Are you ready for the autumn equinox? Throughout the fall season I share inspiring snippets from my upcoming book, Unleash Your Goddess Voice (available January 5th!)
While much of the book focuses on how to free your speaking voice so you can spread your soulful wisdom, my love of singing is woven throughout the book as well. In this passage I get on my soapbox about why everyone has a right and need to sing! Enjoy.
Do you ever judge the “quality” of your vocal sound? Oh, Sister, you are not alone. Almost every person who has walked into my studio has shared those doubts about their voice.
There is a strange modern phenomenon where we judge singers as good or bad. TV singing contests thrive on harsh judges who sneer at people’s “bad” voices. And when it comes to speaking and other vocal sounds, there’s definitely cultural pressure to stick with what is deemed acceptable and polite. As a result, we see a widespread orphaning from the Goddess Voice within.
When singing is only for the super-talented and speaking is often judged and compartmentalized, we become disconnected from the innate joy of expressing our voices.
Beyond the question of whether you want to be a singer or professional speaker, this widespread labeling of voices as “good” or “bad” has a profound impact on our speaking voices and how we express ourselves.
Let’s dig into this notion of good singing for a moment. When I’m paying money to go to a concert, I do indeed like to hear a singer who has amazing pitch, rhythm, style, and expressiveness. But that doesn’t mean the rest of the world shouldn’t sing!
While I’ve been helping students improve the quality of their vocal tone for sixteen years, the magic of this work is helping people love how they sound. Joy is the goal. So while I love the process of improving your singing, I’m also a big advocate of throwing off the judgments and using your voice for pleasure, connection, and liberation. You have a right to sing, no matter how you sound.
If you feel a sigh of relief that it’s totally fine to sing and even to make unconventional and surprising sounds, this represents a homecoming to our ancestral legacy. Anthropologists know that humans of every culture have been singing together for millennia. Some surmise that we began singing before we began speaking!
No matter the continent where your ancestors took root, they surely gathered together in song and ceremony. They lifted their voices to connect to the Divine. Singing was about connection, not perfection. I like to imagine there were probably some folks around the fire singing off-key, but their enthusiasm, expressiveness, and devotion were appreciated as a necessary part of the whole.
In the past few thousand years, the majority of people have become disconnected from tribal ceremonial life. Factors like migration into cities, religious wars, witch hunts, slavery, and colonial domination unraveled the threads of tribal structures as the fabric of our communities. Yet our ancestors kept singing! At the ashram, church, mosque, synagogue, temple, or ceremonial grounds, people gathered to sing. While harvesting crops, putting children to sleep, or gathering for a party, people sang.
Then, in 1877, Thomas Edison invented a machine to record sound (the phonograph). The popularization of recorded music would eventually play a huge role in changing how we relate to our voices. While we have gained so much richness and possibility from recorded music, we have allowed our innately human need for singing in community to fall by the wayside. In revering the megastars, we project onto them the joy of vocal sounding which has been neglected in our souls.
Like many cultural shifts, we can sow the seeds of change in our own lives. If you are ready to reclaim your right and need to sing, the first step is to soften judgments about how you sound. Unless you want to sing on stage, it’s really not an obstacle to sing off-key, out of rhythm, or with an uncertain voice.
If you can speak, then you can harness the healing power of singing and sounding. You don’t have to be perfect to express something meaningful.
Plus, singing has been shown to lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol. To me, that is proof that we are all born to be singers regardless of how we may sound.
Once you get comfortable with experimenting and embracing your voice on your own, you can seek out safe places to sing and sound with others (no microphones needed.)
After hearing my sermon on singing for connection, my friend Nancy began to sing to her young daughters before bed. She had never given much thought before to the notion that she shouldn’t sing unless she had a great voice. However, when she took the risk of singing anyway she found that she and her daughters experience great joy through her lullabies.
She describes an experience with her teenage daughter, kindergartener, and preschooler all singing together: “The four of us sang before bed while laying down, just Twinkle Twinkle since we all know it and it’s short. It was one of the most beautiful feelings I’ve ever felt in my life. All of us together, two sweet little voices and my teen’s now deeper womanly voice along with my own.” Not only did she get to experience this heart-opening moment, she showed her daughters the power of enjoying your voice without judgment.
If you feel the pull to let your singing voice free, try putting on a song you love and blast it on some decent speakers. Then let yourself sing along! If you notice judgements arising, remind yourself that this is about having fun, not about “sounding good.”
Let me know how it goes for you in the comments!
P.S. If you are a sassy and soulful woman entrepreneur or writer, I invite you to join my free networking group on Meetup where we are building powerful connections.