The Beating Heart: Music and Healing
by Randi Israelow

About the author:
Randi Israelow is a writer with a masters degree in creative writing from the University of New Mexico.  She has ten years combined experience in the country music and Christian music fields working with Capitol Records and Word Records.

I am an expert in only one thing: breathing.

I was born with a hole in my heart and still I breathed.

I have been rejected in relationships. I have never met my biological family. I have survived sexual abuse.

Still I breathe.

Due to the loving kindness of my adoptive parents, I have a patch over my heart now that stops the hole from leaking.

Still I breathe.

I breathe because I am a part of the world’s rhythm.

I breathe because I have a beating heart.

I place my hand upon my abdomen and feel the rise and fall of my breath entering and leaving my body. The pace is slow and quiet, but it is still a part of the multitude of sounds heard all around me, both soft and loud, that are available to me when I am still enough to listen.

Even now, as I sit here in a park, I can hear the rhythms from life: the elongated whistle from a train in the distance, the squawking of ducks flying overhead, the steady pounding of a jogger’s shoes on the pavement, the wind moving the tree branches up and down like wilting fans, the baby crying for its mother.

All these sounds are music. All of these sounds contribute to the world’s rhythm.
I place my hand over my chest and feel a slow repetitive booming. The rhythm of the world is inside of me, too. It begins under my skin and ribcage. It begins with my beating heart. It is speaking to me. Every beats says it longs for connection and wants to be understood. Right now it beats with the same pace as the jogger’s shoes hitting the pavement, and in realizing that, I realize that I am not alone.

Music has the same healing affect. It allows us to realize that we are not alone. Just as rhythm is innate within our bodies, so it is within music. Our bodies and music cannot exist without rhythm and they cannot exist without each other, either. We hear music and we tap our toes. We hear music and we clap our hands. We hear music and we sway. We hear music and we stand and dance. We hear music and we bow our heads. We hear music and we feel tears falling from our eyes. We hear music and we sing. We do all of these things because we breathe, and we breathe because we have beating hearts.

Sometimes music expresses what our bodies understand, but what we are unable to say out loud, what we are unable to find the words for ourselves - I’ve been hurt, I’ve been sad, I’ve been unwanted, I’ve been broken, I’ve been happy - and in giving melodies and lyrics to such things, music also gives them a voice. When we are sad and hear a sad song, our hearts connect and speak. When we feel victorious and hear a victory song, our hearts connect and speak. When we hear these things while standing in a crowd of people, or being one of many listeners hearing music on the radio, many hearts connect and speak all at the same time and create a community even larger than we ever imagined.

I will always remember when I lived in New York City and shared an apartment with three of my friends. Often when one of us arrived home from work before the others, that person would put music on for the rest of us to listen to when we got home. This almost always lead to dancing because after a long day at our various jobs, our bodies were so full of stress that we needed something to help us get some relief. What better way than to dance? Enter Aretha Franklin’s “Respect”. Enter the B-52’s “Love Shack”. Enter Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog”. We would play those songs so loud and just dance and dance and dance until we just couldn’t dance anymore, and somehow the day was always better after that. Because the rhythm in our bodies matched with the rhythm of the music, and in sharing them together we created a community. And it healed us. Everyday.

Music is something that opens us to healing because in it we find connectedness. Not just to the rhythms of life and to the communities around us, but to the beating of our own hearts. For it is through music’s connection to the beating of our hearts that we are given the chance to shout something very important to the world. We are given the chance to shout, I am alive! I am alive!