Finding your voice
 - the mirror of your heart

“In this article I will follow up some of the points I raised in last month’s magazine when writing about ‘Yoga and Singing’ in the Algarve. It is my belief that the state of our emotions and spiritual health can be diagnosed through listening to our voice in much the same way that our physical health can be diagnosed through examining our eyes or analysing our hair. Like the physical components mentioned above, the voice, to an educated listener, gives a true reflection of what is ‘really going on’ in our lives. One example of this is to remember how simple it is to recognise when someone is feeling excited because their voice gets louder and they speak faster and the opposite is true if they are depressed.
In the safety of the classroom most teachers are at ease giving instruction to their pupils, put these same teachers into a different setting, perhaps talking to a peer group or in another public setting and the voice dries up or becomes unreliable. Indeed, most people have some degree of difficulty about using their voice in a public forum. There are also many people who believe they cannot sing and they certainly wouldn’t do this in public. I have witnessed time and time again how gaining confidence in using your voice gives you confidence in all other areas of your life. This confidence is a complex thing because it involves both the physical aspect of being able to control your voice and emotional aspect of believing that you have something ‘interesting’ to say and ‘worthy’ of being said.
Once you begin to explore working with the voice you realise that we have both the spoken word and the singing voice; and in both of these we have not only the sound they make but also the vibration they create within the body. Whilst the physical mechanics of the voice are situated in the throat, the ‘activator’ of the sound is the breath, without which we remain silent. It takes little imagination to then realise that how we breathe must have an effect on the resulting sound. The other physical thing that affects our sound is our bone structure....”

Written by Teresa Varney, the article describes the impact your voice can have, both on yourself and others around you. Teresa Varney is a member of The Natural Voice Practitioners Network, a collection of people who make singing accessible to everyone. for further details see www.naturalvoice.net