Meet Maria Simeone
Somatic Voice Coach, Singer, Sound Therapist, Brain Educator
and Creator of Voice Your Resilience
Maria at age 6
Maria at age 13
Hello Dear Women!
I am so happy to meet you and so honored to support you along your journey to robust emotional resilience through your voice! I am excited for you and the profound transformation you are embarking on with your voice and your emotional resilience.
In my case, my vocal and emotional resilience story is circuitous and I am sure many of you can relate. As a child, I was painfully shy and when I say painfully, I mean literally emotionally painful. Just entering a social gathering made up of my own family members was painfully difficult for me. The thought of speaking up in conversations, expressing my opinions was majorly stressful! So, I kept my thoughts and voice quiet around family, friends. HOWEVER, I had a secret life! I loved to sing when I was alone, journal, write, dance, and make music mainly when I was by myself! I did love performing in the theatre, but that was because I could take on a character and be someone else! I am wondering how many of you can relate to that?
As I grew into my teens, I was no longer willing to be silent at the dinner table! It was also around that time that I longed for singing lessons. I would still (and for a long time to come) become terribly nervous about singing in public but I FELL IN LOVE with the new freedom I had discovered in singing and vocal exploration throughout my vocal range, playing with vowels, discovering the deep emotion that is unique to singing. I loved vocalizing and “warming-up”– so much freedom to play with my voice, challenge myself, listen to my body. It was liberating and I fell in love with “the voice” and moved into a career in singing.
Flash forward to when I became a parent to a beautiful little 2 year old girl we adopted from Kazakhstan. She came to us from an orphanage and had developed vocal nodes from crying and crying as a baby without anyone ever responding to her. She was a red-headed dynamo with a fierce will and a gruff little voice. She also came with a lot of emotional challenges that were immensely hard to handle. I intuitively felt that helping her heal her voice, restoring her natural child’s range and quality would also support her emotional resilience. That intuition led to, what has become, a 20 year journey into the world of sound therapy. Sound therapy digs into the fascinating connection of sound, health, and healing. It bridges the gap from singing as performance to vocal exploration, application, and expression that is open and accessible to EVERYBODY!!!
My daughter’s voice did heal and as a young woman, she has become quite emotionally resilient and leans in daily to her voice as a source of comfort and pleasure. In Voice Your Resilience, I have taken what I’ve learned in my mother-daughter journey and am sharing it with women who feel a deep urge to reconnect with their voices and be fully alive and robustly resilient. I welcome you whole-heartily in your vocal journey and all the joys that await you!
With gratitude,
Training and Affiliations I’ve Manifested Along the Way
BA with honors/Research Psychology and Cognition, California State University, Long Beach
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Published in the Field of Cognition (Pragmatics of International and Intercultural Communication, Belgium)
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Awards and special recognitions in Arts Outreach and Education by Opera America, Segerstrom Center, Alzheimers Orange Country, Amistad Medical Clinics, and the United States House of Representatives.
Opera performance and vocal training, numerous coaches/teachers from Juilliard, Chicago Lyric, LA Opera, Des Moines Metro Opera, Verdi Society, Bergamo, Italy, and many others
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Director of Education at Opera Pacific
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Teaching Artist with Pacific Symphony, Segerstrom Center for the Arts, Remo, Inc.
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Training in Tibetan Singing Bowls (Encinatas), Sound Therapy (Los Angeles), HealthRhythms (Remo), Rhythmic Movement (Sydney), Move to Learn (Sydney), Orff Schulwerk (CA), Dalcroze (Maryland), BrainDance (Seattle), Body-Mind Centering (CA), BioField Tuning (Vermont) and Bio-Spiritual Focusing (Dublin)
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Creator of the Voice-Body Movement game, Flexity Jig used world-wide and is a Remo, Inc. affiliate
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Creator of MusicMovestheBrain
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Avid student of life