Tools for Living

We choke, freeze, panic, sweat. Sometimes the reason is plain, sometimes not. The grey of the past often betrays explanation. What matters is now.

Voice/Movement Therapy (VMT) is a practice designed to offer clients tools to help manage reactions and states of being that may be familiar, painfully so, but unnatural or uncomfortable. Freeing your voice and body to have more useful responses and decisions is a fundamental goal with Voice/Movement Therapy. To change our lives, we must experience and facilitate change in the internal working of our hearts, souls and minds. Then we must find the courage to express ourselves in the world. Sometimes we can wish otherwise, but there is no other way.

Moving

We weren’t given bodies solely to carry our heads around.  The relationship between our physical beings and our voice is vital.  In VMT sessions, the client is given tools to develop and enhance the dialogue between the head, the heart and the belly.  Clients unearth new strengths through this knowledge of who they are as physical and vocal beings.    Much can happen when we pay attention to these relationships.   How is your breath moving through you?  What are you noticing?

Motion is life.  Where there is movement there is possibility for liberation both physically and psychologically.  Our minds and are bodies are inextricably connected; what our mind forgets, the body often retains.  There is a connection to be made between the ways you move in your world and how you express yourself.   

In a VMT session, you are the mover and the singer.  You are encouraged to explore the connection you experience between your movements and your voice.  Through utilizing the VMT techniques, you can acquire a renewed sense of yourself as vital being.  There is much wisdom to be had by simply paying careful and caring attention to your body and movement.

Singing

We are all born to sing regardless of what we perceive to be our talent.  A voice that sings with passion and commitment is beautiful, regardless of tone or pitch.  Voice/Movement Therapy is about converting thoughts, feelings, and desires to songs with, or without, words.

Words can come alive through songs.  Voice Movement Therapy sessions are a place to work with songs you have sung throughout your life.  It may be a lullaby you’ve longed to sing.  You might have a song that recurs and you wonder why.  Song exploration is part of the VMT practice.

At times, the client becomes a composer of her own song.  This process can be surprising and empowering.    Through utilizing the VMT method of song writing, songs very often emerge in a session. Sometimes they are given as a homework assignment. 

Your story of your past cannot be changed, but your conclusions about your story fall within your realm of choice.  Voice/Movement Therapy assists you in telling your story differently.  Composing your own song and singing it can help to loosen the bonds we place around the experiences of life.  Memory and song move together recovering lost images and creating new ones for the future.