E023 - Speak from Presence

Hello, welcome to another blog. This one is about Speaking from Presence. It questions WHERE we are speaking FROM, rather than what we are saying.

Watch the video below, or enjoy the written version. 

Hi.

So right now, you and I are both sitting, covered in rubber bands, all around our arms, all around our mouths, all around our throats, all over our body we're covered in these thick elastic, rubber bands, keeping us constricted and conditioned. They govern all my words. They govern all my actions and yours too.

So what is it to set a voice free? What is it to de-condition and re-wild a voice? I'm gonna tell you, but before we go any further, how about you just head down to the little subscribe thing down there and click it and it'll go , and then we can be friends on YouTube.

Okay, so we are covered in rubber bands of conditioning. And so the thing is, is even when we were tiny, before we had words, as we began to learn them, essentially in those words, we learnt our culture and we learnt how to be. And from our parents and our families, we learnt all the conditioning about what to say, and what not to say, and when to say it. And so our voices get conditioned.

And so you might have one of those voices that's just too much. You are a blurter and you learnt that in your home environment. Or you might be the too little voice, the shutdown voice, the, "I can't get it out. "You'll never know how I really feel, "because it just doesn't come out of my mouth. "You'll know through my passive aggressive behavior." So you might have either of these voices and for sure this was learnt back in those times as a child. Developmental learning, what a thing!

So if my voice is caught up in rubber bands, and when I need to sing, or when I need to speak in front of a whole bunch of people, I feel this constriction, what am I to do? You can hear how it's affecting my voice, not very pleasant doing this, but that ouchie is what a lot of voices go through every day. And how do we begin to release that?

Well, some of it is through practices, just humming or doing mantra work . Developing a quiet, personal relationship with the voice. Others are physical exercises. You wouldn't believe just how much tension, tension lies just in the musculature of the neck as you move it. And so there are many different ways to release a voice. Another huge aspect is to go back and really investigate what happened to our voice when we were small and where all of those patterns came from, so we can begin to then do the work of dismantling them. And then one can do pretty deep work using EMDR, with a psychologist or tapping, or a number of different techniques for releasing core vocal wounds.

Because like with everything it's important to honor how and where we are, but we can also transform and voices change. Voices can grow in power, and love, and confidence, and fluidity, and learn to yeah, to flow. So many processes to release. I speak in another episode about doing humming practice. I just really suggest that as a great way to start the day. I start that way every day.

Now, another thing about getting out of constriction and out of the old patterns with a voice is to do what I call, "Get out of the TV." So what that means is you're watching me like a TV, and you might have given over your attention or your power into the TV of me. So in other words, you're kind of, you're watching the TV and you've lost your critical faculties or rather lost your grounding. It may be that you're experiencing it in the opposite way, where you're sitting back and kind of evaluating, and you're sort of up in your head, mental noting, but the idea is to sit in balance so that on the one hand, you can connect with me and really open up, on the other hand, you're not in my space, or in my face or out of yourself. And this is the same thing we can do in conversation. Don't be so in the story of them, that you're just, are you just feeding on the story and you're no longer at home. Or you're so out of the conversation that you're not really present. It's very difficult to feel safe with somebody who sits out of a conversation like this. It's also quite hard to feel safe with somebody who's completely in your business. Like I'm all over your business and I'm gonna tell you how to be, and I'm gonna fix all your stuff, and aren't you lucky?

Sitting in balance, inside the body, grounded in the being. And one of the best ways to level this balance up, is to do what Loch Kelly calls the 18 inch drop from the head to the heart. So allowing your awareness to essentially center in the heart, it's a little bit more connected. Well, it's a whole lot more connected. These are the eyes of the heart, as I think St. Augustine described it, or Oculus Cordes, or talking, and expressing, and being in heart mind with another. So hanging out in heart-mind with another, very difficult to do if you're in there or out there, but it's a little easier to do here, grounded in the body, settled in the heart.

And if you really, really want to level it up, awaken spacious at the same time. Try and practice this now. It's not about information, what I'm showing right now. I'm trying to share the feeling of it. Can you feel your feet and the lower half of your body?

Can you drop your awareness so that it's centered primarily in the heart? What about doing a little softening into the emotional body? Just there, that little feeling. Allowing that, a sense of almost happy, sad into the heart connection. How does this feel? Did it work for you? Do you do this? If you'd like to share in the conversation, drop a comment below. Love to know how this sits for you. Now we're just hanging out, without really a purpose.