I started The Healthy Voice to teach people how to reclaim and love their voice.
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The Silencer looks like Pennywise. The cure sounds like Kermit.
Published about 1 month ago • 8 min read
A weekly dispatch on voice, healing, and the inner life of a working artist.
This is the last week of April.
And I'm sitting here at the end of a month that changed something in me — in my sessions, in my own body, in the community — thinking about how much has moved.
We started with the psoas. The deepest muscle in the body, quietly holding an old earthquake. We moved through the gut, the fascia, the jaw, the lymph, the diaphragm. We built a map — not of a voice, but of a body. A body that has been faithfully keeping score, storing what couldn't be processed, bracing around threats that have long since passed.
And this week, two more pieces of that map arrived.
The voice doesn't just carry sound. It carries fluid. The lymphatic system — the body's forgotten river, with no heart to pump it — depends entirely on breath, movement, and vibration to keep moving. When we go silent, the river stagnates. When we sing, the river remembers what it's for.
We are not just using the voice. We are using the voice to clean the house that the voice lives in.
This week's podcast started with Romancing the Voice week in the community and turned into something much bigger. We talk about the Silencer — the internal critic assembled from every critical voice you've ever encountered. Mine looks like Pennywise. I read YouTube comments in the voice of Kermit the Frog. And why I use the word romance instead of discipline — because discipline implies punishment, and punishment is rooted in fear. Romance is rooted in love. And when you're in love with something, nothing else has power over you.
The Wizard of Oz is in here too. Obviously.
🎧 Romancing Your Voice | How to Build a Daily Practice You Actually Want to Show Up For → Listen on YouTube
Two new free vocal workouts this week — one for dynamics, resonance, and the speech exercise that will change how you think about cadence forever. One for the Silencer and the high notes you've been afraid to reach for.
🎬 Free Vocal Workout #3 | The Volume Dial, Buzz the Bones + I Didn't Say She Stole My Money → Watch on YouTube
🎬 Stop Forcing High Notes | The Mindset Shift That Actually Works → Watch on YouTube
If something in this week's content landed in your body and you don't know what to do with it — that's exactly what a 1:1 session is for.
I work with singers, speakers, and people who are done swallowing their words. Sessions are trauma-informed, deeply personal, and go places a course or a video can't reach. We work with what's actually happening in your voice — and in the body underneath it.
Spots are limited. If you've been waiting for the right moment, this is probably it.
Yesterday we held our Courage Circle. We introduced something new this month — every Courage Circle now ends with a community sing-along. This time: Stand By Me.
I want to say something about what I'm watching happen in that room. Month after month, the voices are opening. It's audible. The confidence is building. The room feels different than it did in January. Something is accumulating — not just skill, but trust. Trust in the voice. Trust in the room. Trust in themselves.
This week in the community: ANARCHY IN THE VOICEBOX wraps up today. 🎸 Seven days of vocal rebellion, zero apologies, and at least one community member who I'm told performed their bit at an actual dinner party. 👉 Join the community
Next week: ONCE UPON A VOICE begins. ✨
A seven-day Grimm-style fairy tale — one chapter per day — about a child who wandered into a forest and forgot how to find their way home. Each chapter is written to be read aloud. Somatic technique practices woven into every day. And new this series: narrated audio for every chapter and prompt — so if you'd rather listen than read, my voice will guide you through.
Your inner child and your voice are the same thing. This week we go find them. Together.
A reminder: community prices go up May 1 for new members. Everyone already inside keeps their rate. Forever. Foundation $25 / Practitioner $67 / Mastery $147. If you've been waiting — this is the window.
Next week also brings four live sessions: a P+M Deep Dive on vowels — including an original piece I wrote — a Songwriting Workshop where we'll write mantras together, a Sound Healing session, and a Mastery Masterclass. Think private lesson, very small audience.
And May is coming. The theme is PITCH PERFECT — and it includes the upcoming 30-Day Singing Practice Challenge. We build from five-minute micro-sessions in Week 1 all the way to a full intentional 30-minute daily practice by Week 4. No guilt. No performance pressure. Just you, your voice, and the science of what happens when you show up every single day.
