Use Your Voice

Use Your Voice

Because the voice is this other doorway to the heart, playing with our own voices is a powerful restorative practice. I had a very interesting experience a number of years ago, when I overheard a singing teacher tell someone that everyone who can’t sing has had someone, at some point in their lives, tell them that they couldn’t sing. I was, at the time, weeding a garden at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, in Occidental California, and I had to sit down on the ground because a wave of emotion washed over me. That happened to me as a child. And for about 25 years, I didn’t sing. Then, in my early thirties, I traveled to Brasil, and fell in love with the Portuguese language. When people are speaking Portuguese, particularly the Brasilian variety, it sounds like they are singing to each other. The language itself is highly melodic. As I began to learn Portuguese, my voice started working differently. (I was also doing a lot of trauma healing work, and shifting out of defensive states, which impact the voice.). Somehow it didn’t occur to me that I couldn’t sing in Portuguese, and so I started doing it. In English, I had an emotional block around this that I didn’t have in Portuguese. I’m not gonna be cutting an album anytime soon, but I can sing. And it gives me joy. I like to sing to myself, I like to sing in the shower, I like to sing along while listening to music, and I like to sing with other people. Making music with other people has to be one of the most ancient of restorative practices. There’s a cogent argument in Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s book about the San bushmen of the Kalahari, The Old Way, that the origin of the bow (as in bow and arrow) is an instrument. We use the colloquial expression ‘finding your voice’ to mean finding yourself, finding your purpose, and these things are indeed intimately linked: voice > self > heart. Finding your voice is also finding your heart.