Wisdom is a complex human trait, characterized by a marriage of the intellect with the emotions, and put into action. By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest. [attributed to Confucius] The saddest aspect of life right now is that science…
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Value for Friday of Week 41 in the season of Assessing
Healing
Returning home, taking comfort, making peace with and embracing the past all make healing possible.
- Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. [Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet.]
- Healing yourself is connected with healing others. Quite often, it’s not that easy to heal yourself, it’s much easier to reach out and heal others, and by doing that, you heal yourself. [Yoko Ono]
- What I want for my fans and for the world, for anyone who feels pain, is to lean into that pain and embrace it as much as they can and begin the healing process. [attributed to Lady Gaga]
“Emotional healing is the process of recovering from emotional pain and trauma. It involves working through feelings of hurt, grief, anger, or fear that arise from past experiences, and gradually restoring emotional well-being. This journey enables us to come to terms with our experiences, release pent-up emotions, and ultimately find a way to move forward with a healthier mental state. The emotional healing process typically includes acknowledging and expressing your feelings, seeking support, practicing self-care, and sometimes, professional therapy.” “. . . emotional well-being predicts long-term prognosis of physical illness. This suggests that enhancement of emotional well-being may improve the prognosis of physical illness . . .” “Emotional healing becomes more plausible when the patient’s inner strength attains the level of strength of the disturbance, represented by ‘level of potency’, which allows the patient to cope with his/her disturbance more successfully.”
Real
True Narratives
- William S. Sax, God of Justice: Ritual Healing and Social Justice in the Central Himalayas (Oxford University Press, 2009).
- Catherine McCall, When the Piano Stops: A Memoir of Healing from Sexual Abuse (Seal Press, 2009).
- Jane Elliott, The Little Prisoner: How a Childhood Was Stolen and a Trust Betrayed (Element Books, 2005).
- Kristina Jones, Celeste Jones and Juliana Buhring, Not Without My Sister: The True Story of Three Girls Violated and Betrayed (Harper Collins UK, 2007).
- Judy Westwater, Street Kid: One Child's Desperate Fight for Survival (Harper Collins UK, 2006).
- Jennings Michael Burch, They Cage the Animals at Night (Perfection Learning, 1985).
- Peter Roche, Unloved: The True Story of a Stolen Childhood (Penguin, 2008).
- Héctor Abad, Oblivion: A Memoir (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012): the author’s “searing memoir” about growing up with his father.
- Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (Random House, 2016): “For all its terrible human drama and grotesque political background, the most impressive thing about ‘The Return’ is that it also tells a common story, the story of sons everywhere who have lost their fathers, as all sons eventually must.”
Technical and Analytical Readings
- Esther M. Sternberg, Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being (Belknap Press, 2010).
- Fraser Watts, Spiritual Healing: Scientific and Religious Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
- Lewis B. Smedes, Shame and Grace: Healing the Shame We Don't Deserve (Harper San Francisco, 1993).
- Lewis B. Smedes, Forgive & Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don't Desrerve (Harper Collins, 1984).
- Ronald Potter Efron and Patricia Potter-Efron, Letting Go of Shame: Understanding How Shame Affects Your Life (Hazeldon, 1989).
- Rex Briggs, Transforming Anxiety, Transcending Shame (Health Communications, 1999).
- John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame that Binds You (HCI, 2005).
- Harriet Lerner, The Dance of Fear: Rising Above Anxiety, Fear and Shame to Be Your Best and Bravest Self (Harper, 2005).
- Gerald Jampolsky, Good-Bye to Guilt: Releasing Fear Through Forgiveness (Bantam, 1985).
- Gregory L. Jantz, Healing the Scars of Emotional Abuse (Revell, 2009).
- Wendy Maltz, The Sexual Healing Journey: A Guide for Survivors of Sexual Abuse (Harper, 2001).
- Nicole Braddock Bromley, Moving from Silence to Healing After Childhood Sexual Abuse (Moody Publishers, 2007).
- John Bradshaw, Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child (Bantam, 1990).
- Lucia Cappacchione, Recovery of Your Inner Child: The Highly Acclaimed Method for Liberating Your Inner Self (Simon & Schuster, 1991).
