Where the Wild Geese Wake – Preparing to Lead

Where the Wild Geese Wake
Preparing to lead a workshop

Always a relief to get into the camper and drive away. Twice round the apartment making sure nothing was forgotten, the seatbelt on, and away we go. Working as a singer-songwriter, a workshop leader and writer with events in between, there have been more than enough leaving times. You’d think I’d be a champ by now.

Alas no. I still suffer from packing anxiety, the agonizing over all that is and may be needed for the myriad events set to happen. It helps to combine events, that once out the door, the packing for the next action is already in place, at least there’s less choice. Sometimes, back home in Oslo, I don’t fully unpack. Rather leave small piles in our spare room, piles that will be going on the next voyage. Often more challenging when we pack the camper for several months at once, months that may start out hot, then turn cold along the way. In my mostly touring years, there were boxes of CDs, mics, cables. Now, I only bring books.

And even for a shorter trip there’s weather. Extreme swings of it add another challenge. It was boiling hot last week in Oslo, sweat gathering at my brow while packing up. My husband, who could work as a weather person, and checks his trusty YR app like his bible, announced we were in for a cold snap. Hard to believe dripping as I was, but I took a few warm things just in case. Sitting here in the camper, before I leave to teach my five-day workshop at a pretty retreat center in the south of Belgium––so far south we kiss the French border––I’m wearing those warm things. Reminds me of an old Steve Martin bit: Tomorrow the forecast calls for 10 degrees up to 85, dress accordingly. It makes me laugh, yet it’s entirely true when you’re trying to pack light into a carry-on suitcase.

Eighteen people will be arriving this afternoon for my workshop. More than usual as I try to keep my workshops small and intimate. The voice is the element closest to our soul, closest to the bone, and the hardest, most mysterious element of our beings to investigate and change. Easier in a smaller group. Easier on one hand, scarier on another. I think of these people, these eighteen mostly strangers, a few returning, though I won’t know which faces until they walk in. People who’ve laid down hard-earned money and time to come to this workshop. Can I meet their needs, can I help them take those bold moves that evoke providence? I always think of the Goethe line: that the moment we commit and take those bold steps, providence moves with a burst of wonder. Wild geese awaken in the veins.

Over the years I’ve witnessed students find the missing pieces of their own puzzles, the way my teachers once helped me. All the people I’ve worked with, touched, met and challenged. Not everyone. But most. And still, every time it feels daunting, the responsibility of helping someone make the impossible a little more possible. A slight change in the habitual hold of the nervous system can feel, from the inside, like a titanic shift. Change takes courage, and it’s crucial that people feel safe, safe enough to take a tiny step, the real work of any workshop. Not learning a new technique. Rather creating a laboratory where it’s safe to play, because nothing in it is life-threatening, even if at moments it can feel so.

To find my own courage in being the workshop leader and holder of the space, and breathe into the years of experience behind me. The years of training, all the voices I’ve heard and helped shape in private and group sessions since the 1980’s. It isn’t me, exactly. I become a channel. A non-judgmental force of love.

I think of some intense students along the way, who gripped their resistance like a life raft––the ones who swore they’d never sing. (You wonder why they signed up for a workshop in voice liberation) And then something happens along the way. Providence moves.

Here in Belgium in the forest, where I take the students usually after dinner, two women, who swore they’d never sung before became ‘instruments’ of sound. Music poured out of them, improvisational, silly, wild and glorious. They couldn’t stop. I guided them back to our room, and the whole group caught it, like a good fire. Everyone was part of this contagious opera.

Another time, in Croatia, a student from Slovenia made me promise I’d not make her sing during the week-long workshop. I never do, never make anyone sing. At the start, I ask everyone to throw away that word entirely, that idea that something must be perfect and beautiful before daring to give it voice. To think of it instead as moving vibration, of letting yourself be sung. She wrote to me days after the workshop ended: for the six-hour drive back home, she couldn’t stop crying or singing.

It’s never the same, that moment of awakening. Yet once the river starts, it’s easier to keep it flowing. People come to my workshops who haven’t made a sound since they were children. (The invitation is clear in the write-up that beginners and those who think they can never sing are welcome.) By the end, the sound weaving through the group is enough to break your heart.

Maybe what I love most is the twinkle that arrives in the eyes. The face opening. An aura of wonder settling over the group. It always happens; I just never know when.

There have been hard students, tough groups. Resistance so mighty it takes over the room. Someone hiding, someone with a sudden migraine, someone unleashing their fear to demand the group’s whole attention. Holding the group steady so it doesn’t collapse into any one person’s storm, that can be the biggest challenge.

So I pray now, to the God of all things, before meeting the group later, for the skill and strength to hold the group to get out of the way and let the magic happen. The crucial element in the mystery school.

I just met one of the students, who like me, arrived early. I asked her what she’d hoped for.

“My voice,” she said. “I teach yoga. My students like the sound of my voice, but there’s something holding it back, holding me back, hurting in my throat.”

I smiled at her, “You’re in the right place,” I told her.

The wild geese already beginning to fly.