Finding Your Voice

Course Description

In this course Barbara McAfee will gently lead you to your own and your bravest voice, invite you to let your silly side spill out in sound, and show you how to speak with your natural authority.

Barbara´s enthusiasm for vocal expression is contagious and you’ll quickly find your voice has caught the bug of wanting and using a fuller range of vocal resources. By trying out the sounds that come from your different body centers you´ll find new ways to bring what’s inside you into the world. 

You’ll learn the origin and principles of the Five Elements Framework™, a tool for opening the voice to more flexibility, power, and pleasure in everyday expression. Barbara starts with warm-up exercises that include barking like different dogs and imitating instruments to get us in the mood. The first class gives us an overview of Barbara’s work and the 5 elements framework. The next 3 classes focus on the specific elements. 

You’ll learn how to access the earth, fire, water, metal and air in your body centers, what the voice sourced in that center sounds like, and the strengths and disadvantages of each voice. Barbara brings in characters we all know to help you make the sounds of the element. She helps you move from big sound to song to spoken poetry to everyday use of the voice in each element. 

As you explore the elements you’ll discover your own vocal strengths and challenges – how they might reflect the ways you’ve been shaped and how they might be influencing your life.

The classes are available now.

This course is ideal if

• Let more of who you are come through your voice
• Feel more grounded in your body by using your voice
• Sense where the power in your voice comes from
• Let the compassion you feel be heard by others
• Play with a range of vocally expressive characters
• Explore the sounds and vocal styles of genders and characters you were taught are Other or off bounds to you
• Learn how different types of expression are related to different centers of your body
• Match your voice to the situation you’re in

Course Overview

Class 1. Guidelines to Voice Work and Introduction to the Five Elements Framework

Available Now

Barbara opens with a short song about finding our astonishing light when we’re lonely. If you explore your voice along with Barbara through these classes, in depth and in play, you may indeed come upon astonishing lights, shadows and timbres inside you.

In this class Barbara encourages curiosity about your voice. She presents the origin and principles of the Five Elements Framework™  for voice work. You’ll hear a vocal sample of each of the five elements, earth, fire, water, metal and air, along with a profile of its uses and limitations.

Class 2. Earth and Fire voices and Shadow Considerations

Available Now

In this class Barbara explores the Earth and the Fire voices; where they reside in the body, their cultural characterizations and how they move through our voices. Then Barbara talks about how limiting our voices is related to Jung’s ideas about Shadow. She encourages us to make sounds that might run counter to cultural norms as a way to stay whole and let our inner animals come out.  Barbara gives homeplay exercises to continue your adventure after the class.

Class 3. Water and Metal voices, Gender and Other Considerations

Available Now

Carry on with more investigations and more fun with vocalizing and localizing the Water and Metal voices. Barbara gives demonstrations of these voices in everyday expression and invites us to follow her examples. She explains that regardless of your gender identity, to be whole you need to incorporate as many human qualities as you can. She encourages each of us to explore typically feminine and masculine voices as ways of touching softness, sensuality or power we may have been taught were not for us to express.

Class 4. Air voice and Integrating the 5 Elements into your everyday life

Available Now

This class explores the Air voice, its strengths and weaknesses. Barbara´s exercises access this center at the top of our range. Barbara gives special encouragement to introverts to express themselves. She gives you practical tips for bringing this work into your everyday life and encourages you to evaluate your vocal habits and where you might explore new possibilities.

Class 5. Last Class

In this last class, participants were invited to share their learnings, and engage in a conversation, and ask questions around applying the course learnings. 

By the end of this course you will

• Use your voice with more flexibility, passion, compassion and authority
• Hear the different voices that the different centers of your body produce
• Understand the correlation of the Five Elements with the parts of the body and fundamental human qualities
• Know vocal exercises to stimulate the different body centers
• Feel more free to play with your voice, and in the world, too!
• Recognize how our voice reflects our current situation, life-long education and can express what’s moving in our soul