There is a question every healing music practitioner eventually asks: why did I start?
For me, the answer lives in both directions, backward and forward at once.
I picked up a guitar when I was young because it felt like the most natural thing in the world. I could not have told you then what it would become. I only knew it felt right.
Years later, when I began bringing my guitar to hospital patients as a Certified Therapeutic Musician, I watched what music could do in a clinical space. I watched patients soften. I watched the room change. I began to understand that the instrument I had carried most of my life was not just a personal passion. It was a tool for something much larger.
Then came the fires.
I do not say that lightly. There were losses in my life, significant ones, that arrived the way a wildfire arrives: without warning, consuming everything in their path, leaving ash where there had once been forest.
But the giant sequoia has something to teach us here.
Its cones can remain sealed for up to twenty years, held by nature itself, waiting for the right conditions. When a fire sweeps through, the intense heat rising from the flames dries those cones from the outside in, and they open. The seeds fall. Not in spite of the fire. Because of it.
That is how Acoustic Healing began.
Not as a plan, but as a seed released at exactly the right moment, into exactly the right soil.
If you are a healing music practitioner reading this: your path did not begin at your first certification. It began long before. And every fire you have walked through has been part of making you ready.
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