What Is Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS)?

The Director of The Listening Centre said a Tomatis Method listening program would help my chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). I had researched our “incurable” disease. I assumed that he, like most people I met, did not comprehend my disability. Three members of our family had been ill for eight years. Life felt like perpetual winter.

While Daniel was being healed of ADD, I listened to a parallel program, pleasant but unmusical because the filtering of frequencies left a sound like radio “static” on a classical music station that won’t tune in clearly. During less than seven hours of binaural listening, I did not notice anything happening to me. Suddenly, halfway through my fourth session, I felt as though someone had thrown a switch in my head. My former sense of normal energy returned instantly. I was amazed, elated, and full of questions. How does music heal CFS? What had been happening to me during those seven hours? What was the event that restored normal energy to my whole body instantly? How could everything about me be transformed so suddenly to verdant spring?

I was more focused on changes in Daniel. However, despite his first major psychotic break and several further hospitalizations, which brought extreme stress into my life, my energy remained high. I did not regain full strength in muscles that had been wasting for eight years and I was post-menopausal, nevertheless, because my immune system functioned normally I could return to editing and doing other activities with my former energy.

When I relapsed into CFS several times, I experienced a peculiar series of events that revived my healing: laughter, singing, amplified listening to music, and the triggering of a smoke alarm. I settled on singing and on listening to music through ordinary headphones to keep CFS from returning. What did those events have in common? What could be the link between Daniel’s ADD and my CFS? I certainly did not connect my CFS symptoms to Daniel’s schizophrenia! Ten years of questioning, observing, testing, and research brought astonishing answers: the right ear controls the immune system as well as the dominance of the left-brain in cerebral integration.