What does it take to find your authentic voice and to stay in it?
Along my journey of awakening, I found a fragmented version of myself called “Dead Ted”. For years I lived an emotionally dead life. Dying emotionally will, eventually, drag the physical body with it. At the bottom of my dark night of the soul, I remember hoping only that I would live longer than my mother (merely as a kindness to her).
Later, as I began to excavate the layers, barricades and numbness from around my heart, immense feelings of joy and playfulness emerged. I reconnected with my passion for living.
“Dead Ted” was a stoic, unemotional, shell of a man who mimicked other men looked up to in childhood. He was always ready for physical confrontation (though it never came) and never available for true heart-to-heart connections. The role of “Dead Ted” actually made life easier. He didn’t have to be vulnerable. He didn’t have to take emotional risks. He didn’t have to experience disappointment or even joy, for that matter.
Peeling away “Dead Ted” from my heart and from my façade, revealed what about it made life seem easier.
I was born a highly empathic and intuitive baby. Aren’t we all? Quickly that baby learned that something was wrong with the world. Either people around me were dishonest, unhappy and in deep emotional pain or else the baby had it all wrong. The logical choice for baby Teddy was that the adults had it all together and I had it all wrong. For an infant, the adults are gods; simple as that. Clearly, my intuition, empathy, and “knowing” were messed up.
In addition, my game in childhood was to be the “good little boy”. When you are “good” then your parents will love you. Get good grades, do what you are told, and learn about life from the adults.
The end result of all this was to think, act and speak the way that I thought would best be rewarded with the love of my parents.
Years later, as an adult, “Dead Ted” was a handy way to act because I didn’t truly know my own feelings or my own thoughts. In particular, I did not know my own voice. Being dead was a convenient way to cover over the fact that I didn’t know where my authentic center was and I might be afraid to look. Better just to stay focused on my goals and make good money. Everybody can agree with that.
On the journey of awakening and reconnecting with my heart, I discovered that I spoke with a constricted voice much of the time. I still knew how to do a stern, scary voice as “Dead Ted”. But I really had no idea how to do a grounded, congruent, powerful voice while maintaining open heart vulnerability and loving connection with other people. No idea how.
The journey of awakening led me to begin exploring what it means to be a congruent human being. What does it take to have your head, heart and voice all totally in alignment; acting as a single, unified being? How do you do that?
I had known what it means to be fragmented. You know how, maybe, your head wants to be “secure” by making a lot of money and your heart wants to be a hip-hop street dancer; if that is what it wants. Or, maybe, you don’t pursue the woman of your dreams but you find yourself in a decades long marriage that “made a lot of good financial sense”.
So, what does it take to find your authentic voice and stay in it? First, you have to uncover it. You have to find out who is doing the speaking now. Is it a “cute” voice speaking? Or a resigned one? Is it a “victim” talking? Ever try the “nice guy” rap? Is there a thin, shiny veneer covering up rage?
If you’re like me, underneath any pretend voice or act is probably a whole lot of fear. But you can’t see it until you start digging around down there. Maybe you once decided that “I am not good enough”. So you keep trying to prove that “I am good enough” but it is always on top of “I am not good enough”. Or maybe its “hopeless”. How about “shame” and “guilt”? Those are some pretty deep wells to uncover.
If you can get yourself to the place of the ultimate observer and you can hear “who” it is that’s doing the talking when you are speaking……then you are getting somewhere. Once you can hear your voice clearly for what it is, then you can hear whether it is your true, authentic voice in complete alignment with every cell in your body. Or if there is a fractured part of you doing the talking.
