I started The Healthy Voice to teach people how to reclaim and love their voice.
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Are you fully here right now — or somewhere else entirely?
Published 18 days ago • 14 min read
A weekly dispatch on voice, healing, and the inner life of a working artist.
How are you spending your time right now?
Not in the beats-per-minute sense. Not the clock on the wall or the number in the corner of your laptop screen. I mean the bigger picture of it. Are you fully here as you read this — or are you somewhere else? Replaying something that happened last week, running calculations about everything you need to get done before the weekend?
I ask because I live in a constant negotiation with time. It's something I'm always working on reconciling.
This week I've been thinking about time in the largest sense — what it means for things to happen on their own time, to be in the right place at the right moment, or the opposite. And I've been thinking about what it actually takes to be present. Not as a concept, but as a lived, physical state. Because I've found that the nervous system and the clock have a strange relationship. The more you focus on time — fearing you're wasting it, anxious you won't have enough of it, fretting about what you haven't done — the more the fear response amps up. The more dysregulated you become. And dysregulation and presence cannot occupy the same space.
What brings me back, every time, is a physical practice. Singing. Running. Yoga. Something that demands enough from the body that the mind has to show up fully in order to keep going. Exertion is one of the most reliable portals into the present moment I know. And the present moment has this remarkable quality — it stops time. When you're fully in it, the past stops haunting and the future stops threatening. There's just this, right now, which is more than enough.
This week's content is all about that. How to protect the system that makes presence possible. And what becomes available in the voice when you finally get there.
I've been obsessed with the idea of time travel since I was a kid. Back to the Future. DeLoreans on the freeway. Books about what technologies might one day make it possible.
But time is also something I think about seriously. Ancient cultures didn't experience time as a straight line marching toward some inevitable end. They understood it as cyclical — seasonal, spiraling, a wheel rather than an arrow. Sound operates the same way. The major scale appears to circle back on itself, but in nature it spirals outward rather than closing. Cycles within cycles. Time moving like music. Music moving like time.
Singing requires something that yogis call mindfulness — full immersion in the present moment. There is no room in the process for yesterday or tomorrow. And when you can sustain that state for several minutes, something happens to time.
You time travel.
Not backward or forward. Sideways. Out of clock time entirely. Into a space where time simply doesn't operate the same way. And in that space, there is no haunting. There is only the sound you are making, the breath that is carrying it, and the astonishing fact of your own presence.
The present is not a thin sliver between past and future. It is the only place where anything is actually happening. Singing teaches you this — not in theory, in the body.
And then there's the question of which songs you step into.
I have a confession: I don't practice songs much unless I have to sing them for a specific audience. Six years ago when I tried to reclaim my voice, I chose a repertoire and found it emotionally impossible. The songs I had spent years performing — songs I had written as therapy in my early twenties — pulled me straight back through the portal the moment I started singing them. I didn't want to go through it.
So I stopped singing songs entirely for several years. Warm-ups. Toning. Chanting. The voice as instrument, not as a vehicle for lyrics. And it changed everything.
Recently, several students have told me the same thing: they can't find songs they want to sing. They feel embarrassed about it. They wonder what's wrong with them.
Nothing is wrong with them. Songs are portals to emotional dimensions. Every song you choose to sing is a kind of spell — a rhyming poem, set to meter, spoken with full breath, over and over again. If you sing a song about how much pain you're in every day for years, you have to ask yourself honestly whether it's keeping you inside the very experience you're trying to heal from.
You don't have to push through the emotional weight of a song because you think you should be able to handle it. You can work on the voice itself. The breath. The resonance. The technique. The pure experience of making sound in your body. And when the ground is stable enough beneath you — choose the portal you want to walk through.
Choose carefully. What you sing, you become.
✍️ Songs Are Portals to Emotional Dimensions → Read on Substack
$97.00
Voice Liberation Method Course
Your voice isn't broken. It's blocked.
Blocked by tension. By fear. By things that happened to you that you may not even... Read more
This week's video is something you can do right now. Before you sing a note. Before you speak a word.
Most singers warm up their voice. Very few warm up their face. The muscles of the face, jaw, and neck are directly responsible for resonance, emotional expression, and vocal freedom. If they're tense — from stress, trauma, a hard conversation, or just the accumulated holding patterns of daily life — the voice will reflect that.
Ten minutes. Face stretch, sternocleidomastoid release, jaw and masseter work, the forehead massage that signals safety to the brain, audible sighs to integrate everything. As a bonus — massaging the face and neck stimulates the vagus nerve, which triggers the relaxation response in the entire body.
After the routine, pause and say something out loud. Notice how different your voice feels.
This isn't just vocal preparation. It's stress management.
🎬 The 10-Minute Face Massage That Calms Your Nervous System → Watch on YouTube
And this week's podcast goes deep into the foundation of all of it.
