Music, Healing and the Journey Back to Yourself

What if music could help you express what words cannot — and reconnect with parts of yourself you've lost touch with?

In this episode of the SOULFULL SOUND Podcast, I'm joined by Layla Minoui, an award-nominated film and television composer whose work spans DreamWorks, Disney and Netflix. After years of composing music for other people's stories, Layla began creating music that told her own — a deeply personal journey shaped by her experience with cancer and her relationship with sound, creativity and healing.

Music as a pathway to healing

Layla shares how improvising at the piano helped her explore difficult emotions, including grief and anger, giving her space to feel what was happening without needing to explain or resolve everything immediately.

We also explore a powerful shift in perspective: while we cannot always control our circumstances, we can sometimes choose how we meet them. For Layla, time with her young son helped her reconnect with curiosity, play and the wonder of being present.

Intuition, self-trust and rebirth

Our conversation explores the difference between understanding something intellectually and truly embodying it, and how we can learn to listen more deeply to our own inner knowing.

Through her project Journey to Rebirth, Layla explores an idea I find particularly beautiful: rebirth as remembrance. Rather than continually striving to become someone new, perhaps healing can also mean reconnecting with who we are beneath the expectations and identities we've gathered along the way.

Meeting ourselves with curiosity

A thread running through this conversation is the importance of curiosity and compassion.

When difficult emotions arise, we can quickly move into judgement. We may question why we feel a certain way, tell ourselves we ought to be further along in our healing, or try to make an uncomfortable experience disappear.

Curiosity offers a different starting point.

Instead of immediately trying to correct what we feel, we can ask what the experience might be showing us. We can make room for the complexity of being human without demanding that every part of us be resolved.

Music can be one way of doing this. So can movement, writing, time in nature, sound, stillness or any creative practice that helps us become more present to ourselves.

The invitation is not to find one perfect method of healing. It is to discover what helps us listen, reconnect and respond to ourselves with greater care.

This is a conversation about music, resilience, self-trust and meeting ourselves with greater curiosity and compassion.

As you listen, consider: What helps you come home to yourself?

Points Of Discussion:

01:02 – Growing Up Between Two Cultures
04:12 – How Music Shaped Her Identity
05:38 – From Film Composer to Personal Storytelling
07:35 – Creating Music Through Her Cancer Journey
09:28 – Rediscovering the Heart of Music
12:32 – Trusting Your Own Creative Voice
15:05 – Improvisation as a Pathway to Healing
17:17 – Making Space for Difficult Emotions
20:45 – The Moment That Changed Her Perspective
22:17 – Rediscovering Wonder, Play & Presence
25:51 – Why Healing Is a Continuous Unfolding
30:07 – Intuition, the Body & Inner Knowing
33:43 – Creating Space for Curiosity and Compassion
35:27 – What Rebirth Really Means
40:00 – Coming Home to Yourself
55:51 – Meeting Yourself With Compassion
58:15 – Journey to Rebirth & Its Wider Mission

Resources & Links:

Website: https://laylaminoui.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/layla_composer/

About Layla Minoui:

Layla Minoui is an Iranian-American composer for film and television based in Los Angeles. She is known for her remarkable emotional depth, which lends itself to a sense of openness and breathability in her music. Across a wide variety of genres, she explores sound, texture, and movement and finds the right tone to best support a story, giving each picture its own unique sonic world. Instead of telling the audience what they ought to be feeling, she identifies the core emotions of a character, drawing out the emotional subtext and connects the audience to its rawest essence through music.

Layla Minoui has amassed a diversity of credits in both film and television including DreamWorks short To Gerard (written/directed by Taylor Meacham), Disney animation series Vampirina (created by Chris Nee), Netflix series Ridley Jones (Chris Nee), Bravo’s Girlfriend’s Guide to Divorce, and has written additional music for Castle (ABC), The Gates (ABC), The Family (ABC), Lie to Me (Fox), and Disney Channel’s original movie Girl vs. Monster.  Minoui has worked on several independent features including comedy-thriller The Sound and the Shadow (dir. Justin Paul Miller) and Elysium Bandini’s gothic drama The Mad Whale starring James Franco and Camilla Belle. Her score for The Mad Whale has been nominated for the HMMA 2017’s Best Original Score for an Independent Feature Film.

Layla carved her path in the music world at a very young age. Given her Iranian background, she was immensely influenced by the rich blends of both Western and Eastern music and quickly discovered her own voice as a composer. By the age of eight, she wrote her first piece of music for which she was awarded first place in the Yamaha Junior Original Composition Competition. At age seventeen, she released her first solo album A Fallen Muse, written for solo piano and cello, solidifying her desire to pursue a musical career path. After receiving her Bachelor in Music Composition at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Layla further developed her composition mastery in the Scoring for Motion Pictures and Television Program at The University of Southern California where she earned a BMI Scholarship in her excellent achievements. In 2008, Minoui was selected as the recipient of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Fellowship and was honored by the opportunity to apprentice alongside two our industry’s leading composers, Emmy-award winning composers Snuffy Walden and Alf Clausen. From 2009-2016 Layla quickly gained momentum while her time scoring television series alongside Emmy-nominated composer Robert Duncan, with whom she collaborated on over 200 episodes.

Throughout Layla’s career, she has also participated in Hollywood’s most prestigious film scoring programs including ASCAP’s Film Scoring Workshop in 2011, for which she was granted the Recording Musicians Associations of LA Grant. In 2018, Layla was selected as a featured composer in the first Universal Composers Initiative, and went on to score DreamWorks Animation film To Gerard (writer/dir. Taylor Meacham).