PEACE WITHIN
A Sound Healer Shares His Journey to Spiritual Wholeness
by Allison Gorman
DeMaria knows that music saved him, the wounded child, and then saved him again years later, when he was on the brink of suicide.
masked strangers, the cloying smell of ether and the vortex of unconsciousness, to a place of light and love and peace. The sensation is so acute, even upon recollection, that DeMaria must pause for a moment when describing it. “It took me to that place that I remembered, where there was no pain,” he fi nally says. “It took me to the other side. And I would do that over and over again. Many times it was the same note; other times I would change to a note just above or below it. I didn’t realize for decades that I was self- healing, just intuitively.”
DeMaria can trace his to a single note on the piano—a note he struck over and over again as a shy, sensitive child seeking solace from pain. “My parents thought I was autistic,” DeMaria writes in his new book, Peace Within. “Years later people made fun of me, saying I was a new age musician before there was a new age. Looking back on it as a psychologist, I realize now that I was self-soothing and putting myself into a trance of sorts that was healing for me—and the sound literally took me to another world—or perhaps reminded me of the true, real world of silence and vibration infusing all we see.” That fi rst note would lead to a career DeMaria never imagined when he began using indigenous instruments to create meditation music for his intuitive therapy practice in Pensacola. He now has a wall full of industry awards, including one for appearing on a Grammy-winning album, and four Grammy nominations. On any given day, 150,000 people are listening to his music on Pandora. But commercial success and critical acclaim are mere side products of DeMaria’s music, which is intended,
M
ost people can’t trace their careers back to a single moment. Michael Brant
above all, to heal. He knows that it saved him, the wounded child, and then saved him again years later, when he was on the brink of suicide. And music is the vehicle for his life mission, which is to bring healing to others by forging the connection between heart and soul.
“Self-Healing, Intuitively” When DeMaria struck that fi rst note, he was 7 years old and had just had his third surgery. He was in physical pain, with hundreds of stitches in his abdomen, and in emotional pain from the terrors he’d endured in the hospital. He’d had a near-death experience on the operating table, entering a subtle world of color and sound, a world so peaceful that returning to his body left him in a state of shock for weeks. That sense of disconnection, which had never entirely gone away, had become debilitating. “Now I understand that I was suffering from post-traumatic stress,” he says. “I was having depersonalization, I felt like life wasn’t quite real, I was suffering physically and emotionally, but I didn’t have words for it.” At some point in his anguish, he
wandered over to the piano, struck a single note—and listened, eyes closed, as the dissipating sound carried him past nightmarish memories of a cold gurney,
22 Central Florida natural awakenings
A New Source of Healing From that point on, music was his refuge. His parents—conservative Catholics who had bought a house in the Connecticut wilderness to protect their three sons from radical 1960s culture—were appalled when their middle son, upon seeing his fi rst live jazz performance, announced that he wanted to be a drummer. “They were horrifi ed,” DeMaria recalls. “I was supposed to be a doctor.” Despite their reservations, they got him a drum kit and some lessons, and he blossomed. (Earlier piano lessons had been a bust, he says, as his teachers had insisted that he learn to read music rather than compose his own. “I was a terrible piano student. For me, music was an intuitive, inner process, grounding me from the inside out. That’s why it meant so much to me.”) As a freshman in college, DeMaria bought the fi rst of dozens of synthesizers; he loved putting on headphones and creating cosmic sounds. As he forged his way through academia—earning dual degrees in philosophy and psychology by age 20, then a master’s in psychology and, at 25, a doctorate in clinical psychology— he found that a few hours at a piano or keyboard were natural stress relief. But it wasn’t until he was 31, and well established as a Pensacola therapist, that he went on a vision quest
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