The Music As Medicine Project is cultivating resilient cultures in our communities through in-person and online programming that democratizes access to healing and education, with offerings centered on practices of the Work that Reconnects, community singing, and ancestral healing.
As each day we face the news of climate chaos, political warfare, species extinction, and ecological and social suffering, we are asked to reconcile these collective traumas with all that is breaking in our hearts. It is natural at this moment to feel despair, overwhelm, and grief. Our work at Music As Medicine offers tangible tools, through transformational group work and teachings, for metabolizing grief, anger, paralysis, and fear into compassionate action in the world. We believe in our ability to heal, together.
When we partner together as communities and individuals, we bolster our capacities to resist injustice and flourish brilliantly.
Currently due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we are primarily offering courses through our online school, which offers a Work That Reconnects Facilitator Development Group, a WTR-based Support Group and other programs.
Our programming at Music As Medicine is to support innovative and evolving stewardship of the Work that Reconnects — the lineage of Joanna Macy, a scholar and respected elder in systems theory, deep ecology, and Buddhism. Our goal is that, with the Work that Reconnects, we help networks and social movements metabolize systemic trauma, cultivate energy for action, reconnect with the more-than-human world, and create meaningful art for social change.
While serving a diversity of communities and populations, we orient to centering BIPOC activists, organizers, healers, and educators. At our core, we seek to uplift and support all marginalized folks with access to the healing spaces and transformative experiences we offer. In particular, this has taken the form of creating inclusive spaces for mothers and parents, #blacklivesmatter activists, differently-abled veterans, those with chronic illness, as well as offering full scholarships to transgender and nonbinary folks. Overall in the last year, Music As Medicine has redistributed at least two hundred scholarships — amounting to $14,000.
At Music As Medicine, we do our best to listen and be sensitive to the systemic and structural oppression that privileges a small section of people with class, race, and gender access. So we are deepening our commitment to democratize our healing and education, never turning any participants away for lack of funds. Our Scholarship Fund is the primary leverage points in our organization ecosystem that liberates us to be able to effectively do our work in the world.
Support for the Scholarship Fund enables Music As Medicine to offer accessible transformative and healing experiences for marginalized communities and those most as risk by settler-colonial white-supremacist ableist cis-hetero-patriarchy.
Become a donor here to support us and our communities at the Evolving Edge of the Work that Reconnects:
Who We Are :
Music As Medicine was visioned, founded and is run by Iranian-American artist & facilitator Lydia Violet Harutoonian. Through the programming of Music As Medicine, Lydia serves as a keeper and steward in the lineage Joanna Macy and the Work that Reconnects. Lydia’s work was born out of a call to respond to the ecological and social crises of our time, recognizing the profound power of groups engaging in the WTR to cultivate healing and empowerment in these critical times. Lydia envisions a just and liberated world with equity for all — Music As Medicine is an offering in the service of that vision.
Our reach as an organization and influence in cultural change is supported by our cooperative partnerships with artists, educators, and organizers. Music As Medicine collaborates with these public figures in our public offerings, including musicians such as Rising Appalachia, Amikaeyla Gaston, Kele Nitoto, MaMuse, Tannur SheWrightz Ali, Ayla Nereo, and and teachers such as Joanna Macy, adrienne maree brown, Adrian Villasenor-Galarza, and Penny Livingston.
In our workshop offerings and programs, we consistently partner with a local organizer who can help us orient to their particular regional struggles. We have collaborated with organizers such as Lydia Atkins and Lindsey Jayne of Wild Ground Alabama, Sarah Wu of Envision Festival, Adriana Ayales, Free Fereal, Journey Allen, Polly Howells, and Kara Bender. It is through such co-conspiration that Music As Medicine extends our grass-roots network of people empowered to address climate chaos and systemic injustice.
Resources:
- Website: www.musicasmedicineproject.org
- Contribute to our Scholarship Fund: https://musicasmedicine.wedid.it/
- Online program offerings: https://music-as-medicine-project.teachable.com/
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