Ways of Speaking

How well acquainted are you with your own voice? Its timbre and resonance, the way it feels in the body, the curious ways it responds to the unspoken intentions behind your words? Do you feel internally aligned with what comes out of your mouth, or are you often on autopilot, producing sentence after sentence without being fully present?

Unless you are a professional singer, actor, or embodied practitioner, chances are that you’ve never spent significant time contemplating such questions. We live in a rapid-fire culture where speech has morphed into ‘content’ and our voices have been reduced to functional devices, personal loudspeakers for getting as much said as possible, in the shortest amount of time, to cater to ever-shrinking attention spans. Even when we have nothing of real value to share, we push ourselves to speak up in meetings to appear productive or chatter away to pre-empt awkward silences. Our voices are employed as crude tools for outward communication and performance, approached mechanically and instrumentally rather than in a way that is intimate, integrative, sincere. As a result, so many of us experience a disconnect, even estrangement, from our voices. 

If there is a path to recovering a closer unity between our voices, bodies and intentions, it may begin with those magical moments when hidden feelings gush out from somewhere deep within us, sweeping away all internal barriers. Without any prior intention, words of tremendous emotional weight suddenly burst out: ‘I love you—I can’t deny it anymore’. ‘I may seem angry but actually I am just sad about what happened’. ‘I wanted you to accept me as I am—to simply see me without trying to change me’. ‘I never thought much about death before but when my time comes, I want you to be there by my side’. At such moments of vulnerability and revelation, we do not so much ‘communicate effectively’ as allow that which needs to come out to be expressed, without suppression or distortion. It is in those instances that our voices come alive as instruments joined to a deeper purpose, bringing our internal and outward expressions into an embodied coherence to affect the hearts and minds of others.

Beyond these rare moments, is there anything we can consciously do to turn our voices into holistic instruments of the soul? Can we ‘tune’ ourselves, our vocal apparatus, our breath, our being, through a personal practice of some kind, to nurture the aliveness that our voices are clearly capable of? I believe that intentional re-tuning is especially crucial when we have suppressed our voices for any extended period of time, whether owing to illness, anxiety or fear, negative self-beliefs, or challenging circumstances at work.

A vital first step I learned from an experienced voice coach is to simply give yourself permission to fill the space around you with the full presence of your own voice, without hesitation or embarrassment.² Tell yourself it is OK for your voice to ring out in a way that is unconstrained, free and natural to you. There is no need to feel guilt over being the one who is vocalizing. As you continue this practice, you may detect subtle sensations of tension around the diaphragm, chest or throat, as if you are bracing and contracting even before any words actually come out. If so, gently embrace all such sensations and let them go, for they are no longer needed. Your voice is entirely welcome in your own body, your consciousness, and the spaces you inhabit.

There are many technical voice exercises, for example, keeping the lips pressed lightly together while ‘brr-ing’ melodies to massage your vocal cords, that play an important role in preparing us to produce sounds sustainably, enjoyably and effortlessly. Yet these are of limited use when it comes to the question of how to mean what we say and speak from a grounded sense of truth. Technical practice alone cannot help you bring your voice alive to the point where your words cohere with your deeper being and your sincerest intentions.

Fortunately, certain activating practices of evoking and experiencing specific emotions can help restore the ability to speak from our core. For one, we may choose to feel gratitude towards a person who helped us at a time of struggle, bringing warmth and expansion to the chest and allowing those sensations to linger. We may evoke the love that we have for family, friends and the natural world, taking a moment to truly inhabit that loving awareness in our bodies, letting it spread outward from the heart. Or we may choose to forgive ourselves for things we regret having said or done, welcoming the sense of release that forgiveness engenders. And when internally oriented work of this kind feels difficult, we can help our emotions flow and become palpable through singing, moving, writing, painting or taking part in various healing therapies. What matters is that we give our embodied selves the space to fully experience and, where needed, thoroughly unblock our emotions as we continue to observe how they shape our words, seeking alignment and pausing to reflect when our speech becomes untethered from our felt truths. 

The importance of these personal practices notwithstanding, reawakening one’s genuine voice is a quest with tremendous significance beyond the purely individual level. To rediscover and maintain one’s authentic living voice is to step into a transformed relationship not just with oneself but, over time, with other human beings and the entire more-than-human world. As the ecological philosopher David Abram reminds us, to speak truthfully is less about verbal correctness in a narrow or even factual sense, than about being in right relationship to the world. 

“Ecologically considered, it is not primarily our verbal statements that are ‘true’ or ‘false’, but rather the kind of relations that we sustain with the rest of nature. A human community that lives in a mutually beneficial relation with the surrounding earth is a community, we might say, that lives in truth”.³

The recovery of our living voices amounts to the restoration of our ability to live in a truthful relation to others. Moving from vocal estrangement towards aliveness means entering a state of being that produces mutual integrity, nourishment, and steadiness. To grasp why this is, think back to those moments when we cannot help but convey our deepest truths: these do not simply exist to produce a sense of momentary relief or empowerment in the speaker; instead they make it possible for others to know with great certainty that person’s real intentions. From here, an entirely new alignment can come into being. As true intentions become aired and received, a different way of relating becomes not only possible but virtually inevitable. 

In a wonderful symmetry, by recovering our own voices we also transform into attentive listeners, for our purpose is then not to dominate a conversation but to bring true intentions into an honest, generative interaction. The new ways of relating we develop through this process of growth are more resilient and creative precisely because they are rooted in our centers of truth rather than in the misaligned utterances and half-intentions we communicate when held back by our anxieties. Even if the truths that surface initially trigger painful feelings or land as surprises, they have a way of propelling and guiding us towards meaningful experiences and healing.

You may still wonder how to actually speak in the particular circumstances of your day-to-day life, and that is understandable. If so, when you prepare to speak your next sentence, remember what you’ve just read. Observe your voice as well as your words, and consider how connected you feel in relation to both. Then repeat this simple practice and witness what begins to shift, through discoveries that may be subtle or stark, sudden or gradual. With this renewed awareness, you have already begun the journey back into your words.