The Wild Voice
One-on-One Voice Lessons to Express from Your Soul
When I was 29, I had recently finished my master’s program in classical Voice Performance. I had solid vocal technique, a rich education on some of the most beautiful music ever written, huge accolades on my Master’s recital, and yet, felt disconnected from a dimension of myself and voice that I could only name the Wild Feminine. The instinctual, unbridled expression from the depths of the Earth and my being. To be sung, rather than to sing.
Then I met the voice teacher who changed my life, Bisan Toron.
The dimensions of my voice we explored together existed largely in the realms of the shadow and muck I had been taught by my Sufi spiritual background and classical training to either ignore, rise above or “smooth out.” But I was also guided into the territory of the Goddess. To the Exiled One. To sounding the Earth and the dirt. To the wild, defiant screams of witches burned at the stake. Under Bisan’s expert guidance, I excavated, like a vocal soul archeologist, dimensions of my body and heart that I didn’t even know existed. When they freed themselves, when I allowed their energies to move me as an art project, rather than try to control them or transcend the intensities of their expression, I felt an incredible liberation. A deep aliveness. One day, after sobbing tears of release as some of these energies moved through me, I opened my eyes and said, surprised by what I was witnessing:
“There is so much light in the room.”
Since then, I’ve only been interested in exploring and expressing what feels true. Any kind of performative singing, divorced from true feeling, locked in rigidity or motivated from perfectionism, no longer has any meaning for me, because I’ve touched the wonder and magic of what it feels like to be sung by the Real.
And this is what I have to offer you.
Not more “therapeutic work,” but communion, with the art of your soul. For its own sake, not to heal or get anywhere, but to be in the flow of life. Yet, paradoxically, a lot of healing can happen, simply because we aren’t controlling ourselves so much. Instead, we learn to surrender to what is enlivening in our very being.
Connecting to one’s voice is communion with the Mystery of Life. To her pleasures and her pains. To her terrors and her ecstasies, to her longing and her satiation, to her anger and to her love. To the creatures we share DNA with, to the plants whose air we breathe. To all that it means to live and feel as a human being. To truth. Not ascending and transcending to some sanitized place, but letting the light of aliveness be born through singing all of our experience.
Singing is not so much something we do as it is something we open to and receive, until we ourselves are sung by Life. Song is where the human is touched and surrenders to the deeper undercurrents of Soul. A somatic spiritual play, where receiving and giving, being and doing, listening and sounding all dance together in a seamless unfoldment.
It is also scary as all hell.
It is no small endeavor to trust that all can be alchemized into beauty through our body’s wisdom. It is paradoxical, and does not obey our conceptual mind’s demand for certainty. It is a leap into the unknown.
The vast aliveness beyond concept longs to express itself through the medium of your own voice and body. To bring itself closer to you and reveal itself as the deepest part of your being. It longs to pulse and breath and cry and sigh and melodize and rhapsodize through you. Perhaps you too desire to give yourself over to this force—to something much greater than your conditioned, controlled self. The untamable currents of your voice long to break out of the straight-jacket of holding it all together.
Beyond sounding “good” and beyond someone else’s definition of beauty, or perhaps even your own. Beyond expectation, planning, or perfection.
The wild voice leads to something much more exciting: the living current of Reality. The Celts called this awen. Flowing inspiration. Divine Spirit. This demands deep devotional presence and the death of our control. Scary? Maybe. Exhilarating? Definitely.
The mad dervish doesn’t care if she is mad. All she cares about is being close to the Living Flame, burning her wings on the edges of the heat, before being consumed all together.
What is true and alive? This is what we explore together.
Are you ready to let the wilderness of your voice sound through you?
While grounded in solid vocal technique from my years as a classically-trained vocalist, I will guide you beyond the limitations of musical “shoulds” and into the territory of the wild, instinctual voice. Using somatic techniques, inquiry, breathing practice, improvisation, and intuition, I will help you explore your own inner world through voice, allowing the expression of feelings, emotions, bodily sensations, soul, spirit and unbridled aliveness move through you. The moment is our guide. Intimacy with oneself (and by extension, Life itself) is the orientation. What is true in the most basic and embodied sense is the ever-flowing question that leads us onward.
