Testimonials

Lisa:

“Mali Sastri is a gifted Voice Movement Therapist, individual and group facilitator, voice and songwriting coach, and mentor. She has many human gifts of compassion, insight, and the ability to meet clients where they are at to help support and reflect their/our journeys with voice, sound, movement, words, emotions, feelings. Mali intuitively and creatively understands the inner workings and complexities of her client’s soul-selves and is able to profoundly support their/our individual and group process and growth with precision, skill, imagination and creativity. Mali draws upon her own journey as a talented and experienced singer-songwriter-performer to help inform and best support her client’s voice exploration, skill building and growth. It is both joyful and meaningful to work with Mali in Voice Movement Therapy sessions as well as within a group setting. She partners with each person she works with and engages with us with passion, care, enthusiasm, commitment, joy, openness and imagination.”


An article by one of my clients about her experience with chronic pain and VMT:

How Voice Movement Therapy Transformed My Experience of Chronic Pain


Alison:

When I first started working with Mali, I truly had no idea what VMT meant. I had heard of her through the grapevine from a few friends who went to her workshops, and also knew that to reconnect to my voice would mean some emotional levels, not just going back to voice lessons. I had no clue why, after so many years, I let my voice quietly disappear. Music, and specifically singing, was so important to me for most of my life, but somehow it had slipped out the back door.

Walking into the front door of the studio and facing my first session, I was overwhelmed by such self-consciousness and shyness. I had no idea how I would be able to utter a note, let alone anything further. But there Mali stood, gracefully real and without pretention. Clear with her intention to help me connect to whatever may happen within that hour.(Actually, it was half an hour – I classically acted out my ambivalence by arriving half an hour late.) But the alchemy of the moment took over.

Those first few lessons were the start of my journey back to my voice. She gently prompted me to find a way to make the space my own by just walking around the room, defining a space within the space. Her patience and acceptance of where I was at this silent beginning made me feel a loosening of my awkwardness, and to feel a tiny internal room – a little room that, after a few sessions, started to become bigger and more secure. Welcoming even.

Mali exudes a calm and a way of allowing me to just be where I am. With just a few words, she is able to convey acceptance, safety, encouragement and immutable support. She is an astute listener and observer – of the body and of the voice. She has the uncanny ability to know when I am about to leap away from that internal space – usually because of my own fear and/or self consciousness – and at just the right moment say “stay with it” – gently nudging me to stay focussed and to trust that place within me. With that nudge, she has encouraged me to face a deeper sense of my self. She has celebrated the moments when I have rediscovered/reunited with those parts of myself who are like old friends – my imagination and my storytelling.

The powerful reconnection to my own sense of artistry that, for whatever reason, I never quite took seriously. With the help of Mali in these sessions, I have developed the ability to bring forth these parts of me. She has been a witness to my interaction and struggle working with those more powerful and essential aspects of myself. Over time, I have more easily been able to access my internal voice, bring it forth, and feel the joy of my range of expressiveness once again. Even more exciting is that I have been able to take it further; I have become stronger in my ability to risk and feel more comfortable with that process of going beyond the comfort zone which, at the beginning, was silence.

Without Mali, I can truly say that a deeper part of my soul would have stayed languishing and neglected. She has helped me connect to a vital and essential parts of my self that were there in earlier years, but never quite encouraged in the way that Mali has been able to do. She knows how to sherpa people to connect to that place within – and she has a powerful belief in the individual’s capacity to explore and bring forth these powerful and essential aspects of the self.

Her extraordinary guidance, through movement and sound, skillfully provides the support to guide one towards their own inner light – and darkness – and all shades in between.