Potent Voice brings together all the various elements of whole-self voice work that I have been gathering and refining over the last 38 years…
My Potent Voice classes and courses combine Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement® with the state-of-the-art vocal training techniques that have emerged in recent years, thanks to the more refined observational equipment available to modern vocal science. My intention is to enable anyone who wishes to develop a flexible, strong, healthy, authentic self-expressive voice to be able to do so.
Whether your interest is singing, speaking well as an actor or presenter, or freeing your natural voice as part of a self-healing or spiritual development process – and of course any combination of these elements – then there will be something in my classes for you.
There is no pressure on you to perform in my classes – the idea is to enable you to become more conscious of exactly how your voice works, and to develop your vocal awareness, confidence, and authenticity, so that – with practice – your voice can become fully integrated, both physically and emotionally. A naturally spontaneous, fully embodied voice is what I mean by a Potent Voice, and for this reason it is very important that you feel relaxed and able to experiment with making – often rather silly! – sounds, without any embarrassment or self-consciousness. I have found that working online facilitates this playful element, and that compensates us for the sometimes poor quality of the sound reproduction on Zoom.
Potent Voice workshops are beneficial for:
Singers, presenters, performers, and anyone interested in the voice, and any aspect of self-expression
Anyone dealing with chronic stress issues, or breathing problems/conditions
Anyone dealing with chronic tension in the face, tongue, jaw, neck, and throat
Anyone interested in meditation, chanting, and neural self-regulation
Anyone who feels that emotional inhibition is limiting their capacity for self-expression and self-assertion.
Functional Integration – Feldenkrais For Your Voice
Hands-on muscle-releasing training sessions, focussing on integrating your neck, throat, face, rib cage, and the respiratory (and other) organs.
Feldenkrais comes in two formats, group training, known as Awareness Through Movement®, and individual hands-on training, known as Functional Integration®. Using sensitive touch as a teaching process can be a valuable addition to more familiar methods of vocal training, and may be particularly helpful if you feel your issues with performance are connected to deep muscle tissue holding patterns.
The daily format will enable us to make enough progress to achieve the physical freedom necessary to access our louder, richer, more expressive vocal qualities with more confidence. When the course is over you will have the lesson recordings, plus detailed notes, and illustrations, to support your continuing vocal development. Please note you are welcome to sign up to receive all the course materials if you are unable to join us live.
Potent Voice Workshops
[Mostly!] Monthly On Sundays:
Online – Recordings & Notes included – or sign up for the recordings if you cannot join us live…
2pm – 5pm BST ~ 9am – 12pm EDT
£45 (suggested fee, or any donation welcome)
Coming up…
Potent Voice–Access Your Full Vocal Range
Sunday March 29th
Human voices can access four registers, each with a distinctive sound quality, but with overlapping pitch ranges and of widely differing usefulness for singers and other performers. The most available and flexible is the modal register and it is this voice that singers and actors strive to extend and enhance. This is the register we all use naturally for speech and it is by far the most rich and resonant of the four, but we are often aware of the other possible sounds we can make and may experience the change in register from modal to falsetto as a real barrier to developing the higher notes that singing usually demands. The very high “whistle” register and the low beating of the “fry” register may not be very useful in performance but they can be enormous fun, and developing the extremes of your range can be a great tool for enhancing the core of your performing voice. Falsetto is not without its uses, and for many singers learning how not to slip into it unawares is an instant way to produce a richer more mature sound.
In this class we will explore all the registers and play with the different possibilities they offer. Increasing your range naturally requires that you learn how to protect yourself from injury by learning how to retract your false vocal folds and“open” your throat so this technique will also be included in the day.
Potent Breathing
Sunday workshop – July 5th
Breathing in a ‘well-organised’ way is the most fundamental of my Feldenkrais fundamentals; during Awareness Through Movement lessons, whatever we are doing we always paying attention to the ease and flow of our breathing as we are doing it.
Using carefully designed breathing patterns for health and well-being is so fundamental that their history goes all the way back to our most ancient cultures, and many of the processes our ancestors discovered are still in use today – Qi Gong and Pranayama are particularly well-known, but even a brief stint on google reveals links to other, less well-documented traditions from all over the world, and of course as a singer I am well aware of just how fundamental singing and chanting were to our earliest tribal communities – some researchers even believe that singing pre-dated speech in our evolution.
Breathing remains one of the most effective, most affordable, and most portable of our natural self-healing tools. We will explore…
*Breathing in a naturally-well-coordinated manner – including improved structural organisation of the jaw and tongue
*Breathing as a self-calming practice
*Breathing as a self-healing practice (these two naturally overlap; we will be exploring breathing as an energising and vitalising process, as well as a soothing and quieting process)
*Breathing as a chanting practice – a core aspect of working in harmony with your vagal nervous system.
Ancient techniques can seem familiar simply because they are naturally similar to our modern, well-researched, updated versions -– in essence, we can inhale in a particular manner, and we can exhale in a particular manner, and we can pause our breath at a particular moment – it is a testament to human ingenuity that there are so many alternative methods to explore! What is even more pleasing is that all of these health and mood-improving benefits occur naturally as a “side-effect” of practising sustaining vibratory vocal sounds – very much a win win win!
Improving your ability to breathe, freely, fully, and spontaneously, without inhibition anywhere in your throat, your chest or your abdomen, remains one of the most effective, most affordable, and most portable of our natural self-healing abilities.