Photographs
Documentary and Educational Films
- Heimat: a documentary trilogy chronicling a German family from 1919-2000
- Moving Midway: exploring emotional attachments to history, including family history, and the human capacity for moving on
- Hell and Back Again: a badly wounded U.S. soldier returns from service in Afghanistan
Imaginary
Fictional Narratives
Novels:
- Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer (Delacorte, 1995), about a man's gift for healing others.
- Gary D. Schmidt, Okay for Now (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011): a children’s book about “an eighth grader’s healing and discovery through art.”
- Kaui Hart Hemmings, The Possibilities: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, 2014): “ . . . a novel about learning to move forward, even while haunted by such dark thoughts.”
- Erika T. Wurth, White Horse: A Novel (Flatiron Books, 2022): “Kari’s mother abandoned her as a newborn, a foundational wound that Kari does not want to reopen.”
- Laura Zigman, Small World: A Novel (Ecco, 2023), “is a graceful swan dive into the question of how a family rearranges itself after the death of a child.”
- Chetna Maroo, Western Lane: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023): after her mother’s death, a girl finds refuge playing squash.
- Han Kang, We Do Not Part: A Novel (2021), “takes on the lasting devastation of the violent suppression of the Jeju uprising of 1948 and 1949, probably unfamiliar to many American readers despite the complicity of the United States military in the massacres that took place in the name of anticommunism. Between 1947 and 1954 on Jeju, an idyllic subtropical island off the coast of South Korea, at least 30,000 people were killed in mostly government-perpetrated atrocities, which involved gang rape, infanticide and mass executions of civilians.”
From the dark side:
- Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux,1970), about emotional wounds.
Poetry
Books of poems:
- Dana Levin, Now Do You Know Where You Are: Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2022), is “the diary of a poet’s painful passage from not writing to writing again. Levin freely shares the self-doubts, false starts and dead ends of her return to poetry in this unguarded literary experiment.”
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
Robert Schumann, Symphony No. 2 in C Major, Op. 61 (1846) (approx. 35-40’) (list of recorded performances), “began to take shape at the end of 1845, shortly after his recovery from a nervous breakdown. His comment then to Felix Mendelssohn, ‘drums and trumpets have been sound- ing in my mind for some time now,’ might strike us as a wry reflection on his dis- turbed mental condition, replete with aural fantasies, of the year preceding.” “The narrative of the C major Symphony is that of the journey from despair to healing and redemption”. In this work, “Schumann reinvented his own compositional language and created an alternative way of thinking about the symphony – despite the onset of the syphilis that was eventually to kill him”. Top recorded performances are conducted by Toscanini in 1941, Bernstein in 1960, Szell in 1969, Karajan in 1971, Sawallisch in 1972, Kubelik in 1978, Gardiner in 1998, Gielen in 2010, Holliger in 2012, Abbado in 2013, and Thielemann in 2018.
Michael Torke, “Last” (2025) (approx. 47’) is a set of “twelve meditative pieces” for violin and orchestra, each piece being about a particular framework of the past. Torke writes: “The Stoics recommend we live in the present: to fret over the past or stress about the future is counterproductive because these lie beyond our control. But I think there are other ways to respond to the past. We can cherish and even mourn what is no longer present. For me, our past populates our present, whether it be last year, last month, last week, or last Sunday.” The work “can allow us to simply let go of the burdens we carry – even if just for a few minutes at a time.” It “invites us to slow down the frenzied pace of our lives, to reflect on who we are as human beings, where we have been and where we are going.”
Perhaps Tibetan chant offers the music most overtly focused on healing:
- Chant of healing mantra (121’)
- Tayata Om mantra (65’), for healing all sufferings
Many pastoral-toned short works by British music suggest a return home to England’s soothing and verdant landscape.
- Ralph Vaughan Williams, Fantasia on Greensleeves (1934) (approx. 4’) (list of recorded performances)
- Vaughan Williams, English Folk Song Suite (1913) (approx. 10’) (list of recorded performances)
- Edward Elgar, Serenade in E minor for Strings, Op. 20 (1892) (approx. 13’) (list of recorded performances)
- George Butterworth, The Banks of Green Willow (1913) (approx. 7’) (list of recorded performances)
- Peter Warlock, Capriol Suite (1927) (approx. 11’) (list of recorded performances) “is set of six contrasting dances in a renaissance style.”
