Most of us are carrying more tension in the mouth than we realize. In fact, it can become so familiar we stop feeling it. And while obviously that tension has a direct effect on the body and our physical experience, it also affects the sound by tightening the edges, narrowing the resonating space, and keeping everything a little more controlled and a little less free.

When the jaw releases, the tongue rests, and the lips stop working so hard, the larynx drops, the pharynx widens, and resonating space opens up and shows us what’s possible for our voice. As a result, the sound that comes through is rounder, fuller, more buoyant.

It’s the difference between a sound of release and a sound of reaching—which is both heard and felt, by both you and others.

An open and relaxed sound helps others feel more open and relaxed around you, too.

How you can practice today:

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It holds the emotional information inside the sound and lands in the body of whoever is listening before they’ve even processed what the word means.

This week’s practice is about zooming in and looking at the information within each vowel sound and shape so that we can connect the dots between vowel, emotion, physiology, sound, and expression.

Words are always happening.

…but of course we don’t think about how they’re happening. Kind of like how we don’t think about the muscles and tendons firing and pulling when we walk across the room to grab another cup of coffee. It’s just happening.

Vowels are part of our emotional experience and expression in every moment, day in and day out, whether we’re aware of it or not. Sometimes a word feels like what it means, not just because of its definition, but because of the sound it makes in the mouth… the feeling it creates in the body as we say it.

There’s a relationship between the shape and meaning of a word.

This is why we reach for certain words when we write. Not just for what they mean, but for how they feel to say, how they feel to hear.

And yet, we rarely let ourselves fully arrive in the sound. In English especially, we have a habit of closing off the vowel shape —something called a diphthong— where we move quickly from one vowel shape to the next before fully landing in the first one.

Moving through a vowel quickly before fully arriving can also be a habit of not letting ourselves stay inside something that feels very open and exposed. Like a window or a portal to our soul and our spirit.

Every vowel holds a possibility for depth and meaning.

This practice is about sitting within the purity of each vowel shape and really feeling the possibility of that sound and what it expresses. When we start tuning in to the nuances of vowel shapes, we’re adding colours to our vocal expression palette that give us more intentionally and agency in our communication and our vision.

How you can practice today:

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But where this hinders us the most is within the defaults we return to. Our expressive response is so reflexive, so automatic, and so consistent that we stop noticing we’re holding back important cues… and that information gets reflected in our voice.

This episode is about moving through all of that.

The siren —in Greek mythology— was a voice so full, so magnetic, so unapologetically expressed that entire systems were built around containing it. Sailors had their ears stopped with wax. Odysseus had himself lashed to the mast. And while the myth frames that as danger, what it’s really depicting is the power of a voice that holds nothing back.

Perhaps more than destruction, this story is pointing to the magnetism and impact of full expression.

A a fully expressed voice lays the groundwork for connection (and makes it possible). It carries empathy, relational connection, spiritual depth and encodes it in sound.

When a voice is rooted in real emotion, we don’t just hear it. We feel it. In our body. We’re pulled toward it.

That magnetism is our interconnectedness at work.

The warning siren has a connection here, too. It was named after the mythological siren because of its ability to command attention. We can bring this etymology into our awareness and use it intentionally to move into the fullness of our voice and that is what we’re digging into in this episode.

How you can practice today:

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This is the practice of giving voice to our feelings.

…and the recording this week is more of a meditation than an exercise. So come as you are and be held in gentleness through whatever is happening for you right now.

Whether we are singing, speaking, communicating, leading, creating — if we are not checking in and being slow and intentional with the way that we are communicating... if we are not taking the extra space we need to listen to the body first... we end up reacting.

And that reaction may not represent truth.

There’s a different way to move into expression, and it starts with a pause… which, I acknowledge, can be very challenging in a real-time moment. So today, we’re practicing this together by doing a somatic scan to land in the body, feel what’s there, and create sound from that place.

When we do that first —when we let the body speak before the voice does— we create a tangible shift. Our intention lines up with our expression and what we communicate starts to carry the actual fabric of what’s true for us in that moment rather than whatever our nervous system has defaulted to in a reactive state.

The body is always holding something. The question is whether we’re willing to slow down enough to feel it before we open our mouth.

Here’s how you can practice today:

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We became a passive audience to our own sound.

Your voice doesn’t just exit through your mouth —it moves through tissue, bone, fluid, cartilage, and space. It resonates in your chest, your skull, your face, your belly. And where it’s vibrating directly shapes how it sounds: the tone, the depth, the quality of it.

A voice that’s living in the mask of the face, for example, has a completely different character from one that’s rooted in the chest or the belly, or from one being directed out the back of the head. Same person, same pitch, even the same technique... yet, an entirely different sound.

…and, we get to use imagination as our primary tool to make this happen. How fun!

When we place attention on a specific part of the body and direct the sound into that place, the sound changes. The muscles around the resonating chambers make subtle adjustments.

The vibration follows the attention.

It sounds subtle... and it is… but the body loves simplicity and it is listening.

Once you can feel that relationship, you can start to create a more deliberate sound that can shape tone, access depth, and move your voice into the quality and energy of what you actually want to express.

This practice uses hand placement as a way in.

