Sounds From The Heart: A Vocal Exploration

One of the most precious tools for well being is absolutely free and accessible—your own voice!
There are so many songs within each of us wanting to be revealed.

Vocal Exploration with MayaJoëlle Aubry

Sounds from the Heart creates a space where words are secondary, where you are invited to genuinely share who you are, letting the infinite music in you soar. In these vocal playshops, we start by opening our voices through playful and childlike vocal and movement expression, allowing silliness and laughter. As the monkey mind starts to let go of its grip, we enter a space of self trust. Gently guided by MayaJoëlle, the group moves into natural improvisational singing. Each person enters a co-creation, finding one’s musical space, deeply listening, following one’s own heart.

Everyone’s contribution is a gift unwrapping at each moment—either offering your silence, repeating or initiating a musical phrase, or taking off in an original solo improvisation, while the group provides its loving support through repeated musical phrases and deep listening. We allow it to occur naturally, each in our own level of readiness.

Sacred Chanting —When The Breath Becomes Sound

Sacred chanting occurs naturally when we experience the connection with spirit, when we enter a flow from breathing deeply, to the first note, to spirit singing through us. To let yourself improvise vocally is to dive deeply into the present moment.

Sharing with others the discovery of the natural beauty of your voice can:

  • Unleash your creative energy
  • Develop trust and intuition
  • Release stress, tension, and fear
  • Achieve greater harmony
  • Improve physical, emotional, and mental states of being
  • Express and clear buried emotions
  • Flood us with pure joy

To let yourself improvise vocally is to dive deeply into the present moment.

MayaJoëlle’s experience with vocal improvisation

To me, Vocal Improvisation is a delicious expression that automatically brings me fully in the now. If I hear myself think, I am not fully improvising. To improvise vocally is to let the first note happen, then the next, and the next. It is a journey into sound where there is no destination, no doing. Just being. I find myself musically visiting different countries as the sound may have a Russian, African, Middle Eastern, or Native American flavor. I hang out with different moods, from pure silliness to a very sacred space. I discover new sounds, timbers, rhythms. I connect with the favorite part of me.

Listen to Maya’s Reflections.

Vocal Exploration with MayaJoëlle Aubry

MayaJoëlle’s teaching style

Even though I may present some common exercises, in most of the workshops I facilitate, much of the actual content is influenced by the people who participate, what they are ready for and willing to explore with me. Exploring our musical imagination with more seasoned singers as well as willing beginners opens other doors for all the participants.

The warm up exercises, the silly explorations, besides their purpose of feeling good, are very helpful in assisting the participants in letting go of mental judgment, thereby allowing more of the inner music and beauty to come out. It is important to say that while lovingly encouraged to explore in new ways, at any time, anybody is welcome to contribute his or her silence. Nobody has to express in any given technique what he or she is not ready for or interested in participating in. 

With more experienced singers, I focus on exploring musical styles, textures, harmonies through improvisation. It is not unusual for new exercises of new techniques to be born in co-creation. 

It is my intention to:

  • Open a door for participants to bring forth more of who they are, giving themselves permission to let their creative spirit move more freely, trusting their inner beauty to be sounded, individually and as a group.
  • Develop together a greater sense of community, of belonging.
  • Create a safe space where the inner joy flourishes, the sense of the sacred deeply felt while the childlike wonderment unfolds.

Vocal Exploration with MayaJoëlle Aubry

This was a great, great gift. I reached a place that I am longing for, and found I could stay there, and was very grateful to be given permission to not respond to everything. Thank you, thank you, thank you. If I could I would cry from love, beauty, sadness, fear, relief. Nick