Even though I’ve sung a lot in my life including singing duets and rounds with my brother, Howdy, who, although currently is the President of a popular men’s choral group in Jacksonville, FL called “Big Orange chorus” has been singing pretty much all his life, it’s only been in the last few weeks that I had the realization of just how sensitive I am to the sound of people’s voices.

My brother Howdy is on the left and his son, my nephew, Howdy III is on the far right

Two recent incidents come to mind.  I won’t link you to either one for sake of anonymity for  the people involved so perhaps you can take my realization and apply it to your own interactions and see what you hear in the voices in your daily life.  The first example is a female DJ who I would guess is in her 30’s. Her voice grates on my nerves and she has never done anything in her DJ duties that has ever indicated that she is anything but the nicest of humans.  But I hear in her voice an ego and almost a self-assured mocking  that incites me to want to knock her off her block.  I have no idea if my judgement from listening to her voice is correct; however, I do realize that just her voice sets my nerves on edge.

The second example is a person who I dearly love who has only recently found the inner strength to stand up on their own two feet and declare their place in the world.  When this person talks, their voice sounds as if there might be polyps on their vocal chords. And there might be, I don’t know, but what I’m basing the sound of their voice on is that when this person speaks their voice flows for just the first sentence or two and then their voice sounds as if their words are being funneled through a cheese grater. The voice seems to stop flowing the minute this person realizes they feel insecure and are being heard!

I’ve written before about “toning” with your voice for healing.  I am by no means a professional “toner”, but I have found toning to really help me. Especially if I am stuck and/or can’t quite put my finger on what I am feeling.  When I first began, I used to sit crossed legged in our guest room and let out sounds from low notes to high notes moving my voice/sound from my root chakra and on upwards to the highest note I could sound out.  I could actually feel when my voice/sound would catch where the feeling was stuck and then I’d focus on those notes until the notes became unstuck. Be careful when doing this around a cat or dog friend who is well-connected to you.  My cat Data used to run across the room when I began toning, run up my lap and touch my lips with her paw (sheathed of course!).

We humans are such animals!! I believe the more we accept this about ourselves, the more we can recognize and learn about the natural gifts we have inside.  I mean, it makes sense to me that our hearing can work for us well beyond just hearing the sound.  I remember when I began working in the fast-paced publishing environment “hearing” the shhh-shhh sound of some of the words that the Texan Ad execs (specifically the men) would pepper throughout their conversation with others, especially when they were trying to make a sale.  There was a sound in their voices that would often conjure up images of fine leather plush seats, smooth whiskey poured neat and potent cigar or pipe smoke wafting up and around a bent cowboy hat.

Maybe my sensitivity to voice is one of the reasons that I don’t like to listen to myself in interviews because I can “hear” what I was feeling and more times than not, I really prefer not to be that obvious!

And of course what is my favorite DJ on KUTX.org, John Aillee playing right now as I am blogging about voice and toning?? None other than the wonderful Craig Hella Johnson’s Conspirare singing Joby Talbot’s “Path of Miracles” which starts off with what sounds like Toning and/or Trance Singing!  Love it when everything moves in sync!  Makes me believe I’m right on target writing about the voice.

So…..why don’t you play with this?  If not with your own voice then wake up to the sounds in the voices all around you.  What are the sounds of life telling you?

I laugh at myself a lot.  Bless my little heart.  I must have made a really strong pact with the Universe to be authentic because it seems like it doesn’t give me one inch to fake it til I make it most of the time.  Take my car (no, please, really take it!) it’s a good little car considering it was born in 1999 and has over 189K miles on it. And it is sporty with a little engine that always does.  But the convertible top has had to be replaced and bless their little hearts, my husband and brother replaced the top themselves (original DIY!) leaving just enough of a gap in one side where the top connects to the windshield that when it rains, drops get in and collect.  The first morning after a rain when I realized this, I was backing up our driveway headed to a coaching appointment and the inside of my car sounded like I was at the beach with the waves gently wafting on the beach.   But I wasn’t at the beach, I was in Austin, Texas and so I looked down at my floorboard to discover that over an inch of water had collected in the floorboard of my car.

Of course, I chose to keep my coaching appointment and so on the 20 minute drive had the opportunity to not let the crazy reality of driving up in a car full of water effect the delivery of career coaching for the client.  She never knew!

This morning as I sit in my pjs keeping my commitment to daily blogging for this year, I’m reminded that many of us are in similar disparate situations.  Especially us writers who work from our home offices.  Somewhere in here there’s a mirror image of how we act outwardly differently then we feel inside and in most professional instances, that is good.  Even so, it’s important for us to remember to acknowledge what it is that we’re feeling inside too and not let it get lost.  One of my good friends, I’ll call her “N”, exposed her daily wearing of pajama jeans to her blog readers during a time of intense depression and change after a divorce.  I don’t have the stats to support how much pajama jeans stocks went up after N’s sharing, but I’m betting they did.  Who wouldn’t want to be comfy and look good without notice when going through a dark period of their lives?! A whole lot of us!  And we were all grateful that N had the courage to let us know about her find and her process through the mucky part of her life.

Not sure how I’ll be able to weave the broken zippered sweat shirt jacket that I’m wearing over my pjs this morning, but I know I will and that sharing this part of who I am keeps me humble (and cuts down on the wear and tear of my good clothes too!).  Don’t hate me because I’m comfortable!

And the Universe continues to laugh at and with me! After decades of being shown in numerous ways that I am but “one of many”, yet wanting so badly to be considered awesomely unique,  I find myself smack dab in the middle of the baby boomer generation.  I’ve survived and thrived in life just long enough to know how to turn a fact that I have to accept, into a palatable form, by re-defining definitions to suit my mind and heart.  For instance, yes I am a baby boomer and yes, I am right in the middle of the generation AND we are a generation of all kinds of unique minds and hearts.  The older I get, the more I find this definition to be true.

I believe that many of us baby boomers also think (and would secretly be like) the Millennial Generation if we were brave enough to let ourselves be ourselves.  Like Jenny Lawson, The Bloggess, for example.  Jenny didn’t grow up with the likes of Emily Post or Miss  Manners breathing down her neck like most of us BBs (though I think Jenny would appreciate Miss Manners for her snide wit) so one/we could say that she is automatically freer to say and be who she is BUT if truth be told, I think many of us bbs would be just as outspoken as Jenny if fear wasn’t part of the DNA sequence of our generation.  This blog for this year (Raving Boomer) is my attempt to break through our BB structure and be a voice in the wind for us all….like Abbie did for many of us before our thirties.

In my younger days, I always felt so different from everybody else and then I discovered that a.) most of us felt or feel different from everybody else and b.) in some of the situations that I found myself in like a conservative boarding school that was military for the guys—I was indeed very different from everybody else!  If I was good at math or at least statistics I’d be able to whip out some stats that support the sheer number of people in my generation that all feel different, but since I’m not good at math (but believe EVERYTHING can be explained mathematically) I’ll just leave it to you, the reader, to decide if you relate to what I blog about.  And please jump in with your two cents if for no other reason then to encourage me to show more of my skin!