DragonFly Arts, Inc.

nsformation. I hold the space for you to open it and become awakened in your own creative freedom. My life’s work is helping you embody your unique Presence and Essential Self through giving voice. I help you sing through the shadows of your psyche and unchain the silent self, resonating the primal, raw emotions dammed up in pain and tension. My life’s work is celebrating the full expanse of human expression with compassion. I hold the space of light and power for your soul song. My work synthesizes Voice Movement Therapy and acting with shamanic and mystical/esoteric sound healing practice. Through play, improvisation, ritual theatre processes, and theater games I provide a safe container for the silenced selves and the wounded inner child. I facilitate you singing these soul parts home, retrieving them to the body and to awareness. I hold you in Song. DESCRIPTION OF OFFERINGS
My story and the path that leads me to you:
I could never have imagined that my life’s work would involve helping people to embody their unique Presence or Essential Self through voice. As a young person I felt shy, and saw myself as spacey. I look back and see the early makings of the mystic and poet. I sang to trees as a child. I spent all day alone in the woods, watching tadpoles grow in the pond. Snakes never scared me. I wondered how I got here and where I really came from. I wrote poems about feeling caged and wanting to fly; poured my sadness into my fingers and let them dance the piano, fell in love with acting in plays. Through acting I shape-shifted and belonged to different worlds. My beloved Grandmother sang German songs to me and I loved singing with her. I was cruelly teased about my singing - especially my high, piercing, slightly off-key child voice. So I shut it down. I understand how the voice gets repressed, how freedom of expression gets tamed in our culture. I understand how fear takes over the vocal cords, quickens the heart, tightens the throat and tells us we don’t deserve to be heard. We will get hurt, (or killed) if we speak up. We will be laughed at, rejected, made to feel ashamed. It was through chanting in my 20’s that I began to rediscover the joy, healing, and spiritual power of vocal expression. With courage, I opened my voice as a professional actor and as a writer of plays. I began channeling spirit songs in sound healing ritual concerts that I produced. I was being initiated into the powers of voice. When sound healing was on the unknown fringe, I began teaching toning and giving healing sessions. I embodied through my voice. And I discovered my passion. Voice and Body Training:
Over 30 years I have studied voice and how to embody through it. My foundational work was in Voice Movement Therapy (VMT). I studied in 1996 with the founder, Paul Newham. These studies helped heal the split I had between my human shadow and my transcendent, shamanic singer. I learned to facilitate people into their voice and began integrating this into theatre. My Master of Fine Arts training was in Contemporary Theater Performance at Naropa University, Boulder, Colorado. I studied extensively in the field of experimental physical theater, as well as embodiment practices including Body-Mind Centering and Buddhist meditation as applied to the arts. I remain in deep gratitude to the master teachers I was privedged to study under. The other seminal healing modality that grounds my work in the body is Somato Respiratory Integration (SRI), developed by Donald Epstein. SRI is a breath work technique that integrates breath patterns with stages of healing. At each stage and with each breath, clients release stuck energy and resource it into freedom and awakened consciousness. An awareness of breath patterns and the stages of consciousness they reflect underlies how I am able to meet people where they are. I can then facilitate the movement into embodied intimacy with the aspect(s) of self trying to get their attention. Integration and Mastery

Many teachers become masterful at what they teach because they’ve walked a certain path and can look back at where they have come and see reflections of themselves in the students attracted to them. They develop the kindness, understanding, and compassion to meet those students right where they are. In the grip or fear, at the edge of empowerment the master KNOWS how to guide the student to take that next step toward the unfoldment of who they essentially are. I have walked the path. It is really a pathless mystery from fear to love (and back again and again). I have made it from the dark night of the soul to the embrace of my human nature. I have resisted and surrendered to the mystery. The ongoing creative pulse of contraction and expansion continually brings me out of sacred Silence and into my Song. I am, as we all are a spiral of becoming. I feel with deep empathy that pulse, that dance, that potential Song waiting to be sung in everyone I work with. Nature has always been my best friend and teacher. She continues to teach me about love and the songs that heal the soul’s disconnection from the fabric of life on earth. Through her tutelage I guide you into a deeper, more primal relationship with the earth we share. I guide you to listen to and feel what our sister and brother plants, trees, animals, and stones wish to sing to us. I invite you to remember how to exchange soul essence with the heart of Mother Earth’s beauty and bounty and receive Her nurturing and medicine. I walk a path of partnership with Gaia/Sophia/Pachamamma/Mother Earth, my first and primary mentor. I teach the path I walk. I provide healing by the grace of the divine sound beings, nature spirits, angels, and guides who walk by my side. Take my hand, we walk this path together.