By moving your hand from the top of your head to your face, your chest, your belly, and using your imagination to direct the vibration into each area—you’re gathering information. Learning the landscape of your own instrument. This is not about a “right” sound. It’s about developing a palate that we can use to “paint” with our voice.

How you can practice today:

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Think about an accordion, for example. What creates the sound isn’t air escaping, it’s the squeeze. Or a balloon with a small opening. Pop it and the air just spills out, but pinch the opening to let only a little air escape and the air moves through slowly with more consistent pressure.

Your body works the same way. We can create that resistance by building subglottal pressure and then we can release it intentionally through our vocal folds (our “valve”).

The more we learn to release that pressure at various rates, the more immediate vocal power we have access to.

In this week’s exercise, we’ll be practicing what it feels like to move air at various speeds by simulating the vocal folds… with our fingers! I love this exercise because it really allows you to actually feel the movement of your vocal folds (explained in pictures below). And the more you can feel them, the easier it is to manipulate them to get the sound you want.

We’re also building on what we explored in episode seven… but now instead of building and releasing all at once, we’re learning to shape it. Using a single sustained note, we begin to understand how to move a dull, robotic expression into an emotional and musical one through dynamic contrast.

How you can practice today:

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In this week’s exercise, we’ll be diving into this by tuning in to the subterranean level of the voice. I’ll be guiding you through what it looks like to slow down enough to truly listen BEFORE the sound starts. This is what sets this method apart… we’re not just addressing the surface-level constraints.

Most of us are so conditioned to produce (to fill the space) that we skip the step of actually feeling before we speak. We move from thinking to expressing without listening to and acknowledging the body… and what gets lost in the process is often the most real part of what we have to say.

I call this practice: receiving mode. It’s a state of tuning in before opening up. Becoming a channel. A conduit. It’s not about making something happen by our own will… in fact it’s very much the opposite:

this is about surrendering and listening for what’s already there.

When you slow down enough to hear the root of your expression, your voice transforms. There’s a felt magic, a magnetic quality… a presence that no amount of technique can replicate.

How you can practice today:

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Most of us are walking around with significant jaw tension and have simply normalized it. That tension has a direct effect on the voice, because the opening of the jaw is directly connected to —and is part of the shaping mechanism for your resonating chamber.

When the jaw is constricted, so is your sound. There is literally less room for what wants to come through you.

There’s a fascial connection at play here, too. Fascia (the connective tissue that connects our entire bodily structure) carries the movement of the jaw all the way down through the throat, chest, diaphragm, and hips. These structures are in conversation with each other. Releasing one can start to invite release in the others.

Once we start feeling more mobility in the jaw, we can make more space for the vowel… and when you sustain an open vowel and open up the space for sound to resonate, there’s less room to hide behind the consonants.

Welcome to being seen, and heard!

The tone of our voice holds information... information that is felt. Physically. No wonder it feels vulnerable! Opening up the vowel is like opening up a portal for people to see your soul.

YES.

The open vowel IS a portal to your soul,
and this practice is about being willing to go there.

Here’s how you can practice today:

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Vocal fry is that low, slow, creaky sound that lives at the very bottom of your range. You probably made this sound as a kid without thinking twice about it… and then you "grew up” and stopped playing so much.

Fun fact: it’s the same mechanism that death metal vocalists use to create that guttural screaming sound, just pushed into the higher register with a lot more force behind it.

While we won’t be training our death growl today ☠️ what we will be doing doing is exploring what happens when the vocal folds vibrate at their slowest oscillation. This creates something called subglottal pressure… and it works like a hydroelectric dam: the controlled movement of something substantial through a narrow passage generates literal energy in your body.

When we’re holding stress, tension, unexpressed emotion, it often lives in the body as pressure… compressed and waiting. This practice is about meeting that with intention. Something of equal force: building it, holding it, and then releasing it.

Think of it like a wave. The pressure builds, and when you let go, whatever was sitting in the body gets to ride out on it.

That release is where the regulation is.

Here’s how you can practice today:

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Vocal register carries a lot of cultural baggage

—a low, deep tone / registration, for example, has been historically coded as masculine, as authority, as the voice that gets taken seriously, which means depending on who you are and how you’ve moved through the world, this territory might feel like either it wasn’t meant for you, or that you’re boxed into something you can’t break free from.

It’s worth noticing what comes up before you even make a sound.

When we’re anxious or holding tension, the muscles around the larynx contract and pull upward, which can make it difficult to “reach” those lower pitches. As we relax into the lower register, we will naturally invite that tension to reverse: the larynx descends, the throat opens, and the body reads that spaciousness as a signal to soften.

This practice helps us feel the difference between pushing down and letting gravity do some of the work. Once you learn how to feel this sensation, it becomes something you can return to whenever you need to find the ground... in your sound ;)

How you can practice today:

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We’ll talk about how the body’s main communication highway between brain and body, and how it runs right through —and intersects with— the the voice pathway. Therefore, when you hum, your nervous system feels it.

Through this practice and through your voice, you can start to send the message to your nervous system that it’s safe to settle… which in turn helps your voice open to more resonance… which in turn, helps the nervous system settle…

doesn’t that sound like a great loop to be in?

