What if your true voice–the one that represents your deepest truth and your most spectacular gifts–sounded like this flower looks?
I think it does. The question is, how do we remember how to bring out that true voice and give it to the world?
After all, if we don’t, our deepest message–which is what Angeles Arrien calls our personal medicine–could be lost to the world forever.
I just finished faciliating a luncheon seminar with an intimate group of 8 women seated around a table at one of Tucson’s loveliest resorts. This Feast for the Feminine Soul session was titled “Nourishing Your Authentic Voice.” So we discussed all the aspects of what the song is we want to sing, what stops us from singing it, and what might happen to us and to the world if we belted it out with abandon.
After all, we mused, how do birds know their songs? Well, it sure as hell isn’t because they think about it, try to figure it out, consider how it will affect other birds, or decide what they have to sing isn’t worthwhile. Their song is simply part of them, inseparable from their being– as the vibrant color of the flower in the photograph is inseparable from its petals.
We thought about the fears of singing out, and how they are related to being rejected or oppressed or made foolish or feeling unworthy, and decided that it’s true that these fears are part of being human. But as women leaders, we also know that we are, as the Dalai Lama pointed out recently, the ones who will save the world. And so the time’s up for those old fears. We long to move past them, to trust our voices. After all our lyrics are all about justice and love and compassion and all those other good things we want for ourselves and for the world.
We’re going to sing in the shower, in the grocery store, in our offices and in our bedrooms and board rooms. We want to belt out messages of truth and beauty and clarity, and we have faith that these songs will reverberate to places we cannot even imagine.
And you? What do you long to sing? What messages do you hope to contribute to the world? And if you spoke them with the deepest, truest voice within you, without false pride or false fear or apology, what might be the results? Could it be that you might change your loved ones in positive ways? Might you inspire others? Might you feel fulfilled and relieved from the freedom of being your real self?
Sing out and let us hear your voice.
