My Singing Voice Journey to Well-being

It’s taken me eight years to realize that my healing journey with my singing voice has been one of the most profound spiritual initiations of my life.

Since childhood, singing has called to me. Inspired by my parents’ performances in musical theater and their Broadway show records, I progressed from school choirs to a cappella groups, from musical theater to a few cabaret nights. I even created my own vocal demo tape.

I’ve spent decades circling around the sound of my own voice ~ wanting to trust it, but never fully able to, despite having taken (and taught) formal vocal lessons.

Throughout this journey, an intense anxiety has pulsed through me before every performance. For larger performances in which I’ve had solos, I’ve sometimes felt nauseous. I never developed enough technique or confidence to easily cross the threshold between chest and head register, as though a gatekeeper stood there saying, “You may go this far, but no farther.”

It wasn’t until eight years ago that I began to understand what that gatekeeper really was: unhealed trauma ~ specifically, the pain I had carried from watching my own mother’s heartbreak with her voice.

My Mother’s Song

My mother, Marie Dolores, had a beautiful, distinctive tone when I was young. Singing brought her joy. But she, too, doubted herself. She took voice lessons that, sadly, trained away the natural quality that made her sound like her.

Then lupus took a firmer root in her body and intensified its cruel work. I watched her strength ~ and her voice ~ deteriorate. In the last year of her life ~ she died at thirty-nine ~ she performed around with a solo recital in our local area in Westchester, NY, but the disease was increasingly attacking her vocal apparatus. I can still see her standing there in our living room, valiantly practicing high notes that came out as a croak, then nervously cutting several songs from her program. I felt her pain, deeply. Worse, I felt grief stricken for her.

Somewhere in my child’s heart, I connected singing with sorrow.

Learning to Stand and Sing Again

Decades later, in 2018, my aunt recommended that I have a corner of my life that was purely creative, not tied to my spiritual life ~ and she suggested I sing again. I had long lusted after one of the local African-American gospel groups in the San Francisco Bay Area, singing along with their CDs in my car, and I decided to join their “non-audition” community group. In fact, I also joined two other gospel choirs. The spirit of that music ~ so embodied, so heart-opening ~ drew me in… but the terror came too. For the first performance, I was so afraid of collapsing that I had a chair placed behind the choir just in case.

At one concert at San Francisco Symphony Hall, standing in the front row before thousands, I began to lose feeling in my feet. I willed myself not to collapse. Every bar of music was a battle with gravity.

And yet I kept showing up.

In those gospel choirs, something began to shift. Singing music rooted in joy, devotion, and praise was surprisingly liberating, and even, in some senses, “brought me back to Jay-zus.” No one cared about politics or religion or who believed what. We loved each other through the sound. Music became the bridge that transcended every division.

The Community of Song

When I moved to Massachusetts that next year, I discovered Rock Voices, a remarkable community choir that performs rock and pop songs with live band accompaniment in multiple cities. I joined, and over the next two seasons I sang two solos, keeping to my lower range where I felt safe. Then the world shut down, and with it, the choirs.

When singing resumed in 2023, I felt the call again ~ stronger this time ~ to rejoin, but at a higher level. I decided to join the “mothership” choir in Northampton, MA, an hour away from me.

From there, I kept stretching: first a scat exploration in George Benson’s Give Me the Night; then a demanding solo in Under Pressure, where I had to glide into the stratosphere on a sustained note that once would have terrified me; then Natalie Cole’s This Will Be, a playful, acrobatic piece that required true vocal quality and stamina.

Each challenge built new confidence. I moved from extreme anxiety (for Under Pressure I bought a stool and kept it onstage in case I would get too nervous to stand) to manage nerves. By the time I got to This Will Be, there were moments of exultation.

And something else began to blossom: community. I felt a growing sense of belonging in a large musical ensemble. Our director, with his humor and heart, has created a field where everyone ~ from seasoned soloists to shy first-timers ~ is celebrated.

In this vast choir of nearly 200 people, I’ve been reminded again that differences simply dissolve in song. Our political views, our physical abilities, our personal stories ~ none of it matters. Among us are people of all ages, several who are cognitively or physically challenged, and they are cherished presences, radiant souls who remind me what courage and authenticity look like. Their willingness to show up has softened my own fears and dissolved old barriers I didn’t realize I still carried.

Here, I feel appreciated ~ and I offer that appreciation to others. Music makes it effortless.

The Sound Initiation

Recently, within the Mary & Magdalene Priestess Training, we engaged the Sound Initiation Mysteries ~ an ancient remembrance of how voice serves as a bridge between heaven and earth. We explored how vibration itself can open portals of consciousness and healing, and how the voice becomes a vehicle for divine frequency when aligned with the heart.

That teaching has landed in me like a key turning in a lock. Over the past two weeks, I’ve realized that my long journey with singing has not been separate from my priestess path ~ it has been a key part of the initiation. Every moment of trembling before a microphone, every note that’s cracked or soared, every breath taken in trust has been part of my own training in sound alchemy.

The Marys teach that when we heal the voice, we heal the world. The human voice ~ especially the authentic voice, uncloaked ~ creates harmonic coherence in the collective field. It can soothe division, bridge differences, and reweave connection. I’ve seen it, felt it, lived it.

In my choirs, I now witness these mysteries alive in action: hearts uniting through song, vibration replacing judgment, resonance replacing fear.

The Deeper Healing

Last year, I wrote about a powerful medicine-ceremony experience in which I called forth my mother’s spirit. For the first time, we met in peace. I could feel her pride in me, her freedom beyond the illness, her blessing to take the voice farther than she could.

I realize now that something in me truly loosened that day. It was as if the gatekeeper at my throat said, “The karma is fulfilled. You may go on.”

Since then, the transformation has continued. I walked into the most recent audition with genuine anticipation rather than dread. I look forward to hearing my resonance fill a room. Singing has become both prayer and play.

And always, I feel my mother beside me ~ no longer struggling for air but harmonizing in light.

What It Means Now

I used to think I was learning how to “sing better.” Now I see that I was learning how to trust life again, how to reclaim the parts of myself that went silent in grief and fear.

Every rehearsal, every concert, every shared harmony is now an act of devotion, a way of sounding love into the world.

Because music, when sung from the soul, overrides everything that divides us. It is the language of the Marys, the vibration of unity itself.

And that, I realize now, is what healing sounds like.