I started The Healthy Voice to teach people how to reclaim and love their voice.
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Most voice teachers get asked about high notes. I get asked about the other end.
Published about 1 month agoΒ β’Β 11 min read
A weekly dispatch on voice, healing, and the inner life of a working artist.
Honesty keeps making itself present in my sessions this week.
I believe honesty is one of the most essential parts of the healing path. It's also one of the most challenging. What I've noticed is that there comes a point when you realize that in order to move forward, you have to be honest about something you've been avoiding. Something that feels too painful to look at directly. And yet it's the avoidance that's keeping you stuck. The only way through is the truth.
Even though I was honest with myself about needing a vacation this week, and I took one, I still felt inspired to talk about this. So even though I had decided I would not make any content if I needed to rest instead, I felt inspired enough to record a podcast on this very topic β about my own thirty-year self-healing journey and all the times I got stuck avoiding the truth. I was also able to put out two Substack articles. I hope you enjoy them.
The Healthy Voice Community has been enjoying Elevator Music, our Vocal Recess activity this week. It's been really fun to watch everybody make the connections between pitches and spots in their body and where notes actually ring. And next week we have the third lesson of Over the Rainbow in our Voice Lessons series. Looking forward to it.
Oh, and by the way β Monday's YouTube video went viral. Seems like a lot of people aren't using their real voice.
In the meantime, I'll be taking a little break this weekend. ποΈ
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Do You Have to Perform to Heal Your Voice?
One of the questions I get asked most often: do I have to perform to heal my voice?
The short answer is no. The longer answer is more interesting.
Performance anxiety is one of the most common blocks. The voice is fine alone but disappears in front of people. This is a nervous system response, not a talent gap. The healing work and the performance work are two different things, and you don't have to do both.
Singing for healing is about the relationship between you and your voice. The breath, the resonance, the somatic experience of making sound in the body. It is private, intentional, and does not require an audience.
Being witnessed in healing is different from performing in the traditional sense. It's choosing, deliberately, to let your voice be heard in a container that feels safe. That's why the Courage Circle exists. Not to evaluate, but to witness.
You are allowed to want one without the other. You are allowed to heal your voice and never step on a stage. That is a complete and valid path.
The audience you need first is yourself.
βοΈ Do You Have to Perform to Heal Your Voice? β Read on Substackβ
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Stop Attacking Your Voice
There is a sound hiding inside most people's voices they have never noticed. The glottal stop. A tiny click before vowel sounds. In small doses it's normal. In American English it's habitual. And it's exhausting the voice.
We attack sounds that should simply be greeted.
A surfer doesn't attack the wave. They wait, read the water, feel the timing, and at precisely the right moment rise and join the motion already happening. The voice works the same way. Sound is already happening. Breath is already moving. What we are doing in healthy speech is joining that motion. Arriving into it with ease, at the right moment, with presence but without force.
The soft onset: beginning a vowel sound with a gentle open initiation of breath before the vocal folds engage. No grip, no stop. It feels almost too quiet at first.
That feeling is correct information. You are doing less. Less is right.
You're Speaking Too High. Here's How to Drop Into Your Real Voice.
This video went viral. ποΈ
Most voice teachers get asked about high notes. I get asked about the other end.
When the nervous system is in chronic stress, it creates muscular tension throughout the body, including the tongue, the jaw, and the throat. The tongue lifts. The throat tightens. The voice gets pushed into a pitch that's higher than where it actually wants to live. Most people have been there so long they don't even know it.
The first time I encountered this was in my own vocal recovery. A holistic speech therapist listened to me speak and said immediately: lower. When I dropped it, I discovered something in my voice I hadn't known was there.
In the video I walk you through a guided practice for accessing the lower register and the chest voice. Face stretches, yawn-sighs, jaw drop with the emperor's pose, hands on the chest to feel the vibrations of the low notes, sternum pressure point release, and a full integration practice.
π¬ You're Speaking Too High. Here's How to Drop Into Your Real Voice. β Watch on YouTubeβ
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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
On the passaggio, the healing journey, and what it actually takes to keep going.
This episode started as a conversation about vocal technique and became something else entirely.
The passaggio is the bridge between your chest voice and your head voice. That tricky spot where most untrained singers get stuck. Learning to pass through it with ease rather than force is one of the central things I teach. But this episode is less about the technique and more about the metaphor. Because the passaggio describes something that goes far beyond singing.
Most people who come to work with me are standing on a bridge. They can sense the other side. They've had glimpses of it. But they're not through yet, and the passage is uncomfortable.
I started my healing path in 1996. I was sixteen. And I kept going, off and on, through breathwork and hot yoga and chanting and sound healing and therapy and journaling and letting go of relationships that were harming me, for the better part of three decades, before I was clear enough and strong enough to start The Healthy Voice.
This episode is the story of that journey. The part I don't usually tell in full.
If there's a reason I say "keep going" at the end of every episode, this is it.
Coming Next Week in Vocal Recess: THE TRICKSTER π
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This week we're spending seven days getting to know the trickster. That rule-breaking, shapeshifting character who shows up in every good story and is almost always the funniest one in the room.
Because the inner critic is a trickster too. It wears a mask, borrows other people's voices, and hands your own fear right back to you, all to keep you small and quiet. But you don't beat a trickster in a fight. You laugh at it. Because you cannot laugh and clench up at the same time. Which means laughter is a real vocal technique, not just a nice idea.
