Christine Isherwood
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M.A., VMTR, Singer-Songwriter, Dip Assertiveness Trainer, has been engaged in teaching VMT internationally for twenty years, in the UK, the USA, and other places. She works with individual clients, teaches workshops internationally, and supervises VMT students and practitioners. Engaged in a quest for voice and psychological well-being she trained with the founder of VMT, Paul Newham, in London in the mid 1990’s and subsequently taught with him prior to his retirement from this work. In partnership with Anne Brownell she established, co-directed and teaches the Foundation Training in Voice Movement Therapy. The next training, “Singing The Psyche: the Voice Unchained” will commence in April 2016
Before training in VMT, Christine took a degree in Cultural Studies at the University of East London, gained a Diploma as an Assertiveness Training Teacher with the Redwood Women’s Organisation, undertook a two year training in Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychotherapy and studied therapeutic healing with noted eclectic healer Trisha Mulholland for many years. She has over thirty years experience working with people, including extensive experience with street homeless people in Central London, as a mental health counselor, group facilitator and trainer, and as a VMT practitioner with individuals seeking to transform their personal or professional selves through the voice. She is a founding director and member of the International Association for Voice Movement Therapy.
Christine is a singer and writer who has written and performed in political musicals, toured the UK and Europe with theatre groups and bands, and recorded as a pop singer. She has lectured and taught at Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts, (LIPA, co-founded by Sir Paul McCartney), the Western Australian Academy for Performing Arts (WAAPA), and the International School of Interdisciplinary Studies, the Integrated Arts Therapy Training Program (CREATE), Toronto, Canada. Christine continues to commit herself to an intensive exploration of VMT and to training new practitioners while she continues to explore vocally and to write. She lives on Martha’s Vineyard and is currently working on a new album.
Personal Statement: “I came to Voice Movement Therapy in search of my own voice and a compassionate ability to live with myself. Life had thrown me around and I had encountered many dramatic events which had taken their toll on my psyche. In my broken state, one thing was clear: I needed to sing. I needed to express myself. My voyage of discovery into the depths of my psyche became my route to health, freedom, joy, and love. I had to write my skeleton anew, and listen to my need to find location in my expressive self.
I consider my work to be taking place in the internal spaces, in the spaces not delineated by the boundaries of the body, but deeper, deeper, into the bones, into the blood, into the vessels, past known structures into the sensed, into the felt, into the imaginal, into the nighttime and daytime dreaming. The doors to freedom are clear: they are ourselves, our stories, our voices, our bodies, and the ability to be with ourselves with all the kindness, understanding, and wisdom we can muster in order to be able to go on and create a new story. It is only in meeting ourselves that we can find the release that we as humans so definitely need. It is only in being met by ourselves that we can meet others."