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Journal North: Home | Sports | Opinion | Obits | Entertainment
Monday, June 15, 2009
Therapist Heals Through Vibration
By Polly Summar
Journal Staff Writer
If you've ever believed music could be therapeutic, you'd have to believe in what Maury Brooks does.
Armed with a roomful of chimes and stacks of abstract paintings representing vibrational fields, Brooks has developed a method of healing he calls "vibrational harmonics."
A shaman of sound?
"Shaman of vibrations," smiles Brooks, 49, who's perhaps better known in the local media as an advocate for saving tiny Alvord Elementary School and helping launch it on its path to being a magnet school in environmental science and sustainability.
Living in a cozy home near Alvord with his wife, Maya Itzna, and their son, Aesop, 10, Brooks said becoming active with the school brought a new side to his life — and a not entirely pleasant one. "I've had angry moments," he said. "In truth, I saw a lot of ugly stuff ... and it really bothered me."
But Brooks said he was especially encouraged by the visionary strength he saw in Santa Fe school board president Angelica Ruiz, vice president Richard Polese and former board president Martin Lujan. Saving Alvord and moving it toward magnet status came about because of a "teamwork effort at every level," said Brooks.
Even in the face of Brooks' seriousness about his community involvement and his healing work, the Philadelphia native has a sense of humor about it, too. Brooks is calling his new book, which he expects to be out in a few months, "Awaken Your Healing Power With the Pet Balloon." That's not because he envisions people twisting long balloons into funny animal shapes, but because Brooks wants people to know about "a 10-cent toy that can change one's life."
"A balloon has the potential to revolutionize the concept of sound," said Brooks of the balloon's amplification abilities in vibrational healing.
Brooks' interest in healing began some 20 years ago. "I was giving Maya a massage to relieve a really bad headache, and it wasn't working," he said. "I went to reposition my hands and, as I took my hands off her head, I felt this vibrating field and I just started to play with it, a few inches away. She kind of went on a journey in time and place to a whole other era. And when she came back, the headache was gone."
Over the following years, Brooks began working on friends or family doing the same kind of vibrational work and began reading and experimenting on his own, as well as studying Qigong, a "nontouch" Chinese healing method that dates to 3000 B.C.
"In Qigong, pain is stuck energy," said Brooks. "I work a lot with what I call energetic thorns, like having a pin cushion inside you."
Gesturing around his studio, Brooks said, "I look at healing as a toolbox approach. Everything here is part of that toolbox." That includes vertical stacks of abstract paintings Brooks did himself using acrylics. He created the first of them some nine years ago when he was studying Qigong and exploring the vibrational field around his head.
A few weeks later, in working on a friend, "I suddenly had an urge to pull this picture out and put it in front of him," said Brooks. "It was very supportive of what we were working on."
In Qigong, Brooks said, there are ways to use sound and colors to support inner journeys, but he hadn't learned those yet when his urge to paint began. The rest of the paintings Brooks created stemmed either from his own healing discoveries or from those of clients who allowed him to paint what he saw them experiencing.
Brooks has found that his work also helps clients deal with trauma-based problems. During one session, he was creating a vibrational painting beginning with an abstract image of a man's face on the canvas. His client was not able to see what he was painting, "but at that moment, she burst into tears," said Brooks.
"It was quite profound," he said. "At that point, she started telling me the story of a dentist she went to as a child who was in jail now because he was caught sexually molesting people under sedation. For years, she had always wondered if that had happened to her."
That same painting is now one that Brooks uses for many different kinds of abuse "because it has that kind of energy, that kind of power to it."
Besides working with individuals and working on his new book, Brooks has a grand vision of having a healing museum about vibrational healing and wakening consciousness: "The essence of my work is becoming one with oneself."
For information, go to Brooks' Web site at www.vibraharmonics.com or www.Qigong-Healing.com.
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