Day 1 β The Genie. Comic relief itself, and why the funniest character is so often the one who sets everyone free.
Day 2 β Yoda. The fool who turns out to be the master. We make friends with the sound in your voice you've been most embarrassed by.
Day 3 β Ferris Bueller. The one who talks straight to you. What happens to your voice when you assume the room is on your side.
Day 4 β Kevin from Home Alone. The small one who wins. We make a big sound on purpose, and remember that volume isn't aggression. It's range.
Day 5 β Mrs. Doubtfire. The voice that opens the door. How a costume gives you permission to sing things you'd never sing as yourself.
Day 6 β Beetlejuice. The one with no filter. We take the microphone back and say the unsayable, out loud and ridiculous, until it loses its grip.
Day 7 β Your own trickster. We name the critic, give it a silly name, a bad hat, and one tired catchphrase, so the next time it shows up you can hear it coming a mile away.
Voice Lessons: Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Week 3 β The Passaggio. Drops Monday. π
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What is the passaggio? When you sing from low to high, you move from chest voice into head voice, and there's a spot in the middle that tends to catch in the throat. A crack, a flip, a wobble. It's incredibly common, and it's what we're smoothing out this week.
We start with siren slides and lip trills, where the glide feels easy. The hard part is trust. We brace for the jump, and that bracing creates the very tension that trips us up. So here's your first assignment: decide right now that you're okay with ugly sounds. If you're afraid of sounding bad, you'll keep flinching away from the high notes. Set up the conditions with your technique, and trust that the pretty sound is on its way.
Then we take that slide onto an open throat. Drop into a yawn, let the tongue lie flat with the tip behind your bottom teeth, and keep the chin up. When the tongue is out of the way, the sound travels high with ease. That's the secret to the passaggio. We bring it to the big "Some-where" octave leap in the middle key, placing the low note higher so you're already set up before you jump.
Your job this week is to get familiar with your own instrument. Notice where each note lands in your body, and try to feel the placement before you arrive. Practice a little every day, and be gentle with yourself while you do. We love ourselves no matter how we sound.
Honesty keeps coming up. Getting to the other side of your healing path requires being honest about which side you're on right now. That sounds simple. It isn't. The tendency is to skip past the truth of where you are and jump straight to where you want to be. But the bridge only works if you step onto it from the right place. Honesty about the present moment is not a detour. It's the first step.
Reading: Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut. His first novel, and as sharp as ever. A world where machines have taken over human labor and the people left behind are searching for purpose. It's landing differently right now than I imagine it would have in any other decade.
Listening: Matthew Halsall. Jazz, meditative, warm. The kind of music that slows everything down to the right speed.
Watching: Anna Karenina, an Italian miniseries production available on YouTube. Lush, slow, emotionally precise.
THE JOURNAL PROMPT
Which floor do you live on?
Last week in the community we treated the voice like an elevator. Your low, warm chest voice is the lobby, that light floaty high voice is the penthouse, and there's a whole building in between. And what I noticed, watching people play with it, is how many of us basically live on one floor. We find the part of our range that feels safe, and we just stay there.
And I don't think it's only true of our voices. Most of us have an emotional floor we live on too. A range we're comfortable being seen in. Maybe you live in the pleasant, easy middle floors, and you almost never let anyone see the big top-floor joy or the low, grounded anger. Maybe you live way up in the light, bright, everything's-fine penthouse and never go down to the basement where the heavier stuff lives. We pick a floor, and we call it our personality, when really it's just the floor we stopped the elevator on.
So here's what I want you to write about. Which floor do you live on, both in your voice and in your life? Where do you feel safe being seen, and which floors do you avoid? Is there a top-floor feeling, big joy, big wanting, that you keep the doors closed on? Is there a bottom-floor one, anger, grief, need, that you never ride down to? And be honest with yourself about this part. What are you afraid would happen if you let yourself be seen on a floor you usually keep locked?
π This Week's Practice
Start by humming a low, warm, comfortable note, right down in the easy bottom of your voice. Sit in it for a second. That's your lobby. Now, very slowly, glide upward, like an elevator rising, letting the pitch climb up and up until you reach the highest comfortable note you can find. Let it be light and floaty up there. That's your penthouse. Then glide slowly back down. Don't worry about how it sounds. The only job is to travel the whole building, top to bottom, and actually visit every floor on the way.
Now do it two or three more times, and this time notice something. Notice the exact floor where you get uncomfortable and want to stop. For a lot of people it's up high, where it feels too big or too exposed. For others it's down low, where it feels too heavy. Wherever your uncomfortable floor is, just breathe, and glide through it one more time without stopping. You don't have to fix anything or sound good. You're simply reminding your body that it's allowed to visit every floor. The whole building is yours. You don't actually have to live on just one of them.
Keep going β because the world needs your unique voice. ποΈ
β Bella Frequency Notes, From The Healthy Voice
π The Voice Liberation Method Is Helping Hundreds
Seven weeks of trauma-informed voice work β vocal technique, speech exercises, guided visualizations with original music, nervous system education, and journal prompts β all inspired by the same methods I use in my private coaching sessions.
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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." β 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." β 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." β 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." β Stephanie, ZΓΌrich, Switzerland β Mastery member
Seven of the best play-based voice activities from the archive β 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 β 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....
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