BY TESS CONGO, IN INTERVIEW WITH LESLIE HELPERT
Under dimmed lights with the glowing full moon lamp in the corner, we settled in restorative and restful poses on yoga mats across the studio floor. For over an hour, Leslie Helpert sang over us, taking turns to visit us individually, customizing her song to tune into exactly what we needed to hear. It was like a magic spell, designed specifically to soothe us into our softer, stronger versions of our souls. Afterwards, I felt like I was beaming white light, delicate and firm in my being.
I had been attending Leslie’s meditation and sound healing classes for several months at The Well, a wellness center near Union Square in Manhattan where “modern science meets ancient wisdom” when cases of the coronavirus began to rise in the United States. When Leslie emailed me this past week to tell me about an online global classroom she’s facilitating over the next three Wednesdays beginning this Wednesday April 8th, 2020, I wanted to share her work with others who may, like me, be striving to rebuild their foundation in the midst of upheaval due to the coronavirus. The following conversation has been condensed.
I am stunned by the range of your experiences—from being Bermuda and Denmark’s elected resident musician to coaching TED speakers to writing over 1,000 lyrical songs, novels, volumes of poetry, etc. I’d love to dive into your background to give readers a taste of who you are and where you came from. Can you describe your upbringing and how your relationship to sound manifested?
I was born in Upstate New York, but my family moved a lot. By the time I was nine, I had moved five times to different places in opposite ends of the country. I think the gift I got from moving was finding a way to create a sense of foundation and home from something that wasn’t external. Fortunately, my family was a loving one and artistically supportive.
From a young age, I found my sustenance in a deep, immersive world that was a combination of sound, music, nature, dance, and movement.
Right now, some people are quarantining apart from their families, others are confined to unhealthy home situations, and others have actually left their homes to socially distance themselves in other places. As someone who developed skills to build an internal sense of stability, what advice or wisdom can you offer to people who are finding it challenging to remain emotionally and mentally grounded wherever they are?
I feel it is crucial to maintain strength, drive, and creativity during this time. It's never too late to find a passionate discipline and practice that yields a sense of being present — or grounded. Self-compassion is a vital practice, staying connected to ourselves and our self-care. This might look like taking baths, keeping our circulation moving and eating well so we are "checked in" more than "checked out.” You might have a writing practice, make a special meditation zone in your home, get a sketchbook, sing from the windows, turn off the cellphone after 9 pm and keep it off ’til morning. We're going through a lot, but we have our core values, our essence, our breath, our heart, and our ability to travel inward— these are our valuable tools.
Can you talk about what it’s like to work in sound healing after so many years of performing in venues as a touring musician?
When I work in what I call a voice lab or what's often called a sound bath, I go directly inside the geometrical design and the space, and work with people there. While I've played in some truly beautiful, artistically-inspiring venues, it feels like a natural evolution to engage with sound now in unamplified space— to play with acoustics, without lighting, in a space where everyone’s practicing self-care. Offering sound in this capacity was just a natural evolution for me, and it's really what I've always gone toward in many ways.
How is sound related to health and wellness?
I think all healthcare would benefit by implementing what I've called creative wellness or creative health. For some years, I've had the joy to work with various companies and HR teams to educate about the importance of creative health, which is a bridge between mental health and physical health. Our creativity is what determines our relationship with our world, and our creative drive is our gusto, which literally comes from the word wind, and is activated and finessed through our voice.
All of us have different relationships with our creative expression but what’s really important is that we know how to respect it. We know how to respect our creativity when it needs to rest, and we know how to respect it when it needs to be taken care of and be heard. We learn how to listen to our creativity as a primary, significant source. Some of us were discouraged in our earliest years from opening our mouths, perhaps hushed or deterred from singing, but our vocal cords are literal mechanical tools to open up the interior and exterior body. By working with sound, I can support homeostasis which is not a stagnant thing, but like music itself, moving all the time.
When you sing over people as with sound healing sessions at The Well, what is it you’re responding to that makes you shift the way you sing over individuals?
The work in sound healing is the effect of my voice methodology, Therapeutic Vocal Performance Technique. At The Well, I’m working with intervals, architecture, the bones, muscle, fascia, circulation, and a more universal simplified scale. I offer a type of song, or motif, that sometimes comes from an individual, or the moment, or the natural cycles of the season.
All of us together are working with “the voice.” It’s sort of like the grand resonant sound of the universe that’s in every cell of our body. My practice is to stay more in my somatic instrument and less in my thinking mind. I love doing this work and I love how, after our sessions, people often have similar or the same kind of visualizations, experiences, or feelings.
While nature offers stress relief, we’re being discouraged from populous places and not all of us have access to unpopulated green spaces. How might people connect with nature from their homes?
If you seek a forest, find a mirror. Put on Ravel’s solo piano work. Sit in a comfortable position, breathe into your own eyes. Say beautiful things to yourself. We have to use our imagination as a perceptive tool in this time. Imagination creates practicality and reason; it gives us the opportunity to imagine the best, to create experiences virtually even.
Speaking of virtual experiences, can you talk a little bit about the Nest: Vocal Immunology—The Global Classroom you’re offering for three Wednesdays starting this week? What inspired you to host these classes and what can participants expect from them?
Online, I had never created a group class, and I decided when [the coronavirus] happened it was an invitation to offer such. Usually, especially based in New York, there’s a certain price point I work with, but I really wanted to make this available for everyone in the world. How can I help people collectively connect and access their voice right now?
Really getting the mindset of wellness and being able to fill our own body with that I really think is as important and essential as washing our hands and taking a lot of vitamin C and staying inside. The voice is a way that we can connect to ourselves, to our integrity, and to connect to the truth of our expression. The classes will support people with breath techniques, movement, and a bit of sound healing and the opportunity to come together with like-minded people. I’m hoping we’ll have people from all around the world join in.
To join Leslie’s NEST: Vocal Immunology—The Global Classroom which starts THIS Wednesday, April 8th visit here, or Venmo $97 to Leslie directly at @HELPERTMUSIC (Leslie Helpert). To reach Leslie directly, email her at lesliehelpert@gmail.com, or visit www.dynamicvoicetraining.com for more information.
Tess Congo's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Publisher's Weekly, PANK Magazine, Curlew Quarterly, Bowery Gothic, Stone Pacific Zine, and the anthology Ripe (Afterword Books). She has studied writing at Harvard University, the University of New Orleans, and the University of New Hampshire, and is currently earning her MFA in poetry at Hunter College.