I started The Healthy Voice to teach people how to reclaim and love their voice.
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August is about breaking through.
Published about 1 month ago • 11 min read
A weekly dispatch on voice, healing, and the inner life of a working artist.
August is about breaking through.
In voice lessons, we work on something called the passaggio — the transition point between the chest voice and the upper register where most untrained singers hit a wall. The voice gets stuck, tension rises, and the belief settles in that they simply cannot sing. It's one of the most common and most discouraging experiences in voice work.
But the belief is not true.
What's true is that there's a block. A moment where the voice doesn't know yet how to navigate the transition. And where there's a block in the voice, there's almost always a corresponding block somewhere in the life — a belief carried since childhood, so old and so unconscious it feels like fact. A place in the body where the energy gets stuck, the fear rises, and the impulse is to stop.
August is the month we go through it. We break through. In the voice and in everything else.
Not everyone who has been through chronic threat responds by shrinking.
Some people do the opposite. They stand very straight. They hold themselves deliberately upright. They project something formidable — because they learned that going unnoticed didn't protect them.
This is also a trauma response. It just looks like confidence from the outside.
From the inside, it feels like gripping. The lower back holding the spine in place. The shoulders elevated, compressing the neck, and it's one of the most underrecognized sources of chronic headaches. The jaw slightly set. The voice producing sound from inside an armor it doesn't know it's wearing.
The shape we're looking for is in the middle. Quieter than both collapse and performance. When you first find it, it often feels like you've disappeared, because the performing body has been on default for so long that neutrality reads as absence.
That feeling is important data. Information is always our friend on the recovery path.
The second article this week is one I want every singer and speaker to read, especially those of us in the New World who seem to fear the T!
But the truth is, most people never think about how they make a T sound. The tongue just goes where it goes, automatically, without a second of conscious attention. But when the voice has become effortful — when years of bracing have gotten into the mechanism of speech itself — this is exactly where the work begins. Not with performance. Not with projection. With the T.
Every word you speak is made of individual sounds, each with a specific physical sensation. When you start attending to those sensations, something remarkable happens: you stop speaking on autopilot. You become present in your own voice. And the voice, in response, begins to ease.
Learning to speak is something we do through imitation, and it's often taken for granted. This is about learning to inhabit it.
✍️ You Already Speak This Language. You Just Don't Know It Yet. → Read on Substack
And since I have found it so much easier to work within a consistent theme of the week, the video is also about posture.
Two postures, actually, in case you want to go deeper from the Substack articles.
Two fear responses. Both silencing the voice, but in different ways. And the question: What do these postures do to the voice?
The hunched posture compresses the breath; the performed posture surrounds the voice with tension, but neither one is a character flaw.
I'll talk about what a calm upright posture actually looks and feels like and demonstrate through shoulder rolls, chest lift, chin up, jaw dropped, tongue anchored, and the phrase that ties it all together:
I speak with ease.
This is athletic work, not a quick fix, which means you have to learn a whole new way of holding yourself up. Be patient with yourself.
🎬 Why Trauma Collapses Your Posture — And What It's Doing to Your Voice → Watch on YouTube
$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 podcast is the companion to the diction article — and one of the most helpful episodes I've recorded.
I was thirty-one when I first encountered speech training. I'd been singing classically for years and assumed the technique transferred automatically to my speaking voice. Then I took a part-time teaching job and lost my voice after two hours of talking. I didn't know how to speak. I could sing for hours, but speaking drained me.
What changed everything was learning to feel my voice instead of just hearing it. Your mouth faces forward, and your ears face sideways. Of course it's hard to hear yourself accurately. But you can always feel.
This episode covers the glottal stop — what it is and why American English is full of it — and the hard onset, the habit that's exhausting your voice one vowel at a time. Plus: the surfer and the sound current, soft onset explained. And the crossover between vocal technique and life metaphor, because the wave has a way of showing up everywhere once you start looking.
🎧 The Voice You Never Learned to Use → Listen Here
What's Happening Inside the Community
The Time Machine wrapped up this week — seven decades, seven grooves, all felt in the body. From the Charleston's long-short swing to hip-hop's laid-back boom-bap to the 2000s syncopation that tilts everything sideways. A whole rhythmic education through music you already love.
We also started our new Voice Lessons Series with Over the Rainbow! A perfect tune for our "Breaking Through" theme.
And coming next week in Vocal Recess: ELEVATOR MUSIC. 🛗
You step into an elevator. Each day it stops on a different floor — and each floor is a different part of your voice. The lobby is your chest voice. The penthouse is your head voice. And the tricky bit — the lurch, the little stomach-drop, the place the elevator jerks as it changes floors — that's the passaggio. The spot where chest voice hands off to head voice.
Most singers spend years avoiding that spot. This week, we ride straight through it. Up, down, up, down — until the ride gets smooth.
The comedy is the elevator itself: the muzak, the awkward silence, the person who presses every single button, the polite nod, the private terror of being stuck between floors. The lesson underneath is register transition — learning to glide from the bottom of your voice to the top without the jolt.
