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Saturday, December 17, 2005

Carnival of Healing # 21: 5th Chakra: Doorway to the Song of the Heart

This week’s Carnival of Healing carries the theme of the 5th chakra. The fifth or Throat chakra is located at the top of your throat, and is centered in your spinal column behind the “V” in your collarbone. The fifth chakra energetically controls the thyroid, parathyroid, shoulders, neck, arms, and hands.

The fifth chakra is the center of communication, both verbal and non-verbal in your physical body. This is the area of self-expression, of speaking your truth, and allowing others to speak theirs. Your fifth chakra stores self knowledge as well as the information from your senses of hearing, taste and smell. It is also the center for telepathy. The color blue is associated with the fifth chakra.

This is a color with a high frequency. Only the colors of indigo and violet have higher frquencies. Aquarmarine, sodalite, azurite, chysocholla, blue opal, blue topaz, are associated with the fifth chakra. Flowers essences that connect with the fifth chakra are cosmos, larch, and trumpet vine. In traditional cultures the deities of Saravati, Ganga, the Muses, Nabu, Brigit, Apollo, Hermes, Seshat were associated with the fifth chakra.

Here is a link to many articles and resources on the fifth chakra and a chakra balancing meditation, as well as a wonderful way to incorporate sound and music into an 11 step program to expand your intuitive abilities.

The healing properties of the fifth chakra have been used for millennia by shamans, healers, priests priestesses and ordinary people. It may have been the first healing practice, when early humans lived in caves. It may be the song of mother to a child, the sound of chant or mantra, the toning of sounds for balance and healing.

A Fifth Chakra Healing Story:

Shin, the snow leopard at the San Francisco Zoo, took a turn for the worse in early May of 1995. She was a month shy of her tenth birthday, and she'd lost a third of her weight. It was clear to the veterinarians, who had her on antibiotics, that she was exhausted and dangerously ill. Their tentative diagnosis: inflammatory bowel disease. By midmonth, Shin stopped eating. She refused further medicine and would not come down from her perch. The luster of her coat was fading. She had never seen the world she was produced for, having been born in the Bronx Zoo and having spent her whole life in captivity. But her native Asian habitat was reflected in her beautiful coat: The gray of her fur was the hue of its mountain mists, the brown of her camouflage spots was the color of its ragged earth. Shin's secretive sisters were rarely seen in the wild, but their footprints were sometimes spotted as high as twenty thousand feet in the snows of Tibet.

As it happened, the third week of May, eleven Tibetan monks arrived in San Francisco from their home-in-exile in Tenzin Gang, India. They had been invited to perform their Gyuto Tantric chants by Mickey Hart, the drummer of the Grateful Dead. They asked the keepers of the San Francisco Zoo if there were any sick animals for whom they might offer a puja, a traditional prayer of purification, a prayer that Tibetans believe is not simply a petition for health but a way of actually strengthening the flow of life-energy in a sick creature. The sound itself rights the body.

And so the monks, dressed in their saffron robes, were shown to the Feline Conservation Center, where Shin was draped listlessly on her perch. They formed two rows in front of her cage. None of them had ever laid eyes on a snow leopard; like Shin, most of them had never even been to Tibet. But when they raised their voices in the droning overtone chant of their monastic tradition, Shin stirred. She climbed down the logs from her perch fifteen feet above the ground and came to the edge of her cage. Her whiskers poked through the wire mesh. She blinked and rubbed her face with her paws. And as the monks sang, Shin sat raptly as if she recognized some music she had never heard from a country she had never hunted. The puja lasted only five minutes, but it seemed much longer to the people in attendance—the keepers from the feline center, zoo staff, an Associated Press religion reporter. It seemed timeless and exquisitely beautiful. It was as if a bond had formed between the monks and the leopard, and with each minute that Shin remained at the edge of the cage, listening, some old kinship bound the wounds of exile in man and animal both.

When the chanting stopped, Shin turned and walked away. Later that day, her appetite came back, and for the first time in two weeks she showed some enthusiasm for her diet of horse meat and fortified meal. "She seemed so peaceful," said Nancy Chan, the zoo's publicist. "She started to do better."

Alas, healing and curing are not the same. On the ninth of June, her tenth birthday, the snow leopard died.

A personal note to this story, I love the snow leopards and have been to visit them in the San Francisco Zoo many times. If you speak to them in Chinese, they don’t respond. If you speak to them in Tibetan, their head picks ups and they are attentive. If you sing to them in Tibetan they come over to you and look deeply at you. That has been my experience.

