My life so far has been a quest for freedom. Most of the time I had no idea that this is what I was looking for but as I look back over the key moments that have led me here, to Circular Sounds, and you, its clear that I was never content to be what everyone expected me to be.
Everywhere you go and everything you do the world wants to fit you into a box. I have never been able to find one that fits me. So far I’ve had a good life – a loving family, a childhood in a seaside town in the UK, a good education and stable finances. But although I’ve never taken this for granted, I’ve pushed against its borders for as long as I can remember. The middle-class, Jewish identity that I was handed with my birth certificate didn’t quite fit, wasn’t quite enough and always seemed to be a limitation. So bit by bit I started to push at its edges to see how far it would stretch to accommodate all the things I was discovering about myself and all the things I wanted to be.
I started life as a bit of a hybrid, so I was never going to be content with an either/or identity. My Mum is from Israel, with a German father and Yemeni mother. We spent every summer in Tel Aviv and ate food that no one had heard of in 1970’s Britain. I was probably the first of my school friends to eat pasta at home. My British Dad was training to be a civil servant, but to help pay the bills we hosted foreign language students from all over the world, who came to our town to learn English. I grew up surrounded by Iranians, Swiss, Italians, French, Mexicans and Spaniards – a whole world of people and languages that pushed at the box’s edges. I was growing up with a very broad conception of what it meant to be human.
Performing was always my first love and I was involved in shows all through school. Because I was academic this was never taken seriously as a career choice, although it was clear to me that this is what I loved doing most. My parents and my teachers had decided that I should follow a career as a lawyer and right up until the age of 18 I accepted that this was a sensible choice. It was only after failing to get the grades that I needed to go to law school and spending a mind-numbing year studying and working part time in a local government legal department, that I realised sensible was never going to make me happy. My first rebellion. A year later I was studying drama full time.
I soon discovered that rebelling against my family’s idea for my career was just the beginning as there were more and more boxes to try to fit into – politics, sexuality, religion, nationality. Even following my dream to be a performer there were smaller and smaller boxes. After finishing my drama course I started training as an opera singer with the dream of one day being able to express myself in all the different genres of the performing arts. But after finishing four more years of training I found myself squeezed into the tiniest box of all – Rossini tenor! Branded with a label to make it easy to fit me into a pigeon holed career.
So are we really our labels? What lies outside of our boxes? Walking out into the world after my years of training I found that the constraints placed upon me by others were draining me of my creativity. There had to be more to life than this! The freedom I was craving had nothing to do with standing on a stage and singing and everything to do with the choices I was able to make about how and when I wanted to express myself. It has taken a great deal of searching, learning and discovery to understand that ultimately those choices lie with me. I can either walk a path where I wait for others to give me permission to be creative, or I can walk my own path and throw away all the boxes of other people’s expectations leaving myself free to evolve in any direction I choose.
The dictionary definition of creativity is: the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations. My own journey has led me to embrace this definition fully and it is this idea of transcendence that I bring to the process of Circular Sounds. My passion is to bring transformation through creativity in all I do and all my different trainings have provided me with many tools to share.
Life isn’t black and white – you don’t have to be just this or that. True creativity is not about painting or dancing or singing, it is about flexibility in the mind. Throw away the either/or existence and embrace the possibilities of “and”. With Circular Sounds my dream is to unlock all the “ands” and open all the doors to the boxes in the mind – this is the essence of all true transformation and the doorway to continually expanding potential.
To find out more about Darren go to his website: www.darrenabrahams.com
To email Darren directly: darren@circularsounds.org
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