We talk about cardiovascular health constantly. Everyone knows you should be doing cardio. Everyone knows resistance training matters. But nobody talks about the nervous system that way. And we are living through a genuinely revolutionary period — in the historical sense — that is putting more pressure on the nervous system than most of us have ever experienced.
During the pandemic lockdowns, my nervous system went into what I can only describe as a state of collapse. Panic attacks lasting an hour, followed by a crash of exhaustion so complete I had to cancel sessions and spend the rest of the day in bed watching movies just to get through. That experience sent me deep into research on what it actually takes to keep the electrical highways of the body running smoothly.
This episode covers everything: the digestion-energy connection, exercise for the high-strung nervous system, the hydration framework, why I finally gave up coffee three and a half weeks ago and can already feel the difference in my voice and my sinuses, and why singing is one of the most direct tools available for regulating the nervous system.
I'll always come back to it as the foundation of this work.
🎧 Nervous System Health — The Missing Piece of Your Wellness Routine → Listen here
The Lab published this week — the science behind all of it. 🔬
The vagus nerve is the body's primary parasympathetic pathway — the biological brake that counteracts the fight-or-flight response. But what the research is now revealing goes beyond stress management. It's about vagal flexibility — the ability to rapidly engage and disengage that brake in response to changing demands. And that flexibility turns out to be one of the strongest predictors of peak cognitive and physical performance.
The people who can enter flow states and recover quickly from stress are not people with less stress in their lives. They are people with more responsive nervous systems.
This explainer covers vagal flexibility and flow states, practical regulation techniques including humming and the cold water diving reflex, and the specific foods that protect vagal health at a cellular level — magnesium, B vitamins, omega-3s.
Seven months in — and I finally updated the landing page.
When the community launched, that page was thrown together fast and never revisited. A lot has changed since then. The community has grown, the offerings have deepened, and the original page just wasn't doing it justice.
The new page is clear, concise, and actually shows you what's inside. There's a video where you can peek behind the curtain, and everything included at each tier is laid out simply so you can figure out exactly which level is right for you.
If you've been curious but weren't quite sure what you were signing up for — this is your moment to take a look.
I have to tell you — this one was a labor of love. I got to borrow from my own family, who really are scattered all over the country, with a whole crew of cousins back in Italy too.
For most of my life I've watched Hollywood tell one Italian-American story — New York, sometimes Chicago, and that's about it. But the truth is we're everywhere. Italian families put down roots in every corner of this country, and each place shaped us a little differently. So this week is a tribute to that — and a lot of fun with my favorite family traits.
Seven relatives. Seven cities. All named Tempo. Each one secretly living at a different musical speed.
🌴 Aunt Carmela — Miami — slow as warm honey, takes a full minute to answer a yes-or-no question. Largo.
🍷 Cousin Aldo — Napa — so relaxed he could defuse a hostage situation just by describing his vineyard's soil. Adagio.
🎷 Aunt Josephine — New Orleans — can't get to the store without greeting every soul on the block. Andante.
🎲 Uncle Frankie — Las Vegas — wears a tuxedo to lunch, never once missed the beat. Moderato.
🎸 Uncle Gino — Chicago — seventy-three, plays air guitar mid-conversation, never been bored. Allegro.
🕶️ Vivian — Los Angeles — speaks entirely in exclamation points; everything is fabulous or tragic, darling. Vivace.
🗽 Uncle Sal — New York — hasn't taken a real breath since the Ford administration. Presto.
Each day you don't just meet one — you become them. Read their monologue out loud, in their voice. The words are built to move at their speed. Carmela's long slow vowels won't let you rush. Sal's rapid-fire consonants won't let you slow down. You're not studying tempo — you're catching it, like an accent, from your relatives.
No music theory required. No singing background required. Just come meet the family. 🎭
Voice Lessons: Week 2 drops Monday. 🎵
Last week we opened the throat. This week — breath support, applied to Fly Me to the Moon. The song is the same. The instrument is getting deeper.
🎤 All Levels Practice Session — Tuesday July 7 at 11am PDT Our monthly all-levels session is open to Foundation, Practitioner, and Mastery members. This month's theme is All in the Timing — and we're going to feel what that actually means in the voice. We'll work through the technique together and leave time at the end for Q&A.
Come with your questions, come with your voice, come as you are.
11:00 AM PDT · 2:00 PM New York · 7:00 PM London · 8:00 PM Europe · 5:00 AM Sydney (+1)
🦁 Courage Circle 1 — Thursday July 9 at 4:30pm PDT The first Courage Circle of the month — open to all levels. You show up. You sing. You are witnessed. No audition, no critique, no performance standard. Just the experience of letting your voice be heard by people who understand exactly what it costs to open your mouth and mean it.
