The Voice and Silence
““Indeed, the path toward true union may not be through the voice, but through silence. “”
My life has been informed, shaped, influenced by, and devoted to the voice—in both its literal and its figurative manifestations—and to its shadowy companion, silence.
While my early life was influenced primarily by the more literal manifestations of the voice—the sound of my parents’ accented English, the made-up languages I created to communicate with the birds on my pre-school playground, the endless hours I spent training my singing voice in a practice room—later in life, and, particularly as I began working professionally with the injured voice, more metaphorical expressions of the voice came to the fore. I have always recognized the voice as the vibrational medium that carries words, emotions, and intentions from the silent interior of the self into the outside world. It is also a symbol of power and oppression. The voice, and its silence—or, more often, its silencing—determines who is valued, respected, and responded or reacted to, and who is not.
I suspect that much of my early desire to sing opera, similar to the desire of so many people who perform on a stage, stemmed from a wish to be seen and heard. I suspect, also, that the moment when my singing voice began to fail me signaled my body’s refusal to tolerate the relentless scrutiny to which I was subjecting it. The self-and-other-inflicted dismemberment of my vocal instrument in the name of perfecting an operatic ideal did damage to my vocal mechanism. It also did violence to my soul.
The decision to shift my focus from being an opera singer to becoming someone on whom opera singers might rely for guidance and support evolved as a slow unfolding over time. It reflected an orientation toward life that is shared by many teachers, advocates, activists, philanthropists and people in the helping professions—an orientation in which an individual is driven, by sympathy, empathy, fate or destiny, or perhaps a moral imperative, to survey his or her community or the broader, global community at-large, and to ask: where am I needed? In what capacity might I have the most positive effect on specific individuals, a group of individuals, or on humanity as a whole? What skills, talents, abilities, and privileges have I been given by birthright, by circumstances, or have I obtained through education or experience, that make me uniquely qualified to contribute something meaningful to others in this lifetime?
My father was a doctor, and my mother was devoutly dedicated to her faith-tradition, so, in many ways, my upbringing modeled a cultural and religious bias toward serving others. Yet, as a child of educated immigrants, there was also an extremely high value placed on succeeding. While the cultural ideal of my family of origin would have been for me to pursue a career as a physician, or a lawyer, or an engineer, at a young age, my elementary school music teacher discovered that I had a talent for singing. And so, I sang, not only because I enjoyed it, but because I received recognition and accolades for it. Being a singer gave me a sense of place in the order of the universe, or, at least, throughout the strange, confusing universe of schooling and adolescence. When I competed for, and attained, a lead role in the high school musical, or I won a singing competition, it gave me a sense of accomplishment, and it continually confirmed my identity as a singer. I knew who I was and where I belonged.
The path of singing was, for me, a path of competitive striving; a world of constant comparison. It was also, paradoxically, a portal into something sacred. Singing gave me the opportunity to experience a kind of embodied resonance that allowed me to transcend the physical world through being fully in alignment with the body. I would reach a particular note in my range that resonated perfectly in my body, mind, and soul, and I experienced this resonance as a direct connection to divinity—as a sort of access to and expression of a god-presence. This experience of spiritual singing was intermittent, however, and it was often in conflict with the rigorous training I received in order to shape my voice to align with my aspirations of becoming a professional opera singer.
In that frame of mind, my audience was not solely seen as a group of unique individuals with whom I could connect through a beautiful art form. In fact, I rarely saw myself as someone who was in relationship with my audience; I saw myself, rather, as performing to or acting upon them. My audience was, in a sense, not a gathering of human beings with their own unique identities, but, rather, an “other” entity that provided a necessary mirror to reflect my need to be seen and heard as someone with talent and potential. I was in a continual state of offering a “product” for consumption and anxiously awaiting feedback that would ultimately determine something akin to my worth. This dynamic disconnected me from my audience in a way that perhaps left me feeling accomplished and even powerful for brief periods of time, but that ultimately separated me from the very things with which I was attempting to connect: beauty, art, and a long lineage of traditions that sought meaningful communication through vocal expression.
By the time I went to college to study music, an incongruity had rooted within me—a tension between the pleasure and freedom that could be found in the resonant connection of singing, and the confinement that was imposed on me by the continual honing of the vocal instrument through classical training. Within the paradigm of formal study, my voice was rendered as an object that I constantly sought to control and manipulate through discipline and technique, and, also, through chronic, insidious shaming and relentless self-criticism. When my voice failed to react or respond to my command (it was, after all, only a human instrument, ultimately vulnerable and fallible, like all human things), I became angry with it and humiliated by it, demanding that it behave in a way that represented me well—as a talented and admired singer, rather than as a human being who sings. My voice took on a persona, one with which I had a peculiarly adversarial relationship.
