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Music Therapy Using music and gestalt therapy as a path to wholeness is one of hundreds of ways in which Medical Mission Sisters around the world try to be a healing presence to those in need today. Music has been important to German Sister Angelika Kollacks throughout her life. A graduate of the Fritz-Perls Institute in Music and Gestalt Therapy, she has a special healing ministry in Marzahn, a satellite town of East Berlin. More than 60 instruments with various qualities of sounds are in her working room at the counseling center she shares with Sister Michaela Bank. “It was through music that I could enter a very strange world here in the Eastern part of Germany, where 90% of the people were nonbelievers and atheists who were still working hard on their past with communism and socialism,” Sister Angelika says. “I learned to listen to the painful experiences of people who were persecuted by the political system, and people who were the persecutors. Pain and anguish, anger and fear could be expressed first by instruments and later on in words.”
Sister Angelika does individual and group therapy, and uses imagery and musical instruments to facilitate healing. She also conducts workshops in healing sounds for people in the health field, and for those who serve in churches. She has given workshops for former victims of concentration camps from Lithuania, Ukraine and Poland. “It is very inspiring to work with various groups, and experience that there is one main source of life for all.”
During the 15 years she has lived in Berlin, Sister Angelika has been active in liturgies in various settings. “We have interpreted biblical stories and readings, like the creation story, with various instruments. The goal is to help people to find their own tone…and then join together with others in a creative symphony of sounds.” “Music connects with the spiritual and inner being,” Sister Angelika shares. “Because I know that music can help us to connect to the spiritual, I believe in it. This is what I rely on when I work with blockages or irritations in therapy. I rely on God being present in every person, and I trust in the healing power inside everyone as a potential.”
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