I started The Healthy Voice to teach people how to reclaim and love their voice.
Share
The note you've been avoiding is not a technique problem. It's shadow material.
Published about 1 month ago • 9 min read
A weekly dispatch on voice, healing, and the inner life of a working artist.
June is doing something this month.
Something is loosening. The sunshine is showing up in more parts of the world — and I don't think that's unrelated. The voice is seasonal. It responds to warmth, to longer days, to the particular quality of light that arrives in early summer. And I'm watching it happen in real time in sessions.
The long game is paying off. People who stayed committed — who showed up month after month, who didn't quit when it got uncomfortable — are having real breakthroughs right now. Not because they suddenly got lucky. Because they kept going long enough for the work to find them.
Watching that renews my own faith in the practice. Every single time.
This week I also got to share my story — how music became a career, how a career became a crisis, and how a crisis became The Healthy Voice — on a podcast called The Eternal Void, but with Jazz. It's the origin story, told in full. If you're new here, this is where it all begins.
Two pieces of writing this week — and they belong together.
The first starts with Carl Jung, who never wrote directly about the singing voice. But described it exactly.
The shadow is not evil. It is everything we have rejected. The child praised for being quiet learns to reject loudness. The adolescent shamed for sensitivity pushes it underground. And the rejected material doesn't disappear — it goes into the shadow, operating outside conscious awareness.
The shadow is where the silenced voice lives.
The note you avoid. The key that makes you feel exposed. The song that gets too close to something true and shuts you down — all of it is shadow material. Not a technique problem. A shadow problem. And shadow work isn't about forcing yourself through it. It's about curiosity. About bringing it into the light and saying: yes. This is also part of me. It was always mine.
✍️ The Voice You've Been Avoiding Is Shadow Material → Read on Substack
The second piece is about where that shadow lives in the body — and why talking about it isn't always enough.
Talk therapy has real value. I started at nineteen and don't regret it. But it didn't reach the place where the fear actually lived. Massage school at twenty-five changed everything. What I learned: trauma buried as chronic tension, as armor, as physical memory — when released by touch, the emotion has to go somewhere. And the healing that followed — in my mid-twenties, then again in my late twenties when the flashbacks started — became the true foundation of everything I teach now.
The body learned to leave because leaving was safer than staying.
Regular bodywork. The harmonium drone. The hum that vibrates the places that have been held. The voice as body work — not just technique, but the body learning, again, that it is safe to be inhabited.
Social anxiety is a trauma response. When fear floods the body, it travels the vagus nerve — the highway connecting brain to face, throat, lungs, heart, and stomach. That's why the voice rises in pitch in a room full of people. It's all connected. And it all passes through the throat.
But the same pathway that carries the fear signal can carry the calm signal right back.
Start humming before you get there. By the time you walk through that door, your body will already know that you're safe.
🎬 Why You Freeze Around People — And How Humming Fixes It → Watch on YouTube
And this week's podcast — a companion to the video above, and the most personal episode yet:
I had social anxiety for years before I admitted it at twenty-eight. I covered it with performance training — I could channel the character of someone comfortable at a party while filling with dread in the hours before every event. When I tried to tell people, they said: you're the most confident person I know. Which made it worse. Not just afraid, but fraudulent.
This episode is about what social anxiety actually is — rooted in a primitive fear of tribal rejection, which the nervous system reads as a fear of death. About upspeak as an unconscious survival signal (don't get mad now). About the vagus nerve as an interstate connecting states of mind — brain, throat, lungs, heart, stomach — and why humming is a massage for the whole highway.
And about what finally changed it: sovereignty. A real sense of self-worth. Comfort in authentic expression. Once you develop that, the anxiety starts to lose its power. It has nothing to feed off of.
🎧 Social Anxiety and the Voice — How Humming Heals → LISTEN HERE
Tomorrow: Voice Lessons Series: Resonance. 🎤
Lesson One: Open Throat. Lesson Two: Breath Support.
Now — the sound finding its rooms. Members are hearing themselves change week over week. Same song, different instrument. That's what consistent layered work does. The Water is Wide is becoming something in this community.
Coming next week in the community:
🎸 Songwriting Workshop — Monday June 15 at 5pm PDT (Practitioner + Mastery)
🎓 Masterclass 1 — Tuesday June 16 at 11am PDT (Mastery only)
Seven days of restorative voice care. One treatment a day. No belting, no pushing, no getting better. Just breath, nervous system, and the voice looking after itself.
New this week: every practice is scored — original soundscapes under each one. You're not following a talking head. You're lying down inside the sound.
🤍 Monday — The Check-In
💧 Tuesday — The Hydration Bar
♨️ Wednesday — The Steam Room
💆 Thursday — The Massage Table
🧂 Friday — The Salt Scrub
🔔 Saturday — The Sound Bath
🕯️ Sunday — The Quiet Room: one last sound… and then rest. Real rest.
Community members only. Pour the water. Find the floor. See you at the spa. 🛁
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.
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.
The long game. That's what I keep coming back to this week.
The people who stay committed — who show up month after month, who don't quit when it gets uncomfortable, who trust the process even when the progress is invisible — are the ones having real breakthroughs right now.
Not because they suddenly got lucky. Because they kept going long enough for the work to find them. Watching that renews my own faith in the practice. Every single time.
📖 Reading: The Wonderful Book of Suffering by Joe Phipps — about how pain can become the ground for spiritual growth. Which is, in many ways, exactly what we're doing here. The suffering doesn't go to waste. It becomes the work.
🎵 Listening: Old-fashioned nostalgia orchestra music on YouTube — the kind that sounds like the opening credits of an early Disney film. Pure, uncomplicated wonder. I find it restorative right now.
✍️ Journal Prompt
The shadow is not dramatic. It doesn't announce itself. It's just the quality of voice you learned to put away — the one that was too loud, too soft, too sad, too joyful, too strange for the room you were in.
What is your voice's shadow? Not the voice you perform. The one underneath it. The one that comes out when you're alone and you forgot to be careful — and then you caught yourself and pulled it back.
Where did it go? And what has it been costing you to keep it there?
$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
Before you walk into the next difficult room — a meeting, a conversation, a situation where you normally freeze — hum.
In the car. On the way there. Not a song. Just a low, easy hum. Feel it in your chest. Let it travel up through your throat and into your face.
That vibration is moving along the vagus nerve — the same highway the fear signal travels down. You're sending the calm signal back up. By the time you arrive, your body will already know it's safe.
And when you get there — find one person to focus on. One person to make feel comfortable. Watch what happens to the fear monster when your attention moves toward someone else.
** Sessions are temporarily closed to new clients. An announcement will be posted when the booking calendar resumes.**
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
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. This was the first week since I started The Healthy Voice that I didn't post a YouTube video — and I'm pretty sure I haven't missed a single week until now. We've been in the middle of a heat wave here in Los Angeles, and I've also been focusing more of my time on private students. I'm now seeing around nine clients a week, which I love deeply and have no intention of giving up. That, on top of all the live community...
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...
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...
