I started The Healthy Voice to teach people how to reclaim and love their voice.
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You don't free a voice overnight
Published about 1 month ago • 5 min read
I used to walk out in front of an audience without a second thought, and for years that was the most natural thing in the world to me: the lights and the faces and the sound of my own voice filling a room I loved being in. And then somewhere along the way it changed, and I would step out to sing for the very people I had adored performing for, and I would freeze. It happened one-on-one too, in ordinary conversation; this person who had been so free and so comfortable for so long suddenly bracing at the thought of being seen at all.
It took me a long time to understand what was happening, and even longer to undo it, because the truth is that you do not free a voice overnight. You don't watch one video and wake up changed. Real change comes from commitment, from showing up to the practice day after day, from slowly learning to notice the places where you're holding on so tightly that the sound can't get through. And it helps, more than I can tell you, to have someone a little further down the road walking it with you, someone who's already been where you are and can point to the thing you can't quite see in yourself yet.
This is what I've been doing every single day since I started The Healthy Voice. I work with individual adults from all over the world, and every one of them comes to me carrying something a little different. For some it's the fear of being seen or heard at all. For others it's the fear of simply being themselves out loud. And for so many of them there's trauma somewhere back in the history, the kind that teaches the body to brace and to hold, and that bracing lives right in the throat and the neck and the breath, tightening the voice down to something small and safe.
So every day, whether it's in a private session or inside our private community, we work on freeing that voice together, in the body and in the mind both, because with the voice, those were never really two separate things to begin with. We loosen what's been held, and we let the sound come back.
I do this because I know what it is to lose your voice and then slowly find your way back to it, and I want to hand that back to as many people as I can. That's why I show up for free on Substack and YouTube and now Instagram, and it's also why I'm so grateful to get to do the deeper work one-on-one, the kind that actually changes things, with the people who are ready for it.
A FREE GATHERING I'M PART OF
If you've been carrying invisible wounds, this one might be exactly what your heart has been waiting for. From September 28 to October 3, my colleague Tanya Stevens is hosting a free six-day online event called Transcend Trauma: Heal Your Past to Thrive NOW, and she's gathered me together with a circle of other teachers to help you release shame, regulate your nervous system, and open back up to peace and purpose.
Over the six days, we'll be sharing practices and tools to help you release shame and self-blame, regulate the anxiety that trauma triggers, feel safe in your body again, rewrite the story that trauma left behind, and open to self-love and peace.
It's completely free to attend, and it all begins on September 28.
THIS WEEK'S ARTICLE: Sleep, Daily Walks, and SINGING
We all know the health list by heart: walking and water and green vegetables and meditation, and I want to make the case that singing belongs right there on it, because now there's actually data.
This one gets into the studies: the cortisol that keeps dropping the longer you sing, the immune markers that rise only when you make the music and not when you just listen, and the teenager I used to be who guarded her choir practice like her life depended on it, because it turns out it might have.
ALSO THIS WEEK ON SUBSTACK: I Never Learned to Surf
I grew up around surfers on both coasts, and I wanted the way they carried themselves so badly I can still feel it, that loose, unbothered ease. But I never learned, because I could never make myself walk into the water I was afraid of, and somewhere in writing this down I realized that's exactly what people want from singing: the freedom of it without the part where you're afraid, and you open your mouth anyway.
This one is about what the surfers actually know: show up every day, read your conditions honestly, don't call a flat morning a failure, and go in afraid.
THIS WEEK'S VIDEO: The Neck Tension Trick That Frees Your Voice
When your neck is tight, it pulls on your tongue and your throat, and suddenly notes you could reach last week feel like they've wandered off somewhere you can't get to. So this is the trick I use with every student who walks in with something stuck back there, and it comes more from my massage therapy training than my classical years.
Vocal Recess starts Monday in the community, and we're closing out the month with Mary Poppins, which is really a week about everything that becomes available to you the moment you stop forcing. Seven days, seven games.
The wind changes, a spoonful of sugar, laughing your breath open, turning practice into play, one day of big joyful sound and one day of tender sound, and then on Sunday the wind changes again, and you let the whole thing go.
Each day takes a few minutes, and each one is a vocal technique in a costume. Come play with us.
If any of this week's writing landed close to home, the deepest way I know to work on it is one-on-one, and this Fall I've made that easier to say yes to.
I've just opened two session packages, because so much of this work is the kind that keeps unfolding when we get to stay with it over time rather than trying to do everything in a single hour.
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.
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