What’s fascinating is that this isn’t unique to humans. Research on cats shows they produce vibrational frequencies when purring that correspond exactly to the ranges used in clinical therapy for tissue repair—and they don’t just do this when they’re content, but when stressed, injured, or afraid too. Vibration as self-regulation is something living beings have always known how to do.

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Lip trills (that good ol’ motorboat sound) create back-pressure in your vocal tract. This resistance does two things: it takes the effort and tension away from your throat and puts it where it belongs —in your breath support. Your core.

The cool thing about lip trills is that the vibration we create with our lips actually simulates what’s happening with our vocal folds, so through this exercise, we’re not only training the outside… we’re training the inside (all within the same action!).

This is a foundational exercise in vocal coaching because ultimately, it teaches your body how to support your voice… and that support allows for an alignment between your breath, body, and sound… which allows you to dig into your voice support a more powerful sound (when you want it).

Most importantly, it teaches you that you don’t need to push, to be heard.

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It’s been a hot minute… one that has dampened my day for the entire month of March: with a couple of floods in my basement, challenging banking issues, 9-day migraines, the flu, having to throw hot water on my heat pump daily for an hour with kettle after kettle of boiling water, a child on spring break that is bored and missing friends and looming… going through a major sleep regression! (and and and)

How does this affect my voice and vision?

I shut down. I stop wanting to share. I show up less because I feel like throwing up and then crawling into a hole. There are some times where I feel like I literally lose my voice… I call my husband at the end of the day and throw up hand signals and very subtle head nods or sometimes even a long blink to answer a question.

In the moments when my nervous system is flooding in tandem with my basement, my voice just can’t.

Have you ever felt that way?

Recently, someone referred my podcast to someone whose child stopped speaking entirely after a traumatic series of family events. He had become non-verbal and no one knew how to help him because the communication was compromised. I have known others who physically lost their voice when they lost a parent, or when life threw them some trauma that triggered the body into shut down.

This is a freeze response from our nervous system, and it can have physical implications that can happen psychologically or physiologically… chicken and egg.

In these moments, it feels incredibly uncomfortable to speak, almost like a tickle sensation or any completely overwhelming bodily experience, and while this may feel like something is wrong with our voice, it is actually the opposite:

our voice is telling the truth… and we are listening.

The instinct of not wanting to speak is the result of a completely coherent nervous system.

In shutdown, your sympathetic nervous system has technically done a good job by expanding your throat and drawing apart the vocal folds to allow as much oxygen as possible into your body: in a state configured for breathing, not speaking. And if you’ve dropped further into freeze mode, the social engagement system (which includes the larynx) has gone offline entirely (which = what I call, cave mode).

When you try to phonate in that state, you’re asking the muscles to close the vocal folds while another part of your nervous system is actively holding them open. Muscle tension dysphonia (a change in the sound or the feel of your voice due to excessive muscle tension around the larynx) for example, is characterized by the vocal folds failing to come together properly because two muscles are pulling in opposite directions simultaneously. That’s what you’re feeling—a mechanical conflict… two sets of instructions colliding…

…kind of like trying to swallow while inhaling.

As if that’s not enough, there’s another layer at play causing an almost-involuntary resistance. When you become stressed, your body switches from the parasympathetic to the sympathetic nervous system, and when that happens, the nerves that control speech are essentially “switched off”. So when you experience that overwhelming “tickle” when trying to phonate, it’s like trying to move a limb that’s fallen asleep. You’re trying to use a system that has been neurologically deactivated.

Speaking then, becomes an almost violating experience—a dismissal of the body’s current survival strategy.

So what do we do about it?

We tend to default to the notion that the voice is an external product. A sound. A “doing”. But the voice catalyzes before the escape hatch. It starts in the emotions, the thoughts, the intentions, the being. It starts… in the spirit.

╰┈> That spirit informs the body.

╰┈> That body informs the breath.

╰┈> That breath informs the voice.

If we are trying to impose a sound that doesn’t match the wisdom of our voice, a tangible dissonance occurs.

They key to bringing sound back into the body so that we can release it is to meet the voice where it’s at. To listen for the information in the body and the breath to inform and support the sound that wants to come out.

And sometimes that means meeting it in silence.

The process of bringing back sound into the voice can be slow. Like I said at the start of this, sometimes that is long time. In extreme cases, years. Because, safety doesn’t happen overnight. It happens through gradual experiences that confirm and reassure a sense of safety… and we provide this safety by allowing sound to come out in small —even inaudible— ways.

So on today’s Year of Embodied Voice exercise, I walk through the process of experiencing how to do this: a process of vocal resuscitation, if you will. These are weekly “practice-along” tracks for your voice. And not just for singing, but for self-actualization. As you may already know from reading my other articles, these two are pretty inseparable.

As a paid subscriber of this publication for $8 USD a month, you get access to these exercises each week for a whole year :)

How fast does this work?

Because I have a close relationship with —and understanding of— my voice, I’m able to bring myself back rather quickly when my voice “disappears”. Generally for me, this state tends to last only a short time (ranging between 15min to an hour or two) before I can phonate again.

When I listen to my body first, allowing it to inform the breath… then I can gradually (and gently) utilize that breath to inform the voice.

