I started The Healthy Voice to teach people how to reclaim and love their voice.
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There's nothing wrong with you
Published 6 days ago • 7 min read
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; careful with my tone, my words, even my face, because more than once harm was read into my expressiveness where none was ever meant. The moment I land in New York, my shoulders come down.
Sitting in an Italian restaurant last night, I told my husband how nice it was to be around people who would most likely never interpret a single thing I say offensive. And it reminded me of something my community and I were talking about in a workshop this week, which is that every culture, family, and town makes its own rules about what you're allowed to say and how you're allowed to say it. If you've never had the chance to travel, you might not realize that somewhere out there is a whole culture that communicates exactly like you do. I didn't realize it myself until I was thirty and first landed in Italy, and standing in baggage claim, watching a mother and daughter have a loud, intense, twenty-second exchange and then go right back to normal, I thought, oh my God, there is nothing wrong with me. It's just that I had spent my whole life in a place where I had to be so careful with every single word.
I know a lot of you feel some version of that. Maybe you don't express yourself the way I do, but you know what it is to feel alien or different, to sense that something about you doesn't fit the room you're standing in, and to go quiet because of it. It is an unpleasant way to live, and for a long time I believed the problem was me.
Exactly one year ago, I decided I was finally ready to share everything I'd done to get free of that, and after a year of teaching a small handful of students in the little Northern California town I was living in, I watched it work, and I knew it was time to bring it to the world. That became The Healthy Voice, and this is the month I get to celebrate its first birthday, which I'm doing from my favorite city in the country, where authentic expression is practically the local language. To celebrate, the community is 25% off your first month all October with the code SING25. So wherever you are, and whether or not you've found your people yet, let me say this: trust yourself, stand tall, be proud of who you are, and always remember: dignity above all else.
JOIN THE COMMUNITY — 25% OFF ALL MONTH
Our one-year anniversary sale is still on through the end of October, so your first month in The Healthy Voice Community is 25% off with the code SING25, and you can cancel or change tiers any time. If you've been thinking about it, there's still time to come in and see what it's like.
THIS WEEK'S ARTICLE: Vocal Control Is Non-Interference
In the 1890s there was an Australian actor named F.M. Alexander whose voice kept failing him on stage, and no doctor could find a cause, so he set up mirrors and watched himself for years until he caught it: in the instant before he spoke, he was pulling his own head back and shortening his neck, and had been doing it his whole life without knowing.
The whole Alexander Technique grew out of that one discovery, and its central idea is a single word, inhibition, which means stopping the thing you're already doing that's in the way instead of piling a new fix on top.
This piece is about why the singers with the most control are the ones doing the least, and why reclaiming your voice isn't about taking command of it, it's about getting out of the way of something that was always there.
THIS WEEK ON THE LAB: Vocal Music Therapy and Severe Trauma
If you've ever been in a session with me, you know the three things we always come back to, and it turns out those same three are the core of a recognized clinical modality, used by licensed music therapists in treatment settings with survivors of sexualized and interpersonal violence.
This Lab episode walks through the research on using the voice to come back from physiological dissociation, how breath and toning re-establish a person's awareness of their own body, and why the voice turns out to be such a direct route into work that talking alone struggles to reach.
It also gets into the part I find most interesting, which is what happens relationally in the room, and why working through that is itself part of how a person rebuilds a sense of agency.
This week's video is another real session from inside the community.
When we think about vocal power we usually jump straight to volume, and projection does matter, but there's just as much power in slowing down, in enunciating, and in cadence, which is the rhythm of what you emphasize and what you let pass, and done well it makes people stop and listen.
The session opens with a full body warm-up and a set of face, jaw, neck, and throat massages, because presence in the body comes first, especially for those of us who tend to drift out of it, and then we get into diction and cadence with a single sentence, moving the emphasis word by word until you feel how the meaning changes every time the stress moves.
I made a list of nine speakers who have almost nothing in common except two qualities, and those two are what this episode is really after, because charisma turns out to have far less to do with a beautiful voice than you'd think.
A couple of the people on my list have voices I'd have a full page of notes on, and they still hold a room better than almost anyone alive. A few of the names will surprise you, and one or two might irritate you, so I'll say up front that this isn't about politics, it's about speaking style.
And in the back half it turns into something I wasn't planning when I started, about why anyone with real influence owes it to everyone else to get clear on their own moral code first.
VOICE LESSONS — WADE IN THE WATER: Lesson Three, Power, Not Pressure.
Week three is usually where we spend an hour on breath support, and we do touch it, but mostly I want to tell you the truth about it, which is that the longer you sing, the less you think about your breath, and the better off you are for it.
You don't manage your breathing in the middle of a conversation, and the air keeps arriving anyway. So this lesson is really about attitude, and the kind of entitlement that means knowing you have the right to be heard, because power in singing was never about volume, it's the feeling that you're allowed to be here and allowed to be loud.
And because Wade in the Water is an African American spiritual, a song of hidden power coded to carry resilience and hope and a way out, you cannot sing it docile. You sing it with trust, and faith, and the certainty that you're getting through whatever you're in.
Vocal Recess starts Monday, and it's our Halloween finale, so put on a mask, because every guest at this ball is a monster. But these monsters aren't here to scare you. They're here to show you something. Each one is a mirror, a shadow pattern we all carry a little of, and this week we meet them face to face, dance with them, play with their sounds, and quietly learn something about our own voice.
We meet the Vampire, and look at where something, or someone, has been draining the life right out of our voice.
We meet the Werewolf, and find the trigger that makes our voice flip and shake without warning.
We meet the Ghost, and give a little breath and sound to the grief that still haunts us, so it can finally move on.
We meet the Witch, and reclaim the power we hid away because, once upon a time, it got us feared instead of loved.
We meet the Mummy, and drag the old buried story about our voice up into the light, where it loses its shuffle.
We meet Frankenstein's monster, the big, gentle, misunderstood one, and find the warm enormous sound that was never actually too much.
And at the stroke of midnight we meet the scariest monster of all, The Silencer, your own inner critic, and this time you give it a costume, put it on a little stage, and make it perform for you.
It's part costume party and part gentle look in the mirror, and it's the perfect, spooky-sweet way to close out the month. Come to the ball with us.
Settle in. Put your feet on the floor. Take a breath. Then write.
What makes you charismatic? Name one unique thing about yourself that could actually be considered charisma, maybe something you'd never have filed under that word before today. And if none of it landed, then name one quality you could lean into and cultivate instead, and write about it.
WORK WITH ME — NEW SESSION PACKAGES
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.
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...
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...
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...
