologists, including the British pioneer Flinders Petrie, have studied and recorded Egyptian culture through these works.

Music as culture and healing

Ancient Greek medicine and science included music as a healing practice — a tradition found also in the Arab Muslim world of Persia, the Turks, and Basque culture. Hindu traditions have long used bells as instruments for healing through sound. Music, writing, and painting have appeared across America, Africa, the British Isles, Asia, Mexico, Germany, Russia, France, China, and India — including remote locations such as Easter Island and the Hawaiian Islands.

While on the Big Island of Kona-Kailua, Conley studied local music, instruments, dance, wood carvings, and artwork. That experience revealed a sense of oneness with nature and a spirituality that persists today. The culture blends Hawaiian, Polynesian, and Japanese influences.

Among Native American Indian cultures, drumming and flute playing — together with herbal practice — continue as healing rituals. Drumming and dance also serve as prayers for rain during drought, a practice echoed in African cultures through ritual drumming and dance. In churches worldwide, many religious denominations use music and prayer for spiritual healing. Instruments include the harp, piano, organ, and guitar, along with vocal choirs performing hymns and meditation. This tradition echoes that of monks performing spiritual chants and prayer in churches.

Expressions of this kind take many forms: painting, poetry, dance, theater, music, woodwork, ceramics, sculpture, and architecture. At its core, this work enriches a desolate environment, helping humankind produce beauty and embark on spiritual healing. In music therapy and psychotherapy, a doctor can interpret a patient's symbolic expression through art to aid diagnosis. Therapy addresses everything from physical and emotional trauma to brain injury and illness.

Art therapy and nature counseling

Combining art therapy with nature walks can help patients heal both body and mind. Art offers an outlet for everyday stress, bringing enjoyment much like music or poetry writing.

Sigmund Freud, the Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis, developed early theories of the unconscious mind and repression. Conley contends that writing, poetry, music, and painting can unlock the door into the mind, creating a new sense of expression while unlocking subconscious levels. Bringing suppressed material to the surface helps individuals reach inner peace, cope with hidden pains, achieve emotional balance, and address what plagues their secret life.

British physician Adrian Hill — well known as an artist and medical doctor — coined the term "art therapy" and used it with his patients in the United Kingdom. He published Art Versus Illness in the 1940s. Margaret Naumburg, the first American psychologist to offer training and graduate courses in art therapy, established the Walden School in New York City.

Professor Randall McClellan, a philosopher and composer, researched the acoustics, hearing processes, vibrations, and energy of the human body. His work The Healing Forces of Music: History and Practice covers sound vibration on physical matter, voice therapy, and healing through music on emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual levels.

Dr. Raymond Moody, a psychologist, medical doctor, and author of Life After Death and Glimpses of Eternity, studied near-death patients — some reported hearing loud buzzing or ringing during out-of-body experiences. Scientific investigations point to the possibility that consciousness survives death as spiritual energy.

Conley holds that frequencies inherent in the physical body — made of matter and water — are joined by a spirit of conscious awareness both in life and after. While the body decomposes, the spirit remains, moving into an eternity where time becomes an illusion. Spirit ascends into higher or lower frequencies of awareness, able to hear sound and vibrate.

In modern practice, Andy Wasserman applied universal sound through music to help individuals with neurological impairments, memory loss, autism, ADHD, and vision or hearing issues. Christopher Dunn, an engineer and author of The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt, used reverse engineering to explore the Great Pyramid of Giza as an ancient power source. Dunn explains the narrow passageways within the pyramids that allow acoustic sound to create harmonic resonance, interacting with the Earth's atmospheric energy.

Again, sound vibrations serve as a tool to penetrate Earth's energy fields for harmonic effects, influencing the human field. Performers can use sound as therapeutic healing through music, humming, or chanting to raise human vibration patterns.

Self-healing music as therapy

Conley released a CD titled Passages of Time as a musician — containing seventeen tracks including classical piano, self-healing, ambient, and film-movie themes. The song "Tribal Visions" is a dedication to great-great-grandparents Sir John Rolfe of England and Princess Pocahontas (Matoaka) of the Powhatan tribe of Jamestown, Virginia. In Powhatan culture, drumming, spiritual dream visions, and sacred dance were deeply connected.

Dr. Ruth Garrett, a gerontologist, counselor, and author of Embracing Aging, reported that listening to the CD during her daily commute through traffic helped her relax. An executive director at the USDA in Northern California found the music soothing for her office and helpful against daily stress. A practitioner at a holistic spa in Florida played the CD during massage therapy, cultivating a calm atmosphere for meditation.