The uses of sound and music in healing are many and have been a particular interest of mine in my spiritual healing and medical intuitive practice.

"Novalis, the German poet, said, "Every sickness is a musical problem; the healing, therefore, is a musical resolution. The shorter the resolution, the greater the musical talent of the doctor." Unfortunately they don’t teach Novalis in most medical schools. So it is important to re-discover and to create new modalities of healing with the fifth chakra.

The Sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan writes in his book “The Mysticism of Sound”
The life absolute from which has sprung all that is felt, seen and perceived, and into which all again merges in time, is a silent, motionless and eternal life... Every motion that springs forth from this eternal life is a vibration and a creator of vibrations...The human being is not only formed of vibrations, but lives and moves in them; they surround us as the fish is surrounded by water, and we contain them within as the tank contains water...Creation begins with the activity of consciousness, which may be called vibration ...Sound gives to the consciousness an evidence of its existence... All things being derived from and formed of vibrations have sound hidden within them, as fire is hidden in flint; and each atom of the universe confesses by its tone, ‘My sole origin is sound.’ If any solid or hollow sonorous body is struck it will answer back ‘I am sound.’

Many musicians know of the healing properties of sound, by the opening of themselves to the flow of sound from their voice or their instrument.

The group Sigur Ros (pronounced SIG-ger roas) from Reykjavik, Iceland has a unique, ethereal and atmospheric sound. Their music has been compared to (Pink Floyd x Godspeed You Black Emperor) + Radiohead.

Here is a concert of theirs from 2005 in Maryland from the National Public Radio blog.

Another audio resoource that explores healing thru music is the WGBH program.

Sound & Spirit: This program weaves history, myth, and spiritual traditions together with music to take listeners on a journey around the world and through the ages.

For example this weeks program is:

Blessed Virgin MaryMother, Maiden, Comforter and Friend--some of the many aspects of Mary, as expressed in prayer, art and music from around the world and through the ages. Ellen Kushner explores this rich tradition including music of Stravinsky, Monteverdi, J. S. Bach and John Tavener, 13th-century Cantigas de Santa Maria, Irish singer Nóirín Ní Riain, Incan festivals and the legend of the Black Virgin of Brunettella.

In the music of the Mevlevi Sufi’s there are many healing songs and musics. The CD “Rivers of One” by Oruj Guvenc from Turkey is the first time a "Makam" has been available on CD. Makams are musical tonalities that have specific edfects on the physical and spiritual aspects of the human being. The Rast Makam enhances deep calmness, improves flexibility of the limbs, and stimulates clear thinking.

This is music that provides an opening to the deeper realm within all of us.

For music of the first century A.D, in Israel we have San Antonio Vocal Arts Ensemble
(SAVAE) CD entitled “Ancient Echoes”.

The spiritual grandeur of the Temple... the earthy simplicity of a caravan campfire... the refined formality of Herod’s court. The music on “Ancient Echoes” hopes to capture the atmosphere of these contrasting settings that existed in the Holy Land two thousand years ago. Yet, there is little precise knowledge of the music that flourished prior to the destruction of the Temple in 70 c.e.. How can one hope to recreate it-

By studying archeological findings—illustrations etched in stone, sculpture, coins, and musical instrument—as well as written historical accounts and biblical texts, one can weave the clues together. But for this recording SAVAE’s most significant resource was the landmark work by musicologist A.Z. Idelsohn.

In addition to the musical challenges, the ancient pronunciation of Hebrew and Aramaic is uncertain. In order to approach these dialects SAVAE studied Hebrew, Aramaic, and Quranic Arabic with native speakers and scholars. Enriched by history and Idelsohn’s vast body of work—and inspired by the guidance of our teachers—SAVAE began to listen for the “ancient echoes” from the Holy Land in order to recreate its music.

Each year I compile a list with reviews of what I consider the best recordings of healing music from all traditions, cultures, and periods. These are the ones that best express the use of music for healing of the spirit, mind, heart and body. If you would like to receive a copy please email me at medicalintuitive@comcast.net and I will forward you a copy of the list for 2005.

Listen Well,

Be Well,

Be Love,

Christopher Stewart
Medical Intuitive ~ Spiritual Healer
http://www.clairvoyantguide.com/


Next week the Carnival of Healing returns home to Healing.About.com for it's Christmas edition. If you would like to submit your blog post for consideration in an upcoming edition of the Carnival, please visit the Carnival home page.

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posted by Christopher P. Stewart @ 11:59 AM   |