Music as a Healing Power

Interview with Ciarán Sheehan and Catherine Nadal

Celebrated singer Ciarán Sheehan, one of the stars of The Four Phantoms, recently discussed the topic of music as a healing force to help individuals recover from trauma with Catherine Nadal, a well-known New York City-based psychic medium. The Four Phantoms brings together the former lead performers of the Tony Award-winning Broadway show, The Phantom of the Opera. Catherine and Ciarán use their gifts to help and serve others, relieving stress and anxiety.

In its most abstract form, the power of music has always confounded Ciarán. “You know, why does music work the way it works? Why do a certain set of intervals at certain lengths suddenly go BAM, and you’re in floods? You’re just so emotionally affected by things like that.” After a lifetime of performing, he understands the healing abilities of music that he calls “God’s currency.”

Ciarán spent his early years in America, singing for a Catholic boys’ choir. For Ciarán, much of what inspired him was the “spiritual power” and the sort of “theatricality” of the Catholic mass that began shaping his passion for singing and theater. In addition, the “energetic exchange of love” between him, the choir, and the audience uplifted and inspired him. He’s observed how different pitches affect the human body, the various chakras in particular ways, and their relationship to helping people out of spiritual or emotional trauma.

When Ciarán was about eight, he moved to Dublin and switched from singing for people to singing for female bovines. He said, “So my father’s older brother had this beautiful tenor voice; he was a dairy farmer. He would serenade his cows when he milked them. And he insisted on milking them by hand because he said that produced more milk, but he would sing with them. And so, he made me sing. And he said the two songs that produce the most milk from the cows were ‘I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,’ and ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree.’“

Then when he was about 20, Ciarán was back in the United States and joined a heavy metal band in New Jersey. While performing in this band, he experienced an out-of-body experience during a serious motor vehicle accident, after which he decided he needed a change. “Our lives are supposed to be joyful and fun. And I was missing the ride by being angry and afraid.” This realization “awakened a spiritual path” and helped guide him directionally toward the theater. After his introduction to friend and mentor Harold Prince and with the introduction to psychic medium friends Catherine Nadal and James Van Praagh, he found his way to spiritual healing as a practice.

Catherine and Ciarán became good friends, and this brought their families together. After being introduced to many spiritual gifts, Ciarán later became certified in a type of spiritual healing called Integrated Energy Therapy, or “IET,” a similar treatment to Reiki. When working, he incorporates his voice into the IET process, with which he has had significant success.

With his voice as his tool in his practice, he has discovered the art of helping others open up and express their emotions. He and other professionals have found how we store emotions in our bodies and how we need to release them by letting them out. However, not everyone he’s found can be open. “People wear invisible armor to protect themselves, and it becomes a habit; it becomes difficult to break those habits, and I think that’s why people end up getting sick and unhappy.” They struggle to embrace the beauty of the journey. “I can only speak for the arts, but, for the most part, people identify themselves by what they do, not who they are. And they can no longer do what they do. Stripped away, we think, ‘Okay, now, what am I? Nothing?’“

Unfortunately, the escape for many artists or people with trauma will be anesthetizing themselves when they feel at the end of the road. Because in the words of Ciarán, “…most disease is dis-ease; it’s not at ease with yourself… And I think when we connect with similar people and feel we’re on a similar path, it’s very healing.” Finding some form of the arts to open your heart and soul, Ciarán believes, is the path to this bidirectional healing process.

Ciarán often performs songs for families during funerals providing musical healing to help ease their grief. He has performed for notable presidential families’ funerals, including the son of our President Joseph Biden (Beau) and the son and daughter-in-law of President Kennedy. Catherine asked Ciarán to attend the bedside of her godfather Henry while he was fighting for his life. Ciarán sang one of her uncle’s favorite songs, ‘The Impossible Dream,’ from ‘The Man of La Mancha.’ “For Uncle Henry, because that storyline of always battling resonated for him, we surmised that he could probably pick up on it at some level; for me, it was real at that moment…to see the joy in Uncle Henry’s eyes when I was singing the song. Even if it’s only five or 10 minutes, you’re taking someone from a place of fear or strife to a place of joy; I can’t help but believe that is healing for everyone.” The Man of La Mancha is about pursuing excellence and trying to live a noble life, but more than anything else: Ciarán believes it is about love.

Is the impossible dream healing through love, through music? As experienced by Ciarán and many others, perhaps divinity is found when one person can connect to another, however fleeting, through the power of music as a transmitter of love. And accordingly, God’s currency can help heal the soul and serve as a way for those with a gift to truly help others.

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