I started The Healthy Voice to teach people how to reclaim and love their voice.
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Your voice was never the problem. It was always just waiting for someone to finally say so.
Published 14 days ago • 10 min read
A weekly dispatch on voice, healing, and the inner life of a working artist.
This week I hit 40,000 subscribers on YouTube.
I want to tell you what happened in the comments — because it says something about why this work exists, and why it matters more than I can sometimes find words for.
One person wrote: "I always knew something needs fixing, but I didn't know what it was, until I saw your channel and I said, this is it."
Another: "My husband asked me what I was watching because I looked distraught. For YEARS I've been so frustrated with my body, feeling disconnected — and the only real connection I got from my body manifested in tension in my voice. I told my husband once that I felt like my voice was connected to the other parts of my body and if I worked on them maybe it would improve. Hearing that I'm holding onto that tension STILL hit me like a freight truck." — Taylor
And this one, simply: "Your videos changed my voice."
These are not comments about technique. They are people recognizing themselves for the first time. That is the whole point. That has always been the whole point.
Thank you for being here. Thank you for every share, every comment, every person you sent this way. The channel exists because of you.
This week I published the most personal piece of writing I've ever released.
I was four years old. A tonsillectomy — routine surgery, common in the late 70s, entirely well-intentioned. I went under.
I woke up voiceless.
My parents reassured me. They brought gifts. The voice came back. And my mind moved on.
But the body at four years old has no framework for benevolence or malevolence. It only knew: something is cutting into me. I cannot stop it.
And it remembered. In every table it braced against. In every instrument that came toward my face. In decades of hypervigilance in rooms where I was perfectly safe.
I discovered this sitting with my harmonium during the pandemic — what I now call forensic scuba diving for the soul. Following what the body wanted to show me, with no agenda. And what came through stopped me cold.
I cried for the four-year-old who woke up without a voice. For the body that had been faithfully protecting me from that memory for decades. And then I sent the vibration of sound — soft pink light — through every place that had been held. And said, in the only language the body truly understands:
The teacher who called you out in third grade and told you to lip sync. The choir director who glared at every wrong pitch. The band director who threw his baton.
They weren't monsters. They were products. They taught the way they were taught — through pressure, shame, and the unspoken belief that excellence justifies cruelty.
I didn't escape this entirely. In my early years of teaching, I carried the ghost of every exacting teacher I'd absorbed. The defensive impatience. The flash of frustration disguised as high standards.
That wasn't teaching. That was inheritance.
And inheritance can be interrupted. Every pattern handed down can be examined. Every reflex that came from someone else's unhealed wound can be traced back to its source — and replaced with something you actually chose.
Your voice was never the problem. It was always just waiting for someone to finally say so.
If you grew up in a home where someone overpowered you with their voice, a moment may have come where you decided to fight back. What happened next — if you had a naturally gentle voice — was likely a glottal attack. The vocal folds slamming together at the start of sound instead of gently meeting. Done often enough, it becomes a habit. And now speaking feels exhausting even when you're not in a fight.
A surfer doesn't fight the wave. They wait for exactly the right moment and join it. Your voice works the same way.
🎬 Why Your Voice Sounds Harsh or Angry — The Survival Pattern You Never Chose → Watch on YouTube
And underneath the forcing — the breath that's been holding since the beginning.
Remember hiding during hide and seek, holding your breath so you wouldn't get caught? That was your first lesson in fear breathing. If your body went into fight, flight, or freeze regularly — that pattern may have never fully left.
When you breathe too shallow, your brain reads it as a danger signal. Even if you're perfectly safe at home watching TV. Even if there's nothing actually wrong. The pattern is running in the background — and it's affecting your voice, your ability to speak up, your courage to say the thing you want to say.
🎬 The Breathing Pattern That's Telling Your Brain You're Still in Danger → Watch on YouTube
The 30-Day Pitch Perfect Challenge is in its final week — Pitch in Performance.
Everything we've built lands in real songs, real expression, real commitment. Precision in service of meaning. Not precision for its own sake.
Coming next week: ON BROADWAY 🎭 — seven days of performance presence, projection, and vocal commitment. Three layers every day: Sing It, Move It, Feel It. Your name above the title.
And ON BROADWAY is the first official entry in VOCAL RECESS — COMING SOON: our new dedicated series space where all the play-based weekly activities live in consecutive order. Dial V for Voice, The Voice Correspondent, Game Week, On Broadway — all in one place, forever accessible, at your own pace. Coming this week.
Seven days. Seven stages. Your name above the title.
Each day has three layers — Sing It, Move It, Feel It — because the voice doesn't live in isolation from the body or the emotion. Neither does a Broadway performance.
