Dr. Helen Bonny
// AuthorDR. HELEN BONNY is an author and Founder of The Bonny Method of Guided Imagery and Music, the inspiration behind the Bonny Institute, now retired and living in Vero Beach, Florida. Her books “Music And Your Mind: Listening With A New Consciousness” (1990), co-authored with Louis Savary, and “Music Consciousness: The Evolution Of Guided Imagery And Music” (2002), co-authored with Lisa Summer, are both available from Barcelona Publishers. Helen Bonny’s music therapy techniques are foundational to Kenneth Bruscia’s and Denise Grocke’s book “Guided Imagery And Music: The Bonny Method And Beyond” (2002) also available from Barcelona Publishers. Dr. Helen Bonny pioneered the development of Guided Imagery and Music (GIM), referring to all forms of music-imaging in an expanded state of consciousness.
Photo: Bea Stoner / The Bonny Foundation
Interview:
Everyone needs a passion in their lives. We need it to live fully and freely. Something to give our “all” to; something that is big enough to completely lift us out of the usual humdrum feelings of dull mere living through our days. What is your passion? For Saint Francis of Assisi, the passion was his vision of Christ, a daily Christ-Consciousness through his vows of poverty, devotion, and joy. For Heinrich Schliemann, the passion was to discover, to dig in ruins, and find the gold of Troy. Is it the Hero’s quest? That and more. It is using oneself fully, every ounce of oneself in total devotion to a goal that is bigger than self, bigger than life. If it is not bigger than life, then one comes to the end of one’s passion, as is too true of a physical love passion, and finds it has evaporated as mist before the sun and there is nothing left but the shell. What is your passion? Mine is music. It is endless. There is nothing in great music that does not point beyond itself to a greater extension of itself. Music is an enigma. It beckons and calls; it engulfs and fulfills, but it always leads on. After the last note has ended, in the auditory sense, it continues to resound into the seeming emptiness. It is music that is the passion, or can it be that music is only the generator, the stimulus, the perpetuator, the genius of the universe? Does music lead on much as a guide leads on to greater awareness? To fuller becomingness? Is that our passion: to become all that we are and more?
“Music is an enigma. It beckons and calls; it engulfs and fulfills, but it always leads on.”
– Dr. Helen Bonny, author of “Music And Your Mind: Listening With A New Consciousness”
