The Healthy Voice Notes Podcast

Bella Payne
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Health & Fitness
  • Updated Weekly

Healthy Voice Notes I'm Bella Payne, trauma-informed voice coach and founder of The Healthy Voice. These are my voice notes to you — unscripted reflections on voice, trauma, healing, and the work it takes to express yourself freely. If you've ever felt like your voice gets stuck, shaky, or silent when you need it most — you're in the right place. Subscribe and let's heal together. rawveganbella.substack.com

  1. 6d ago

    The Voice That Made Me Recoil

    Only a few days left in the End of Summer sale for the Voice Liberation Method. Thirty dollars off with code End of Summer. Link here. Something happened to me last week that I did not see coming. I heard a stranger’s voice, and I recoiled. Immediately, physically, before I had a single thought about it. I want you to understand how out of character that is. I work with troubled voices every single day, and judging them is not something I do. I can’t remember the last time I had a thought like that about anyone. So I spent the next hour studying my own reaction instead of just having it, and what I found underneath it was old. Much older than that room. In this episode I tell you what I heard, why my body treated it as a threat, and what it eventually led me back to in my own history. Then I want to hear from you. Ready to work on your voice? Private sessions are open for singers, speakers, and anyone who has been taught that enjoying their own voice is something to be ashamed of. Book a session here. Come sing with us. The Healthy Voice Community is where we practice this together, finding the pleasure in the voice and learning to stay with it when the inner critic shows up. Join us here. Free Beginner’s Guide to Healing Trauma Through Voice Community, Coaching, + MORE. Old Delhi Music harmoniums — Get 5% off The Healthy Voice Writes is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Healthy Voice Writes at rawveganbella.substack.com/subscribe

  2. Aug 29

    Unapologetically You

    I didn’t plan this one. I was sitting down to write a script for a YouTube video about what Dolly Parton did for me growing up, and this came out instead. So this is off the cuff, and it goes somewhere I wasn’t expecting. You don’t really know how much a person shaped you until they die. If they go and you feel nothing, you find out they were never really part of your life. And if they go and you can’t stop thinking about them, and you want to play all their records and watch all their movies, then you know. I’m saving most of what she meant to me for the video. What I want to talk about here is the thing underneath it, which is learning to be unapologetically yourself, and what that has to do with your voice. Because it has everything to do with your voice. When fear takes up space in your body, it builds tension patterns. My physical therapist friend Dr. Jim calls them holding patterns, and I’ve never found a better word for it. Your body organizes itself around what it had to survive. Someone who grew up able to say whatever they wanted, in a house where nothing bad happened when they did, simply doesn’t carry themselves the way the rest of us do. You can see it in how they stand. You can hear it when they speak. And underneath most of those patterns is shame. I talk in this episode about the video of mine that went viral, the one about shame living in the hips, and about the comments it brought in. Some of them were ugly enough to be hard to read. Which taught me something, because talking about shame triggers shame. People react instead of getting curious. I know that, I’ve studied that, and it still gets to me. I have my own history of being criticized and humiliated by people I trusted, so I fixate on the one person in the room who doesn’t like me and forget the hundred who do. I also get honest about something I don’t usually say out loud, which is that I am not a perfect peace activist. I took a class on nonviolent resistance in college and I loved what I learned about Gandhi and Dr. King, and I also couldn’t do it. When someone treated me without dignity, I snapped back. That’s what I learned growing up, and unlearning it has taken most of my adult life. I’m still not finished. Somewhere in the middle of admitting that, I stopped and scanned my own body on the recording, and I tell you exactly what I found. Shoulders up. Upper back tight. Sinuses closing, which is my tell that I’ve been breathing shallow this whole time. You can hear it happening to my voice in real time. That is the whole thesis of this work, demonstrated live and by accident. I also talk about growing up around hypocrisy, about being told as a kid that I was going to hell, about my dad and what I watched him live with, about why I stay suspicious of diagnostic labels, and about the thing I think is genuinely the hardest part of any of this, which is the isolation. The belief that you are the only one. You are not the only one. If you make it to the end of this one, leave a comment. It doesn’t have to be words. An emoji is enough. Just something that says you’re out there too, so the next person who finds this can see they’re in company. Ready to work on your voice? Private sessions are open for singers, speakers, and anyone who has been taught that enjoying their own voice is something to be ashamed of. Book a session here. Come sing with us. The Healthy Voice Community is where we practice this together, finding the pleasure in the voice and learning to stay with it when the inner critic shows up. Join us here. Want to see what The Healthy Voice Community actually looks and feels like? Here’s a short preview. Free Beginner’s Guide to Healing Trauma Through Voice Community, Coaching, + MORE. Old Delhi Music harmoniums — Get 5% off The Healthy Voice Writes is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Healthy Voice Writes at rawveganbella.substack.com/subscribe