4:30 PM PDT · 7:30 PM New York · 12:30 AM London (+1) · 1:30 AM Europe (+1) · 9:30 AM Sydney
A monthly editorial magazine — deeper into the science, the philosophy, the voice. Issue 5 is about The Emotional Dial, the shadow, and the voice that was always yours. Four back issues included when you sign up.
Something keeps coming up this week that I can't stop thinking about.
More than one person came into a session and discovered something completely unexpected about their own voice. A range they never knew they had. A speaking pitch that is naturally lower, fuller, and more powerful than anything they've been using. A sound that had been sitting there the whole time, waiting.
And in every case, the reaction was the same: I had no idea.
This is what happens when the voice has never been given the right conditions to reveal itself. Most of us develop our speaking and singing habits by absorbing what's around us — our families, our environments, the voices we grew up hearing. We never chose our voice. We inherited it. And then we spend years assuming that the voice we have is the only voice we have.
It isn't.
The voice someone arrives with, and the voice that emerges when the throat opens, the breath deepens, and the body finally feels safe enough to let the sound through — they are often two very different things.
The voice you think you have and the voice you actually have may not be the same voice at all.
🎬 Watching: The Red House (1948) — a psychological thriller with a secret at its center that the whole story keeps circling. Dark, layered, the kind of film that rewards paying attention.
🎬 Also watching: The Painted Memory (1947) — another late 40s psychological drama from the same era. There's something about that period of filmmaking that gets at darkness in a way modern films rarely do.
🎵 Listening: French café playlist on Spotify — something unhurried and European. After a week of thinking about time and the nervous system, the music that asks nothing of you is its own kind of medicine.
📖 Reading: Honestly — nothing this week. I'm open to suggestions. If you're reading something that's changing how you think, send me a message. I'd genuinely love to know.
✍️ Journal Prompt
When was the last time you heard your own voice and thought — that's actually me?
Not the voice you use to manage a situation. Not the voice you put on for certain people. Not the voice that comes out when you're nervous or performing or trying to get something right. The one underneath all of that. The one that surprises you a little when it comes out.
If you can't remember a moment like that — what do you think it would take to create one?
🌀 This Week's Practice
Sing in the shower. Or in a bathroom — anywhere with hard tile walls and a small enclosed space.
Not because it sounds better in there. Because you can hear yourself better in there. The acoustics of a shower stall return your own voice to you with a clarity and fullness that almost no other space can match. You hear the resonance. You feel the vibration. You notice things about your sound that get lost in an open room.
Be fully present with what you're hearing. Don't analyze it. Don't compare it to some idea of what you're supposed to sound like. Just feel it.
And remember this: if you feel good, you sound good. That's not a motivational phrase — it's acoustics and physiology. A voice that is free, supported, and present in the body produces a sound that reflects all of that. The feeling and the sound are not separate things.
Let the shower be your private recital hall this week. Show up for it every day.
Seven weeks of trauma-informed voice work — vocal technique, speech exercises, guided visualizations with original music, nervous system education, and journal prompts — all inspired by the same methods I use in my private coaching sessions.
A single private session with me is $150 for 60 minutes. Seven sessions would cost you $1,050. The Voice Liberation Method gives you over 7 hours of that same work for $97. That's a savings of over $950.
This is the course I wish I'd had when I was a young classical singer with tension in my shoulders that nobody thought to ask about. Now it's yours.
"Voice Liberation is full of tools for my toolbox! It's working. I'm trying to get through the vocal exercises then go back and do the lessons! The content. Wow." — Belinda Williams, VLM student
"Once I let go of the fear of singing the song wrong in our last Courage Circle, was when my voice was able to be unleashed. This journey of reclaiming my voice has taught me so much of myself so far." — BellaShanti, Foundation member
"This was a fantastic session. I learned so much about how the vocal instrument works, and the emphasis on somatic awareness opened up a whole new approach for me. It's amazing how one can go for decades using the voice without ever really understanding it, and what a difference it makes when knowledge and experience are put together in a structured way. Also, it was just plain fun." — Steven Brent, Practitioner member
"Working with you has helped me to overcome my fear, follow my own inner voice and give it expression. The Community is very supportive and the content is extremely rich." — Stephanie, Zürich, Switzerland — Mastery member
Seven of the best play-based voice activities from the archive — available to everyone, no membership required.
A noir mystery. A Grimm-style fairy tale. A vintage romance novel. A punk week. A comedy week. A Shel Silverstein poetry week. A 1950s newsroom. Every one of them secretly a technique lesson.
Your voice doesn't need more pressure. It needs permission.
The harmonium changed my practice. There's something about the drone — it drops you into your body faster than almost anything else I know. I've had both of mine for years and I wouldn't trade them.
Old Delhi Music is where I got them. Colorado-based, independently owned, exceptional quality.
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