Please describe what you do.

I’m a singer and songwriter: I write songs, music and lyrics and I perform on the stage. I also lead sound healing workshops, getting people to use their voices to release feelings, for relaxation and in meditation. And I’m a sound healer, which means I work with people one-to-one either getting them to use their voices to release energy, or I use my voice to sound over their body while they’re lying there, putting them into a state of deep relaxation and vibrating the whole body with sound.


When did you start singing, and how did you arrive at writing and singing the songs that you now sing?

I was brought up in Wales from the age of three – my mother is Welsh. Being the Land of Song, once they find out that you can sing you’re always encouraged to sing and to enter competitions. As I was growing up both my brothers were into rock and roll so the house was full of that. They both had rock bands and I used to go along and try and sing with them when they’d let me – very occasionally. I had singing lessons with a member of the Welsh National Opera but that only lasted for a year because I soon realised that I didn’t want to sing classical music – I was far more interested in the contemporary music of the time.


I started out with the guitar, doing Joan Baez imitations and singing folk music because that was the simplest thing to do. When I went to university I formed a rock band with some other students and afterwards we got a recording contract and turned professional. I just carried on from then really. The band was called Children – and we behaved like children! We were never famous but later on I worked with well-known groups – I performed for three years with Ray Davies and the Kinks during their concept musical period and we toured America. After that, I was in the Gordon Giltrap Band for a while


So I was in rock music for most of my life, and when the punks came in I didn’t really like the way music had gone so I moved over to theatre and wrote and performed musical theatre. I went through a Dark Night of the Soul in 1986 and came out the other side deciding that if I was going to sing and play music then I’d use my gifts to help in some way. To write songs that had some inner meaning and inspiration; and to just sing for the joy of singing wherever I was asked to go. I was invited to go to the Republic of Slovenia in 1992 and I’ve been singing there ever since.


You’re well known in Slovenia now aren’t you?

Yes. TV Slovenia is going to do a documentary on me and my work. I’ve just had a book published there that I co-created with a Slovenian photographer. It’s called Simply Slovenia and is to promote Slovenia to the English-speaking world with my songs on CD and my text with his photos. The book launch in Ljubljana [in February 2008] was lovely. We invited all the different embassies and ambassadors, and I’ve been working with a Slovenian record producer, Tomaz Kozlevcar who’s very well known in Slovenia, so I performed three of the songs and we presented the book. It was a wonderful evening with fabulous Slovene wine!


When did you first become aware of the power of sound for healing?

When I was in the Gordon Giltrap Band I really began to understand the power of sound – Gordon didn’t want me to sing lyrics, he wanted me to use my voice as an instrument. I kept hitting these very high notes and the vibration made me feel really good. I think that was my first awareness of the power of those high tones.


And before that, while in the university band we all became initiated in Transcendental Meditation (to stop us arguing!). That was in 1971, the Maharishi’s first outreach into England with English-trained teachers. So I’d been meditating for many years and after I’d been through my Dark Night of the Soul the two things came together and I began to make sound during meditation and realised that it can really affect the body and help to clear out old feelings and old memories. I intuitively knew that memory was held in the cellular structure of the body, but it wasn’t until I read Deepak Chopra’s books some years later that I learned it had been scientifically proven that there is a membrane surrounding each cell which holds memory.


So it all came very naturally…

Well yes, naturally, but not in an easy way, as often happens, when you have to make those transitions. When I went through my Dark Night of the Soul everything seemed to fall apart in my life and I even contemplated killing myself. Out of that darkness a light began to shine. That was quite a difficult phase to go through but was a transition between one state of being to another. Since then, I have my ups and downs like everyone else but I’m much more able to accept things philosophically. I see everything that we create as life challenges that help us grow towards love – real love, that is, not the romantic love as sold to us in the Hollywood movies.


How did you start doing your sound workshops?

Having worked with sound on myself and discovered that emotions and patterning, feelings and old memories, can be released through making sound, I was very reluctant at first to do it on anyone else. But then friends found out what I was doing and asked me to work on them – mainly in Slovenia – and so I agreed to do it, because in a sense, I was just experimenting. But then they asked me to lead a workshop teaching them how to work with sound – and I said I haven’t trained with anyone, I’m just following my intuition! In the end, I did the workshop and people loved it, and then there were more workshops and more sound healings. And then they kept asking me to write a book. ‘Oh no,’ I thought, ‘people will finally know I’m mad! … all these sounds of “ooh” and “ah” that I’m vibrating bodies with…’ But I wrote the book, called Sound Healing, and it was published by Piatkus in the UK. And it’s a continuing journey. I’ve learned so much more since then and I plan to write a book called Raising Your Vibration but it’s a question of finding the time.