  3. Aug 8

    Breaking Through

    This episode started as a conversation about a vocal technique and became something else entirely. The passaggio is the bridge between your chest voice and your head voice, that tricky spot where most untrained singers get stuck, where the voice cracks or seizes up when the notes start climbing. Learning to pass through it with ease rather than force is one of the central things I teach. But this episode is less about the technique and more about the metaphor, because the passaggio describes something that goes far beyond singing. Most people who come to work with me are standing on a bridge. They can sense the other side. They’ve had glimpses of it. But they’re not through yet, and the passage is uncomfortable. I started my healing path in 1996. I was sixteen. I checked out library books on alternative medicine, became a vegetarian, started noticing what fresh food did to my body and my mind. And I kept going, off and on, through breathwork and hot yoga and chanting and sound healing and therapy and journaling and letting go of relationships that were harming me, for the better part three decades before I was clear enough and strong enough to start The Healthy Voice. This episode is the story of that journey. The part I don’t usually tell in full. In this episode: the passaggio as a metaphor for the healing path, what breaking through actually feels like and why it’s often terrifying rather than triumphant, the years I spent cycling through healing and then retreating back into denial, the specific moment in 2008 when something shifted, what it cost me to finally tell the truth, how I lost my ability to perform at exactly the moment I started getting honest, the breathwork sessions that felt like psychedelic experiences, how sound healing eventually gave me my voice back, and why fifteen years is a long time and what I’m trying to do about that. If there’s a reason I say “keep going” at the end of every episode, this is it. Leave a comment and tell me where you are on your path. What does your passaggio look like right now? And if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, a review would mean a lot. It helps this message reach more people. Free Guide: https://bella-payne.kit.com/freeguideAll Services: www.BellaPayne.comJoin The Healthy Voice Community: https://the-healthy-voice-community.circle.so/untitled-pageVoice Liberation Method ($97): https://the-healthy-voice-community.circle.so/untitled-page-1-e9c083Book a private session: https://calendly.com/hello-bellapayne/75Old Delhi Music harmoniums — 5% off: https://bella-payne.kit.com/f76f7a876e Get full access to The Healthy Voice Writes at rawveganbella.substack.com/subscribe

