Inhabiting Your Naturally Free Breath and Voice
In this workshop, we will dive into the sacred terrain of breath and voice.
What is your natural breath? How do you sound as your uncontrived self?
What does it mean to experience freedom in our breath and voice?
So often when we work with breath, there can be a quality wanting to improve or fix. Doing pranayama, breathwork, meditation practices, biohacking to move toward some ultimately optimal breath. All can be powerful and helpful practices. yet when do we take our breath as the teacher? Can we learn from the wild intelligence of our breath, from our breathing’s millions of years of evolutionary learning?
In a way, it is a paradox. Many of us have habits that limit our breath, and as we are herd animals, the breathing pattern of those around us affect and influence our breathing. How can we play with, experiment, and learn different possibilities that interrupt our habits and patterns, without feeling we constantly need to be improving or manipulating our breathing to be OK?
Our patterns of breathing are inseparable from our voice and how we express ourselves, and how sound moves through and out of us.
Many of us inhabit a small landscape in our potential range of sound. Are you free to weep, to laugh, to shout, to belt out a song?
In modern life, it can be rare to have opportunities and contexts to sing, either alone or with others on a regular basis. If we were not singers or actors or were not musical as children, when do we get to sing with others? I’m of the view that we all have innate movement, voice, and rhythmic intelligence, it is just that there are few doorways to learn and remember that intelligence in a non-performative, playful experimental way.
In our time together, we will work with sound in a way that feels good, that will be like an internal, sonic massage of your tissues. We will make some weird and beautiful sounds together, and we will free areas like the neck and jaw and musculature of the torso, so that our voice is more resonant and free. Hopefully, will emerge from the workshop sounding more like ourselves. More free to inhabit and express our unique voices in speaking, laughter, weeping, singing, whispers, silence….
We will explore Feldenkrais lessons and other natural movement explorations that help to free restrictions and habits of holding in our breathing and our voice. We will learn how to bring breath and sound to different parts of our body to soften restrictions. We will also play with some fun vocal explorations, body percussion, and we will sing and play with sound together! Zoom has its limitations on singing and toning together but they are workable. There are also ways that Zoom supports learning with voice, because being muted allows a freedom to sing off-key, or loudly, or not sing, or to experiment with sound without having others hear you. Much of the time you will be invited to sing or tone along while muted, but there will be some opportunity for all of us to be muted and sing along with you! (Only if you are drawn to do so – no pressure.)
Please note that you certainly do not need to have any singing experience or be comfortable with singing to join. We welcome all the shy, quiet voices in the room to participate as well as those who are comfortable in this terrain. This is not about performance, but rather offers us the primary satisfaction of bringing our unique voices together, and the feeling of relaxing into our naturally free, uncontrived breath and voice.
Saturday, March 11th, 12-3 PM Mountain Time
Recordings provided if you cannot attend live.
Location-your computer on Zoom.
Cost $50
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