Whether you think you can sing or not, making sounds and tapping into your 'naked voice' will release inner conflicts, writes Anne Dempsey who participated in a creative workshop.
Through a distant door comes the sound of low melodic singing, then silence, then laughter. The location is Dunderry Park, a gracious old house in Co Meath where Chloe Goodchild's five-day residential workshop is drawing to a close. She is a music philosopher, voice teacher, singer and composer, and her organisation, The Naked Voice, works to help individuals and organisations find their voice in order to release inner conflicts and generate a more fulfilling relationship with self and others.
While Goodchild's musical pathway has been individual, her use of the human voice as a channel towards self-awareness is part of a contemporary movement, celebrating music, dance, art and bodywork as a route to health and healing. Most weekends around Ireland these days, you will find groups coming together for a gamut of therapies from drumming to aromatherapy and visualisation. The unifying premise is that we access emotions more powerfully by bypassing the thinking left brain and hot-wiring into the intuitive right-hand side.
Goodchild, who studied music and education at Cambridge and Norwich Universities, has worked in conflict situations in Belfast, in prisons in Northern Ireland and America, with a programme that cuts through polarised belief systems. She also coaches entertainers and is credited by model-turned-actor Jerry Hall in helping to open up her voice for theatre.
Goodchild is taking part in Love Comes to Town, on July 29th and August 5th, joining Mary Coughlan and spiritual healer Swami Ji in a celebration repeated on consecutive weekends that includes performance, yoga teaching and practice, meditation, and a health workshop.
Describing the naked voice as the voice of our true self, Goodchild has developed a method which facilitates participants in discovering it. No singing prowess is necessary. She uses mantras, meditation, silence, love poetry, improvisation and movement to help people find a deeper level of self-acceptance.
A vibrant figure in purple tunic and orange trousers, she emerges during a break in the Dunderry Park course, and offers the opportunity to work with her. The result is memorable. Not renowned for my singing, I am invited to express just what I feel right then, while she accompanies on the harmonium. My sound, which begins a little sadly, moves naturally to a happier, playful song, finally ending on a note of longing. She then interprets, very accurately, some of what I am voicing and explains that should we continue, she would work to help more expression of any emotions wishing to be heard. "You see, we've met only minutes ago and already we are communicating on a deep level. Music is like that, it helps us suspend the judgmental mind and come home to our true nature.
"Part of my work is about teaching people to witness . . . to themselves. As children, we learn to analyse, to react, but nobody ever teaches us to observe ourselves without judgment. I was partially deaf as a child and had to communicate with others from a place of silence and stillness. This taught me to witness myself and find deep ways of connecting with myself and others, later reinforced when I encountered spiritual music from Africa and Asia."
Defining conflict as our "chaotic music", she says conflict can also be a messenger, a wake-up call that something needs changing. "We may have been told as children to be quiet, to limit ourselves. Many people say to me 'I can't sing', which can be a metaphor for 'I don't accept myself as I am' . . . But we are music . . . We cry with grief and joy, we laugh, we sigh, we vibrate with energy, we groan. Helping people find their voice as a transformation of conflict is an important ingredient of our work. We provide people with a body of knowledge based on communication, listening, meditation, spoken and sung skills that enables them to continue when they leave. This template strengthens their own self-inquiry and leads them into a more restful and nourishing way of life."