I started The Healthy Voice to teach people how to reclaim and love their voice.
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The voice didn't break. It went into hiding.
Published 4 days ago • 13 min read
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 events I host, writing for Substack, recording the podcast, and video production, I just wasn't able to get to it this week. I've been working on balancing my own personal health practice so I can walk the talk and practice what I preach.
The good news: I've figured out an organizational system, and there will be a video this Monday — and every Monday going forward.
I felt bad about missing it, but I was happy to notice that the Substack content seemed to make up for it. I gained a lot of new followers this week from the two articles and the podcast, and many new subscribers to this newsletter. So if this is your first time here — welcome.
The thread running through everything this week is this: the voice doesn't go silent because of bad technique. It goes silent because something feels unsafe — and that triggers a fear response, which creates tension in the body and makes it difficult to speak or sing with ease. The path back is not more pressure, more intensity, or more effort. It's learning to relax and learning to feel into the body, learning to trust the breath and the voice to do what they're designed to do — without force.
One more thing — I recently got a notification that The Healthy Voice Writes has reached number 40 in the top Substack publications in the Faith and Spirituality category. I wasn't sure what categories to choose when I set it up — I chose Health and Wellness first and Faith and Spirituality second, because so much of what we do here touches on archetypes, philosophy, and the deeper dimensions of healing. Apparently, it resonated. Take that however you'd like — I'm still sitting with it.
I spent most of high school pretending everything was fine.
A typical afternoon: walk home from the bus stop, let myself into the empty house, feed myself, wait for the day to end. And then go back the next morning and do it all over again with a smile, because the one thing I could not bear was pity.
Only recently — through a wave of Gen X nostalgia content — did I realize I was not the only one doing this. That coming home to an empty house, managing your own emotional world from age ten or eleven, was not just my story. It was a generation's story. I had no idea. The shame had convinced me I was uniquely, specifically, privately alone.
That is what shame does. It makes you believe the secret is only yours.
I had my first panic attack in seventh grade. The bullying that year was relentless. I woke up every morning with dread in my chest before I was fully awake — and I never told anyone, because the shame of being bullied felt somehow worse than the bullying itself. One night at church, I reached a tipping point, started crying, couldn't stop — and someone asked what was wrong. I opened my mouth to answer.
Nothing came out.
That image has stayed with me for 23 years of teaching voice. Because it is the moment I have seen repeated, in different forms, in so many of the people I work with. The voice, when shame reaches a certain pitch, simply goes silent.
Not because of a character flaw. Because the body is doing exactly what bodies do when the threat of exposure feels like it could destroy you.
The secret was never the problem. The hiding was.
✍️ The Secret You Were Carrying — and What It Did to Your Voice → Read on Substack
And the second piece this week is about what I did about it.
At eighteen, I tried to get my first massage as a birthday gift. The therapist hadn't even removed the sheet when I panicked, apologized, paid, and left. The experience added to the shame it was a product of.
Years later, I discovered I had VA education benefits expiring in a year and a half. I chose a massage school. And then I remembered that day at eighteen — and I decided this was not a coincidence. I was going to use the massage school to heal the thing that had made that day so humiliating.
What followed was one of the most significant years of my life. Four to five massages given and received every week. Learning to communicate when something felt wrong. Learning to breathe in a way that told my nervous system touch does not always mean harm. The hypervigilance didn't dissolve immediately. But with enough repetition of safe, consensual, skillfully administered touch, the body began to update its information.
Singing works the same way. It is not primarily a technical practice. It is a somatic one. Every time you sing, you are asking the body to open — to allow breath through tissue that may have been bracing for years. Done consistently, in safety, over time, it creates the same update.
The technique is just the door. The safety is what lets you walk through it.
And this week's podcast brings both stories together — the physiology of hiding, what actually happens to the breath and throat and ribcage when hypervigilance becomes a chronic baseline, and what happens when the hiding finally begins to ease.
When it does — when the holding eases enough — the voice is physically pleasurable. That warmth and fullness. It was always available. The body was just waiting.
We kicked off July with our All Levels Practice, diving deep into the theme — All in the Timing — covering meter, tempo, rhythm, waltz time, common time, and syncopation, with two full run-throughs of Fly Me to the Moon together. Our P+M Deep Dive went even deeper with a live metronome demonstration, GarageBand drum beat recordings, and a rich conversation about learning pitch through body sensation rather than ear alone.
Our Courage Circle was one of the most moving yet — members sang original songs, read poetry, including Rumi's The Guest House and Desiderata, and we welcomed several first-time sharers, including members joining us from Vietnam and Australia.
And our Sound Healing session took us through a full guided chakra tuning — all seven energy centers, seed sounds, color visualization, and open throat technique — closing with a fascinating conversation about the emerging use of sound frequencies in medical research.
Each day, the time machine drops you into a different decade and hands you its signature groove — the beat that defined that era — to feel in your own body. You already know these rhythms. You've heard them your whole life. So instead of teaching rhythm with theory and a metronome, we use the grooves you already recognize to teach the ones you don't — swing, the backbeat, the pocket, syncopation. Each day comes with a short, catchy chant built to ride that decade's rhythm. You say it out loud, tap along, and let the groove take over.
The trip, day by day:
🎷 Day 1 · The 1920s — The Swing We open in the Jazz Age with the Charleston: that bouncy, uneven long-short lope that makes jazz swing. You'll feel the difference between straight and swung right away.