Yesterday as I was shaping up the Embodied Voice exercise for the podcast, I was reminded of my days playing Balinese gamelan music and how the instruments move through a dynamic performance, together without any one “conductor”:

The dancer—through body movements and subtle shifts— cues the drummer, who uses their arm movements to cue the ugal player, who through their mallet movement signals to the rest of the ensemble.

Here’s a clip to get a sense of the nuanced communication that’s happening within this sequence of cues (skip ahead to 2:45 for a more obvious moment of this):

It’s hard to know to see / hear where the cues are if you’re new to this world… but it’s somewhat easy to spot for someone who has studied this music / dance. And that’s exactly why studying and becoming more aware of your breath / voice gives you an incredible advantage to using it in all sorts of ways.

That’s why I created these embodied voice exercises…

Let me repeat it again. And again:

Your voice is more than the sound you hear. It’s an inside-out process that holds a key to your identity, your purpose, and your human experience.

And to wrap up my thoughts here:
it’s also the key to bringing your voice back when it disappears.

I hope this has been helpful and insightful! Leave a note in the comments with anything that’s coming up for you as you read this… I’d love to hear from you!

Using a concept from Balinese gamelan music, we explore the hierarchy of voice: your body is like the dancer (shaping the energy and dynamics), your breath is like the drummer (receiving and translating that energy into sound), and your voice is the instrument that carries that information (expressing everything that came before it).

You’re not trying to “make” your voice do anything. You’re listening to what your body is already communicating through your breath, and letting that move into sound.

This is a powerful tool for helping you intuitively explore your voice and releasing emotion through it.

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And that doesn’t mean that you stop listening to your voice, in fact, it’s the opposite; we need to listen through feeling. We need to ground ourselves in becoming the observer—not the critic.

This episode is about finding a note that feels like home.

Not the note you should have. Not the voice you’re aspi…

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I’m so grateful that you are here to walk the path each week with me as we explore practicing voice in all forms through these simple —yet powerful— exercises. This particular episode is one that you can return to at any point to move into a space of safety and calm exploration with your voice.

You can think of this …

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Today, I feel a struggle to be still.

My mind is racing between all the various projects I’m managing—and between the business and the personal, I’m sitting and working with a big vision here. There are so many little pieces crashing together, all talking at once… and in this moment, it just feels like too much.

“One moment I’m soaring in the mystery of the universe, and the next I’m feeling completely destroyed by its immensity.” —me

I know the standard advice: “Just do one simple thing.” And while that makes sense on paper, it doesn’t factor in the emotional physiology of what happens when we feel scattered. When the nervous system is out of sorts, it is incredibly difficult to create from that space.

I’ve been describing this feeling as an ocean trying to come out of a straw.

The abundance is there, the vision is often crystal clear (and other times extremely muddy) but the pressure hits us as soon as we have a moment to stop and feel it.

And of course, instead of feeling it, we tend to our “busy work”: dishes, emails, meetings, tasks for everyone else—because for those of us with so much to give, that stillness can be deafening and hard to sit with.

We feel the immensity of our gifts shouting at us and we realize, perhaps unconsciously, that we are uncomfortable with our own power.

So we grip. We tighten. We go into protection mode. And protection mode triggers a physiological response: our diaphragm tightens, our pharynx constricts, the larynx gets squeezed up… the whole vessel shrinks.

We are trying to force an ocean through a straw that we have accidentally stepped on with our own heels. We constrict the very conduit we need for our vision to move through.

The wide-mouth frog

Learning how to soften and widen the pharynx is a powerful trigger for the nervous system. It is a physical signal that tells the body it is safe to relax. And when the throat softens, the vessel widens. The straw expands. Suddenly, the ocean doesn’t feel like a threat to our capacity; it feels like a flow we can finally hold.

To start, you can think of your throat as the literal straw for your expression. Take a moment to squeeze and tighten it. Does that make it a little harder to breathe? What happens when you try to expand that area… widen it? I love to use the example Lisa Popeil gave me and say out loud “I’m a wide-mouth frog!” (listen below for a laugh?!)

And while embodying the essence of a wide-mouth frog may not inherently inspire much safety, this widening of the pharynx informs a specific vocal posture that signals to your body that it is okay to be a vessel for the immensity we hold.

This is where things start to shift.

I am a vessel. I am a vessel. I am a vessel.

When I sent out my news / love letter this week I talked about this powerful practice of “returning” → inspired by Rev. angel Kyodo williams in this Search Engine podcast interview. It is a reminder that I am a conduit, not the source… and I need this reminder because it’s way too easy to let one “bad” day take over my entire viewpoint when I start to feel that immensity build up.

When I start to feel like it’s too much, my instinct is to throw the straw into the garbage. Maybe I can just go buy a wider straw?

But I know better than this. I know that my straw is also my vessel.

In that same love letter, I also shared about an insight that was given to me many years ago when given the fortune of sitting down with Mary Gauthier to talk about my songwriting. She told me something I’ve held closely ever since: that whether you have 4,000 people or one person in the audience, you have the same gift: the potential to impact one person. You might change a life trajectory with a song and never have the data to prove it.

This invisible part of the path requires immense faith. It requires us to trust the softening—to trust that when we release the grip, the impact is real even if we can’t see it yet.

