The Girl with the Cassette Tape
Tell you a secret: I have never liked my voice. One of my earliest memories of my voice is recording myself on a cassette tape when I was around ten— singing and making little audio journals long before smartphones era. I remember enjoying it so much while recording. But the moment I played it back, I cringed. The voice didn’t sound like “me.” I didn’t like how I sounded. But thinking back it was a time in my life when I felt easiest to express.
Returning to Teach from Maternity Leave
I taught my first somatic yoga workshop postpartum after more than seven months. For over an hour, I held the room together with my voice. Nobody else's. No hiding. It reminded me of those cassette tapes. If there is one thing I had to adjust coming back to the mat, it’s listening to my own voice for so long while holding space for others.
The Body Keeps the Score
In my past life working inside a large bureaucracy, blending in was rewarded. Speaking too honestly and too much often wasn’t. Over time, I learned to shrink, to censor and to constrict. The body remembers that too. The jaw tightens. The throat holds. The breath becomes smaller.
Moving Energy through Sound
One thing I love about somatic work is that movement doesn’t have to be silent. We sigh it out, hum, siren, exhale loudly. Not as performance — but as release. Lately, I’ve been learning this from my little one too. Her babble expands daily into grunts, squeals, sirens, full-bodied cries. She doesn’t second-guess whether her voice is too much, too loud, too emotional, too strange, or at an inappropriate timing. She simply expresses.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped allowing ourselves that freedom as we grow old.
Somewhere along the way, many of us learned that our voices were safest when they took up less space.
Perhaps growing older isn't about becoming quieter.
Perhaps it's about remembering the freedom we had before we learned to hold our breath.