There is a question I come back to often: What would you do for free? Not as a career strategy. Not as a thought experiment. As a compass. Because the answer tends to point directly at the thing you were made to do. For me, the answer has always been music. For decades I did not fully understand why. Now I do. It was never about the music alone. It was about what the music could do for someone who needed it. Acoustic Healing exists to bring professionally recorded healing mus

Bringing professionally recorded healing music to hospital patients does not happen in isolation. It turns out, many people are on this path, moving in the same direction, drawn by the same quiet calling. I am not alone. And if you are doing similar work, neither are you. For most of my adult life, I lived inside a box. You know the one. School. Work. Family. Responsibility. Retirement. Color inside the lines. Stay in the lines. Then life happened. The box of crayons spilled.

It started as a whisper. Not even an idea, really. More of a feeling. A hmmm that showed up one day and would not leave. What if professionally recorded healing music could reach hospital patients through the television system already in their room? What if they could have something beautiful, something human, in a space that so often has neither? I shared it with people I trusted. Family. Friends. A few colleagues who understood what this work could mean. And something shift

I have been thinking a great deal about giant sequoia trees. Scientists have long understood something remarkable about these ancient giants: their cones can remain sealed shut for up to twenty years, held tight by nature itself, waiting. It is only when a wildfire sweeps through, with intense heat rising from the flames and temperatures climbing, that those cones finally open and release their seeds onto the mineral-rich ash below. The fire does not destroy the forest. It se

I needed to stop before I could move forward. After months of preparation — founding Acoustic Healing, recording with three extraordinary musicians, and navigating the early life of an independent project — I found myself in Hawaii last week, watching the sun set over the Pacific with my family. For a long time, during my years as a pharmacist, I didn't give myself permission to do that. Healthcare professionals carry a quiet belief that stepping away is a luxury we can't aff

It Started With a Dinner On the evening of May 16, 2026, a small group of people gathered around a table. They were musicians, a founder, and a shared conviction that the patients in hospital rooms across the Monterey Peninsula deserved something more than silence. That dinner was the beginning of everything that followed. Session One: May 17 at New Dawn Studios The morning after the founding dinner, Mary Superak arrived at New Dawn Studios in Monterey carrying more than ha

On May 19, I attended the Arts Council of Monterey County Grantee Reception with one thing on my mind — gratitude. What I did not fully expect was what it would feel like to hear my name called as one of only two recipients of the Established Artist Grant. I was not alone in that room. Anne, my wife and the steady, quiet backbone of everything I do, was beside me. So was Nicolette. The three of us stood together at that reception, and I thought — this is exactly right. T

May 12, 2026 On May 17, 2026, Acoustic Healing holds its founding session. This is the moment the project moves from intention to action — from a vision carried by one person into a shared act of care. Four musicians. One purpose. A belief that the people inside our hospitals deserve more than what the standard of care has always offered them. We want to introduce the musicians who are making this possible. Mary Superak is with us for the morning session. Mary is the kind of

There are moments that fold time. Last week I was in correspondence with Vivian — one of the four founding musicians who will record with Acoustic Healing this May at New Dawn Studios in Monterey. Vivian is a retired oncology nurse with over 40 years of clinical experience. She is also a Certified Clinical Musician (CCM) since 2014, having devoted herself to the healing practice of harp after a career spent at the bedsides of the seriously ill. We were simply working out the

April 22, 2026 Last weekend I flew into Denver for a family visit to Fort Collins. But I had something else planned for the first two hours: a quick Acoustic Healing outreach stop in Aurora before making the drive north. I'd looked up the hospitals in the area ahead of time. What I found was striking: just one concentrated cluster of hospital and healthcare campuses in Aurora takes up 0.9 square miles — and that's only one part of a much larger healthcare footprint spread thr

Every company has an origin story. This is ours. Acoustic Healing was founded in memory of a woman named Becca. Becca was our founder David Villareal's daughter-in-law. She was a mother, full of life. And when cancer changed everything for her and for the family around her, it set something in motion that no one could have predicted. David recently described the moment he understood that connection more clearly than ever: "Last night I watched the movie IF with my family — an