Miranda Bungey

Singing

Singing is a thread that has run through every stage of my life. I have found it allows me to touch base with the soul’s presence in a very immediate way, and also share an authentic, joyful and non-verbal connection with other humans. Since my teens I have had the good fortune to study singing, music and sound with different teachers in the UK, Colombia, India, Nepal and Spain. 

I travelled to Colombia for the first time in 2002 for six months, and returned for three years in 2004. I lived for the whole time in Ibagué in the centre of the country and studied, participated and fell in love with the huge musical heritage of this beautiful country. The cultural confluences, as well as the geography, have given birth to a large variety of rhythms and musical styles: bambucos, rajaleñas, cumbias, mapalés, joropos and many more.  

From 2007 to 2012 I lived in Bristol, a university city where I had studied Modern Languages a few years earlier. There, I met Chloë Goodchild and began to study with her in 2010. Her extensive work on freeing the voice from mental conditioning, the importance of non-judgmental listening and the inclusion of negative emotions as sonorous material for transformation, continues to deeply inform my work. 

In 2013, I had the opportunity to travel to India and Nepal and began to discover the beauty of mantras and singing bowls, and upon my return I settled in Huelva, Andalusia and began to run group singing workshops for exploring the voice and song. 

In 2014 I met and began to study with Germana Giannini. Working with her, and sharing moments of inner transformation under her guidance and listening, has allowed me to deepen my perception and experience of my voice and life.  I have also learned to use the body as an instrument, value the strength and wisdom in popular traditional songs and begun to explore the world of choral improvisation. 

It is an immense joy to facilitate and share classes and workshops that bring people together to sing, support them to appreciate their voice and others’ voices, and learn to sing more freely and confidently by themselves and with others.

Yoga

I began practising yoga in 2004 with a work colleague while living in Colombia, and immediately appreciated the inner quietness and relaxation I felt as a result. I studied alone with a book for two more years and then attended classes in the Iyengar tradition back in the UK. I found the practice allowed me to experience my body as a safe and strong holding vessel for the ups and downs of life, and I trained in Hatha Yoga at Bristol School of Yoga in 2012 in the UK (200 hrs). 

Around the same time, I started studying with Caroline Reid, whose teaching is influenced by the yoga of Vanda Scaravelli. In 2018 and 2019 I also had the opportunity to study with Diane Long, who is a direct student of Vanda.

The approach to the body and practice was so different to what I had known until then: there was no forcing or pushing the body into a fixed pose or sequence, but rather a listening, un-doing and connecting. Initially I felt I couldn’t grasp what I was meant to be doing, yet it felt ok not to know and something was resonating with the gentleness and subtlety of the work, so I stuck with it. 

A few years later I reached a turning point and realised I had to let go of the ‘old’ way I was then teaching and completely embrace the Scaravelli influenced practice. It was both like going into the unknown and starting from the beginning again, but also immensely freeing and opened up a whole new way of being in the body, which felt more natural and intuitive to me. This is what I continue to explore in my own practice and share in my classes. 

My practice and understanding of this yoga also feels in harmony and nourished by the guidance of my spiritual master Mooji, who shares teachings of Jnana and Bhakti Yoga from the Advaita Vedanta tradition. 

I very much enjoy supporting people to look after their body, feel their anatomy more subtly and move and explore yoga in an intelligent and sensitive way. The body, like nature, is so grateful for any small amount of care we can give it and will respond in marvellous ways when given a chance.