On Monday, February 13, 2017, I went to Yururi-an in Jiyugaoka — a Bali-style space that serves as a place for talking — for a Voice Healing workshop run by Maria Watanabe.
I first met Maria on November 8, 2015, at a talk by Hitoshi Kakizawa of Kakizawa Consulting, a food business consultant: the second in the “Magokoro no Shigotonin” series, on people who work from the heart.
We have kept in touch since, and when I ran a workshop on how to listen at Session Room ZERO, she came as a guest teacher.
Maria began running Voice Healing workshops in 2016, and I had wanted to attend one. I asked whether she might hold one in February 2017, she agreed, and it came about.
The workshop ran from 7:00 to around 9:30 PM, two and a half hours. The agenda had six parts, set out in more detail on two sheets of A4 handed round. Eight participants, four men and four women. We began after brief introductions.
- What is resonance? — the resonance of your own voice, what it does, what it can do
- Hearing your own healing voice — taking the body as an instrument, how do you make a voice resonate?
- Healing yourself — at what angle does the voice resonate? Looking at the parts of the body against pitch and quality
- Healing another — through paired work, how does the resonance of a voice affect another person?
- Healing what matters to you — what change does the resonance of a voice bring to an object?
- Clearing a space — how does making a voice resonate bring a space into order?
How does the voice change when you shake the body and give it vibration? How do you move the throat, where the voice comes from, to make sound? Maria, who also works as a singer, showed us the method she had been taught by a voice trainer.
The voice has a position that suits the body, she said. Making sound with the head tilted up is dangerous for the voice. Move the head up and down and you find two angles — one in the middle, one somewhat lower — where the voice comes out more easily. Having found that position, you then explore volume and thickness. This was entirely new to me, and it interested me.
After finding your own voice, you feel around the body, touching it, for where the resonance lands. What I found most interesting was the work of sounding while sensing a connection with the earth, a connection with the sky, and the body as a pipe. Standing on one leg made clear something I usually feel after practicing yoga: that the feet are on the ground.
Through paired work, how does making your own voice resonate affect another person? Here and there I could feel the kind of effect on the body that I work with in Rolfing and Source Point Therapy. There was also an introduction to the work of Keiko Ochi, based in Okinawa; it is easy to put into practice, and I think it could be brought into a Rolfing session.
The event yielded more than I expected. Taking the body as an instrument, and asking how the body is released — this connects to the yoga I practice daily and the Rolfing I offer.
In fact, during Phase II of the Rolfing training in Munich, I was taught work that releases the body by making the voice resonate, by Patricia von Weichs, who was assisting Giovanni Felicioni. I watched a body release as a voice resonated (for a summary of the training, see “Becoming a Certified Rolfer in Europe — The Certification Training of the European Rolfing Association“).
How does a voice resonate? Rolfing has a good effect on the breath as well, so I would like to explore the relation between voice and breath a little further in sessions.
Note, September 2026
At the end of this piece I wrote that I wanted to explore the relation between voice and breath a little further in sessions.
A month and a half later, the answer came to me.
In March 2017 I attended a workshop with Gael Rosewood of Rolf Movement. The second session was on approaching the breath through Rolf Movement and sound. A question found outside had its continuation inside the system.
Except that it was less an answer arriving than the same thing arriving twice.
Both Patricia von Weichs and Gael Rosewood are Continuum Movement teachers. Continuum was founded by Emilie Conrad, and it puts sound and breath at its center. Gael met Emilie Conrad in 1980.
I was taught voice work in Phase II in 2014, and took the breath-and-sound session in March 2017. I had thought of these as separate teachers on separate occasions, but they had reached me by two routes from one source.
There are other routes for the voice.
February 2017, Maria at this workshop: that the angle of the head changes where the voice comes out most easily, and sensing the body as a pipe. This comes from her practice as a singer.
And the Tomatis method, which a friend told me about — a method that works with the relation between hearing and voice.
Inside Rolfing and outside it, there were people working with the voice.
Nine years on, where has it landed?
I pay attention to the voice when I listen.
I take time before a session to listen, and what I look at there is which senses a person uses and what their words mean to them. The voice has been added to that. Pitch, thickness, where it is coming from.
The same holds for my own voice. Where I place it changes what reaches the other person.
The theoretical backbone of Rolf Movement is the work of Hubert Godard. His starting point was what he observed while teaching dance: give the same task, and how you talk in the studio changes how people dance.
I had understood that as being about the choice of words. But how you talk includes the voice. Not only what is said, but at what pitch, with what thickness.
Looking for the angle of the head in Maria’s workshop was part of the same thing.