“Hi! I’m Sarah, and I’m glad you’re here!
I help presenters, singers, and actors go from disempowered, monotone, tense, and misunderstood, to poised, expressive, confident, and crystal clear, so that they can give dynamic, impactful performances, using my 25 years' experience teaching voice, speech, and the Feldenkrais® Method.”
Sarah Templeton discovered the Feldenkrais® Method at the age of 19, when she suffered from chronic pain. She tried every method she could find, and found that Feldenkrais® was her greatest ally in the recovery process, as it helped her to develop both a keen awareness of how she was moving, and choice in how she behaved. Since then, the method has helped her navigate pregnancy and motherhood, and been her ‘secret weapon’ as a classical singer, helping with every aspect of speech and singing, including embodying a variety of quirky characters.
Sarah completed her 4-year Feldenkrais® Practitioner training in Victoria, Canada, in 2007 (though certified to teach group classes in 2005). She has taught the Feldenkrais® Method at the prestigious Stratford Festival of Canada, and has taught Feldenkrais® and acting technique to students of both the Vancouver Academy of Music and the University of British Columbia’s Opera Division. She has given many workshops in ‘Feldenkrais® for Singers’ at Western University’s Faculty of Music, and has taught courses in singing, speech, movement, and acting at Fanshawe College’s Theatre Arts Department in London, Canada. Sarah has a Master’s degree in Vocal Performance from Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. She is the creator of several online courses, including An Introduction to Feldenkrais: Get Back Up, 14 Days to Better Breathing with Feldenkrais, and Get Your Act Together: The Complete Program for bringing the Feldenkrais® Method into your Singing, Acting, and Speaking, and runs an active online teaching studio of both Feldenkrais® and singing students. After living in Toronto, New York, Florence, Santo Domingo, Vancouver, and Frankfurt, Sarah now lives and works in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada.
Her lessons are detailed, gentle, effective, and fun, with an emphasis on moving, and therefore living, with a quality that is agreeable to you. Hailing from Newfoundland, Canada, she has a quirky sense of humour, and is quick to laugh and find a joke in most situations. She believes that any learning process should be fun, and conducts her classes in a detailed, but light-hearted manner. This excerpt from Moshe Feldenkrais’ book The Potent Self affects her deeply:
“One has to set about learning to learn as is befitting for the most important business in human life; that is, with serenity but without solemnity, with patient objectivity and without compulsive seriousness. Clenching the fists, tensing the eyebrows, tightening the jaw are expressions of impotent effort. It is possible to succeed in spite of these faults only at the expense of truly healthy joy of living. Learning must be undertaken and is really profitable when the whole frame is held in a state where smiling can turn into laughter without interference, naturally, spontaneously.”
— Moshe Feldenkrais, DSc., The Potent Self, xxxix
