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On Becoming a Certified Music Practitioner
“Have Harpsicle, Will Soothe”

Joan Scott Lowe, BSN, MPH, CCH, LMT, is clearly a woman of letters. Her next healing designation, CMP, will mean she’s also becoming a woman of notes and scales.

Along with two advanced academic and professional designations in homeopathy, Joan is an AIHT adjunct faculty member who trained in nursing and massage therapy. Having worked in hospitals and home health agencies prior to establishing her holistic health practice in 1993, Joan has been a church musician throughout her adult life.

As music director and healing music facilitator for up to three churches at a time, soon she’ll take her act on the road—into hospitals, nursing homes and wherever else she can minister with music to people who are chronically ill, injured, or near death.

On harpsicle, Joan Scott Lowe is accompanied by CMP mentor, Connie LaMonte on recorder. Certified Music Practitioners bring intentional sound healing into homes, hospitals and hearts. The handy harpsicle is interactive, allowing even the weakest fingers to pluck, strum, sense and feel its vibrational healing resonance.

Joan is enrolled in a self-paced healing music training series, the Music for Healing and Transition Program (MHTP), for which she won an independent scholarship. Based in New York, established 11 years ago as a non-profit educational institution, MHTP recognizes the timeless power of music as a therapeutic enhancement to mind/body/spirit healing and the life/death transition.

Joan’s mentor and muse, Connie LaMonte, is a former school counselor whose lifelong hobby led her to become Alabama’s first Certified Music Practitioner (CMP) in 1999. Connie never dreamed that her formal music outreach and her creative holistic improvisations—such as chakra therapy toning with singing bowls, chanting and meditative humming—would also resonate in healing the healer. Music’s Divine energies have brought an ever-accessible, soothing accompaniment during her own dances with cancer.

Music is scientifically proven to help bolster the immune system by lowering blood pressure, anxiety and depression, enhancing sleep and relaxation. In Biblical times, when King Saul fell victim to evil spirits, he sought the music of David’s harp for relief and deliverance (1 Samuel 16:23).

Within healing transitions, creative processes such as music, storytelling, movement and drawing can serve as abstract means of exploring core issues and potentialities.

As a universal language, music’s calming gifts of peace, hope and encouragement can open a healing space for people dealing with the difficulties and mysteries of life and death.

For family members coping with the illness of a loved one, or trying to understand a seemingly senseless tragedy, people of all ages and all backgrounds have experienced music’s power to soothe, heal and bolster their courage in difficult times.