I started The Healthy Voice to teach people how to reclaim and love their voice.
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You can't heal your voice alone
Published 12 days ago • 5 min read
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 you eventually hit that solitude can't get you through, which is the simple fact of being witnessed. Saying your opinion out loud to an actual person. Singing a phrase and letting someone else hear the crack in it. The fear of being heard only ever heals in front of people, and it heals fastest when those people are kind, and when nobody in the room is going to punish you for getting it wrong.
This is exactly what we built the Healthy Voice Community to be, a room where it is safe to be heard. We sing together, we speak up in our Courage Circles, we make the ugly sounds on purpose, and little by little the thing that used to feel like life or death starts to feel like play. I get to watch people walk in barely able to unmute themselves, and a few months later they're the ones welcoming someone brand new.
And this October the doors are open a little wider than usual, because we're celebrating our first year, so your first month is 25% off with the code SING25, and you can cancel any time or change tiers whenever you like. If some part of you has been practicing alone for a long time, quietly wondering what it might feel like to finally be heard, this is a very good month to come find out.
JOIN THE COMMUNITY — 25% OFF ALL MONTH
And a warm welcome to the new faces who joined us this past week. I'm so glad you're here, and the start to this month has been a really good one. If you'd like to join them, your first month is 25% off all October with the code SING25, and you can cancel or change tiers any time.
THIS WEEK'S ARTICLE: Push Hands, and What Relaxation Really Means
There's a principle at the heart of push hands, which is that you cannot push someone who isn't resisting, because the force has nothing to grab onto. And your voice works the same way. So much of what we carry as tension is really resistance, and it's exactly what fear and pressure get to shove around, while a relaxed voice gives them nothing to push against.
This one is about what relaxation really means, and why it turns out to be one of the most powerful things you can bring to your sound.
ALSO THIS WEEK ON SUBSTACK: The First Time I Heard Myself Get Loud
This is a story from middle school, about the first time a sound came out of me that I didn't know I had, and about what finally pushed me there. It's about volume, and about the particular kind of power that lives in being able to get loud when the moment truly calls for it.
This week's video is the first of something special, because all month I'm opening the doors and sharing real live sessions from inside the community, and this is a full belting and projection workshop I taught to all levels.
If your voice is soft and quiet and getting louder has always felt impossible, this one solves it, because volume never comes from your throat, and squeezing there is exactly how people hurt themselves.
THIS WEEK'S PODCAST: The Burden of Shame is Heavy, but I Carry it Well
Hypocrisy is the thing I've disliked the longest, and in this episode I turn that honesty on myself and talk about the shame I still carry, and what I'm still working on. It's a more personal one this week.
Vocal Recess starts Monday, and we're pulling the log up close to the fire, because this week we're telling ghost stories. And every one of them is true, because every one of them happened to a voice. Seven nights, seven tales, each one a real fear every singer carries, told with all the hokey campfire drama it deserves.
We open on the crack, the voice that betrayed a boy at the worst possible moment, and learn it was never a curse, only a doorway we were too scared to walk through.
We face the wrong note, the one that rang out sharp and loud in front of everyone, and discover that the pros were never perfect, only quick to recover.
We survive the blank, the night the words simply vanished mid-song, and build the safety net that means you can never truly be stranded again.
We sit in the silence that wouldn't end, and find out the terrifying pause was never a pit at all. It was the setup.
We sing in the dark, where no one can see us, and meet the free, full voice that only comes out when the eyes are gone.
We make peace with the recording, that stranger in the speaker, and learn why the honest voice sounds so unfamiliar, and how to stop hitting delete.
And on the last night, around the fire, you tell your own scariest voice story out loud, and then you sing anyway, because that is exactly how you end a haunting.
Bring a flashlight, and come tell ghost stories with us.
Settle in. Put your feet on the floor. Take a breath. Then write.
When did you first learn how much space your voice was allowed to take up? Not who taught you, though you may know. What were you doing at the time, and what did your body do with that information afterward?
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.
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;...
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...
