On Healing, Community, and the Power of the Arts
A Letter from One Mind CEO, Kathleen M. Pike, PhD
On June 8, our family said goodbye to Sally, a woman who came into our lives 28 years ago as a helper, and who left us as something far more: a beloved member of our family. She was born in a small, remote village in the Philippines, and it was there that we traveled to say farewell.
The church on the hillside was still unfinished, open, unpolished, and completely full. Every pew held someone who loved her. The outpouring of community was profound, and what I witnessed in that space continues to linger and fill my daydreaming.
What I experienced was a community actively practicing what we at One Mind spend our days advocating. Not in theory. In lived, embodied ritual. The elements were ancient and unadorned: gather, sing, grieve together, give what you can. And yet in their simplicity, they were complete. This community did not name what they were doing as “mental health support.” They simply knew, as humans have always known, that no one should have to carry loss alone.
The choir sang songs that everyone knew. Familiar melodies moved through the space and through the people in it, connecting the grieving to one another and to the generations who had come before. We know from the emerging science of neuroarts that music operates on multiple levels simultaneously: the emotional resonance of melody, yes, and also something deeper, a vibrational quality that can shift our physiology, ease our nervous systems, and open us to one another. In that church, it was palpable.
Then came the offering. People with extraordinarily limited financial resources nonetheless gave. Quietly. Generously. It reminded me that giving is not an act that requires abundance measured quantitatively. It requires a mindset of abundance. And we know from decades of research that the act of giving generates something powerful in the giver: agency, purpose, a sense of meaning. These are not small things. These are the architecture of mental health.
Connection. Belonging. Giving. Agency.
Thousands of miles from my own home and traditions, I found myself standing inside a community that had built, without naming it as such, strategies that protect and promote mental health and human flourishing.
The science is catching up and elaborating on what communities like Sally’s have understood intuitively. The field of neuroarts studies how creative expression, built environments, visual art, and music affect our health. It is producing compelling evidence for what humans have long practiced instinctively. The NeuroArts Blueprint initiative, led out of Johns Hopkins International Arts & Mind Lab, is doing exceptional work in this area, and I hope you’ll explore it.
At One Mind, we have long believed what that hillside community also knows: that the arts are woven into how human beings survive, grieve, connect, and heal, and that this is mental health, expressed in its most elemental form. In a world flooded with information and technology, it is increasingly easy to lose our footing, to drift from feeling connection and agency without quite realizing it’s happened.
The arts call us back.
It is this belief — ancient, communal, and now increasingly validated by science — that lies at the heart of the 32nd Annual One Mind Music Festival. I hope you’ll join us on Saturday, September 19, at Staglin Family Vineyard for a gathering that brings together music, science, and human connection, rooted in the conviction that mental health and healing is possible and that none of us are in this alone. Here’s a glimpse of last year’s magic.
Come be part of it!
Warm regards,
Kathleen M. Pike, PhD
CEO, One Mind