As the tension within my mind-body-spirit grew, my voice started to “crack”, and nobody, least of all I, knew how to fix it. By the time I completed my undergraduate degree in vocal performance in 1996, I could no longer sing with enough consistency to pursue an operatic career.
After seeking assistance from professionals in the medical field who were trained to help me but whose interventions did not result in the healing of my voice, I decided, instead, to complete a master’s degree in speech pathology with a specialization in voice. I believed that this course of study would help me to understand and heal my own voice, and, ultimately, it did.
I also felt that this path would allow me to utilize my mind, my heart, and my intuitive abilities to help others who had lost their ability to sing or to speak, and, indeed, it did.
After completing my speech pathology training, I slowly did the work of releasing my long-held identity as a singer. I understood, over time, that my calling was not to be on a stage, but, rather my deepest fulfillment actually came from helping others to reclaim their lost voices. I committed myself to helping those whose loss of voice left them feeling afraid and alone and unsure of who they were anymore or how they would express their emotions and their identities.
When I now reflect on what purpose “losing” my voice may have had on my life’s path, I see that this “failure” provided a necessary opening for a shift from an ego-based drive to perform toward a more meaningful expression of a voice that I could recognize as my own. I now see the experience of “losing” my voice as a meaningful one—one that led me to find my own voice and to help others find theirs. At the time, however, the loss of voice and, more poignantly, the loss of my sense of identity, felt vulnerable, disempowering, and, at least temporarily, debilitating.
“When I now reflect on what purpose “losing” my voice may have had on my life’s path, I see that this “failure” provided a necessary opening for a shift from an ego-based drive to perform toward a more meaningful expression of a voice that I could recognize as my own.”
It prompted me to ask myself: if I were to let go of all tension in my body, of all preconceived notions in my mind, and make sound that is connected with my heart, what would come out? Would it be opera? If not, what would it be? The last twenty-five years of my life have been devoted to the exploration of that inquiry, both in myself and in those I have had—and continue to have—the privilege to work with.
I also believe, after many years of engaging in both scientific inquiry and psychological/spiritual exploration, that this “crack” in my voice was a symbolic representation of what began long ago as an interruption in the archetypal voice of The Divine Feminine. I have dedicated my life to listening for the echoes of the Goddess that remain hidden at the center of every voice, and to revering the voice itself as a powerful vehicle of personal agency and evolving selfhood.
While there are thousands of creation myths that have emerged from the imaginations of many different cultures around the world throughout history, my own personal creation myth—informed by my experiences of reconciling the effects of my own “lost” voice—proposes that it was the sacred voice of the Goddess that birthed matter out of chaos. Hers is the voice that creates something out of nothing, and it was the interruption of this voice that caused a disconnection between the origins of all things and the things themselves. It was this cosmic crack that caused the break between sacred Masculine and Feminine principles; between Self and Other; between the Divine and the Mundane. It represented a disruption in the divine order that favored separation over unity. And it is for this reason that the loss of voice is experienced by so many as an intolerable affliction.
My own experience of feeling isolated, broken, and, in a sense, abandoned by a benevolent force that, I thought, was meant to have my back, both caused me to lose my sense of grounded identity, and to find a deeper strength within me that I eventually realized could guide me, and others, on the path. It provided the context and the impetus that has allowed me to bear witness to the suffering of countless others during a 25-year career as a voice therapist, and that experience, combined with the knowledge I obtained from studying the science of voice, has allowed me to help others heal. I learned that our most vulnerable experiences often allow us to access both our shared humanity, and our god-and-goddess-like divinity.
The feeling of alienation that results from the loss or separation from one’s own voice is ultimately a call from the divine to the divine. How each individual chooses to answer will differ, of course. It may call for a new path of service, or a renewed commitment to similar service but in a deeper way. This path may not be the path of finding a voice, but, rather, of losing one—it may be a path of sacred silence, from which an entirely new voice can emerge.
Only silence…the silence of all tongues, the taciturn waiting in the unformed, undifferentiated, prelinguistic word leaves the You free and stands together with it in reserve where the spirit does not manifest itself but is. All response binds the You into the It-world. That is the melancholy of man, and that is his greatness. For thus knowledge, thus works, thus image and example come into being among the living. (Buber, 1970, p. 89-90)
References
Buber, M. (1970). I and thou (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). New York, NY: Touchstone of Simon &