That invisible path begs us to keep trying…

It doesn’t let us walk away from the ocean.
It doesn’t let us throw the straw in the garbage.

It’s the voice that returns to say “I am a vessel.”

and…

Vessels
Straws
Oceans
Invisible paths

…they’re all part of the same thing:
our ability to open and trust our voice.
our ability to sit with the stillness.
our ability to take our vision into our hands and fully commit.
our commitment to knowing ourselves more deeply.
our faith in process.

Working on the vessel (e.g. reading for the sake of it, singing to yourself, tending to your nervous system… proclaiming that you are a wide-mouth frog) is the work. When you cultivate an environment of safety, you allow the ocean to pour through you without the force of control.

and if we focus on just entering the space and softening, the wisdom will come.

When the ocean can pour through you, you realize the vessel.

and when you realize the vessel, you birth the art.

and… ps: you are the art.

The energy you bring to your work matters more than the output. The state you’re in while you create—whether it’s a song, a business plan, or a conversation—gets woven into the very fabric of what you make. Because it comes from you.

You cannot transmit what you do not possess.

If you’re writing from anxiety or urgency, that frequency is woven into your words. When you create from peace, from alignment with your voice and vision, that gets embedded in the work. When you pour the ocean from a constricted straw, the result reflects the lack… not the expansion.

Expansion is the foundation of transmission.

So in service of the vessel, I choose to open myself to the mystery of it all: overwhelm, anxiety, grief, rejection, depression, joy… to my greatest expansion. I am softening the straw. I am letting it move through me. My invitation to you is the same.

♥︎ Chelsea

ps: You can use this wide-mouth frog technique to set your nervous system in the direction of that expansive feeling. Try it… leave a comment and let me know what you think :)

pps: Because I know we all need help carving out this kind of protected space, I’m hosting The Stillness Sessions on the last Friday of every month, from 11am-1pm PST over Zoom. You can come and work on your book, your piano improv, your paintings, your business, or perhaps it’s a bigger-scope-whole-life vision. This is sacred time for the sacred things you have to birth—a space where we focus on making beautiful things together.

You can register here for free — I’d love to hold the space for you.

About three weeks back, I got a comment on a post from 10 years ago. The one where I joined in chorus with the wave of “me too”s and spoke my truth, unfiltered. And while it was brief, I managed to get out in bullet-point form, the details about my experience with sexual abuse, assault, and trauma.

You gotta love Facebook and the way a post from 10 years ago makes a comeback. All of a sudden, it’s at the top of everyone’s feed as if it’s brand new, and as the OP, I was not prepared for it. Fear raced through my body, my heart rate increased, and my breathing shallowed as I experienced it all again.

10 years ago meant that a whole new decade of people would read this truth (and for me, a decade = a whole lifetime). It meant new communities, colleagues and clients were likely seeing that post for the first time.

A flood of fear, rejection, and shame came rushing in at the thought of being seen so deeply. I could be attacked. People could be upset that I’m writing something so bold. I could stir up feelings and make people feel uncomfortable.

And even though I didn’t have any plans of taking that post down, I really wasn’t ready to confess it all again at that moment.

See, I wrote that post with a cape on.
And 10 years later, in that moment of resurfacing, my cape was off.

My heart raced as the comments came in, feeling vulnerable and exposed—even feeling the trigger of those details that I shared. Even with my own trigger warning.

And although the response was overwhelmingly positive as I reviewed the supportive words of the past and present… even though I was feeling the solidarity in my bones and out through my eyes… even in FULLY KNOWING that I am loved and respected deeply FOR my truth… my heart still thumped. I couldn’t shake it.

There’s a reason why our heart races, why our breath becomes shallow, when we go to reveal who we are through our voice.

Our voice holds a tenderness. It holds a truth. And our voice holds the key to our belonging… because it’s our identity.

Therefore, sharing our truth is imperative to our ability to belong to the right people.

But that comes with a cost.

The risk of being attacked. The risk of being judged by the wrong people.

And that cost triggers something deeper inside of us: the fear of isolation… the fear of being extricated… the feeling and the fear of being cast out… and cast away.

Despite this, I know that the bravery I show up with through those fears is also the key to my belonging in more than one way:

1. I belong to myself first. I’m standing by my truth. I’m allowing myself to be seen and heard for who I am. I belong, because I am.

2. That bravery also holds the key to my belonging with others. It triggers solidarity. It’s a signal for my tribe. It’s my door to connection.

   ---

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Wearing the cape paves the pathway for collective truth.

When I wrote that original “me too” post ten years ago, the collective wave was moving through all of us. Thousands of voices reverberated, creating momentum and weight to carry the next.

The energy was transformative. The wave moved culture forward at a tangible rate.

Me too. It carried my voice and made it so that I didn’t have to manufacture the courage. I rode that wave… and as a result, my truth came out uninterrupted. Gut, soul, heart, throat, mouth—my whole channel was open.

That collective energy provided a cape. I wore it. I added my voice.

I spoke.

Another wave bites the dust.

This was weeks ago when my body surged with the uncomfortable, potent flood of comments that came along with the memory… but that wave inside my nervous system also offered a new truth. So I started a voice memo, typed out some notes. I outlined the cape metaphor, wrote a rough draft of my ideas, and then… I didn’t write the piece.

