Karleena has a varied background in music, dance, theatre, business management, graphic design and psychology, as well as experience in running a retreat center and leading workshops in the U.S. and Mexico. Along with offering Natural Voice workshops, her current passion is leading the Tucson Women's Chorus, an a cappella chorus singing chants, rounds and songs from many cultures and traditions around the world. She founded this group in the fall of '02.
Karleena's story:
In 1997 I was incapacitated by a condition that reduced my world dramatically. Even the simplest tasks were a challenge. I was in constant pain. Through the haze of that time I remembered a friend talking about toning to her garden plants to help them grow. I hadn't heard of toning as such, but with my background as a trained musician I decided to begin experimenting with holding a single tone on a single open vowel sound for the length of a breath. Over and over.
Finding a tone and a vowel that I could hold effortlessly for a long time, I got to the point of toning for a half-hour or more once or twice a day. What I began to experience was a complete cessation of all pain and fatigue during the toning sessions. While sitting and toning I felt like I was inhabiting a healthy, vibrant body! It's true that after each toning session the symptoms would flood back, but they no longer felt like my identity. I was not be able to escape the symptoms completely at that time, but I could take a vacation from them when I chose to. That was a great blessing to say the least.
This experience fascinated and excited me so much that I began devouring books on sound and healing. I discovered in the process that what I was led to do naturally was exactly what was being described as a method of teaching toning for the purpose of healing and of maintaining health.
The previous year, during a ten-day Insight Meditation retreat I had come to a life-changing insight that my professional path as a psychologist was not good for me. I walked away from that path, shaking my head in bewilderment but sure that somehow all of that training and experience would support what was to come by following what I knew by then was my true path -- music. I just didn't know how those two things, music and psychology, would come together. It was the health crisis experience the following year that began to show me the way, though it was several years before it became clear.
My husband and I moved from Putney, Vermont to Tucson, Arizona in 2000 as part of my quest for health. Here I founded the Tucson Women's Chorus and began developing workshops in sound and movement. In 2004 I discovered online an organization based in the U.K. called the Natural Voice Practitioners Network. Their philosophy was exactly in line with my own. I traveled to England to become trained in that method.
The Natural Voice workshops that I offer are an amalgam of specific techniques I learned in that training along with techniques that continue to emerge from my experiences in working with people in using the voice, and using the body to support vocal expression. My background in psychology helps me in creating and holding a safe and supportive space for people experiencing the potential vulnerability of vocalizing in public. The training I received in England was designed to point Natural Voice practitioners in the direction of developing our own techniques based on the training and the philosophy of the Natural Voice Practitioners Network. As such, it has continued to be an invaluable service as I continue to grow in this work that gives me such joy.
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