MY STORY

I am Christa Ray, MFA. I am a Voice Movement Therapist/Teacher, Sacred Improvisational Performance Artist, Sound Healer and Spiritual Awakening Mentor.

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What lies in your voice? What freedom lies on the other side of embodying it?

I teach voicework as a path to soul awakening, integration and embodiment. The voice is a built in tool of self-discovery, healing, and transformation. I hold the space for you to open it and become awakened in your own creative freedom. My passion is to guide you to discover, deepen and embody your unique Presence and Essential Self through giving voice. I coach you sing through the shadows of your psyche and unchain the silent self, resonating the primal, raw emotions dammed up in pain and tension. This creates the spaciousness in your system for you to realize your true nature as a Divinely Human Being . 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 to come into existence.

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My work synthesizes Voice Movement Therapy, trauma resolution methods, and embodied creative process with mystical/esoteric sound healing practice, mantra, meditation instruction and breathwork.  I provide a safe and sacred container for the silenced selves and the wounded inner child to come into existence. I facilitate you singing these soul parts home, retrieving them to the body and to awareness. I hold you in Song. I hold you in the Wholeness of your Perfection where nothing needs fixing.

My story and the path that leads me to you: I could never have imagined that my life’s work would involve supporting people to embody their unique Presence or Essential Self through voice. As a young person I felt shy, and "different."  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, celebrated my human emotions 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 playwright. 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.

After a recent 2 year spiritual retreat delving into the Silence and Stillness at the core of my Being,  I am discovering a new Universal Song that is living me. A Song of Oneness, of actionless action, a Song that is an unfolding mystery moment by moment. This Song that I AM is here for the evolution of the planet and the human species. Many of you reading this have also incarnated to be of service during this pivotal time of accelerated planetary evolution.

My work now acknowledges that as we  attend to our individual soul evolution, we are also participating in the planetary shift unfolding through the descent of powerful, luminous universal forces that we can become channels, instruments and physical anchors for. Our heart-voice is one portal for discovering our role in this global transformation.

MY TRAINING:

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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, sacred singer. I learned to facilitate people into their voice and began integrating this into theater performance.

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, Roy Hart voicework, 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 privileged 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. Partial shadow selves show up and have the opportunity to come into existence and integration. 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.

Voice Dialogue is another approach to integrating shadow parts of self and discovering the self behind our symptoms. I apprenticed with the late Douglas Brady in this powerful and creative work.

In the last 2 years I have rediscovered my early love of Sanskrit mantra as a vibrational medicine for awakening. (It was through chanting OM with profound focus on my body that I experience my first awakening at age 24) I share, when appropriate, mantras that invoke powerful divine forces into the body for purification and spiritual evolution.

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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 of fear, or at the edge of empowerment, the master practitioner KNOWS how to guide the student to take that next step toward the unfolding of who they essentially are.

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I have walked the path. It is really a pathless mystery from fear to Love to Truth (and back again and again). I have made it from the dark night of the soul to the embrace of my human nature and the woundings that have shaped my gifts. 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 which expands the deeper we recognize our belonging. I feel with deep empathy that pulse, that dance, that potential Song waiting to be sung in everyone I work with.

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I am here to listen to your deepest heart Song and assist it's emergence into the world.

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