This became yet another idea collecting dust in my abundant graveyard of brilliance.

When I came back to write it here, I felt three layers removed from the source… in a different state… holding a different voice. Once again, my cape was back in the box, my voice had changed and the energy that had once filled the words was dried up and inaccessible.

I have so many ideas like this, that are hard to ignite when I step out of the moment. And that makes it harder to share. But I want so desperately to share. Fuck.

We might think we’re being productive by waiting to do it right later, but distance changes truth. And this is the problem we face as prolific creators: we don’t fail for lack of ideas; we fail in the delay. We capture the spark, then tell ourselves we’ll return when there’s time (and for the sake of time right now, I’ll avoid going down that rabbit hole).

Avoidance loves that distance, damn it.

Delay doesn’t just steal momentum; it changes the truth available to you.

I’ve been observing my own experiences and those of my clients and our tendency to avoid finishing the gifts that felt so alive when we started them.

For those of us awake and listening, waves of brilliance and truth surface every single day: something lights us up, moves us, pisses us off, breaks us open… these are the moments when the voice pathway is uninterrupted and something wants out.

And in those moments, if we act... we create shareable, impactful truth.

But too often we are limited by time, pulled back into the minutiae and away from our creative waves. We might capture the essence in a note or voice memo. We think: I’ll come back to this when I have time to do it properly. And then we come back later and can’t access it anymore.

All of a sudden deeply embodied words feel distant and foreign to our voice.

We find ourselves trying to finish what we started in a completely different state.

Our truth depends on that wave to make its way out into the world.

Not just the momentum of it. Not just the energy. But the truth itself.

And to be clear, I’m not talking about productivity or “strike the iron while it’s hot” energy… I’m talking about recognizing that some truths can only be born in certain states. If we wait too long, we’re not just losing momentum —we’re losing access to the truth itself.

Perhaps then, truth is a state?

Honestly I start to get lost when I think about it. But this is the perfect example. Here I am, revealing a truth that I feel was given to me, and all of a sudden I’m spiralling into “what is truth, anyways?” and I’m not even sure of what I’m talking about anymore. Part of me wants to close this window and shut off the argument in my brain.

But I’m not willing to leave this in the graveyard this time.

And while unpacking the meaning of truth is not within the scope of this essay, I can say with some certainty that multiple truths can exist at once. That’s why this conversation is so important.

So the first thing I need to say definitively is that when something lights up inside you, when you feel a swell of emotion, or when you feel broken and cracked open, destroyed and raw… use that energy.

It holds a truth. And your voice is the vehicle to deliver it.

[I’m going to contradict myself in a minute but for now, let me tell you not to wait until you’ve processed it into something calmer.]

That feeling is fuel. The voice needs direction to ignite.

A great example of this is: When you see someone about to step into traffic and you yell “STOP!”, your voice doesn’t hesitate or get caught in your throat. It fires because urgency and purpose are present. Technique coordinates itself when the fuel is real.

That’s truth.

Trying to yell at that person on the road four hours later changes your voice. You’re yelling into a moment that doesn’t exist. A literal screaming into the void.

Our voice carries signal… and the nuance of that signal can only be felt.

You feel that through tone. And tone shifts with the moment. Without the urgency, it will have settled into something calmer, more processed and refined. It’s not in relationship with the same truth.

But this doesn’t mean that if you miss the wave you should throw it all in the garbage. In fact, there are times we genuinely need to pause and chill the F out.

Sometimes the cape needs to remain in the closet.

Not acting in the moment provides another valuable truth. It provides reflection. Discernment. Space for insight and depth to evolve.

Not wearing the cape? You are still a superhero.

This doesn’t fundamentally determine who you are, and it doesn’t change the truth (yeah I know, here I am now contradicting myself, but I did warn you).

The lesson is not so black and white. It lives in the nuance of feeling. And within that feeling, your body and your voice have to hold matching energy.

That’s the truth of the moment.

A simple gut check can help you feel the difference.

Here’s a snapshot of the feeling in both states…

Cape on: I feel it in my blood. I am a channel. The messages are coming through me. I write in bursts. I don’t justify; I declare. I don’t negotiate. I capture. I speak. I move. [In summary: The body leads, the page follows]

Cape off: I slow down. I add context. I challenge my ideas. I choose calmer words. I don’t force it. I keep the notes, let the state pass, and wait for a new wave to arrive. [In summary: The Insight replaces the ignition]

Both matter: One births the raw signal; the other builds the bridge.

This essay is the work.

This essay is me working through the waves of the moment.

This essay is bringing words of the past to life.

And while capturing those notes in the moment was enough to help me process the flooding, coming back here connects me to why I do this work in the first place.

I do it because I need it, too.
That’s how I know it works.

Maybe there’s more to excavate when the wave moves me again. When something reignites that particular truth. But right now, this is what’s alive. This realization about the wave. About the timing. About how our truth shape-shifts depending on the state we’re in when we try to voice it.

I’m learning to trust that.
To act when the cape is on
To let things sit when it’s not
…and to notice the difference.

I’m learning to be more prolific and less perfect. Trusting that the timing is now—not when it’s polished. Not when I’m “ready”.