People are often surprised that my workshops are not solely for musicians but for anybody, even those who haven’t used their voice for years, and that it’s not a singing workshop (which can be competitive) but a sound workshop. It’s about making sound, whatever the sound is – I don’t judge and I ask people not to judge. To make their own sound will really bring them something special. It’s amazing: by the end of a day’s workshop people will look different and the sound they’re making will be different. And with the sound healing sessions it’s the same thing. The workshops help people to connect with their voice. Sometimes people cry – perhaps because they haven’t sung since childhood, but it’s so great that they’re doing it now; it’s so healthy to express with sound.


Tell me about your one-to-one sound healing sessions.

The sound healing sessions are quite an amazement for me. Eventually I developed a system of how to work on the whole body with sound. The things that have happened with people have been incredible. People can suddenly go into a memory of abuse in childhood which they’ve blocked for years. The first time that happened I was pretty scared because it was a Slovene woman who didn’t speak English and I didn’t know what she was saying, and she was totally agitated and releasing so much emotion from her body. But my intuition told me that it was sexual abuse, so I carried on with the session and she calmed down and she was absolutely fine. At the end she said in translation that she’d clicked back into a memory of being in a cot as a small child and her grandfather coming in and lifting up the sheets and abusing her. And it made sense because she dressed in a very masculine way and she said that all her life she’d never dared to express being a woman because it felt dangerous. After the session, she changed completely and bought herself new underwear and massage oil – her husband must have wondered what on earth had happened! – because she released the fear of attracting men to her for the wrong reason. After that experience, I became used to people going into what we call rebirthing when people release deep, deep emotion – and I get them to make sound to help them release, and rock the body and things like that. Sometimes a healing is very gentle and people simply relax and drift away – some people just need the relaxation and others need to let go of something. But it never ceases to amaze me because it’s so simple: sound is so simple to work with.


How do you feel when you’re performing and giving sound healings?

People say there’s a healing sound to my voice, so even when I do concerts, people experience healing, wherever the concert is, it seems. In Slovenia, venues for concerts range from theatres with an audience of 400–500 to a forest by a lake for 50 people. When I sing, this huge energy just pours through me: I have been known to do concerts for two hours – just me singing and talking! – I think the pure joy that comes through me is because of the songs I’m singing, which are expressing spirit – is a huge rush of energy and sometimes it feels like it’s going to lift me off the stage. That’s real joy.


It’s not the same thing when I’m doing a sound healing but certainly I feel the energy coming through me, and very often I feel as though I’m an instrument being sung. It’s like spirit or life force energy, or consciousness, or whatever you want to call it, comes through me when I open my mouth and it’s effortless. Because I’m toning for a long time when I’m sound healing – it can be for 45 minutes – people are sometimes concerned that I’ll get tired. But at the end of a session I usually have more energy than when I began and feel clearer and stronger because the sound works through me; it clears me as it goes into the person. It’s a great therapy to do but I can only do two sessions a day, not because my voice gets tired but because the muscles in my chest get tired through continuous breathing. In Poland I do sound healings day after day, and it can be quite challenging to keep going. At the moment people there are still releasing a lot of emotion – it’s still coming out – connected with everything that happened to the Polish during the two World Wars. It’s quite challenging, but wonderful to do and be able to help people.


Where do you think you’re going to go from here?

I’ve no idea! I put a prayer out to spirit many years ago after my Dark Night of the Soul and said I will go wheresoever you ask me to go, I will be with whosoever you ask me to be with, I will do whatsoever you ask me to do, in service. Show me the way! So I wait to be asked, really. Wherever spirit needs me I will follow. I just trust in spirit that it’ll be OK, and it always has been.


When you say you trust, do you feel protected?

Well not in the sense that I think there’s an angel standing over me. But I have an expectation that things are going to be all right; I don’t have an expectation that I’m going to be mugged or end up in the bottom of a river face down. I have an expectation that I’m going to be looked after and everything will be fine. It’s a bit like The Secret DVD, the law of attraction: what you’re expecting and vibrating with – what you’re putting out – is how it will be. I have this very strange thing that wherever I am in Europe, whatever town I happen to be in, people come up to me and ask me the way. So I must have the energy of being a local or being at home wherever I am!


Find out more about Shirlie Roden at www.shirlieroden.com

Download the ‘Prodajni katalog’ catalogue from the publisher’s website, which has more information on the content of Simply Slovenia: www.zaklad.si