In this exclusive interview, MysticMag delves into the fascinating world of sound therapy with Alexandra Rigazzi-Tarling, a seasoned Sound and Voice Healing Consultant with over 25 years of international experience. Trained as an opera singer and equipped with a profound understanding of the human voice, Alexandra has transitioned from the stage to the realm of holistic healing, where she uses sound and voice as powerful tools for personal development and well-being. Join us as Alexandra shares her unique journey, the therapeutic potential of sound, and practical advice for those looking to reconnect with their own voice and self-expression.
Your career spans over 25 years in both opera performance and vocal coaching. What inspired you to transition from a focus on performance to incorporating sound therapy and healing into your practice?
I grew up surrounded by both music and complementary healing. My mother was a teacher but also a therapist and healer and so that was a normal part of my existence. In our family we looked at how to prevent illness with various complementary approaches and through this there was an emphasis on personal development and understanding the self. We always sang a great deal and both my parents enjoyed singing, so again this was normal for me and represented happiness and wellbeing. When I entered into the performance world, as much as I enjoyed the music and discovery, the travel and the idea that I was developing the thing I loved to do the most (singing!), much of the joy began to fade and I began associating singing with criticism, striving and often unhappiness. I was a natural performer and loved working with different aspects of my personality by developing a character on stage or through an operatic aria, but I wasn’t competitive, I wasn’t keen on the idea of constantly chasing the proverbial carrot, and I was fed up with having to prove myself all the time, whether it was to an audition panel, an agent, a director and so on. I was dissipating energy and living from a place of fear and I found that I was getting ill a lot of the time. I had trained intensively since the age of 18, and had been pursuing an operatic career for some years both in the UK and abroad, when one day in my early thirties, I was working for a small opera company in London, and the day before opening night, I came down with an awful bug, and lost my voice completely. I remember the producer shouting at me down the phone, telling me to get a steroid injection to make the voice work so I could sing. It was in that moment, that something clicked and I realised that this way of life was no longer for me. I stopped actively pursuing a performance career the week after and started to investigate ways I could use my voice to help people. I had always been drawn to helping people, and wanted to reconnect with my healing and complementary background as well as working as a vocal coach. I also had the feeling that there were other people in the world that were also natural singers but didn’t know how to express themselves outside of a performance career. One day back in 2011, I found Simon Heather and the College of Sound Healing. I trained as a vocal sound healer, and the rest is history. I combined my extensive experience of performance psychology, vocal technique and energy work and began a new pathway to use the voice as a healing tool.
For those unfamiliar with sound therapy, can you explain how it works and what kinds of conditions it can help with?
Sound Therapy/Healing works on the premise that everything as we know it in the world around us is a mass of vibrating particles or energy. If something is vibrating it has a frequency and can therefore be tuned. When we think of the human body we know it to be solid and water. We can therefore deduce that it is also made up of millions of tiny vibrating particles. If we allow our minds to expand for a moment and think about what this means, we might form a picture of a body that is not stuck or solid, but is actually very moveable, intuitive and with its own energetic patterns. Sound therapy and healing helps us get in touch with this resonant aspect of our being which is directly connected to our nervous system and therefore our ability to self-regulate and find the root of what might be making us unwell, or indeed, keeping us healthy! Given that medicine, including the NHS, has used sound for years to break down kidney stones, hear babies in the womb and even destroy cancer cells, it’s not such a new concept. Acoustic physicists like John Stuart Reid for example, continue to work to discover the secrets of sound in their laboratory experiments.
However, sound healers like myself, work with sound and voice in an intuitive way. We look upon the human body like Rudolf Steiner’s concept of an orchestra, containing many vibrating parts. If all the parts are vibrating and sounding together in harmony the person will probably experience wellness and harmony in their life. However, if one part is out of balance (or out of tune), it can affect the whole system. As an voice and sound healer, it is my job to use my voice over the person’s energy field and sense where imbalances exist, so that I can tune them and in doing so, assist the client with rebalancing their physical and subtle bodies. In essence, sound ‘healing’ refers to someone that works as a vessel for universal energy, or Chi and through the natural phenomenon of entrainment and pure intention, assists with moving stagnant energy in a person’s body, tuning and restoring balance. Most illness seems to stem from unresolved emotional stress and the way humans perceive what happens to them. Our conditioning and our mind tell us we should be living a certain way, even if it makes us unwell. We learn as humans to desensitise to what our bodies are telling us. We ignore our natural responses, suppress our feelings and emotions, until our energy system is full and literally has no way of flowing. Sound healing works to restore this flow and lead clients into deep silence, where the body’s intelligence can be tuned into. Healing is different for everyone and it’s not a one size fits all approach. However, by guiding a person regularly through sound into a place of silence, it is possible to reconnect with a relaxation response, identify stress triggers and learn how to manage stress and emotions through acceptance and expression rather than avoidance and suppression. Sound healing is not waving a magic wand. It is a two-way process between the therapist and client. I am quite strict and have my clients doing homework practices between sessions whether it be deep breathing, vocal toning, or simply taking 10 minutes to switch into an alpha state with some day dreaming! It is so important that the client is empowered to find their own healing pathway, guided and supported by the therapist as to what they might look like. It’s a journey, not a quick fix.
You mention using the voice as a healing tool for personal development. How does the voice play a role in someone’s personal growth or healing journey?