Because utilizing my truth while it’s alive unlocks new pathways to understanding myself. And that’s the ONE purpose I believe we are ALL born to actualize.

This is self-actualization.

Not perfecting ourselves, but knowing ourselves.

I’m choosing to meet that wave right now.

What waves are you sitting on?

ps: here’s a helpful affirmation you can take with you today…

My voice isn’t separate from the moment I’m in. It’s not separate from my nervous system, my emotional state, my embodied experience. My voice is all of it, braided into a signal only I can send.

My voice is me.

It happened again.

That familiar tightening in my throat. The sick feeling in my stomach. That sensation of being completely cut off from myself - from my voice, from my breath, from any sense of power or clarity.

Triggered.

Triggers never show up when it’s convenient. They show up when we’re trying to get something done, when we’re trying to enjoy a once-in-a-lifetime experience, when we “finally have space” to feel joy. Or when we have limited space to process.

And triggers don’t just affect our emotional state… they create a physiological shut-down in the voice pathway. The body responds to the flood of chemicals with constriction, tightening, closing… the throat narrows… the breath becomes shallow… and the voice —if it comes out at all— is reduced to a weak, shaky, powerless skeleton of what we’re capable of.

This isn’t metaphor. It’s actual physiology.

When we’re triggered, our nervous system floods us with stress hormones like cortisol. Our body goes into protection mode—tightening the laryngeal muscles, shallowing the breath due to autonomic shutdown, constricting the airways, and locking down the muscles along your voice pathway to silence what feels unsafe.123

—or in other words, it protects us by shutting down the very pathway through which our voice moves.

Cruel, isn’t it?

Because those triggered moments —they’re the times our deepest truth is trying to come through. Truth that would help us connect with the people we love. Truth that would allow us to stand up for ourselves, to speak what’s been unspoken for years. The kind of truth that could heal by moving trauma out of the body.

But the trigger acts like a circuit breaker. It cuts us off from the source we need the most: our ability to feel our body clearly and to hear our own wisdom.

We have a response to the thing —we know what we want to say, what we need to say, and yet the trigger stops the flow before it can happen.

Let’s back up for a moment though and talk about what I call the voice pathway.

Your voice pathway begins deep down in your pelvic floor, gathering and generating energy through your core (abdominal walls, diaphragm), guiding your breath from your lungs through the trachea, moving past the vocal folds into the resonant spaces of your throat, mouth, and nose, before finally shaping itself through your tongue, teeth, lips, and jaw. It’s a physical channel for breath and vibration. A literal pathway through your body.

And breath is the foundation.

But your breath doesn’t start in your lungs… it starts with your thoughts. With intentions. We breathe to express. We breathe because we have something to release—even if that thing is just a sigh, moan, or grunt of frustration.

So when our intention / breath / expression is flooded with trigger chemicals... our voice responds from that place. The whole pathway responds.

This is why you can tell yourself from the top down: “I am safe” in a moment where you genuinely are safe - but your body still doesn’t believe you.

Your voice doesn’t believe you because the physiological response is already happening. The constriction has been set in motion starting from the bottom up: the information the breath receives from your nervous system.

We can’t just stop ourselves from being triggered.
We can’t just erase the discomfort.
We can’t tell ourselves to stop feeling.
We can’t just think our way out of it.

But what we can do is build a relationship with our voice that’s strong enough to hold us through it.

Voice work becomes something more than technique when you understand this.

Know this: when you practice connecting to your physical voice, when you learn what it feels like to let emotion move through your body on a breath, when you pay attention to sensation, when you stay with the discomfort of uncertainty and let your voice come through anyway… you’re not just learning how to make better sounds. You’re building trust.

You’re training yourself to stay present with your body even when it’s uncomfortable. You’re learning how to come back to the roots of your voice when you get pulled away. You’re discovering that your voice has the capacity to move through difficult feelings, to shape them, to express them, to release them.

And that practice (the relationship you build when you’re not triggered) becomes the anchor you can return to when you are.

Because in the triggered moment, you need somewhere to land. You need a felt sense of “I know how to do this. I know how to breathe. I know how to let sound out even when I’m uncertain. I know how to stay with this.”

You need to trust that your voice will deliver your truth.

I’m still working through this myself. I don’t come here with all the answers.

But what I can tell you is that when that tightness happened in my throat today, I started paying attention to the physical sensations differently by opening my pharynx. Lowering my larynx. Manually releasing the diaphragm. And instead of trying to push through the feelings or make them go away, I gave them a soft place to land by allowing my sound to be breathy, quiet, uncertain…

I trusted that I have the tools to shape my emotion into a message that is meaningful to me, because I know my voice.

And as I stayed with it —the constriction eased just enough for my voice to start opening again so that I could speak what I needed to speak. So that I could stay connected to the person I was with instead of shutting down (in this case, my husband), and so that I could move the feeling through my body instead of holding it in. Because at the end of the day, not addressing our triggers and working with them somatically is a detriment to both ourselves and the people we love the most (since they’ll be the ones to trigger us more than anyone else throughout our life).

Voice work is not separate from healing work.

Your voice is not separate from you. It is you.

The way your voice responds to triggers is the way your whole system responds to triggers. The constriction in your throat is the same constriction happening in your heart, your gut, and your brain. It’s your capacity to stay present and connected.