And yes — this week, your elevator pitch is exactly what it sounds like.
Voice Lessons, Part Two Drops on Monday: OVER THE RAINBOW. 🌈
Dorothy longs for life on the other side of the rainbow. Can't we all relate to that? A yearning to be free? This week we learn freedom through breath support. Let you voice ring out!
Voice Lessons videos drop every Monday inside The Healthy Voice Community. Sheet music and audio tracks in three keys are in the course space — try all three before committing to yours.
If you've been curious about what Voice Lessons looks like from the inside — this is a great month to begin.
Long-term students are breaking through. In a lot of ways, they inspired the next month's theme.
The passaggio — that tricky middle point where the chest voice meets the upper register — has been a wall for so many of them. The voice gets stuck, tension floods in, and the belief sets in that they just can't sing. But with consistent work, that wall is becoming a door.
Students who have been showing up for months are now moving through it with ease, reaching notes they couldn't reach before — both higher and lower. And what's striking me most is what happens alongside the vocal breakthrough: they're also standing more firmly in their own lives. Setting limits. Claiming space. It's as if the voice and the self are breaking through together. As their teacher, I find it genuinely energizing to witness. This is the whole point of The Healthy Voice.
📖 Reading: Parallel Universes of the Mind — sitting with the idea that the reality we inhabit is one of many possible ones. It makes you look at your own choices differently.
🎵 Listening: Cal Tjadar. A discovery from last week's adventures with 60's Vibraphone Spotify Playlist.
📺 Watching: Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist. I didn't grow up with cable, so in the 90's I really missed out on the cool shows they were making. I'm catching up, and even though I didn't see it the first time, it fills me with nostalgia.
👀 Noticing: There will always be people who criticize the way you do things. What matters is that you are doing what you are supposed to be doing — fulfilling your purpose, trusting your decisions, and taking other people's opinions with a grain of salt. Not every voice in the room deserves equal weight. Learning which ones do is its own kind of sovereignty.
THE JOURNAL PROMPT
The in-between place.
This week in the community we've been playing with something singers call the passaggio. It's that spot in the middle of your voice, between your low register and your high one, where things get a little shaky and unstable, and your voice wants to crack or flip. And here's the thing most people do with that spot. They avoid it. They rush through it, or they force their way past it, or they just stay down low where it feels safe and never go up top at all.
But that shaky in-between place isn't a flaw. It's a bridge. It's the only way from where you are to where you want to go.
And I think we do the same thing in our lives. That messy middle where you've left the old thing but you haven't arrived at the new thing yet. Where you're not who you were but you're not quite who you're becoming either. It feels unstable because it is unstable, and everything in us wants to either rush through it or turn back.
So here's what I want you to write about. Where are you in an in-between place right now? Some transition, some bridge, some spot where the ground feels a little shaky under you. What is it, and what does it feel like in your body when you're standing in it? And be honest with yourself about this next part. Are you letting yourself be in it, or are you rushing to get it over with? What might change if you treated that shaky place as a bridge you're allowed to cross slowly, instead of something that's gone wrong?
THE PRACTICE
Hum a low, comfortable note, down in the easy part of your voice. Then very slowly slide upward, like an elevator gliding up, all the way toward the top of your range, and then slide back down. Go slow. And somewhere in the middle you're going to feel that spot where it wants to catch or wobble or flip. When you hit it, don't stop and don't force it. Just keep gliding through it, gently, and let it be as bumpy as it is.
Do that a few times, sliding up and back down through the wobbly part without bracing against it. And just notice what happens. Most people find that the more they relax and let themselves pass through it — instead of clenching up to get past it — the smoother it starts to feel. That right there is the whole lesson, and your body will understand it faster than your mind will. The shaky middle gets easier to cross the moment you stop fighting it.
Keep going — because the world needs your unique voice. 🎙️
— Bella Frequency Notes, From The Healthy Voice
🎓 The Voice Liberation Method Is Helping Hundreds
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 is 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.
A weekly dispatch on voice, healing, and the inner life of a working artist.There's a moment in a lot of songs where the whole thing lifts. The key changes, and the same melody suddenly feels higher, brighter, or a little more urgent. And if you're not listening for the mechanics, you don't notice them at all. You just feel that something shifted. It's been a week of big energetic shifts. We lost a truly iconic voice. And from the flood of articles and videos and posts, it's obvious how many...
A weekly dispatch on voice, healing, and the inner life of a working artist.There's a moment in a lot of songs where the whole thing lifts. The key changes, and the same melody suddenly feels higher, brighter, or a little more urgent. And if you're not listening for the mechanics, you don't notice them at all. You just feel that something shifted. I've been thinking about that all month, because so many of you are in the middle of one. A key change in your own life. And from the inside, a key...
A weekly dispatch on voice, healing, and the inner life of a working artist. We've spent all of August breaking through things. Higher notes. Older stories. The tight places in the throat, and the tighter ones in the mind. Now, during the upcoming last week of the month, we do something different. We turn around and look at what was actually in the way. And here's what I keep finding, after years of this work: Most of what stops us was never actually a true wall. It was only a perception....
