Know Your Voice, Know Your Power

When I was in grammar school, I remember doing a science experiment with a prism, sunlight and a piece of paper. Our teacher told us that if we used the prism to reflect the sunlight onto the paper at the correct angle, we could harness the energy of the sun and burn a hole in the paper.

That sounded like fun and even magical to grammar school aged me. I remember trying to figure out what the correct angle might be. So many different possibilities existed, and many of them yielded no result. But after a lot of experimentation, I was overjoyed to find the right angle, and watch my prism bend the sun's light and burn a hole in my piece of paper. Once I found that right angle, I could repeat the process over and over again. And I felt like I had just been introduced to a super power!

As I grew into a singer/songwriter and even an author and public speaker, I realized the metaphor of the prism, the paper and the sunlight was a helpful one to explain and illustrate the power of voice. You may ask, "what is voice?" Voice is a very deeply rooted, innate sense of who we are. To connect with that innate sense of self requires not only introspection, but also embodied introspection. If we are not grounded, and feeling and sensing our somatic experience, it is hard to find that deep internal place that might be called essence or soul or spirit. That deep place is where we experience the part of us who just knows who we really are. When we find that place, voice gives us a way to direct our core energy through an expressive pathway and to create a mark in the world, however large or small.

Connecting with that core sense of self is a journey and a process. And even if we find our core sense of self deep in our heart or gut, being able to translate the felt sense into meaningful expression is a whole other process. I believe that human beings are innately creative, and finding a pathway to connect with and express our creative energy is important to health, well-being and joie de vivre. Our society is very verbal, so "voice" is often expected to be experienced and expressed in words. Words are certainly one form of expression for voice, but not the only one. Drawing, painting, taking photographs and other visual arts, dancing, just plain moving, singing, songwriting or any other form of musical composing or even acts of service towards others can also be expressions of voice. All of these forms can be very powerful both for the creator and the receiver.

What is most important is both the energy you direct and how you direct it. When the energy comes from your core, it can feel enlivening to channel it. Opening our creative channel to find an authentic expression of that energy, is a practice that can be enhanced by learning how to become present the moment, grounded in our felt experience and non-judgmental about what will come through, when and how. When an athlete is in the zone, they are likely connected to their felt sense of core energy, and channeling it through their physical art form. Finding our "zone" for living the dailiness of life as well as for creative endeavors helps us feel more powerful and authentic in our actions and interactions.

For women, the power of voice is even wired into our neurobiology. When a woman in stressed out, in order to decompress, she usually needs to write, vent, speak, or express herself in some meaningful way to another human being. If she is not allowed to express, she feels like she will implode. This is the equivalent of the way a man decompresses by sitting on the couch in front of the tv and channel surfing. Different neurobiologies is different genders lead to different needs for destressing and decompression.

Being able to express oneself to decompress and being able to express oneself to create or bring something into being through channeling one's energies are two very important examples of the power of voice.

Being Gentle With Anger

"Anger is the roar of a lion, the cry of a universe longing to be born. It reminds you, when you have forgotten, that the power of life moves through you. That you have a voice."

--Jeff Foster

Anger often gets a bad rap. Sure, when a person acts out thoughtlessly from anger or impulsively without considering the impact of his/her actions on self or other, anger can be harmful personally and relationally. Becoming verbally or physically abusive is not okay. However, we often fail to make distinction between healthy, life promoting angry feelings and destructive expressions that may obscure deeper feelings and experiences underneath the anger.

Anger is a natural response to someone crossing your boundary in a way that is not okay for you, imposing their will on yours, treating you unfairly, breaking an agreement or breaking your trust. In these circumstances, your anger says, "what you are doing is not okay for me." "I matter." "I have rights and needs." Anger allows you to stand in your truth and your worth. And it tells the other person that what they have done is not okay.

If you fail to honor your anger in these kinds of circumstances--pushing it away, labeling it as "bad" or "negative," you do your heart and soul a disservice. On the other hand, if you act out from the anger, you may do yourself a disservice as well, and make the situation worse. Being able to "be with" anger--feeling its intensity, its power, and often the pain underneath it, allows you to stand in the value of your own experience.

Poet Jeff Foster writes, "Feel its pounding, its vibrations, its longing to be acknowledged, held. At its burning core, discover courage. The courage to be yourself. To hold your path fearlessly. To speak for those without a voice…. To roar with love."

Anger can be an affirmation of life. Anger can be an act of love for others or self-love. If we don't care, we don't get anger. What we do with anger is a choice and learning how to respond rather than react is an important skills and lesson.

If we suppress anger, it does not go away. Anger holds a lot of energy. It can eat away at us deep inside. It can haunt us. And it might pop up down the road when something unfair, or confrontational happens again. A woman I know noted that she became like a feral cat as a child to respond to feelings of unfairness and invisibility. Her power was in her anger, like a cat growling and swatting with her claws. So, when something felt unfair, she would get angry and confrontational. There was no room for her hurt and her pain. And sadly, there were things she needed then and now which required vulnerability that she could not access because anger had become her shield. She had never really gotten comforted when she needed comforting. And she had also never been able to express her anger in a way that felt healing, where she got heard. She found herself getting stuff in the growling, when she needed to find comfort. Learning how to hold her anger and pursue what she needed was a critical learning.

Even the worst criminals who act out of anger in unfathomable ways often have a painful context that fuels their unfathomable actions. I read an article in the Boston Globe today about the history of a man who shot a Boston Police Officer. What he did was horrible, for sure. But the author of the article asked, "what kind of life had this 41 year old man had that could have led him to do such a horrible thing?" It turns out that the shooter had a 23 year record with the law, including having been shot 13 times on two occasions himself. One time when he was being arrested, he told the arresting officer, "It's okay, just shoot me." The author of the article noted that this was not a normal response, but instead reflected the level of violence this man lived in and around since childhood. He posed the question: how scary must it have been to live in this kind of environment, and to have a gun in your possession at all times as a first line of self-defense against others with guns?

There is no arguing that shooting the police officer was wrong. And yet, recognizing the humanity in the "criminal" and what led him to behave the way he did is critical. If we found ways to intervene with compassion first, perhaps those most wounded could learn to be more gentle with their anger. And perhaps the difference between being with anger in a healthy embodied way and acting out of anger in a way that is destructive to self and others would be more commonly understood.