12/06/2025
Alexander Lowen writes:
“If one wants to change character (and Anne Brownell adds here ‘change restrictive habits of body, mind AND voice’) it is not enough to talk about feelings. They must be experienced and expressed. The body must be freed from its chronic tensions and constrictions if the person is to be freed from the fate they represent”
This is at the centre of Voice Movement Therapy; how can we work and play with feelings in new and expanding ways, how can we engage and create with our material rather than simply talk about it, how can we support clients in finding the courage to truthfully and authentically express themselves.
The modality offers clients a safe and creative space in which to embody, experience, actively explore and full express all that they feel so that the things (including vocal and movement habits) that restrict and limit our expression of self can be understood and shifted. Engaging in Voice Movement Therapy leads to a liberated voice, a free body, and to an empowered sense of self. It is a way to Know Thyself.
VMT founder Paul Newham writes that “if the hurt self is encouraged to discharge itself continually without progression to an artistic mode of expression, the process of catharsis will serve only to feed the very pain that it seeks to heal.” Through its dynamic integration of song, movement and dance, drawing, writing, images and symbols Voice Movement Therapy encourages us to create with our experiences of being human and through so doing convert the shadows and the pain into something more positive and beautiful…
Alfred Wolfsohn and Shiela Braggins (pupil of Wolfsohn) speak of
“the beauty of the dared expression” This is what we do, we find and become more open to the beauty of expressive our full unfiltered Self.