👟 Day 2 · The 1950s — The Backbeat A sock hop and early rock & roll, where the clap lands on beats 2 and 4. It's the little shift that makes your head nod — and the heartbeat of nearly every song since.
🎵 Day 3 · The 1960s — The Pocket Motown: steady, even, locked-in, joyful. You'll practice holding a groove perfectly steady — simple to describe, surprisingly hard, and deeply satisfying when it clicks.
🪩 Day 4 · The 1970s — Four-on-the-Floor Disco, mirror ball and all: a thump on every single beat, with the hi-hat sizzling on the "and" in between. Relentless and hypnotic.
🤖 Day 5 · The 1980s — Straight The drum machine arrives. This is the exact opposite of Monday's swing — perfectly even, machine-precise, right on the grid. Learning to flip between swung and straight is a genuine superpower.
🎤 Day 6 · The 1990s — Behind the Beat Hip-hop's boom-bap, and its secret: laying back just behind the beat instead of right on top of it. The difference between rushing and strolling — pure cool.
💿 Day 7 · The 2000s — Syncopation Our last stop, and the trickiest: the 3-3-2 that took over pop and club music, landing between the beats, off the grid. It takes everything you've felt all week and tilts it sideways.
By the end of the trip, you'll be able to feel the difference between swung and straight, find a backbeat, sit in a pocket, lie back behind the beat, and hear syncopation — a whole rhythmic education, through music you already love.
No music background required. Just a body that likes to move. 🕺
The final lesson of the month. Everything lands in Fly Me to the Moon.
We've built the open throat, expanded the ribcage for breath support and phrasing, found the mask resonators, and felt the chest resonate on the low notes. This week, we bring it all alive with diction and emotional expression — and here's the secret: they're the same thing.
Think about what happens when you're angry. You over-enunciate. You want to be clearly heard. The emotion drives the diction naturally. That's the trick. When you enunciate more, more emotion comes out. They're not separate skills — they're the same impulse.
This week we work through the specific sounds in Fly Me to the Moon:
TH — the tongue rests between the teeth, vibrating. Hard TH (the) vibrates more. Soft TH (think) less. A sound worth savoring.
T and D — the tongue hits the roof of the mouth at the front for T, slightly back for D. Feel the difference.
F — teeth pressing against the bottom lip, which vibrates. Different from TH but related.
L — a liquid consonant where the tongue lingers and can block the sound. Go slow. Learn to love it.
The diphthong — fly is technically one syllable but sounds like two. Sing the AW shape and sneak the I in quickly at the end. Flaw... fly. This is the kind of thing that gets better little by little.
The practice this week: go through the song very slowly — slowly enough to feel every single sound as its own life force. This is not a performance. It's an exploration. And then make time to sing it in real time, at normal tempo, with everything you've built this month behind it.
Congratulations on finishing the Fly Me to the Moon series. 🌙
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 full chakra tuning practice has been showing up again and again in sessions this week — and the results are striking. Students who have been doing it consistently are reporting that things are opening up, tensions are releasing, and energies that have been stuck for years are finally starting to move.
The heart chakra in particular seems to be where a lot of people are breaking through right now. What's becoming clear is that the voice, used as a healing instrument, reaches places that talk therapy and even bodywork sometimes can't.
If a dedicated guided sound healing session is something you'd be interested in as a standalone practice, reply and let me know. I'm considering creating one.
📖 Reading: Still with The Catcher in the Rye — taking my time with it.
🎵 Listening: French café playlists on Spotify. Makes me feel happy.
📺 Watching: Blood and Water on Netflix — a South African series about a child abduction and the possibility of finding that child years later as a teenager. Intense, intriguing, and the kind of story that pulls you in and doesn't let go.
This week's journal prompt and practice are brought to you by last week's Vocal Recess activity — The Voice Anthropologist. A taste of what we do inside the community every week.
BECOME AN ANTHROPOLOGIST OF YOUR OWN VOICE
A practice + journal prompt from this week's Vocal Recess
Last week, inside the community, we did something I love: becoming anthropologists of our own voices. Not critics — researchers. The whole idea rests on one quiet truth: you can't judge and get curious at the same moment. Curiosity takes the seat that criticism usually sits in. So here's a piece of it for you to try at home. It's gentle. There's nothing to fix.
THE PRACTICE — "Field Recording"
Record yourself for one minute. Read a paragraph, tell a story, describe your morning — anything at all. Just press record and talk.
Listen back — once. Notice the flinch. (Almost everyone has one. It's okay.)
Now become the researcher. Every time a judgment shows up — ugh, I hate how I sound — catch it and trade it for two words: I notice… ("I notice I talk faster when I'm nervous." "I notice my voice drops at the end of my sentences.")
Jot down three "I notice…" observations. No verdicts allowed.
That's the whole tool of the week, in two words: I notice.
THE JOURNAL PROMPT
When did you first decide there was something "wrong" with your voice?
Write the memory down the way a field researcher would — just what happened, who was there, what was said. No verdict. Then ask the one question that changes everything: whose voice was that judgment, really? A teacher's? A parent's? Someone from a long time ago? Was it ever actually yours?
(If it feels tender, you don't have to push. Note what came up, and gently close the notebook. This is observation, not combat.)
The truth is, most of us have never actually listened to our own voice without bracing to fix it. This week, just notice. Curiosity is where every real change begins.
If this resonated and you want more of this kind of work, this is what we do inside The Healthy Voice Community every single week. 👉 Join here
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 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 — 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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