The voice is our sonic identity, and it represents a person on all levels of being. It is possible to tap into the inner workings of a person’s physical and emotional wellbeing, just by listening to the sound they produce e.g. when speaking. For many, the concept of vocalising means singing for performance. Most people I speak to have some hang up about their voice, and spend their time telling me how they can’t sing. The music and performance industry has brain washed us into thinking that good singing is only akin to that which you might hear on the radio or high profile concert and because we do not receive any education to the contrary, we believe this. We forget that as babies we gurgled and sighed with happiness, cried with hunger and pain and for our care givers. What about these sounds? In short, I believe we have become so caught up with how we think we should sound in order to fit into society and our environment, that we have forgotten how to express ourselves through voice. We have forgotten our sound and our natural resonance which is nucleus of our self-expression. We clam up when we need to speak, we suppress our emotion to make ourselves sound strong, we are criticised for making unacceptable vocal sounds whether singing, speaking or expressing ourselves. Most people tell me they hate to hear the sound of their voice when played back. Why, is my question? If we don’t like the sound of our voice, what is that really saying about us? It’s our sound! It is everything we are! I usually start here with a person and what follows is often a deep swelling of everything that has ever been kept down, coming to the Light to be witnessed. Once this phase is done (and it can take time), we begin again, truthfully and in acceptance of ourselves, who we really are and how we truly sound. From this place, we can grow and develop and most importantly unleash our full creative power.
You’ve developed a system called Singing Therapy and Voice Reconnection®. Could you elaborate on what this involves and how it differs from traditional singing lessons?
A traditional singing lesson is usually rooted in performance and wanting to be able to sing a particular genre e.g. pop, opera, jazz and all of the above. As a vocal coach I will always strive to work with the vocal apparatus in the most natural way, meaning that there is a technical understanding of how the voice functions, and I follow that. It might be that someone has particular problems of tension in a certain area, throat constriction, tongue retraction, sub-glottal pressure and so on. A traditional singing lesson looks to fix these issues so that a person can access their authentic sound comfortably, and then apply their voice successfully to whatever genre they choose.
Singing Therapy on the other hand started because I was asked to work with singing and vocal exercises for people with conditions such as Dystonia and related muscular spasm and breathing disorders, autism and dementia. The therapy aspect was that for people with dystonia, there seemed to be relief with muscular tension. I had youngsters come for sessions that had been diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum and I remember some explaining to me that singing was very calming and helped them ‘download’ the tension they were experiencing. Even recently working in a one to one capacity with special needs teens, they seemed to find a way to express themselves through the vocal sounding, in a way they couldn’t with plain speech. We would sing songs they wanted to sing, whatever they were drawn to. We would also do all sorts of vocal exercises to get their sound flowing. The vocal apparatus is a complex system yet its function involves so many physical aspects of the human body including the vagus nerve via the larynx and the diaphragm. When we are allowed to sing and sound freely we activate parts of our physiology that have a profound effect on our nervous system as well as releasing feel good chemicals such as endorphins and oxytocin. Vocal sounding encourages the body to behave naturally, how it was designed to be used as sounding beings. If we don’t use our vocal system, we are living in a state of deactivation and it is my belief that this can cause both physical and mental illness.
Voice Reconnection was a therapy I designed for those that for whatever reason had felt stifled and unable to express themselves vocally in their lives, often in speech. I’d get clients coming to see me that were afraid to speak, or if they did would feel unheard, ashamed of their sound, of themselves. This work attracted people from all sorts of backgrounds from barristers to corporate, to those that just wanted to explore their intense fear of sounding. People were initially drawn to have a voice coaching session with me because of my holistic background, but so many people came for this type of work where they needed to ‘reconnect’ with their voice and that sonic part of themselves, that I created Voice Reconnection therapy to be clear about what I was offering.
What advice would you give to someone who feels disconnected from their voice or self-expression? How can they begin to reclaim and unlock it?
I am very pragmatic about this work and believe that the best way into such a profound topic is breaking through physical patterns. Connecting with the voice can be done very simply to start with by practising vibrating the vocal cords on the breath and teaching yourself that this is ok. By that I mean, if critical thoughts come up to tell you how bad your voice sounds, or how ridiculous you are for doing such a simple exercise, to observe these and continue anyway. Try to do this exercise alone, taking 10 minutes for yourself in a place where you are undisturbed. If that’s not possible, this technique is very quiet so go outside and sit somewhere, or you can even do it whilst walking to the bus stop!
This simple form of vocalising is called ‘vocal toning’ and it is about creating vibration at the point of the vocal cords and sustaining this vibration quietly on a held tone. In doing this we begin to regulate our breathing, enter into a relaxation response, and link the vibration of voice with a positive exercise. Doing this for even 10 minutes a day will help anyone begin to form a subconscious and conscious connection with their voice. The voice is directly linked with self-expression. Once your sound begins to flow in a peaceful, unjudged environment, a spark of creativity follows. I stress the importance of not judging your sound or initially being around people who might be conditioned to. I have been to many a yoga class where vocal toning has been turned into an external pushing out of the voice in competition with others in the room. It’s not that. It’s personal, internal and not a competition. Ever.
Start by taking some deep belly breaths. As you inhale through your nose, keep your shoulders and upper body down, and allow your belly to expand. As you exhale, and observe the belly gently moving back towards the spine as the lungs empty, quietly begin to hum. Try to hold it as long as is comfortable. Over time your aim is to hold the tone for longer. Keep your back teeth apart even though the lips are gently closed and allow the sound, rather than push the sound out. As you do this exercise, try to think of something that makes you happy.
