The Sound of Possibility

Reflections on what movement and sound can reveal about ourselves.

When I was planning the first HEARD workshop, I found myself wondering what might happen if I invited people to come into the space and start making lots of noise with tap shoes.

Being loud as an adult, and particularly as a woman, can feel surprisingly transgressive. Many of us have picked up subconscious messages about noise from our childhood, school years, culture and society more generally. People might recognise phrases like "walking on eggshells", "children should be seen and not heard", or even more direct comments like "pipe down" or "put a lid on it" from their own lives. These kinds of messages can teach us to lower our voices, not to disturb people, to stay in control or avoid drawing attention to ourselves.

So, asking a group of adults to explore sound through movement felt, in some ways, like inviting them to play with those internalised rules—some shared through culture, others shaped by their own unique experiences.

After the workshop, I sat down with the feedback forms to see how it had landed.

People wrote about feeling joyful, liberated and safe. They described a sense of connection with others in the group, the fun of the experience and, perhaps most interestingly, "unexpected revelations".

What interested me most wasn't that people enjoyed making noise together. It was that once they knew the space felt safe and they were given permission to play and make noise, they took that invitation with gusto. Even more interestingly, it was in the doing—the act of putting on loud tap shoes and playing with noise—that people began reflecting on the kinds of stories they were carrying within them. Sometimes those stories were about being too much, too visible, too loud or needing to stay in the background – each person had their own internal associations with noise and taking up space. Those stories or rules can become so familiar that we stop noticing they're there. They quietly shape our everyday lives without our awareness.

Sometimes trying something new in a safe environment is enough for those rules to become visible. It gives us an opportunity to play with them a little, to experience a different relationship with them, even if only for a moment.

The workshop wasn't really about making noise. It was about trying something noisy and seeing what that meant – even if that was different for each person in the room.

Confidence seemed to grow as people played and realised the group was supportive. People spoke about feeling increasingly able to express themselves. By the end, what might have felt awkward at the beginning had become playful, joyful and, for some, unexpectedly freeing.

As a therapist, I'm interested in the relationship between thinking and doing. Talking and reflection are often where we begin to make sense of ourselves, and they can be invaluable. But sometimes it is experience that brings something into awareness first. By stepping, however briefly, outside our usual way of being, we can begin to notice assumptions and stories that had become so familiar they were almost invisible. The conversations that followed weren't separate from the activity; they grew out of it.

Perhaps the tap shoes were simply the invitation. What mattered was the opportunity to step into another possibility.