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The Award Winning Healing music for the healthcare environment

What Does the Future of Healthcare Sound Like?

Why Arts-Infused Strategies Can Support Healthcare to Offer the Leading Edge for More Humane Care

Day in, day out, Americans are subjected to endless debates and disagreements concerning what kind of healthcare system we as a culture wish to provide our citizens. Is it a privilege or a right? Can we create sustainable, scalable ways to develop humane modalities, environments, and systems that would care for people in ways that are not just about alleviating symptoms and delivering medical protocols, but are also about treating people with greater compassion, sensitivity and respect? Could we become compassionate enough to create healthcare systems that would fulfill the dream so many health professionals share, to embody the true manifestation of what it means to be “care-ing”?

Now is the Time

If we ever wake ourselves up to help set us on a course away from the world of our fears so we might shift our attention toward the fertile world of our dreams, it will clearly take all of us: the politicians, the CEOs, the academics, the media, the healthcare professionals and the scientists.  But if we are truly serious about making this shift, it’s time to intentionally integrate what the mainstream can no longer deny is true.

It will take the artist.

 

Why the artist?

The language of the arts is universal. It speaks to each human heart in its own dialect, in ways that touch and ignite precisely what is needed for that heart to open and bloom.   The arts hold the key that unlocks the human soul, long held in myopic confinement by the logical eloquence – and dominance – of our rational minds.

Ever willing to affirm Descartes’ interminable delusion, the world’s developed nations are now awakening to a new realization of unparalleled importance:  The unquestioned belief that the human mind alone can solve our most intractable challenges is a delusion. Most forward-thinking futurists now believe that the genius of the human mind, extraordinary and illuminating though it is, must be tempered and infused with the wisdom of the human heart. And what domain touches the human heart most effectively, efficiently and powerfully?

The arts. The multi-dimensional, multi-sensory, non-linear and immersive experiences that only the arts can deliver.

The arts – especially when created with life-enhancing intentions – provide a direct connection to that part of us that makes us distinctly human. The generosity of compassion, the poignancy of presence, the interplay of our interdependency; the tender courage of our vulnerability and the shared concern for the common good. These can be best elicited through the domain of the arts.

Neuroscientist Dacher Keltner’s research describes these distinctly human traits as ‘hard-wired’ in the anatomy of our brains. When awakened and utilized, these qualities strengthen our evolutionary capacities not only for surviving – but for increasing the chances that we as a species will thrive.

The arts are endowed with the unique power to transmit these kinds of experiences directly to our senses and to the very center of our consciousness.  Even more interestingly, the arts reach our awareness “under the radar”,  by impacting our subconscious –  from which so much of how we behave, relate, care for each other, and create meaning originates.

 

The Art Form that Reaches Our Subconscious Most Effectively

Of all the existing art forms, the art form that can most effectively alter our bio-chemistry, activate our neurotransmitters, and reduce stress and suffering associated with pain and trauma is the modality that can shift our vibrational field at the cellular level, activating waves of feeling within us. It’s what many refer to as “the universal language of emotion”, and of course that art form is music.  By generating waves of feeling within us, life-enhancing music and sound experiences can catalyze our vital, life-enhancing human traits in remarkable ways.

Now is not the time to invest in the belief that if we only had enough scientific research, technological breakthroughs, and symptomatic or reductionist strategies, we would finally be able to figure out how to create a better world, not to mention a more humane healthcare system.

Now is the time to be wholehearted and audacious. Now is the time to explore and integrate the compelling revelations about the kinds of intelligence from which we can benefit by integrating the wisdom in our “heart and gut brains”. Now is the time to expand boundaries and learn about the beneficial results of mindfulness, or the counter-intuitive wisdom of radically caring for our beloved, overworked professional caregivers before even thinking about patients.  Now is the time to use what author Daniel Pink calls our  ‘whole, new minds”.

When we honor all aspects of our humanness, we can thrive more harmoniously, care for one another more humanely and collaborate more cooperatively, all while staying grounded, pragmatic, and medically competent.  By even utilizing just a few ways to artfully honor the heart and soul components of our humanity in healthcare, we can learn to treat one another with greater compassion and soulfulness.  In a world where so much suffering, insensitivity, and chaos exists, we need what the arts – and the artists – can offer us so naturally: beauty, coherence, inspiration and awe, every day, as much as is feasible, in every part of our lives.

If you work in healthcare today, these needs are more immediate, more poignant, and more pressing than ever before. This is what Aesthetic Audio Systems’ programs have been created to address. We are dedicated to harnessing the astonishing power of music to create supportive fields of vibrational coherence that will resonate and awaken the highest intentions of the spaces in your institution, for a more effective and successful healthcare experience for all involved.

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