One-on-one voice lessons for singing with greater freedom, expression, and aliveness

Why are we called to sing? We sing to commune with the depths and heights—the full range of life, but also the Life beyond our limited concept of self. We channel something both ’of us’ and ‘beyond us.’ If we’re lucky, it is here we discover ecstasy and aliveness. Singing is alchemy. And all is welcome in the realm of song.

So… what do we actually do?

Every lesson is different, because every voice, and every person, is different. We may work with:

Vocal technique

Breath, resonance, range, registration, alignment, articulation, and the physical coordination that allows your voice to become freer and more expressive.

Embodiment

Bringing awareness into your body and noticing sensation, impulse, tension, emotion, and movement as part of the singing process.

Improvisation & play

Making sounds without needing to know what comes next. Exploring texture, rhythm, resonance, movement, and the unexpected.

Emotional expression

Giving your voice permission to express the full spectrum of your experience—joy, grief, anger, tenderness, longing, sensuality, power, vulnerability, and everything in between.

Myth and Archetype

Exploring our inner world, the different “beings” within us as they manifest through bodily impulse in the moment

Song & repertoire

Applying what we discover to music you love, whether that’s classical repertoire, contemporary music, folk songs, your own compositions, improvising or something you’ve always wanted to sing.

Intuition

Learning to listen inwardly and trust what your voice and body are telling you.

What I believe about the voice

I believe the body is not an obstacle to spiritual experience. Rather, it is through the body that we encounter the numinous. Our emotions, desires, sensations, grief, joy, sexuality, anger, tenderness, absurdity, and wildness need not be separated from our creative or spiritual lives. They show us what is real and true for our particular soul, and become the raw materials of our most beautiful creations.

The voice can hold contradictions. It can be beautiful and ugly, controlled and wild, delicate and enormous. It can carry things that words cannot. And when we allow ourselves to listen deeply enough, singing can become a form of communion—with ourselves, with one another, with the mystery of being alive.

A little bit about my journey

At the start of the pandemic, 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. I felt an incredible liberation when these energies freed themselves through sound and movement. When I allowed them to move me as an art project, rather than try to control or transcend their intensity. One day, after sobbing tears of release as some of these energies moved through me, I opened my eyes and, surprised by what I was witnessing, said:

“There is so much light in the room.” 

I had so long feared diving that deeply into my own body and emotional landscape. Yet what I found in singing the dark was that it was inextricable from the light.

The spiritual dimensions of the voice

Connecting to one’s voice is communion with the Mystery of Life and all its contradictions. To its pleasures and its pains. To its terrors and its ecstasies, to its longing and its satiation, to its anger and to its love. To the creatures we share DNA with, to the plants whose air we breathe. To our womb-space where eros and power reside. To all that it means to live and feel as a human being. To truth. 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 can also be one of the scariest and most vulnerable things we do.

I know this from my own experience. Which is why I will be there for you, cheering you on, supporting you, reminding you you aren’t alone as you dive into uncharted waters. 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.

A vast aliveness beyond concept longs to express itself through the medium of your own voice and body. To 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 is a free voice, and leads to something much more exciting: the living current of Reality. The Celts called this awen, or flowing inspiration. Entering this space demands deep devotional presence and the death of our control. Scary? Maybe. Exhilarating? Definitely. A little crazy? Absolutely. But 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 in you? This is what we explore together. 

Curious about The Wild Voice?

You don’t have to know exactly what you’re looking for before you reach out.

In a free consultation, we’ll talk about your experience with singing, what you’re longing to explore, and what you’d like and develop in your voice.

I’ll answer your questions and we can feel out whether this way of working together is a good fit.

Come as you are!

The Wild Voice is for you if…

You love singing but feel like something is missing from conventional voice lessons

You want solid vocal technique without losing the feeling that makes singing meaningful

You tend to get stuck in perfectionism, self-consciousness, or judgment

You long to become transparent to the divine through voice and body, to become a channel for what wants to move through you

You want to become more expressive, spontaneous, embodied, or emotionally available in your singing

You feel disconnected from your body and creativity and want to come home to yourself through the voice

You are an experienced singer or musician but have struggled letting yourself improvise, or make more raw, unconventional or primal sounds

You’re tired of “performing” and long to surrender to the wilderness of your being through your voice

Or maybe you’ve never considered yourself a “real singer” at all—but something in you wants to sing

Or maybe you just feel an indescribable soul’s pull to this kind of work and want to follow it bravely into the unknown