I started The Healthy Voice to teach people how to reclaim and love their voice.
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One year ago, I finally stopped being quiet
Published 19 days ago • 8 min read
It's a new month, so it's time for a new theme. This October, inside The Healthy Voice Community, we're spending the whole month on where power lives. It's also a very big anniversary for me, because one year ago I launched my YouTube channel. I originally called it The Healthy Singer, but within a few weeks I changed it to The Healthy Voice because I realized I didn't just want to help singers. I wanted to help all voices, speakers too, anyone who had ever been made to feel they couldn't use the one they were born with.
And here we are. Hundreds and hundreds of people have taken my course, the Voice Liberation Method, come to the group sessions inside the community, and sat with me one-on-one in private sessions. My life is completely different than it was a year ago. Back then I was teaching eighteen piano students, all of them kids, some of whom had been in my life for anywhere from five to nine years, and I honestly couldn't imagine my life being any other way.
But there was a moment when I realized I had been keeping myself quiet for so long, and it makes me cringe a little to admit it was longer than a decade, because it was. We had taken a hiatus from Los Angeles and moved up to Sonoma wine country for a few years to get away from the COVID chaos the way so many people did, and when we were finally ready to come home, and I was still hustling to get us unpacked, I knew I couldn't keep putting it off any longer. So while the painters were still working on the walls of the hallway outside my brand-new studio, I sat down to record the thing I consider one of the most important pieces of my whole method, which is massage. I made a video on throat massage.
That is the video that put me on the map. It went viral almost immediately. Hundreds of people signed up for my mailing list, thousands subscribed to my YouTube channel, and my inbox started flooding with people asking whether I did private sessions.
To celebrate, I'm running a sale all month long. You can join The Healthy Voice Community at 25% off your first month with the code SING25, and after that it simply goes back to the regular price. You can cancel any time, and you can change tiers any time, so there's no risk at all in coming to see what it's like. The platform turns one this October, and the community itself turns one at the end of November. I am so proud of what we've built in there that I want you to be a part of it too.
All month I'm also going to be letting you see inside the community. Every YouTube video will be a little preview of the real sessions we hold in there, every podcast will pull back the curtain on what we actually do together, and every Substack article this month is taken straight from THE FIFTH, the monthly magazine I write for our members. So if you want those, make sure you're subscribed on Substack.
And because this week is the very beginning of Power Month, everything circles that one idea. The first article is about what it felt like to grow up as an outsider, the kid who kept getting the social script wrong and slowly learned to go quiet, and how that same fear of speaking up finds its way into so many of us. The second, Where Power Lives, comes straight from THE FIFTH, the From the Founder letter I write to open every issue.
My video this week is a little more controversial than what I usually make, but I wanted to name something I've been watching grow in our culture year after year, which is a kind of thought segregation, where we're all being encouraged, and honestly where we're doing it to ourselves, to divide along the lines of ideology and belief. I'm against it, because it's a big part of what keeps people silent and scared to speak up. I've been contrarian by nature my whole life, which has meant a lot of uncomfortable rooms where mine was the unpopular opinion, and over the years I've learned how to hold my ground while staying calm and keeping my dignity. So I made a video about your right to disagree, and I share what's worked for me, in the hope that it helps you do the same.
So come see what we've made. Join us in the community this month while it's 25% off, and let's spend October finding out where your power actually lives.
A FREE EBOOK FOR YOU
A while back I was invited to join a collaboration of health food writers, and since my nutrition background is in raw food, I wrote a book about the thing I know best, which is how what you eat and drink shows up in your voice. Then I sat on it for months, waiting for the perfect moment to sell it, until I finally decided I'd rather just give it away. Feed Your Voice has everything I've learned about hydration and the voice, my most popular face and throat massage routines on video, and more than twenty juice, smoothie, and salad recipes to keep your voice hydrated from the inside out.
And if you know someone whose voice could use some care, please send them here to grab a copy of their own, because I'm working on growing this list and every share helps.
THIS WEEK'S ARTICLE: My Big Mouth
This one is about where power lives, and why so many intelligent people are terrified to say what they actually think. I write about the ocean-wave heartbeat and the thin sweat on the back of my neck that used to show up the second I had an opinion that differed from the room, about growing up with a big mouth in a punitive world, and about what I've come to believe we're really watching when a whole culture learns to quietly censor itself.
And underneath all of it, the thing I see every day in my work: which is what chronic self-censorship does to a body, and how it settles right into the voice.
