The Voice that was taken from you.

You don't need to be a voice specialist to be aware of the millions of people who still struggle with their spoken and singing voices. All you've got to do is to attend a large gathering and ask each person you meet if they like their voice, or if they can sing.

What if you could revisit your worse childhood singing experience and still take that choir position you've always wanted to fill?

How important is it for you to enjoy listening to the recording of your own voice?

Can you ever forgive your siblings for not finishing their singing studies when you had to give up yours because your parents didn't believe you could sing as well?

Over the years, I've been privileged enough to have experienced the healing journeys of 1000's of singers, public speakers, and artists who suffered from the traumatic effects of verbal remarks about their developing vocal performances. I must confess that some of these personal stories have brought chills to my bones.

These people were walking around believing they were no good at either speaking in public or singing. I could tell who they were as soon as their training became that much more challenging; they would immediately start justifying that they couldn't do it because they were told in the past that they would never be good at it. But I wouldn't give up. I fought hard to keep them practicing and coming to lessons, working on their amazing gift.

These are the stories I want to share with you. And they are still surfacing today through my social media channels to this day.

These stories will help us to map out how we have come to accept and assimilate these external negative beliefs and how they become an integral part of our identity. Some limiting experiences are evident when we come of age, during our teenage years, whilst others surface later during our adult life.

It is important to make a clear distinction between the written voice and the spoken voice. I have often seen that the two mediums of expression are interrelated in areas that exceed self-expression or creativity.

A person who is a confident speaker and uses their voice fluently with a high degree of self-expression can easily express their ideas and transfer them into a written format. But what happens to those of us who have felt or still feel that our voice is not good enough, not bright enough, not resonant enough, or beautiful enough?

We are all born with a voice that was whole, spontaneous, and coherent. There was once no doubt in your mind, that you could sing a new tune down the stairs, you could perform a duet with your auntie's radio, or grabbing that mic at a friend's party. At some point in time, you used your voice freely, in copious ways.

That's because you had a natural sense of feeling comfortable using your voice. You were born enjoying the sounds you made, however imperfect before the threat of being judged, the artistic criticism of teachers the often random opinions of others gradually shipped away from the clarity you once had.

Once upon a time, your relationship with your voice was free of negative beliefs, negative remarks, and the negative emotional charge accumulated over the years. Initially, these layers seem to appear as a result of our interactions with our closest family members, but they gradually expand to our school life and are later cemented within our professional lives.

It is a lot easier to understand how to reverse this process through the experiences of others, rather than taking them head-on. Perhaps it's because we first need to find a community of people who have been successful in navigating their own fragmented experiences, and in doing so can help us to achieve some kind of relief.

Stories are the healing windows of possibility. If we are to make sense of the process involved in recovering the voice we once had, there is a need to listen to the journey of other people's voices.

I hope you can shed the layers that are holding your voice back and share your own vocal experience even if it's in the safety of your family, home life, or with a close friend. Ask questions, engage in conversations that bring to the surface the experiences you have had with your singing teacher, parents, or college choir, however insignificant, will eventually release the emotional kingpin to our authentic self-expression.

"Safety is much more than just the absence of a threat safety is the presence of connection."

Maria Moreira-Edwards