The work of building relationship with your voice - of learning to stay with sensation, to trust your body, to let expression move through you even when it’s uncomfortable - that is the work of healing.

Because speaking truth is what connects us most deeply to the people we love.

And when we hold that back, when we let the trigger win, when we let the constriction shut us down… we’re not just holding back our voice. We’re holding back love.

I don’t do that anymore.

I don’t want the physiological response to a trigger to be the thing that stops me from saying what needs to be said. From moving trauma out of my body. From connecting with the people who matter most to me.

And so I practice.

I practice staying with my voice even when it’s uncertain. I practice letting sound out even when I don’t know what’s going to come. I practice trusting that my voice has the answers - or at least the capacity to shape and move through the questions.

And I practice this with a group of brave souls every Sunday in The Creative Sanctuary, because it’s one thing to do it alone… and a whole other level of healing to practice truth-telling in a group of people with varying beliefs and backgrounds, knowing that you’ll be safe to be different. Safe to be yourself.

Because again, we can’t stop ourselves from being triggered, but we can build a relationship with our voice that holds us through it.

We can learn to come home to where the roots of our voice lie.

And maybe that’s all that’s important.

55 Rhododendrons

I have 55 rhododendrons in my yard. In the spring it’s like a park witnessing each plant blossom into its unique colour as it adds life and beauty after a dull, rainy, grey winter on the Pacific Northwest Coast of Canada.

I used to really dislike rhododendrons when I was a kid. In fact, I hated them. They didn’t smell... they were sticky and hard to put in a vase, AND they attracted a ton of bees which was a huge fear of mine and so I stayed the heck away from the bushes we had in our yard! But since now becoming a caretaker of 55 of them, I’ve come to appreciate rhododendrons (and the bees) for their contribution to environmental health, and… their beauty (although I still sure wish they would smell like something!)

I’ve since also learned that they thrive in acidic soil environments... which, many plants do not (and is probably the reason my lilacs are not doing very well).

32 Flavours

Last week, one of my clients sent me a song they’d been singing: 32 Flavors by Ani DiFranco— and, as I listened with new ears, a door opened up… my eyes widened, and my jaw dropped. I heard my client’s voice!

Raw, real, expressive, “unrefined”.

Ani has this way of pouring her identity out through sound… grunting, wild, guttural laughter, and “untamed” breathing. Stuff that you probably wouldn’t find on an Ariana Grande album.

and by the way—I’m not qualifying either of these voices as the better way of vocalizing—in fact, that’s the important point I’m about to make.

Over the past while, this client and I have been working on smoothing out the voice, creating more stability, rounding out the edges... making it “pretty”. When she sent me this song, a whole new world (sorry for the earworm) opened up as I made the connection.

When we talked about it later, I asked her to describe all the qualities that she loved about Ani’s voice. As she answered, her expression became animated, alive, and inspired. She explained the way she connected to this artist’s voice on a deep, visceral level. The lack of filter. The immediacy. How the voice shifts from soft to grit without apology. How you can hear breath and laughter with no pretense or perfection.

It stopped me in my tracks... here she was describing all the qualities she had been trying to fix in her own voice… the rawness and the imperfections—the ingredients that inspired and infused strength as she listened.

And yet, there we were... trying to grow lilacs in acidic soil, as if they were rhododendrons.

It’s like that Einstein quote: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.“

And so the message I need to share with you today is one that could potentially change your entire relationship with your voice. In fact, one song —one singer— could be the slight directional shift that brings your voice into the light.

Your voice needs the right environment to thrive.

You might be trying to “fix” and “erase” the qualities that your voice needs the most in order for it to make sense —in order for it to sound like you.

Have you asked yourself lately (or ever) what’s important in a voice, to you? What voices draw you in, speak to your soul, make you feel alive? What are the qualities you admire and connect with on a deep, personal level?

Your voice is a value.

Your voice is a sonic representation of who you are.

And if you feel emboldened, inspired, and alive when you listen to Bjork, you may not need to follow bel canto vocal technique like it’s the law.

You can explore without being wrong.

We spend so much time trying to make our voices fit into systems that weren’t designed for us. Conservatory training. Techniques built around uniformity and measurement. Ideas of “good” that have nothing to do with our actual nature.

We take the soil conditions seriously for a lilac when we’re really a rhododendron — or vice versa. (and for the record, I’m still not convinced I’d really want to be a rhododendron)

Some voices need acidic soil. Some voices need a neutral ph level. Some voices thrive on sweet, smooth and soft notes. Some voices make the most sense when they stay wild and unruly. When they have permission to get dirty, dark, or different.

This doesn’t mean that the technical work doesn’t matter. Strength training, flexibility, and getting to know your voice on a more physiological, scientific level gives you a more extensive palette for your range of expression. Technique gives you tools, and options.

You DO need some awareness of how your body creates sound so that you can “voice” with intention. But at a certain point, all of that has to get thrown in the ditch so your body can connect with your truth and do the work it already knows how to do.

The voice doesn’t become powerful by becoming more controlled. It becomes powerful when you stop apologizing for its identity.

Your voice is not separate from you. It is you.

And it doesn’t need to fit someone else’s idea of beautiful. It needs the conditions that allow it to be itself.