This one comes from THE FIFTH, the magazine I write for the community, and since we're turning one this October I'm opening it up and sharing a few of my favorite pieces with you. It's my From the Founder letter for the month, and it opens with losing our house somewhere in that awkward stretch before I was old enough to drive, and the powerlessness of those years, and the one thing that made getting up worth it every single day, which was knowing I would get to sing. It's about what I slowly came to understand after that, that working on your voice is how you build real power, and that power was never the forceful, aggressive thing we were taught it was.
You know the feeling. The conversation is flowing, everyone seems to agree, and you think something different, and you want to say it, and you don't, because you already know how it tends to go when you do. This one ties right into October's theme of power, because we'll be doing plenty of projection and belting this month, but there's power in silence too, and in staying calm and dignified while you hold your ground.
I get into what this used to do to my body in a college classroom, why sharing an opinion while you're still inside a fear response rarely goes well, and the one thing that changes how an unpopular opinion lands.
THIS WEEK'S PODCAST: The Healthy Voice is One Year Old
A year ago I started The Healthy Voice on YouTube, and a few months in I knew I had something, so I launched the community on Black Friday from a borrowed house in Santa Monica, frazzled, cooking vegan Thanksgiving side dishes and refreshing the member list all day long. I was hoping for ten people, and by that afternoon thirty-five had joined.
In this anniversary episode, I tell the story of that whole first year, the piano students I had to say goodbye to, the members whose voices went from grief to lightness and humor right in front of me, how Vocal Recess was born, the Courage Circle moment none of us will ever forget, and what I'd tell my nervous self from a year ago about putting her voice online.
Vocal Recess starts Monday, and we're staying in October, where power lives, with a week at the coven. Because your inner critic is a witch, and she's been casting spells on your voice for years, telling you to keep it down, keep it pretty, keep it small. This week, we take the power back. Seven days, seven witches, each one a different voice in your head.
We listen like Glinda, the kind voice we rarely let speak.
We stop apologizing like the aunts from Practical Magic, who never once shrank themselves for anyone.
We go big and theatrical like Winifred Sanderson, who takes up every inch of the room and dares you to look away.
We reclaim our so-called ugly sounds like the Wicked Witch of the West, cackling until the cackle turns into real laughter and the spell breaks.
We unlock the voice we've been scared of, like Sally Owens, the power we buried because it frightened us.
We take our voice back like the sea witch's victims finally would, singing to reclaim what we were talked into trading away.
And on the last day, you name your own inner witch, and you cast your own counter-spell, out loud, in your own voice.
It's spooky, it's a little silly, and it's secretly some of the most freeing voice work we do all year. Because a spell you can see is a spell you can break. Come meet your coven with us.
Settle in. Put your feet on the floor. Take a breath. Then write.
Write about a time you mistook heat for power, in yourself or in someone else, and ask yourself what it actually accomplished, and what was remembered afterward.
WORK WITH ME — NEW SESSION PACKAGES
If any of this week's writing landed close to home, the deepest way I know to work on it is one-on-one, and this Fall I've made that easier to say yes to.
I've just opened two session packages, because so much of this work is the kind that keeps unfolding when we get to stay with it over time rather than trying to do everything in a single hour.
The Homecoming — 4 Sessions is $540, which comes to $135 a session instead of my usual $150
The Homecoming — 6 Sessions is $750, or $125 a session, which is the best value I offer and the one I'd choose if you're ready to really commit to your voice this season.
I've also opened up more room than usual, including new Tuesday hours built around European time zones, so if you've been standing on the sand watching and wanting your own voice back, now is a good moment to walk in.
As I write this, I'm in New York City, one of my favorite places in the whole world. I love it here, I love New Yorkers, and I love that on any given night you can choose between theater and opera and jazz or a dozen things I've never even heard of. But my favorite thing about this city is that I feel completely comfortable here, with the way I talk and the way I carry myself. I'm a blunt person, I'm loud and expressive, but I don't live here, so most of my life I've had to be careful;...
There's a particular kind of quiet that happens in a room right before someone sings for the very first time in front of other people. I've been in that quiet more times than I can count now, on both sides of it, and I can tell you that the thing standing between a person and their own voice is almost never talent. It's that they have never had a safe place to be heard. You can practice alone in your car or your bedroom for years, and a lot of us do, and it genuinely helps, but there's a wall...
For a long time I only offered single sessions, one at a time, because that’s how I started and it felt honest to keep it simple. But the longer I do this work, the more I notice that the real shifts don’t tend to happen in one hour. They happen across a few, when we get to build on what opened up last time instead of starting fresh every visit, and when your body has room to trust that we’re going to keep going. So I’ve finally opened two session packages, and I priced them below what you’d...
