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The Orpheus Institute - Our Story
OUR STORY
The Orpheus Institute is a vision, an ambition and a legacy. Our hope is that through understanding the roots of how the Institute and the work it encompasses came about, you will join us in creating opportunities, innovations, and spaces where truly integrative healing is realized, and for people everywhere. The Orpheus Institute is the heir of my own personal journey in life, the learning journey of many health researchers and practitioners who have contributed to the work here, and the modern embrace of the human spirit as a healing force.
My name is Alain Amouyal. I am the founder of The Orpheus Institute. I am also a dental surgeon, a composer of music, the originator of The Orpheus Project and the teller of the unique story of this innovative organization. While I was practicing my chosen career field in medicine as a dental surgeon, I was pursuing a passion, the music. I followed with formal studies in ear-training and music theory, after being a lead guitarist and bassist in a band. Little did I know at the time my deeper quest into music began, that it, and various other forms of artistic expression, were to become my life’s work. As I studied and explored music, my spiritual mentor suggested I begin improvising on the organ. It was not something I had experimented with before. As I improvised, I became aware that my music was coming from a longing buried deep in my soul. Through improvised music I was somehow reconnecting to my core essence and recounting my own personal history and experience through these spontaneous compositions. I was living a transformation — a true self-healing process through music. The music activated my unconscious and its driving archetypes and revealing different steps of awakening and consciousness. But I didn’t know at the time that the archetypes activated in me during this process could have an impact on others. The impact on Others was Revealing As a practicing dental surgeon, I never considered the therapeutic aspects of my music until a medical colleague asked if he could use my recordings in his work with psychiatric patients. He took the music to his clinic. A month later, I received a call from a psychologist in my friend’s clinic asking me to record more music. At his request, I collected 5 hours of music from my first improvisations, following their chronology. These practitioners discovered my music easily mobilizes archetypes in patients. When a patient creates drawings while listening to the music, it could bring to the surface past traumatic experiences, and serve as a means of releasing the emotional baggage tied to those experiences. My fellow psychiatrist came a month later to introduce me several series of drawings made while patients were listening to – being stimulated by - my musical compositions. Although the themes of the music were never communicated to the patients, there was a striking correlation between the titles I had assigned to these muscial compositions, and the symbols appearing in patient’s drawings. This moment was a revelation for me, a defining moment in understanding the role of music in healing. In 1983 another psychiatrist implemented my music in his inpatient After Care Psychiatric Clinic. He expressed that, in his opinion, my music was particularly cathartic, allowing for the mobilization of emotional experiences by associating it with patient memories. Our collaboration lasted for over 25 years. Serendipity Along the way, I met Chantal Desmoulins, who had a passion for research. Her intellectual curiosity, and the originality of her university studies — foreign and French literature, linguistics, comparative literature and the study of the organized system of images — particularly interested me. Dominique Julliard, my friend and independant architect in Geneva, soon joined us, as did several other music lovers and enthusiasts of its application. We entered into a research period, with a group of about 15 people of diverse specialties, studying thousands and thousands of drawings made under musical induction of my music creations as well as supporting hundreds of professionals ranging from the small private medical practice to large healthcare institutions (psychiatric clinics, hospitals, retirement homes, rehabilitation centers) all of them pioneers in the field of art and music therapy. We explored, as well, the most accurate personality and projective tests to better evaluate practitioner's patients progress. The Catharsis Application Program (CAP) was developed along the years through a hard work of research, application and musical composition as well as the participation of eminent neuro-psychiatrists who have allowed our protocols to expand. Let me, here, pay tribute to 4 of them who have made a particular contribution: Dr Jacqueline Verdeau-Paillès, Dr Lucien Duclaud, Dr Michel Mouret, Dr Christian Simonin. CAP thus became a groundbreaking Psycho Emotional Therapy. It uses an artistic mediation process, weaving art and music into a unique and exceptional therapeutic intervention, helping patients explore their emotions and feelings through the induction of my musical composition while engaged in expressive drawings or paintings. Research continues today and our body of evidence-based outcomes continues to grow. As we researched, we discovered how centuries ago, the ancient Greeks erected spectacular sites to stage great classical dramas connected to highly developed healthcare centers. Spas were part of a healing system that included elements like kurparks (celebrating nature), and theaters (expressing community). Their shared desire was to be restored to health through cathartic theatrical spectacles. This began my journey on a pioneering path toward creating an innovative form of entertainment emulating these legendary Greek healing venues.
The concept for the Orpheus Project comprises two central aspects: The Orpheus Experience, and The Orpheus Center.
Total Immersion : The Orpheus Experience I envisioned hosting The Orpheus Experience, a multimedia-staged spectacle. In this new multimedia-staged spectacle, the audience becomes immersed in a powerful cathartic experience. As my vision unfolded, I was overcome by a desire to create a venue for grand spectacles that bring significant meaning to the human condition. Daring to dream big, I embraced artful concepts to demonstrate how tragedy, goodness and beauty, can transform humanity to greater levels of excellence. The Orpheus Center - The Vision Integrating the grand spectacle of music, art, and medicine into the framework of a single magnificent facility is a feat not attempted in more than 2500 years! In a period where medicine is so fragmented and mechanistic, medicine that has lost the sense of the totality of being, we need the path of the alliance of body, mind, spirit, to the psychosomatic medicine such as our ancestors practiced, a place that is not a hospital but, as Dr. Edward Tick said, a "medico-spiritual sanctuary." For the focal point of the project, we invited architects and engineers from Geneva to participate in development of the amphitheater and stage—from which the entire healing complex evolves. My design for this harmonious, healing complex comprises a magnificent, multi-level, multimedia amphitheater, a vast healthcare and resource center, onsite accommodation, catering facilities, a magnetic levitation transport shuttle, and elaborate exterior landscaping. Visitors to The Orpheus Center will also have access to on-site practitioners offering sensitive, non-invasive, individualized approaches to self discovery. A Revised Focus And An Inspired Idea : The Orpheus Institute While we were starting to find supporters for the project, the nonprofit organization supporting us, for almost 15 years, ceased operations. We urgently needed to focus on our efforts on our extended experience in expressive art therapy, the Catharsis Application Program (CAP). While Chantal and I were extending CAP into the Healthcare Mental Health field, I continued to work on the musical framework of the staged spectacle and the story line. During that time, I learned that more and more Opera and Theater around the world invested money in making opera performances or shows accessible to everyone, everywhere through online streaming. That inspired in me the idea of creating the Orpheus Center online. I needed a legal structure that matched our long commitment Chantal Dominique and I. This is where the idea of creating a nonprofit benefit organization emerged, with the need to be able to pass on to future generations the tools we had developed The Orpheus Institute, our nonprofit benefit organization, is at the service of the human being - technological, spiritual, mental, emotional and physical - in which we are fuly involved. It would be our legacy for the generations that can help them reinvent healing.
"I saw my entire life playing out in front of me: my childhood, my adolescence, all the years of my life going by; I saw the future before me... No other music has had this type of effect on me. Despite any negativity in my life, I saw the good, and I felt at peace. This music really helps you evaluate and assess your own life." — Nicolas, auxiliary nurse, ICU.
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The Orpheus Institute c/o Zaradich, 333 W. Broadway # 653 ANAHEIM, CA 92815 • USA We are a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to empowering people and communities to realize their full potential through the transformative power of music and art.
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