I started The Healthy Voice to teach people how to reclaim and love their voice.
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Sovereignty has a lot to do with timing.
Published 11 days ago • 11 min read
A weekly dispatch on voice, healing, and the inner life of a working artist.
Sovereignty has a lot to do with timing.
Knowing when to act. When to speak. When it's time to double down on your breath, your body, the feeling of your own tongue in your mouth. Most of the time we just talk — we take it for granted, we move through conversations on autopilot, and we don't pay much attention to what's actually happening in the body while we do it.
That's exactly what manipulators count on.
A confidence artist — and that is the full phrase, confidence artist, someone who wins your confidence — works in two stages. First, they get you comfortable. They figure out what makes you feel safe, what makes you relax, what makes you stop paying attention. And once you're there — once you're comfortable and a little off-guard — that's when they find the soft spot. The emotional weakness. The thing that catches you completely off-guard and puts you into a fight, flight, or freeze response before you've even registered what happened.
And once you're in that response, you're completely off your game. You're not aware of your breath. You're not aware of your tongue. Your voice is doing its own thing — and it might not even sound like you anymore. It might sound like somebody else talking through you. The version of yourself that's been managed and braced and careful for so long that the real voice is nowhere to be found.
That is the moment your sovereignty is gone.
This week's content is about giving you a foundation of practices to begin taking it back. The breath that keeps you steady when someone is trying to move you. The tongue that has been holding more than you realized. And the voice — your actual voice — that has been waiting underneath all of it.
The tongue is where I want to start.
Most people don't realize how far back it actually goes — a large, powerful, deeply rooted muscle, and one of the primary sites of vocal tension in the body. When it wasn't safe to be yourself, the voice adapted before the mind had words for it. It understood that full, honest, unguarded self-expression carried risk. And so, slowly and subtly, the tongue began to brace. To stay elevated. To hold an unnatural position in order to maintain a safer, more managed voice.
Maintaining an inauthentic voice is exhausting. The tongue has to hold that position continuously — all day, in every room, with every person.
One of my students said recently that she doesn't feel like her voice is her own. I recognized it immediately. I have felt that. And I think it is more common than most people realize.
The practice is simple. Open your mouth wide, stretch the face in all directions, massage the jaw muscles, stick out the tongue as far as it will go, make sound throughout. Then let the mouth close softly and notice what has shifted. Do this every morning before you speak to anyone. You are not just warming up the instrument. You are giving the tongue permission to stop bracing.
✍️ The Tongue Knows What You've Been Holding → Read on Substack
And here's the breath that protects you when someone is trying to take your sovereignty.
The Ujjayi breath — sometimes called ocean breath, or what one of my clients named it, the Darth Vader breath — is a yogic breathing technique that uses a slightly constricted throat to create an audible, steady breath. Inhale through the nose with the throat open, exhale the same way. Lips closed. Shoulders down. Chest calm.
Here is why this matters: when you are in the presence of a difficult person and your nervous system is trying to pull you into freeze, the Ujjayi breath gives the nervous system something else to do. It signals: the throat is open, the breath is steady, we are not in danger. And it is completely invisible to the person trying to destabilize you. You look completely unfazed — because you are beginning to actually be unfazed.
When they finish talking, your response can be simple: I hear you. Got it. Okay. Nothing more. No defending. No explaining. No fuel.
LIVE Session next week: P+M Deep Dive — Monday July 14 at 11am PDT. Timing and rhythm as vocal technique. How to feel the beat in the body rather than count it in the head.
(Practitioner + Mastery)11:00 AM PDT · 2:00 PM New York · 7:00 PM London · 8:00 PM Europe · 5:00 AM Sydney (+1)
This week's Vocal Recess is unlike anything we've done before. No performance. No technique drills. No goals.
For seven days you become a field researcher — and your subject is your own voice. You're not here to fix it. You're here to study it. To get curious about it the way a scientist gets curious about a culture they've never visited before.
The whole week runs on one simple tool. Every time you catch yourself thinking ugh, I hate my voice — you swap it for two words: I notice. That's the practice. That's the magic. Because you cannot judge and get curious at the same moment. And curiosity is where every real change begins.
Your field studies, day by day:
🎙️ Day 1 — Field Audio Record your natural voice today — just talking, nothing prepared. Then listen back the way a scientist listens to a recording from the field. No verdicts. Just data. What do you notice?
