Susan Elizabeth Hale
// Author & Music TherapistSUSAN ELIZABETH HALE is an author, internationally renowned music therapist, and sound healer from Asheville, North Carolina. Her book “Song And Silence: Voicing The Soul” (1995) was available from La Alameda Press, and “Sacred Space, Sacred Sound: The Acoustic Mysteries Of Holy Places” (2007) is available from Quest Books, and was recently translated into Italian through Edizioni Mediterranee. Susan Elizabeth Hale is the Director of the Songkeeper Apprenticeship, a Fellow of the Association for Music and Imagery, and a seminar leader, teacher, and guide, helping people to explore their sacred paths to find and free their natural voices. Susan is also a pioneer in the fields of music therapy and sound healing, a creative mystic, and soul singer who loves to travel, teach, write, and inspire others to live their creative potential. Recently she created Earth Day: Sing for the Trees, a global celebration that involved participation from people in thirty-nine countries.
Website: www.songkeeper.net
Photo: Susan Elizabeth Hale / SongKeeper.net
Interview:
Music has been with us since the earliest of time. Bird bone flutes are some of the oldest instruments, but older still is the human voice which shaped the air in painted caves summoning, conjuring, and invoking spirits on the breath stream, the animating principle of all life.
Music is our common language for matters of the spirit. Music travels through the air and is an unseen force that we feel moving inside of us, awakening emotions, images, dreams, and memories. Music making and music listening can awaken numinous experiences that can lead to a direct transmission from the Divine. For example, for one client, listening to Vaughan Williams’ “Fantasia On A Theme” by Thomas Talis led him into an ecstatic state where he experienced the pyramids being built out of light. He described a state of oneness that led to a profound change in his outer life. This modern day example leads us back into the awe our ancestors must have felt when they sang in painted caves. Therefore, I believe music is a form of magic.
“Music making and music listening can awaken numinous experiences that can lead to a direct transmission from the Divine.” – Susan Elizabeth Hale, author of “Sacred Space, Sacred Sound: The Acoustic Mysteries Of Holy Places”