Before you decide — I want you to see what's waiting for you inside. This week I'm giving away Issue No. 4 of THE FIFTH — our monthly community magazine — completely free.
The Fifth is a full editorial magazine published exclusively for community members every month. This issue is about courage. Specifically: why going flat is not a pitch problem — it's a courage problem. Why the sovereignty gap between the note you sang and the note you intended isn't about your ears. It's about whether some part of you decided it was safer not to fully arrive. This issue goes deep into pitch, presence, and the voice that learned to apologize before it even opened.
This is what members get every single month. Along with everything else.
I've been building on something fun and inspired by the hero's journey theme of The Voice Liberation Method. It's almost ready.
Voice in Three Acts: Find it. Free it. Use it.
Three complete weeks of narrated story-based voice work. 21 chapters. Talking head coaching videos for every day. Background music composed specifically for each week. Ken Burns animated illustrations. Somatic technique practices woven into every chapter. A private voice memo sharing space. Lifetime access.
The fairy tale. The vintage romance. The pulp-fiction style mystery.
I love story-based learning. Play-centered education. The best way to grow and learn anything is by bringing out your inner child.
More to come...
And here's what someone said this week after completing the Voice Liberation Method:
"Thank you, Bella! I've enjoyed these lessons and found them challenging. My fear is deep but improving. Plan on going through all the lessons again and again until I truly feel my voice is free."
— E.M. ❤️
That's not a review. That's a commitment. And it's exactly what this work is for.
The need for approval weighs heavily on so many of the people I work with — and it lives directly in the voice. Parents, teachers, authority figures who disapproved of your musical desires early on. A choir director's offhand comment. A parent who told you to be quiet. A moment of humiliation that your nervous system filed away and never let go of.
That approval-seeking becomes a fear pattern, and the fear pattern becomes the Silencer, and the Silencer shows up every single time you open your mouth to sing.
What I keep watching happen — in sessions, in the community, in the VLM — is people finally turning around to look at it. Not running from it. Looking. Through technique, through story, through the kind of fun that catches the Silencer off guard. And when they do — the voice opens. Every time.
📚 What I'm Reading / Listening To / Noticing
📖 Reading: Coraline by Neil Gaiman — a child who finds a hidden door into a world that seems better than her own, and has to fight her way back to herself. I read it this week and couldn't stop thinking about ONCE UPON A VOICE. The inner child. The false comfort. The courage it takes to choose the real thing over the perfect imitation. The Other Mother who offers everything you want but asks for your eyes in return — your real way of seeing. It's not so different from the performed voice. The one that sounds right to everyone else. The one that costs you everything that's actually yours.
🎵 Listening: Everybody Knows by Leonard Cohen — the song that says the quiet part out loud. Every single word of it. I find it oddly comforting right now.
👀 Noticing: people are tired of fighting. Not defeated — just done. Done with the noise, the nonsense, the constant performance of having an opinion about everything. What I see underneath it is something simpler and more beautiful: people want to play again. They want to hum in the kitchen. Sing in the car. Make sounds for no reason other than it feels good. That impulse is not childish. It's the whole point.
📺 Watching: Twin Peaks, Season 2. What a wild ride! That's all I can say. Unique characters. Witty dialogue. Stranger than even my strangest dreams. I love it.
✍️ Journal Prompt
What did you love to do when you were seven that you've completely forgotten about? Not the things you were good at — the things you did just because they were fun. Did you make up songs? Talk in funny voices? Perform concerts for your stuffed animals?
That child didn't need permission. That child didn't have a Silencer yet.
What would it feel like to let them out for an afternoon?
🌀 This Week's Practice
Pick a children's song. Any one — Twinkle Twinkle, Mary Had a Little Lamb, whatever arrives first. Now sing it as a lip trill.
That's it. That's the whole practice.
Do it badly. Do it goofily. Let the trill sputter and restart. Let it be ridiculous. And notice — somewhere in the middle of the ridiculous — whether something in your chest loosens.
That loosening is your voice remembering it's allowed to play.
See you next week — and in the forest. ✨
— 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.
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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