Let’s assume you recognize your own voice as a unique gift and accept it totally. Your voice moves freely through your body, acting as an open conduit for expressing your deepest truth. Your breath moves right down into your low belly – your emotional centre – and sails right up your spine and our your mouth, encountering zero tension as it moves.
The breath activates your vocal folds and they are able to do all their amazing, tiny, finesse-ful adjustments to create a wonderfully free, easy, expressive sound.
Awesome! …and it’s not enough.
There’s a little piece of wisdom (I learned from my dear friend Katherine – thanks K!) that goes: Life is a potluck. If you don’t bring a dish, someone else doesn’t eat. Let’s extend that to your voice…
Someone in the world needs to hear something of great importance, and they can only hear it from YOU. Yes, your voice, with all its bumps, jumps,’flaws’, and whatever else you perceive as inadequacies, is THE PERFECT INSTRUMENT to carry a message to someone, or maybe, many someones.
Whoa. Big, right? Yup. Bigger than your fear that your voice isn’t pretty, or smooth, or high enough or low enough or anything enough. So step up, move through the junk, let it all go, and bring your dish. Someone else is hungry.
Try this!
Got tension? Yup. We all do. Life hits us and we harden, here and there, to protect ourselves from the pain of it. Tight jaw, anyone? Hold your tongue much? Carry stress in your shoulders? Breath gets stuck in your chest? Yup. That’s normal. Part of having a voice is learning how to let it all go, over and over, every day for the rest of your life. (It gets easier, though – the body remembers and slides into ease faster with practice.) Look in the mirror while you breathe and sing. Observe your body – what moves and what doesn’t? If a certain part doesn’t move, move it on purpose and see how your voice feels different.