about liv
I have come to understand the voice as a vessel...
...It carries language, memory, instinct and longing. It carries what we have learnt to reveal and what we have learnt to withhold.
My work begins with listening to that.
The voice has been my teacher.
I came to this work through music. For a long time, I thought I was studying singing. Over time, I realised I was also studying relationship: with breath, uncertainty, discipline, silence, creativity and the people listening.
The voice has shown me where I am trying too hard, where I disappear, where I hold back and where
something becomes possible because I am willing to stay.
Again and again, it returns me to the same questions. Can I hear what is here? Can I respond without rushing to control it? Can I allow the sound to be alive?
The traditions that meet in my work:
My study of Hindustani classical music has deepened my relationship with listening, repetition, devotion and the subtle life of a note.
Jazz, composition and improvisation have shaped the way I understand risk and response, tension and release. A background in music therapy has kept me close to the human need to be heard, and to the care required when voice carries more than words.
Yoga offers the philosophical ground in which these strands can meet. Through ideas such as Śabda
Brahman, sound is understood as more than decoration or accompaniment. Vibration is woven into the nature of existence itself.
In Yoga of the Voice, these influences are not presented as separate subjects. They meet in practice.
Improvisation as yoga:
Improvisation is central to my work because, to truly improvise, we have to be present. Fully here.
The moment we retreat into what we already know, we are recalling. The moment we become preoccupied with what should happen next, we lose contact with what is happening now. Improvisation
asks us to listen, respond and trust the next sound before we know what it will be. It has discipline, form and consequence. It also has freedom.
This is why I came to see improvisation as so much more than a musical practice. It has shaped my
work with leadership and it sits naturally within yoga: both ask us to meet the present moment without clinging to what is already known.
For me, this is also one way of meeting Shakti — allowing the creative movement of life to be felt rather than merely discussed.
Voice, grief and being heard
My relationship with voice changed profoundly when my mum died while I was pregnant with my first child. For a time, I stopped singing. It was simply too painful. Something that had always been so close to me became something I could no longer reach. When I eventually began to sing again, the voice became part of how I found my way through grief. Singing gave shape to what I could not explain. It allowed sorrow, love and longing to exist together — and, over time, helped me glimpse something of the beauty that can live alongside grief, even within its pain.
That experience changed the way I understand the voice.
Sometimes we build a wall between ourselves and our voices. Bereavement may be part of that story, but it is not the only reason. We may have learnt to become quieter, to take up less space, to mistrust our expression or simply to lose contact with a part of ourselves that once felt alive. My grief work grows from this lived experience: the possibility of meeting the voice again, gently, and discovering what it might carry when we no longer ask it to be polished, certain or resolved. Those who hold space for others need a place to be held themselves. This understanding runs through my work with teachers, facilitators and anyone finding their way back into relationship with their voice.
