Anna Halprin, Ph.D., created the Tamalpa Institute, which assists health professionals and individuals in coping with such devastating illnesses as AIDS, cancer and other terminal diseases.  She reports that when participants express emotions through dance rituals, positive changes in their attitudes and will to live are observed.

Malidoma Some, Ph.D., author of Ritual: Power, Healing, and Community stated at a conference held by the California Pacific Medical Center's Institute for Health and Healing, that without rituals, we lose track of our true self, and noted that many of the physical and mental illnesses of Western or "modern" culture stem from disconnection from ritual and community.

Dr. Michael Picucci, Ph.D., recipient of the Outstanding Leadership in Research award from the National Institutes on Health (NIH) for the year 2000, convincingly demonstrates that ritual is a healing modality which effectively addresses the problems of our super-technological world, and its emotional side-effects.

Carl A. Hammerschlag, MD, is a Yale-trained psychiatrist who has spent more than twenty years working with Native Americans.  Author of The Dancing Healer, he was told by a Pueblo priest and clan chief “You have to be able to dance if you want to heal”.

F. Holmes Atwater, a human behavioral engineer from the Monroe Institute, specializes in the design and application of techniques for cultivating favorable states of consciousness. He states that ancient cultures used sound and music to influence states of consciousness in rituals and to promote psychological and physical health.

Jeanne Achterberg, Ph.D., has received international recognition for her pioneering research in medicine and psychology.  She is a professor of psychology at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, and has served as associate professor and director of research in rehabilitation science at Southwestern Medical School in Dallas.  Her most recent book, Rituals of Healing, is a primer on the use of creative therapies for health and medicine.

Emile Conrad, founder and director of Continuum, is a visionary whose revolutionary work continues to inspire an international audience of therapists and movement educators. Her love for primitive dance and desire to deepen her understanding of ritual dance led her to Haiti, where she spent five years as a choreographer and lead dancer with a folklore company.  In 1974, as a result of her groundbreaking work with Dr. Valerie Hunt, head of Kinesiology and Movement Research at UCLA, Conrad developed a radical new technique for neuro-muscular innovation and spinal cord injury rehabilitation.

Bradford Keeney, Ph.D., a cultural anthropologist at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, CA, author of Bushman Shaman: Awakening the Spirit through Ecstatic Dance, states that a healing context is one where you create a swirling of the life force, an amplification, a movement, a transmission, an energy field so that when another person steps into it, an awakening of their own inner healing sources is encouraged.

Related topic: Articles