- Frederick Delius, The Walk to the Paradise Garden (from “A Village Romeo and Juliet”) (1906) (approx. 10-11’) (list of recorded performances)
- Ernest John Moeran, Piano Trio in D Major (1920) (approx. 26’) (list of recorded performances)
Charles Koechlin, chamber works:
- Lajos Lencsés, “Chamber Works for Oboe” album (1999) (56’)
- Sonatine für Oboe d’amore mit Begleitung von Flöte, Klarinette, Harfe und Streichsextett, Op. 194 (1943) (approx. 21’)
- Sonate für Oboe und Klavier, Op. 58 (1916) (approx. 26’) (list of recorded performances)
Other compositions:
- Jonathan Leshnoff, Of Thee I Sing (2020) (approx. 22’) is a commissioned work via the Oklahoma City Philharmonic, in response to the terrorist bombing in 1998. The composer says: “The idea would be a 20-25 min piece for orchestra and chorus that transcends the atrocity and focuses on all the good that came out of it in the last 25 years. A city growing together. But also transcending death. To the point where in this bizarre world music actually unifies and makes the listener step out of the crazy into a spiritual sphere. Where the spiritual becomes reality and the other just a dream.” OPC’s music director said, we “didn't want a requiem. ... My thing was that there was something that had to be healing about it . . .”
- Liza Lim, A Sutured World (2024) (approx. 29’) “. . . asks ‘how does light arrive in the world?’ Like all the famous poets say (Rumi, Ursula le Guin, Leonard Cohen, Paul McCartney, Emily Dickenson and others): through a crack, a laceration, a broken wing, a homeless person; through falling, through pleasure, through a flutter in the throat . . .” [the composer]
Albums:
- Steven Halpern, “Music for Sound Healing” (1999) (69’) and “Music for Sound Healing 2.0” (2017) (79’)
- Steven Halpern, “Crystal Bowl Healing” (2003) (75’) and “Crystal Bowl Healing 2.0” (2018) (80’)
- Steven Halpern, “Self-Healing” (1975) (62’) and “Self-Healing, Vol. 2” (1982) (75’)
- Bonnie Rideout, “Celtic Circles” (1993) (57’)
- Nawang Khechog, “Music as Medicine” (2005) (69’)
- Klaus Wiese, “The Healing Touch of Tambura I” (1991) (59’)
- Ruthie Foster, “Healing Time” (2022) (47’): “It leaves you feeling that everything’s alright, which is what Healing Time is all about.”
- Matthew Bourne, “This Is Not for You” (2024) (38’) is an album of introspective solo piano pieces.
- Mthuthu, “Indumiso YabeNguni” (2025) (33’) “crafts a rich African soundscape filled with pulsating rhythms, soulful vocals, and intricate melodies. Each track invites listeners into a harmonious world where the past and present beautifully converge.”
- Laurel Premo, “Laments” (2025) (27’) “presents four pieces of griefwork that sing connection. Delivered through solo voice and fiddle and rooted in the functional music of lamentation, these wailing songs of few words are not themselves live grief ritual work, but prepared compositions that echo sounds found by the maker performing such rites on herself.” It “features four compositions for solo fiddle and voice born out of an instinctive and spontaneous draw into lamentation when my body demanded it as part of its healing processes”, says Premo.
Music: songs and other short pieces
- Sara Evans, “A Little Bit Stronger” (lyrics)
- Nawang Khechog, “Healing Through Kindness”
- Nawang Khechog, “Music as Medicine”
- R.E.M., “Everybody Hurts” (lyrics)
Visual Arts
- Jackson Pollock, Number 1: Lavender Mist (1950)
Film and Stage
- The Horse Whisperer
- I’ve Loved You So Long, on the healing power of Love and understanding
- Silver Linings Playbook: sometimes healing is about making the day about someone besides myself.
- The Science of Healing
- Goodbye, Mr. Chips, about a teacher looking back on his life and service
- Limbo: spiritually, this film is about healing, though the story takes another turn throughout the final extended segment, just as the characters are healing themselves and each other through love.
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