I started The Healthy Voice to teach people how to reclaim and love their voice.
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We're three weeks into Breaking Through, and this is the week it starts to pay off.
Published 23 days agoΒ β’Β 5 min read
A weekly dispatch on voice, healing, and the inner life of a working artist.
For the last two weeks, the community has been living in the passaggio. Learning the registers. Learning how to send the voice into different rooms of the body. That work can feel technical. Slow, even. You do it and do it, and nothing seems to move. And then one day a note you couldn't feel before just opens. The cobwebs clear, and the vibration lands somewhere new.
That's the breakthrough. And it isn't a quiet one. The first time it happened to me, I was a teenager, and I walked around euphoric for the rest of the day, like something magical had happened that I'd never be able to un-know.
That feeling is exactly what I wrote about this week. And it comes with a catch most of us were handed young, a quiet little rule that says you're not allowed to enjoy your own voice. More on that just below.
This week on Substack: exploring what it means to enjoy your voice.
βοΈ The Guilty Pleasure of Good Technique β Read on Substackβ
The Guilty Pleasure of Good Technique. Why feeling good in your voice can bring up guilt, where that guilt comes from, and how to keep singing anyway when the trickster tells you you're being too full of yourself.
Coming Next Week in Vocal Recess: OVER THE RAINBOW π
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Over the Rainbow
This week in the community: Over the Rainbow
This week ties the whole month together. We've been singing "Over the Rainbow" in our voice lessons, and now we climb it, one color a day, from the warm red at the bottom of your voice all the way up to the airy violet at the top. Here's what each day holds.
Day 1, Red. The root. We start in your low, warm, grounded chest voice, because you don't leap from nothing, you leap from solid ground.
Day 2, Orange. We loosen everything up, sliding and gliding the voice into motion so nothing's cold or stiff when we start to climb.
Day 3, Yellow. The brightest color, and the brightest spot in your voice. We find that forward, buzzy ring that carries you upward without any pushing.
Day 4, Green. The middle of the rainbow and the middle of your voice, where so many voices crack. We practice crossing it like a bridge instead of hitting it like a wall.
Day 5, Blue. The open throat. The whole lesson here is ease and space, letting the higher notes through instead of squeezing them out.
Day 6, Violet. The very top of the arc, your light and airy head voice, the floating part of your range so many people never visit.
Day 7, The Leap. We put the whole rainbow together and sing that famous "some-where" jump, a full octave in two syllables, from your red chest voice up to your violet head voice in one move.
If you've ever felt like there's a wall in the middle of your voice, this is the week that shows you it was a bridge the whole time. Come climb with us.
COMING NEXT WEEK - Voice Lessons: Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Week 4 β Diction and emotional expression. Drops Monday. π
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Over the Rainbow, Week Four
We close out the series with the two things that turn clean technique into real singing: diction and emotional expression. We work the four trickiest sounds in the song (B, D, W, and R), so you know exactly where your tongue and lips go, and how to keep it all forward in the mask. Then we let the technique go and feel the words. Sing it, feel it, and tell me what you noticed.
How often people apologize the second their voice sounds good. Someone hits a gorgeous, resonant note, and immediately laughs it off, or looks embarrassed, or says βthat felt weird.β The felt-weird is usually the good part. It's pleasure they haven't been given permission to feel yet.
Listening: Listening: Nina Simone, this month's thinker. Sit with the way she lets a note be exactly as big as it wants to be.
Noticing: Catch the phrase βhe loves the sound of his own voiceβ out in the wild this week, and notice who it's aimed at, and what it's really policing.
THE JOURNAL PROMPT
When did you first learn that enjoying yourself was dangerous? Write about the voice that says you're not allowed to feel good in your own body. Whose voice is it, really? And what would it sound like to sing anyway?
π This Week's Practice
Sing a phrase that feels easy. Then sing it one step higher, and this time close your eyes and don't listen for how it sounds. Just feel where it lands in your body. Don't grade it. Just notice where the vibration goes. That noticing, over and over, is how the breakthrough gets built.
Keep going β because the world needs your unique voice. ποΈ
β Bella Frequency Notes, From The Healthy Voice
π The Voice Liberation Method Is Helping Hundreds
Seven weeks of trauma-informed voice work β vocal technique, speech exercises, guided visualizations with original music, nervous system education, and journal prompts β all inspired by the same methods I use in my private coaching sessions.
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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." β 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." β 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." β 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." β Stephanie, ZΓΌrich, Switzerland β Mastery member
Seven of the best play-based voice activities from the archive β 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 β 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.There's a moment in a lot of songs where the whole thing lifts. The key changes, and the same melody suddenly feels higher, brighter, or a little more urgent. And if you're not listening for the mechanics, you don't notice them at all. You just feel that something shifted. It's been a week of big energetic shifts. We lost a truly iconic voice. And from the flood of articles and videos and posts, it's obvious how many...
A weekly dispatch on voice, healing, and the inner life of a working artist.There's a moment in a lot of songs where the whole thing lifts. The key changes, and the same melody suddenly feels higher, brighter, or a little more urgent. And if you're not listening for the mechanics, you don't notice them at all. You just feel that something shifted. I've been thinking about that all month, because so many of you are in the middle of one. A key change in your own life. And from the inside, a key...
A weekly dispatch on voice, healing, and the inner life of a working artist. We've spent all of August breaking through things. Higher notes. Older stories. The tight places in the throat, and the tighter ones in the mind. Now, during the upcoming last week of the month, we do something different. We turn around and look at what was actually in the way. And here's what I keep finding, after years of this work: Most of what stops us was never actually a true wall. It was only a perception....
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