This week, I've written three pieces for you, all asking you to do the same thing. It was a connection I didn't notice until I reread them while preparing them for Instagram.

Yesterday's post on the Five of Pentacles was about learning to look up, ask for help, and talk to someone. Tomorrow’s post will be about verbally committing to tend to something that isn't quite working yet. And Friday, for the full moon, we’ll be practicing gratitude... out loud. Three different posts, all asking you to use the sound of your voice.

Which is funny, because it's not something I usually do.

I have a little voice that provides a constant narration of my life, living rent-free in my head (as I imagine many of you do too). It narrates, even as I write this, then has opinions about whatever I’m doing, and then I argue with it, on and on. When I sit down to do something in my practice, it’s the voice that shows up to read and recite the words or name the desires. Powerful words that get read internally, silently, in the most dramatic fashion possible. But is it powerful?

When I lived alone (always my preference before I met Steve), I would go entire weekends without saying a word. I never noticed it as it happened because the conversations I had in my head were always so vivid and loud. I’d notice on Monday, though, when I’d go to order a coffee and my own voice would show up shaky and unfamiliar.

Lately, I’ve been trying to say things out loud more often. Specifically when it comes to spiritual things. Some of this has come from reading other books about cultivating your practice and the importance of using your actual voice. Some of it, embarrassingly, has come from getting more comfortable talking on camera. Making content for y’all has accidentally trained me to talk to an empty room with a lot more confidence.

On my dad’s side of the family, they were conservative Southern Baptists, and they did something that probably seemed common to many but was unusual to me as a child. They prayed over every meal. Everyone would be laughing and talking over each other, and then my grandfather would sit down at the head of the table and a hush would fall over the entire room. Just like that, locked in silence. He’d begin to say the blessing over the food, in a lower, more serious voice than he had just minutes earlier. At the end, as if by some unseen force, everyone in the room would utter the same word in unison—Amen. As a kid, I found this so fascinating. I didn’t have the words for ritual, spell, or even religion, so I wasn’t sure why until much later in life.

One thing to note is that I don’t often talk about this side of my family. They never really accepted me for being gay and cut ties with me when I was very young. The environment also had far more problems than just an oppressive religion, so this isn’t really a warm and fuzzy childhood memory for me.

But I’ve spent years in therapy, including EMDR, and one of the changes to come out of that was the ability to actually go back and look at those years of my life rather than just flinching from them. I can now look at them, take them apart, learn, and keep whatever’s worth keeping. It’s one of the reasons I’m such a huge advocate for these types of therapy treatments. The ability to integrate that part of my life has probably been the single biggest catalyst for my own personal growth, and I suspect some of you know exactly what I mean.

So now I can hold both truths at once. That house hurt me, and that dinner table is also where I first learned about ritual and that a room changes when somebody says something with intention out loud.

Last week I wrote about Bessel van der Kolk's book The Body Keeps the Score. There's actually a part of it that fits so well into this write-up on using your voice and the traumas I experienced as a kid.

While his team was scanning folks’ brains during flashbacks, they noticed a drop in activity in the brain region responsible for speech production and language processing. It’s the same area that can go offline in stroke patients. His summary of it is what I titled this section, “All trauma is preverbal.” This means that whatever bad thing happened is stored in the brain without any language attached to it, which is part of why people who’ve been through trauma often can’t find the words to talk about it but can easily experience it as emotions and physical sensations in the body.

There’s some ambiguity with it too, which I appreciate. He writes that they still don’t know whether language is essential to healing in all cases, and spends a good portion of that section on the limits of what talking can actually do.

But I keep comparing that to all the books that say there’s power in using your actual voice, and to the fact that I went for entire stretches without using my voice at all. And my own opinion, which isn’t really grounded in anything other than my spiraling thoughts, is that if the thing that hurt you took your words, then saying things out loud with purpose might be doing more than I’ve actually been giving it credit for (and now all I can think about is that Oprah meme about being silenced… fantastic).

That’s a great question, internal monologue; let’s dissect it for a minute…

If the point of saying the thing out loud were to be heard, then doing it alone at your altar would be pointless because in a solitary practice, there’s nobody else there. At least the blessing at the dinner table had a collection of people around it for acknowledgment.

But if you think about all the stuff we’ve been talking about in terms of feeling it in your body, then saying something out loud and using your actual voice is something that’s not only heard, but felt. You feel the vibration in your chest and on your lips and down the rest of your limbs. You don’t feel it the same way when you just think a sentence. The audience is you… Your body.

Back in July, I wrote about doing the embarrassing thing on purpose and said there’s a lot of power in the voice. The real skill is knowing when to use it and when to STFU. That post was about being heard by other people. This isn’t quite the same and sits at a far more personal level. Most of this isn’t for anyone else but yourself, and it marks a commitment that’s much harder to break than just thinking it silently.

You don’t have to do anything with this. But if you’re doing any of the three practices from this week’s posts, try saying the things out loud instead of reading or thinking them.

And it might feel ridiculous at first. Maybe it feels like your first day in drama class, reciting a part written by someone else. Maybe it feels powerful, like you’re in the midst of reclaiming something that’s been lost. Or maybe you do this anyway, and you’re reading this and thinking, cool, welcome to the party.

But however it is, notice what it’s like to hear your own voice say the meaningful thing out loud to yourself when no one is looking. Notice how it feels on your lips, in your chest, in your ears, and down through the rest of your body.

And if you ever go a whole weekend without talking, call somebody on Monday or go order a coffee in person. Just to check that you still sound like you.

xo,
Chad

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