Embodiment · “Being Precedes Having”
Cantillation
To find the one creative/expressive act that most readily makes you feel loved, and to do it as a deliberate, giving practice — ‘cantillating’ — so as to raise your Life Energy and let that loving state spread into daily life.
Cantillation in 5 lines: Find the one creative/expressive act that most easily makes you feel loved — singing, painting, gardening, cooking for someone. Start by calling up the feeling of being loved. Then do the act as a gift, for love’s sake, keeping attention on the warmth in your chest, not on the result. Practise it often, then let that loving spirit spread into everyday life.
What it is
In his later work Dr. John Diamond reframed healing around creativity. He borrowed the word cantillation (Latin cantillare, “to sing softly” — traditionally the chanting of sacred text) and widened it to mean a state and an act of love: the deep felt conviction “that one is loved, totally loved,” and the expression of that love back out through “music, art, poetry and any other act of creativity.” To cantillate is to do the one creative or expressive act that most easily fills you with that feeling-of-being-loved — and to do it as a gift.
Diamond’s therapeutic move was to find each person’s unique cantillation and then have them practise it to raise their Life Energy, advancing it “ever more correctly, to raise it to ever higher stages,” until “our lives themselves become songs of love.”
The Method
Drawn from Life-Energy Analysis: A Way to Cantillation and The Life Energy in Music:
- Find your cantillation. Identify the activity that, when you do it, most readily gives you the feeling of being loved and loving — the sense of warmth, opening, “coming home” in the chest. For one person it is playing the piano; for another singing, painting, photography, writing poetry, gardening, cooking for someone. It is personal; there is no “correct” art. Choose the one that opens your heart most easily.
- Begin from being loved, not from performing. Diamond’s core: cantillation starts in receiving love (he traced it to the infant’s conviction of the mother’s love) and then giving it out. Before you start, call up that felt sense of being loved — by a person, by nature, by the divine, however it comes — so the act flows from love, not toward approval.
- Do the act as a gift, not a display. Cantillate for the love of it and to give, not to impress or achieve. The aim is the loving state itself, expressed; technical excellence and audience are beside the point. (A wrong note sung with love still cantillates; a perfect note sung for applause does not.)
- Stay with the feeling, not the product. While you do it, keep attention on the warmth and openness in the chest — the felt love — rather than on judging the output. This is what “raises the Life Energy.”
- Practise it regularly, then let it generalise. Return to your cantillation often. Diamond’s progression is to carry the same loving spirit into ordinary activities — speaking, working, cooking, meeting people — so that, in time, more and more of daily life becomes “a song of love.” (Quoted phrases are Diamond’s, attributed; steps are a faithful paraphrase of his taught approach, not a reproduction of the text.)
Source & Lineage
Dr. John Diamond (1934–2021) developed cantillation across his music and creativity works — The Life Energy in Music (Vols. 1–3, 1981–86), Life-Energy Analysis: A Way to Cantillation, and The Pulse of Music.
It grew from his clinical observation (as a Melbourne psychiatrist) that music and creative expression markedly lifted patients. → originator file for John Diamond; companion (thymus thump, life-energy affirmations).
It resonates with expressive-arts therapy, music therapy, Csikszentmihalyi’s flow, and gratitude/loving-kindness practices in this library.
The Traditions' versions
Music therapy / expressive-arts therapy — clinical use of music, art, movement to lift mood and process emotion.
- Flow (Csikszentmihalyi) — absorbed, intrinsically-motivated creative engagement.
- Loving-kindness / metta — generating and radiating love as practice.
- Bhakti / devotional chant (kirtan) — singing love to the divine; the literal root of “cantillation”.
- Gratitude & savouring practices — dwelling in and giving thanks for love received.
Common refinements
Turning it into performance. The instant it becomes about being good enough or impressing, it stops cantillating. Do it for love and to give.
- Choosing the “impressive” art over the opening one. Pick what actually warms your heart, even if it’s humble (humming, doodling, tending plants).
- Skipping the “being loved” start. Cantillation flows from received love. Take a moment to feel loved first.
- Chasing a special state. Don’t strain for bliss; let the warmth arise from sincere, loving doing.
- Keeping it cordoned off. The real goal is to let the loving spirit leak into ordinary life — bring it to how you speak, cook, work.