A voice that felt like it had been silenced for centuries. 

All my life I’ve been speaking and singing, and been criticised… for being too loud, being too harsh, speaking too fast, being rude, not speaking up, singing out of tune…

All these negative messages were fed to me by the closest people around me: family, parents, siblings, friends, husband.

In the end I didn’t need anyone to say anything because the chitta chatter of my mind continued giving me those messages of abuse in the form of self judgement. 

So on many occasions I held back, afraid to speak, or, if I did speak, people were offended so I crawled back into my shell, and shut up.

Until I met Chris James.

I first met Chris many moons ago, what feels like lifetimes. He works with expression, both speaking and singing. You might think just going ooooo is banale (insignificant), but when you do it with your whole body, it can be a delicious feeling.

Over the years, and thanks to Chris, I became more confident about speaking in public, and ran courses for people scared of public speaking. So the confidence in speaking was there, but my voice could still come across as harsh.

My confidence in singing remained low, but it’s something I love to do, so I sang in choirs where I could keep in tune with everyone else.

Chris James runs several choirs and, through attending those where he encourages us to play with our voices and create harmonies, I’ve become more and more confident in my singing.

More recently I’ve had individual sessions with Chris; one-to-one face to face and they’ve been very scary at first but awesome at the same time. 

We’ve done more work on feeling my body when I speak, which is especially useful in all the jobs I do, and we’ve also worked on singing.

With singing, my mind was full of the self doubt chitta chatter with thoughts like “Oh that was awful” and “Are you sure that was in tune?”

Despite the negative thoughts, I kept going and Chris encouraged me to play with my voice, even to sing the lead (despite my initial internal panic), and he harmonised with what I was singing.

It has felt exquisite in my body, not only to have the privilege of such a great musician playing and singing with me in such a supportive way, but to feel my own true voice of song coming through. 

A voice that felt like it had been silenced for centuries. 

Thank you Chris