  4. Aug 1

    The Voice You Never Learned to Use

    Most people never think about diction outside of a posh acting class. But it might be the single most practical thing I teach. This episode is about why so many people get exhausted just from ordinary conversation, and why the answer is almost always found in the individual sounds they’re making without realizing it. I was thirty-one when I first encountered speech training. I’d been singing classically for years and assumed the technique transferred automatically to my speaking voice. Then I took a part-time teaching job and lost my voice after two hours of talking. I didn’t know how to speak. I could sing for hours, but speaking drained me. What changed everything was learning to feel my voice instead of just hear it. Your mouth faces forward and your ears face sideways. Of course it’s hard to hear yourself accurately. But you can always feel. In this episode: * Why singing technique doesn’t automatically transfer to the speaking voice * How we learn to speak on autopilot and why that eventually breaks down * Feeling the voice vs. hearing it and why feeling is faster * T and D, the voiced and unvoiced distinction * F and V, the lip placement and the difference voicing makes * The glottal stop, what it is and why American English is full of it * The hard onset, the habit that’s exhausting your voice one vowel at a time * The surfer and the sound current, soft onset explained * Vowels and how to arrive into them instead of attacking them * The crossover between vocal technique and life metaphor Journal Prompt Record yourself speaking for two minutes and listen back for the grip before vowel sounds. Can you feel it? Can you hear it? And then ask yourself where else in your life you might be attacking instead of joining. The wave metaphor has a way of showing up everywhere once you start looking. Free Guide: https://bella-payne.kit.com/freeguide All Services: www.BellaPayne.com Join The Healthy Voice Community: https://the-healthy-voice-community.circle.so/untitled-page Voice Liberation Method ($97): https://the-healthy-voice-community.circle.so/untitled-page-1-e9c083 Book a private session: https://calendly.com/hello-bellapayne/75 Old Delhi Music harmoniums — 5% off: https://bella-payne.kit.com/f76f7a876e Get full access to The Healthy Voice Writes at rawveganbella.substack.com/subscribe

  5. Jul 25

    The Shape You Learned to Hide In — And the One You Performed Instead

    Episode Description: Most voice teachers talk about posture. But not in the way we’ll discuss it today. Not posture in the old-fashioned sense — not balance a book on your head and stand up straight. Posture as a nervous system response. Posture as a language the body speaks when the mouth isn’t allowed to. Posture as one of the most direct and underrecognized ways that chronic threat leaves a permanent mark on the instrument. This episode covers both sides of that — the collapse and the overcorrection — and the conversation that connects them. In this episode: The voice is not in the throat. The fuel of the voice is breath. Breath requires a body that can open. The rib cage, the belly, the upper back — the trapezius, the rhomboids, the muscles between the shoulder blades — all of it must be flexible enough to allow the torso to expand freely. When those structures are compressed by chronic tension, no technique will fully compensate. The posture is the instrument. What happens to the body under chronic threat. When the nervous system perceives danger — physical or emotional, acute or chronic — it responds with a protective posture. Shoulders forward to shield the vital organs. Shoulders rising to protect the neck. Chest closing. Spine curving. Body taking up less space. This is evolutionary intelligence, not weakness. And when the threat is chronic, the protective posture stops being a response and starts being the resting state. You stop knowing you’re hunching because this has simply become the shape of you. The other trauma response — the overcorrection. Not everyone who has experienced chronic threat responds by shrinking. Some stand very straight. Hold themselves deliberately upright. Project something formidable — because they learned that going unnoticed didn’t protect them. This is also a trauma response. It’s just less recognized. Grounded posture rests. Performative uprightness grips — in the lower back, the abdomen, the jaw, the face. And all of that gripping surrounds the voice with tension, turning a potentially warm and resonant sound into something controlled and precise but emotionally absent. Finding the middle. There is a shape between collapsed and performed. It is quieter than both. When you first find it, it often feels like you’ve disappeared — because the performing body has been so loud for so long that neutrality reads as absence. That feeling is the signal that you’ve found something real. The episode includes a simple physical practice to help you find it right now. This week on Substack: Links: * Free Guide: https://bella-payne.kit.com/freeguide * All Services: www.BellaPayne.com * Join The Healthy Voice Community: https://the-healthy-voice-community.circle.so/untitled-page * Voice Liberation Method ($97): https://the-healthy-voice-community.circle.so/untitled-page-1-e9c083 * Book a private session: https://calendly.com/hello-bellapayne/75 * Old Delhi Music harmoniums — 5% off: https://bella-payne.kit.com/f76f7a876e Keep going — because the world needs your unique voice. The Healthy Voice Writes is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Healthy Voice Writes at rawveganbella.substack.com/subscribe

