E010 - How to unblock your throat chakra

Hello, friend 

In today's episode we're going to be investigating the throat chakra, and more specifically, about how it is that one can go from having an open, clear beautiful voice as a young person, as a little child or baby, into emerging as an adult with blocks and the inability to sing and or speak with freedom.  Watch the video, or read about it in the blog, posted below: 

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Right. Let's go back to that little person. So how does a freely expressing child, baby or young person, who cries when they need to, and laughs when they need to, and expresses completely freely... How do they go from there to becoming an adult, with self-expression blocks, who is shy to speak or sing, or afraid of standing up in front of other human beings, or afraid of making a joke at a party, or afraid of saying yes or no in relationships, or afraid of expressing boundaries and healthy anger, and so on. 

To answer that, we really have to begin by looking at original wounding. What I mean by this is - as you know, real life happens to us, even or especially, when we're young and we become conditioned through the events that take place when we are young and small people, in and around our families. And this can take so many forms. In this episode we'll use the example of a little girl with, let's say, a very domineering or even potentially violent or abusive father. And so in this particular case it will be very unsafe to express herself as she's growing up. She may observe fear in her mother, and she will be mirroring and learning from mother and father as she is absorbing everything from them as a tiny person. And very quickly she'll learn that it's very unsafe, in fact her entire life depends on keeping her mouth shut. Now, you may have subtler versions of this from your childhood where love is withdrawn when we express ourselves or when we cry too much. So an example might be where as a tiny person, if we are ignored or shut down when we cry, a small person can eventually come to the conclusion that it makes no difference whether they make sound or not, and makes no difference whether they express themselves or not. There are so many different variations of this. And this includes situations of neglect, domestic violence, sexual abuse, having to keep secrets in the family, through to parents who have mental health issues or trauma of their own, all of these can affect a child. It even goes as far as intergenerational trauma, since current research clearly shows that trauma from 5 generations or more may be encoded into our DNA and behaviours. 

So once that original wounding starts to happen, then as the little person is growing up, these stories will keep being affirmed, because, let's just say that that girl has developed a deep sensitivity that if she speaks up, that she's going to be rejected or even hurt. She might then have experiences at school where all it takes is one bullying schoolyard incident for her to speak out freely, where she is shamed and rejected and bam it'll go straight back to that original wound, and it will deeply affirm that belief system that it's not safe. And then she will gather increasing experiences over time that affirm that, because she's always going to be scanning, and on the lookout for any data that says she’s not safe. She's now got what you could call protector parts on high alert, eternally on the lookout, trying to keep her safe, but actually also keeping her stuck. 

So she develops these beliefs about her self expression that say, “I can't express myself”, and “it's not safe to speak” or “I am bad at speaking”, “I am a bad singer”, and so on. And then these remain lodged deep inside her being, inside her unconscious being, so she starts developing a life that is designed to keep her safe, and she chooses all kinds of behaviors that will not expose her to the danger of rejection or shaming or or whatever it is that comes up, and was set up originally. So she may choose to avoid work and social circumstances with groups of people, or she may stop singing joyfully for her whole life, or she may choose relationships that don't serve her, because there's kind of a paradox in this: on the one hand, she's going to be actively choosing a life designed to keep her safe. But on the other hand - and the paradox is here - she probably also keeps choosing unsafe relationships or putting herself in situations that make her feel profoundly unsafe. And this is the one of the paradoxes of the wounding is that often we're actually attracted to situations that would push us to resolve the wounding, but also potentially traumatize us and that's a really deep subject, maybe for another time. 

So we now have this human being as an adult with her original wounding and patterning leading to an “I am this” identity, and that belief is fully in place, and now she is operating like this as if this is who she is, and this is who I will be forever, and I'm going to set up my whole life around this. And she spends a lifetime avoiding being shamed or rejected or called out or embarrassed or seen as less than, and by then a behavioral pattern that exists in her, and it has consequences. 

So, what happens with a voice over time is that she develops low speaking and singing skills and has really low confidence in this area. If it's a singing voice that was shut down as a small person, her musculature is weak, she lacks dexterity and flexibility in her voice, and she's got incredible constriction from having used it in the same shut-down way her whole life. And if it is a speaking voice that is afraid of being in public, then she hasn't developed confidence in her public speaking skills because she's spent her whole life avoiding being in front of people. Either way, if you compare her to a little child that developed those skills, early and developed confidence, the confident child would speak or sing in front of people for their whole life. And that means year after year after year, developing the behavioral and neurological and other skillsets to do this with confidence. But she is now 25-35-45-55-65-75 years old, and she's got very low confidence and very low skills, because she's been avoiding this for her whole life. So what do we do when we've got someone who's got a blocked Throat Chakra and blocked self expression? What do we do if she wants to change this, and she's dedicated to changing this?

This is a beautiful thing. This is a beautiful thing and this is how the work goes. 

So one of the first places to begin to turn this around, is to work at the behavioural level, growing skillsets and the confidence. All of the speaking and self expression skills and singing skills can be learned. And, as we turn that around by learning those skills and undoing the lie of “I can’t”. So she begins to learn how to speak and sing, and she begins to learn how to speak from a deeper, more connected, less fearful, more authentic and even playful place inside herself and she turns around the many years of shutdown. She begins to turn it around at the behavioral level, where she can learn to speak and sing, slowly but surely in little increments with confidence and learn to speak in front of people and be fluent and authentic, or learn how to sing and be confident and joyful, or if she's on the other end of the scale and she's one of those people who tends to take over the space and can be “too much” with her voice and maybe too angry, too vocal and then gets rejected because of that. She then learns the skills to regulate her voice and sit more authentically in her being. And so you turn it around at the level of behavior and she grows in confidence in technical ability, and she gets to catch up the years of shut down. 

Let's all take a deep breath. 

And she learns that it is safe. And she reclaims her voice. And she shifts the belief system in her that “I am that”, “I am always going to be the shutdown voice” and “I am always going to be this insecure around other human beings” into “I'm learning and I'm growing”, and she’s tapping into her brain’s incredible neuroplasticity. In other words, the ability of her brain to change and to rewire. 

And at the deepest level, then she is also on a quest to meet and heal the original wounding. So that's the deepest, longest portion of it. But when we work we still aim to identify and begin to meet, and hug if you like these portions of us that got shut down, because often we can remember some of it and begin to work on the hurts directly. But sometimes I just want to say, some people can't remember what happened. It happened before conscious memory, and that needs a special kind of work to investigate and discover - and very kindly and gently and with heart, and really safe container - to do the work to heal that original wounding. 

So, going through all of this, we then are in a position to develop an empowered authentic voice, a conscious and connected voice, an embodied and beautiful voice, or sometimes beautiful because we also give ourselves the space to be ugly and make mistakes, but always, always trying, growing and moving forward. 

Early in my healing journey I was told a saying “as the wound, so is the gift”. In other words, where I'm wounded could be where some of my greatest gifts lie. So maybe at the end of it, she can be a gift to the world with her voice and everything that she's been bottling and holding in for all that time emerges out into the world and can be a gift to all of us. And she can express herself with freedom, and finds joy and confidence in her voice.

So - Thank you so much for sharing in this work and message with me.

Please let me know what you felt and thought while listening to this. Drop a comment below sharing where you are and how your voice is. Please subscribe for more, and as you can see there are other videos in the series. Please do watch them. 

Much love and have a beautiful day wherever you are in this world. May you and your family be healthy. 

Jeremy