Potent Listening:
Tuning Your Ears & Your Nervous System
Potent Voice Daily Summer School
June 1st – 5th
£100 – or any donation you can easily afford
In my ongoing mission to discover the full potential of the sound-making capacities of the human voice, it has become more and more clear to me over the years that the way we learn to listen is a key aspect of our musical and vocal development. I am now confident that it is possible to refine and enhance our hearing abilities by training ourselves to listen in a more conscious and attentive manner.
Listening to our own voice with focussed awareness is important for both enriching the tonal qualities of the vocal sounds we can produce, and increasing the ease with which we produce those sounds.
The effectiveness of our hearing is hard to quantify, and the slow deterioration that occurs as we age is not easy to recognise while it is happening – it is very likely that we may not know what we are losing until it is gone. As a lover of sound who would see little point in living without her music I have been interested in finding ways to maintain and extend my hearing function for many years.
I am still exploring what improvements if any might be possible when it comes to audio perception, but I am confident that we can all enhance and hone our listening abilities – both regarding the way we perceive the myriad sounds in our immediate environment, and in the metaphorical sense of enhancing the way we focus our attention inward onto our internal sensation, and outward to the glorious soundscape in which we live. This workshop will be an exploration of possible ways to increase our ability to both widen and narrow our attention, using all our senses, but focusing on hearing in particular.
We will use our own sounds – vocal, internal and percussive – to increase our whole-self awareness, and from there focus inward in order to explore the different resonating spaces inside ourselves.
We will get a chance to experience and explore the effects of sounding our harmonic overtones on our sensory awareness.
This will be a great daily course for anyone interested in voice, chanting meditation, enhanced self-awareness, and all types of performance, plus of course any interest in improving listening skills – I hope it will even enhance natural empathy, as I believe this is one of the effects of the way we as human animals vibrate in sympathy with one another, reading the emotions of the people around us. The performer’s job is to trigger that sympathetic vibration in the audience so that performer and listener become one for a few moments. Join me and learn how to pick up some of those ‘Good Vibrations’!
Voice & PolyVagal Theory
Potent Voice is also central to Potent WellBeing, my Feldenkrais meditation system.
The benefits to the health of our nervous system that can be generated by:
a) sustaining vocal sounds, and…
b) focussing our attention on the sounds we are sustaining as we are sustaining them…
…while obvious to those of us who love to sing, have now been recognised by many in the therapeutic community, thanks to the pioneering work of Dr Stephen Porges and his ground-breaking PolyVagal Theory of mammalian neurobiology.
If you are not aware of Dr Porges theories, this film is a useful introduction – the longer discussion I used to share here has very sadly been taken down, so I am sharing this lovely longer talk instead:
– Of course those of us who love to sing don’t need scientific evidence to encourage us, but that there is a sound scientific foundation to the health benefits of singing is very pleasing for any voice teacher, and the ramifications are huge, so I will be writing more about it in my blog, as and when time allows.
Weekly Well-Being Zoom class…
Potent Well-Being
Sensory Self-Awareness & Self-Hypnosis for Self-Healing
Wednesday Evenings
7 – 8.30pm GMT / 2 – 3.30pm EDT (1pm start for another couple of weeks, then we shift back into the usual time gap)
Online + Recording £15*
(*suggested fee, or any donation welcome)
These extended* evening classes focus on my Feldenkrais-based self-healing strategies, and the recordings are intended to make it very easy for you to develop these skills for yourself. I am exploring the evening format with the intention of supporting better sleep as well as pain relief and self-calming.
One seldom-discussed aspect of the potency of the voice is the influential presence of an internal voice, constantly commentating on our lives. The voice inside our own heads can be an ally or an enemy; for a while now I have been discovering how to train my inner voice to be a better ally in my on-going project of self-healing. Here is an introduction to the process, from an article on my website:
“Self-Hypnosis – also known as Autogenic Training – has been around for a long time. I first came across it back in the Eighties, in a book called Superlearning. This was at right at the beginning of my interest in meditation, and practising the autogenic sequences from the book were the closest I came to achieving the deeper states of inner calm that are reportedly the most effective brain wave frequencies for healing chronic conditions.
Thus, when a bout of chronic fatigue left me with fibromyalgic pain that did not easily respond to the mindful movements that had helped me free myself of sciatica in the past, my investigations brought me full circle, and this time I made a connection I had somehow failed to make before. I remembered that Moshe Feldenkrais was also interested in self-hypnosis at a similar age, except that – being the over-achiever he was – he translated a significant book on the subject into Hebrew, and boldly added his own thoughts in a 26 page commentary.
The book was The Practice Of Autosuggestion by the Method of Émile Coué (1929), and Moshe’s original contribution has recently been published as Thinking and Doing, A monograph by Moshe Feldenkrais. He retained his enthusiasm for these concepts throughout his life, attempting to republish his translation in 1977, and using the techniques he still valued to speed his recovery after his stroke.
You will need to book with me directly to get the Zoom link, and a recorded version of the lesson is included in the fee. Bookings are by email, or via my contact page.
*I am aware that 90 minutes is a long class, so do please know that you can choose to join us for the first hour only, particularly if that would make joining the class regularly more manageable for you. Please also note that we sometimes finish a little early!