‘So you’re not a voice teacher. You’re not a teacher just for people who are interested in what we call voice. You just take something that everyone has and you use it and its special characteristics in order to teach people to listen to themselves better.’

‘Yes.’

‘There is a lot of work that has been done in that direction. So what is special about what you bring?’

‘So I use this word ‘clearing’ a lot. The clearing work sets up the foundations upon which we can then build something new. The clearing work is essentially moving beyond the concept of right or wrong, good or bad, when it comes to the expression of sound, which in itself can be a huge block for some people, and instead allowing the sensation to guide whatever is being expressed in the moment. This could be tension, activation, pleasure, constriction, whatever. What it is, is much less relevant than the process of truly listening to what is there. And often there are many layers to work through before we can really be attuned to ourselves to that level of degree of sensitivity. 

Anything that is needing to be seen or acknowledged or expressed will be sitting on the surface of your system/awareness. Using the voice and the body and to create more connection within a field or collective that started off as separate and bringing us into a place of listening to what is really there can only happen when you have cleaned away the gunk and stuff at the surface. 

So if you take for example the beginning of a workshop, everyone arrives and they are all separate from one another. That person might be thinking about their wives sister, the other person worrying if they sent all the emails they needed to send. Whatever, but we are not in connection with one another. We might be in the same space but we are not in connection. But as you bring this collective attunement through listening, to lets say, a place in the body. Once we start to clear that area and everyone is doing this together, eventually you will start to hear the sound move from dissonance into a coherent and harmonic expression. The field has started to cohere. We start to sing or sound the same song. It gives us that feeling of togetherness. 

I see in a lot of teams and communities people trying very hard to achieve this flow state, this state of connection and togetherness and coherence. Yet they still are attempting to rely on the mind to get there. The mind is not the pathway to getting us there. It is a top down approach and it doesn’t work.’

‘What you describe is a process by which you teach and support people, especially by working in a group, into a place, this intuitive place, without telling them anything about intuitive place, because once you tell them something about this intuitive place they are stuck in the mind. So what you describe is similar to people talking about Zen meditation. The main concept is just sitting. Why are we sitting? Why should I meditate. And then other people explain to them, well its good for you etc. etc. but then you are already outside. In order to be on the inside you have to just sit. And accept that. So I think it's remarkable that you haven’t started to work with people by just listing goals and ideas and methods but started from this point and that is the basic ground from which you build the whole work. And this clearing, what you call clearing is a beautiful concept or notion, in that you are not bringing anything from the outside just clearing the ground or clearing the space for people to start to feel comfortable to follow what they sense.’

‘Exactly. *It’s like tending to the roots. And only when you are connected to that impulse, that true felt sense, you will reach a state of collective harmony. There are some voice teachers that will tell you that improvisation is about putting people into certain roles, like bass, percussion, melody and then to make it up. But I always felt that if everyone is truly connected, and truly listening, which means that those surface level fears and blocks need to have to some extent, dropped, music will arrive. It will come because we are listening to the same thing. So everyone will find intuitively and instinctively where their voice needs to enter into the whole. Without thinking about it. You have to let go, in order for the music to happen. And that is still a very backwards thing in our current society. As a society we still have so much negative conditioning around letting go.’

‘A word or a concept that I would like to throw in is spontaneity. Spontaneity as the innate ability to do something not from the level of the cortex but because it is already there in the system. Sound and music are already in the system. The problem is that people interfere and when you say clearing, I can relate to it from the point of view of taking away all the cultural conditioning that doesn’t let you see what you already have. So in this sense I understand that you help people realise that they are not learning in sense of acquiring something outside or external but they learn to know themselves.’

‘I’d like to unpack the word clearing, it is the layers of freeze, or disassociation, or overwhelm, or emotional stagnation, fragmentations of someones being, those places that may have felt abandoned, rejected or pushed away’

‘Totally, no need to even go to trauma I mean its enough to just notice our relationship to our emotions, the emotions surprise us and shake us, so there is a lot internal and external inhibition to sensation and emotion. Trauma is much bigger but the way we are shaped in this sense. So what is it that your student learn, what is it that they take with them that they can continue to practice?’

‘Just before I go into that, another word that I use in the process of the work is constellating. To constellate means: To form or cause to form into a cluster or group (like stars gathering into a constellation). Example: “Ideas began to constellate around a new vision.”
To bring together into a meaningful pattern or whole. Example: “Different voices constellated into a unified field. A constellation is the emergence of a shape finding its form and structure within a group. Like a return to original harmony. So when we get used to the clearing work, we add another layer of complexity with the constellation work. So essentially what that means is that through sounding what is truly there, you are finding within the field of the whole space where it is that you fit. Where does your body want to be? You must keep following the impulse of your instinct and the power to move yourself away from, and towards that which is drawing your attention. Eventually these shapes and patterns will start to emerge within the group of people taking part.