Here's the week:
Monday — Audition Day. The audition isn't about being perfect. It's about being present. The casting director doesn't want to see you trying to impress them. They want to see if you're actually in the room. We work on that first — before technique, before pitch, before anything else.
Tuesday — The Rehearsal Room. The best kept secret in theatre. No audience, no pressure, the freedom to be terrible until you're not. Permission to be in process is the most underrated vocal technique there is.
Wednesday — The Eleven O'Clock Number. The moment near the end of Act Two when everything is on the line. The character has been through everything — and now they sing the thing they've been holding back the entire show. Not the biggest song technically. The most honest one. You have one of these inside you.
Thursday — The Ensemble. Broadway is not a solo art. Something happens when voices join together that none of them can produce alone. Heart rates synchronize. Oxytocin rises. The immune system responds. Today we practice what it means to add your voice to something larger than yourself.
Friday — The Notes Session. The director's notes aren't criticism. They're the map to the performance you're actually capable of. Today you are both the director and the performer.
Saturday — Opening Night. All the rehearsal, all the work — for this moment. The voice that stops a room isn't the most technically perfect one. It's the most present one. The house lights are going down.
Sunday — The Standing Ovation. Not for perfection. For showing up. For every day this week you chose to open your mouth. Take your bow. You earned it.
ON BROADWAY is part of Vocal Recess — our new dedicated home for all play-based community series, living in consecutive order so you can find, revisit, and work through any series at your own pace. Dial V for Voice. The Voice Correspondent. Game Week. On Broadway. All in one place.
The theme is The Emotional Dial. The monthly song is The Water is Wide.
And we're launching something I've been building toward for a long time: Voice Lessons. Weekly 10–15 minute videos, one technique per week, all applied to the same song for the entire month.
Week 1: Open Throat. Week 2: Breath Support. Week 3: Resonance. Week 4: Expression and Diction.
By the end of the month, four techniques live in one song. And that song becomes our Courage Circle sing-along — both circles, all levels. Four weeks of private practice, then you sing it together.
The warm-up library was the foundation. The lesson library is where we build on it.
Full June calendar is up in the community. First session: Tuesday June 2 at 5pm PDT. All levels.
I've been using NotebookLM privately for a while to create audio explainers on the research I'm obsessed with — the vagus nerve, the psoas, the immunology of singing, the history of the English language, fascia, ACEs research, nutrition and health topics, polyvagal theory. I do this because I need to understand the science behind what I teach at a depth that goes beyond surface familiarity.
I've decided to start releasing these to paid Substack subscribers.
Not as a bonus. As the actual research room — the place where I share what I'm studying, why I'm studying it, and how it connects to the work we're doing together.
The voice work is the practice. The Lab is the understanding behind it.
Women are especially noticing that energy imbalance right now. Still learning how to be sovereign beings while maintaining their feminine energy. It's a tricky dance — and the voice makes it audible. The voices that had to become harder, louder, more forceful just to be heard in the rooms they grew up in. The voices that learned aggression as a survival strategy and are now ready to put it down without losing their power. What I keep watching is this: when the forcing stops, the voice doesn't get smaller. It gets more itself. That's not a loss of power. That's balance. That's where true power actually lives.
📖 Reading: What We Lost by Howdie Mickowski — sitting with what this title means right now.
🎵 Listening: Mozart Requiem — the mathematical architecture of grief. I find it clarifying right now in a way I can't fully explain.
📺 Watching: The Unchosen on Netflix.
✍️ Journal Prompt
Where are you forcing things? And how is it showing up in your voice?
Not just in singing — in conversations, in rooms where you feel you have to prove something, in the moments just before you speak when you brace instead of breathe.
Are you carrying too much masculine energy? Too much armor? Or perhaps it's too much feminine energy? When your voice feels good — really good, open and easy and completely yours — that's a signal that you're in balance. When did you last feel that? Write about it in detail. Every sensation, every condition that was present. And then look for the patterns. What was true in that moment that isn't true in the difficult ones?
The voice is a map. It's been telling you where you are this whole time.
🌀 This Week's Practice
Breathe in slowly. Let the breath reach the bottom of the lungs before you do anything with it.
On the exhale, let a hum begin — not started, joined. Don't launch the sound. Wait for it, the way a surfer waits for the wave. The moment the exhale moves, let the sound be already there, riding it.
No attack. No force. Just breath becoming sound becoming vibration becoming you, finally moving at your own natural speed.
Do this five times. Notice how different it feels from the voice that grips and pushes. Notice what's possible when the sound is joined rather than forced.
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
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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