Music and art programs, Conley argues, provide an outlet for healing society, pulling individuals into higher dimensions and frequencies of light, conscious awareness, and spirituality. Every person generates an aura, as does plant life and nature. Vibrations flow in and out — the same energy that indicates health or illness applies to plant growth as well. Sun energy and water sustain life within every individual and organism.

Arts programs help keep children in school, connected to their inner selves, and encourages self-expression. A world that sometimes feels cold, detached, and isolating can be transformed through the global enterprise of art, music, and writing — unique in each culture.

Music heals the inner child and the adult, helping them reach deeply hidden conscious levels. By its tones and vibrations, music can heal the body, mind, and spirit — the resonating sound enables spiritual balance.

Post-surgery patients at some hospitals have recovered faster when classical music was used — particularly those with spiritual beliefs.

Music can steady the heart rhythm, helping the body return to natural beats. A frequency exists around a person's spirit, much like the rate of each pitch and chord played in an instrument. This can heal the spiritual self by realigning rhythmic vibrations with the energy field of the atmosphere and environment.

Painting, drawing, and working with clay achieve similar effects by releasing energy through the hands. This integration of mind and spirit brings unity and releases inner issues. Both art and music function as therapeutic remedies within the healing process. Survivors of childhood and adult trauma can release imprisoned feelings by writing poetry, engaging in dance, or making music.

Color painting therapy

Color in painting affects both children and adults — babies naturally gravitate toward bright colors, many parents surrounding infants with colorful items and decorations. Studies show that children who use orange and bright yellow are highly creative. Red can create anxiety in a room, while blue — reminiscent of the ocean and sky — tends to calm. Observing color choices and symbolic objects in patient paintings enables therapists to discern emotional state. The same principle extends to dream therapy, in which the subconscious reveals resting or hidden trauma that often surfaces as memory later in life as coping mechanisms break through.

Author Ellen Greene Stewart's Kaleidoscope: Color and Form Illuminate Darkness explores art therapy and exercises suitable for patients with dementia, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's disease. Art therapist Susan Buchalter's Art Therapy and Creative Coping Techniques for Older Adults uses group art therapy to help individuals experiencing depression or early-stage dementia — along with poetry writing as a further expressive outlet.

The definition of an artist is universal, an individual's style unique across many forms. The hand movement or color use reflects outward what the artist perceives, feels, or imagines. Finger painting, brush strokes, form, shade, space, line, light and dark, and sense of direction bring balance and fulness to the spirit. Symbolic expression — whether by finger painting or visual thinking in dimensional styles — yields a personal work piece.

Classical music, painting, and poetry calm nerves, promoting relaxation and healing. Up-tempo music however sometimes makes listeners more anxious or spontaneous, linked to the frequency levels of sound uses in each scale. Every pitch draws close, particular sound and rhythm vibration.

Beyond therapy, nature walking or walking, having and communing with a pet — every action — feeds recovered energy in children and adults. All forms of art, music, and writing can assist healing. Such creative activities help war survivors and military veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder — re-engaged into memory, through writing poetry, painting, and making music work allow them to recall suppressed memory. Expression encourages a renewed coping process beyond trauma. Inmates in prison can also use these methods to process unopened rage and bottled emotion out of previous existence.

That world can grow brighter, healthier out of all survival needed from conflicted areas, if people teach the capacity to turn external broken homes into positive spaces. Negativities are transformed through using energy in positive actions such as gardening, rolling socks walking paining pen work imagery dance poetry. Healing transforms mind earlier-than-young selves fracture-time. Integration that restores abundant rhythm underneath large self across nature physical base flows onward onward behind broken trauma heavy piece within traumatized step head for eternity already inside now.

When people engage with the Arts naturally, they become more connected to themselves and to the universe’s higher power—the natural law of humanity that existed in harmony at the dawn of creation. This alignment attunes us to our higher spiritual self and makes us teachers of the universe, proving the Arts are essential for human survival.

(2000) University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, the Center for Continuing Engineering Education. Certification: Product Documentation Control—Engineering and Manufacturing.

(1998) Arizona State University, Phoenix, Arizona. Certification: (CMII) Configuration Management in Engineering—Document Control for Business Process Infrastructure, Structured Configuration and Process Information, Engineering Change Control and Traceability, and Change Boards and Change Administration.

(1996) Oracle-Sun Microsystems, Milpitas, California (Technical Campus). Certifications: System Administration, UNIX Programming, OpenWindows, Solaris 1.X System Administration and Essentials, and Solaris 2.X System Administration in Computer Science.

(1993) APICS, the Center for Manufacturing Education, Cupertino, California. Certifications: Introduction to Manufacturing Concepts, Material and Capacity Requirement Planning, and Just‑in‑Time Manufacturing.

(1981) San Benito Artist Scholarship, Hollister, California (Honors).