Vibrant Voice in Hilo, Hawaii

My cousin, Tracey Lambe, and I gave a Vibrant Voice workshop Sunday, February 18 in Hilo, Hawaii, where Tracey lives. Sponsored by Balancing Monkey Yoga Studio, a lovely circle of women gathered to sing, write, open our bodies with yoga, and create our own heart mantra.
Tracey is a poet, writer and psychotherapist. We began collaborating on Vibrant Voice workshops over a decade ago as a way to see each other more often. What we discovered is that creative, improvisational writing widens the voice channel and singing, chanting, and improvising vocally amplifies the writing channel. Voice, in the largest sense, is our capacity to express ourselves in our lives – through our decisions, work, creativity, relationships, speech, and artistic endeavors. Having a fluid, open throat channel facilitates our ability to connect with our world, to speak our truth, and to ask for and receive what we need in life.
The night before the workshop, we were woken up every hour by a tropical storm of biblical proportions – searing lightening, followed by booming thunder and torrential rain. The storm was cacophonous. As Pablo Neruda said in a poem Tracey read at the workshop, “… and suddenly I saw the heavens unfastened and open.” Hawaii is a place where the elements are an impressive, daily presence.
Neruda meant that he found wisdom in writing from nothing, from “pure foolishness, pure wisdom of one who knows nothing,” that the process of expressing ourselves opens us to heaven. What I found is that being in Hawaii with its elemental intensity unfastens me from my traditional moorings and connects me to the core of the earth. In this workshop, I felt like I had come home to myself. That is heaven!

Here I am planning with Tracey while we stretch during a yoga break.

A rainbow over Tracey's house heralded a successful workshop.