🌬️ Day 2 — The Breath Where does your breath actually live when you speak? Does it move when you talk, or does it stop? Does it get shallower when someone is watching? Today you observe without changing anything. Just watch.
🗺️ Day 3 — Mapping the Terrain Where does your voice grip? The jaw. The throat. The shoulders. The chest. Today you make a map — not to fix the tension, but to know where it lives. You can't release what you haven't located.
🏡 Day 4 — Home Range Where does your voice naturally settle when nothing is at stake? Find that place. That's your home range. Notice how far you travel from it when something feels hard.
🧠 Day 5 — The Critic, Observed Today you study your inner critic from a safe distance. What does it say? How often does it speak? And here's the question worth sitting with: whose voice does it borrow? Because it didn't come from nowhere.
👥 Day 6 — Two Cultures Your voice in one culture: alone, with no audience. Your voice in another: when someone is listening. Study the difference. Notice what shifts, what disappears, what comes out of hiding.
📋 Day 7 — The Ethnography Today you compile your field notes. What did you learn about the culture of your own voice this week? What surprised you? What confirmed what you already suspected? And what do you want to study next?
You'll come in a stranger to your own voice. You'll leave with field notes — and a little more affection for the culture you've been studying all along.
Open throat from Week 1. Breath support and phrasing from Week 2. Now — the secret to carrying your sound without straining. The mask, the whiny toddler sound, the open mouth hum, and the one instruction that changes everything: forward, forward, forward. No matter what the pitch is doing, the direction is always forward.
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.
Nine sessions this week. Nine discoveries. And in almost every single one, a student walked out knowing something about themselves or their voice that they genuinely did not know when they walked in.
Someone discovered they can actually sing — the equipment works and always has. Someone else discovered where in the body the real work lives. Another found that words have ingredients she can feel individually. One realized that what she always thought of as a liability is actually an asset. Someone found a whole new framework for self-observation. Another felt her technique becoming instinct for the first time. One found a younger, freer version of herself waiting inside the voice. Another understood that the throat is a channel, not a power source. And one discovered the vowel map hiding underneath the melody.
None of it was about sounding better. All of it was about knowing themselves more deeply.
📖 Reading: The Catcher in the Rye — J.D. Salinger. I decided to revisit some of my favorite books from my teenage years, and this one was particularly special. It came into my life during a period where I pretty much hated everything — school, my family situation, the feeling of being completely isolated and alone. Holden Caulfield was the first character to make me feel less alone.
🎬 Watching: Pippi Longstocking (1969) on YouTube. Pippi was one of my first role models as a child. She was an orphan, more or less, though she never once let herself believe it — and she never let a sad victim thought poison her mind. Every challenge was a game. She had a wild imagination, her own completely original personal style, and an unshakeable sense of who she was. Pure sovereignty before anyone had a word for it. What a gift to live in a time where I can pull up anything I want and find her again.
✍️ Journal Prompt
Sovereignty begins with self-knowledge. And self-knowledge begins with knowing where you're vulnerable.
Start here: make a list of your emotional weak spots. The things that catch you off guard. The feelings that, when triggered, pull you completely out of your body and into reaction. The subjects, the tones of voice, the specific words that someone can use to destabilize you in seconds.
Don't judge the list. Just make it. Because the manipulator has already made it — they've been studying you. It's time you studied yourself.
Then ask: in those moments, where does your breath go? Does it shallow out? Does it stop entirely? Does your throat tighten before you've said a single word?
And finally: what would it feel like to stay in your body the next time one of those triggers lands? To breathe instead of react. To feel your feet on the floor, the tongue in your mouth, the air moving in and out — and to let that steadiness be your response instead of whatever the fear usually says?
The breath doesn't eliminate the feeling. It gives you enough ground to choose what you do with it.
🌀 This Week's Practice
Take this sentence:
My voice is my own. I speak with ease.
Say it out loud. Slowly — slower than feels natural. Let each word land completely before the next one begins.
Pay full attention to the physical sensation as you speak. Feel the tongue placing each consonant. Feel the vibration moving forward into the face. Feel the breath underneath the phrase, supporting it without pushing.
Say it again. Crisply — every consonant clean, every vowel open. Not performing it. Feeling it.
This is not an affirmation exercise. This is a sovereignty practice. The slow pace gives the nervous system time to register that the voice is safe. The crisp diction brings you fully into the present moment. The sensation keeps you in your body rather than in your head.
Five times, every morning, before you speak to anyone.
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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