From Elvis to Queensrÿche: How Music Becomes the Soundtrack of My Healing

Music is not a hobby to me—it is the language by which my soul understands the world. And I’ve come to believe we don’t really choose our music; our music chooses us, because on some sacred level it already knows the truth our hearts are aching to remember.

There are songs that have stopped me mid-breath, moments when sound didn’t just fill a room—it filled me. I remember the first time I truly heard Queensrÿche. Not background, not casual listening—felt, like electricity, through the ribs. When “Suite Sister Mary” found me, I was undone before I had words for why. The arrangement, the drama, the soaring ache—I cried without permission, the way you cry when something ancient inside your bones recognizes itself. That song didn’t entertain me; it awakened me. It taught me that music can be a spiritual event, a full-body remembering.

The Songs That Raised Me

I was raised on the old singing cowboys—Gene Autry and Roy Rogers—because that was my father’s world. He didn’t care to know music beyond them, and yet I learned everything from those voices: loyalty, grit, tenderness disguised as twang. Those records are the sound of my childhood kitchen, my dad’s quiet approval, the code of love I still try to live by.

I can still picture myself in the back of my dad’s old red Dodge Ram van, winding through the Catskills. The windows were cracked just enough to let in the pine air, and my grandmother’s crocheted blanket—soft white with light peach threading—was draped across the back seat. Johnny Horton’s “Sink the Bismarck” played from the cassette deck, and my dad sang along, tapping the steering wheel, utterly alive in that moment. I looked out at the mountains and felt a peace I didn’t yet know how to name. Even now, I don’t remember that moment—I return to it. Music doesn’t just hold memory—it resurrects it.

There were livelier moments too—my mother blasting “Mony Mony” in the living room until the walls hummed. My cousins, my brother, and I would jump around the furniture, laughing and dancing while she sang at the top of her lungs. That song still carries the smell of that house, the carpet under my feet, the wildness of joy. Music, even then, wasn’t something we listened to—it was something we lived inside.

And then there’s Elvis Presley, whose voice can call tears to my eyes before the first chorus. Elvis carried ache and holiness in the same breath. Johnny Cash felt like the ground beneath my feet—honest, steady, human. I walked down the aisle in church to his “Jackson” because nothing about my life has ever been conventional, and the truest love stories have a little wildfire in them.

Somewhere along the way, I fell in love with the drama that only music can hold. The first time I heard “Phantom of the Opera,” the lyrics clung to me like incense, following me through years and seasons. But it was “Music of the Night” that truly claimed me. When those first notes began, I wasn’t just listening—I was surrendering. It was beauty and fear and holiness all at once, a melody that pulled something ancient out of hiding. That score felt like stepping into a cathedral built of sound—a reminder that love can be terrifying and sacred at the same time.

And then there are voices that feel like home, no matter where I am: Karen Carpenter’s tender clarity, Patsy Cline’s bruised honey, Dolly Parton’s bright mercy. When Andrea Bocelli sings, I stop. The world stops. His voice is a prayer I don’t have to translate. Sometimes I don’t even want to know the words—I want to be carried by the feeling. That, to me, is a miracle.

Of course, there is also the fire: Aerosmith turning up the pulse in my chest, and a true love of mine, Sebastian Bach—the former Skid Row frontman—whose power lights something untamed in me. Those vocals don’t just hit notes; they strike matches. They remind me that being fully alive means letting the body participate in the hallelujah.

The Science That My Spirit Already Knew

Even before I studied the nervous system and hypnosis, I could feel what music does. Later, the words found me: how songs activate memory centers like the hippocampus and stir the amygdala; how rhythm can regulate the vagus nerve; how melody can invite the brain into alpha and theta states where healing, learning, and emotional integration naturally happen.

Neuroscientists have since confirmed it—music lights up more regions of the brain than any other human experience. It synchronizes heartbeat and breath, steadies cortisol levels, and reconnects the body to safety. I didn’t need a textbook to tell me that, but I smiled when it did. Of course music heals. Of course it lowers anxiety. Of course it helps us release what language can’t hold.

That’s why I use sound intentionally in my work with anxiety and hypnosis. A harmonic bed can be the softest bridge into safety. A drum can remind a tense body how to move again. A lyric can unstick a memory that’s been waiting at the door.

Music as Memory, Medicine, and Prayer

Some days a song will find me while I’m doing dishes, and suddenly I’m standing in a different year. I can smell the season, hear the laughter in a different kitchen, feel the exact weight of who I was. Music doesn’t just remind me—it reunites me with the parts of myself I’ve outgrown but still love.

When feelings jam up in my chest—grief with nowhere to land, joy with no witness, love that feels too big for a sentence—I don’t reach for solutions. I reach for sound. I let a guitar solo carry the ache. I let a choir widen my lungs. I let a quiet piano make space for the tears that know the way out better than I do.

Motherhood, Bare Feet, and the Living Room Stage

When I was pregnant, I sang to my belly and let our home be wrapped in melody. It felt like teaching my babies a language they’d recognize before they knew words. Now they request “our songs,” and we dance—barefoot in the kitchen, out in the grass, on the trampoline at dusk.

They feel music the way I do—fully. They close their eyes when Bocelli sings, spin in circles to Disney princess ballads, and stomp their feet to rock anthems as if their joy could crack open the sky. Watching them reminds me that music isn’t learned—it’s remembered. It’s something our souls already know.

In those moments, I feel my father in the room again, smiling in the edge of a country chorus. I feel every version of me—teenage, heartbroken, hopeful—singing along. I feel the steady hand of God in the rhythm of small feet on tile, the sacrament of ordinary joy.

Why I Keep Listening

I keep listening because music tells me the truth. It tells me who I’ve been and who I’m becoming. It stitches time together. It gives my body a way to pray when my mind is tired. It teaches my children to live with rhythm and reverence, to celebrate for no reason, to cry without shame, to rest without guilt, to dance like the floor is an altar.

I keep listening because every time I press play, I meet myself again.

And yes, even now, when I hear “Suite Sister Mary,” my chest tightens with the first measure. When the Phantom begins to rise, I’m sixteen and eternal all at once. When Bocelli opens his mouth, I remember that the same breath that made the stars is inside my lungs. When Karen sighs, when Patsy aches, when Dolly grins, when Elvis trembles, when Sebastian Bach roars, when Aerosmith burns—I am reminded that feeling everything is not a liability. It’s the gift.

Music is not just something I listen to—it is the language by which my soul understands the world. And I swear, we don’t choose our music. Our music chooses us, because it already knows the doorways in our hearts and the rooms that still need light.

A Gentle Invitation

What song chose you?
The one that made you cry in the car, or laugh in the kitchen, or dance in the dark like no one was watching?