    The Shape You Learned to Hide In — And the One You Performed Instead

  6. Jul 17

    The Voice That Went Into Hiding

    This episode gets personal. I’ve been sitting with this topic for a few weeks — the connection between shame, hypervigilance, and the voice. And today I’m sharing things from my own story that I don’t often talk about publicly. Because I know this is true for a lot of people I work with: the voice went into hiding at some point for reasons that made complete sense at the time. And it never fully came back. I talk about growing up as a Gen X latchkey kid — coming home to an empty house, feeding myself, managing my own emotional life from a very young age. And carrying the shame of that experience alone, convinced it was only mine. I talk about being bullied in seventh grade so severely that I woke up every morning with dread in my chest before I was fully awake. About the night I was leaving church, reached a tipping point, started crying — and opened my mouth to answer someone asking what was wrong. And nothing came out. That image has stayed with me for 23 years of teaching voice. The voice, when shame reaches a certain pitch, can go completely silent. Not because of a character flaw. Because the body is doing exactly what bodies do when the threat of exposure feels like it could destroy you. I talk about the physiology of hiding — what actually happens to the breath, the throat, the rib cage when hypervigilance becomes a chronic baseline state. And what happens when the hiding finally begins to ease. And I talk about the year I went directly toward the thing that terrified me most — massage therapy. How I tried to get my first massage at 18, panicked before the sheet was even removed, and walked out humiliated. And how, years later, studying massage in Los Angeles for a full year — four to five massages given and received every week — became one of the most significant healing experiences of my life. Because singing works the same way. It is not primarily a technical practice. It is a somatic one. Every time you sing, you are asking a body that may have been bracing for years to open, to allow breath to move through tissue that learned a long time ago to stay quiet. And when it does — when the hiding eases enough — the voice is pleasurable. Physically pleasurable. That warmth and fullness that a constricted voice simply cannot produce. It was always available. The body was just waiting. Journal prompts from this episode: * What is the secret your body has been keeping — not from other people, but from yourself? The thing your voice goes tight around. The topic that makes your breath go shallow before you’ve even opened your mouth. * Is there something in your life that terrifies you the way massage terrified me at 18? Something you’ve been avoiding because the first time you tried it, it didn’t go well. What would it mean to go back differently — with more preparation, with better support — and try again? 🎙️ Join The Healthy Voice Community → 📖 Voice Liberation Method → 🏃 Vocal Recess → 📕 THE FIFTH Magazine → 📬 Free Vocal Guide → 📅 1:1 Coaching → In this episode: * The Gen X latchkey kid experience and the shame of believing it was only yours * Seventh grade bullying and the night the voice went completely silent * Why the shame of being bullied felt worse than the bullying itself * The physiology of hiding — breath, throat, and hypervigilance as a baseline state * What happens to the voice when the hiding finally eases * Why the free voice is physically pleasurable — and why nobody told us this * The 18-year-old who panicked on a massage table and walked out humiliated * A full year of massage school in Los Angeles and what it taught the body * Why singing is a somatic practice, not just a technical one * The body updating its understanding — and the voice following Get full access to The Healthy Voice Writes at rawveganbella.substack.com/subscribe

  7. Jul 4

    Nervous System Health — The Missing Piece of Your Wellness Routine

    Episode Description: We talk about cardiovascular health constantly. Everyone knows you’re supposed to do cardio. Everyone knows you should be doing some form of resistance training. We have a collective understanding of what it takes to keep the heart, the lungs, and the muscles healthy. Nobody talks about the nervous system that way. And we are living through a period — a genuinely revolutionary period, in the historical sense of the word — that is putting more pressure on the nervous system than most of us have ever experienced. The cost of living. The media bombardment. The ambient stress of a world in transition. Your nervous system is taking the hit for all of it. This episode is about what to actually do about that. I speak from personal experience. During the pandemic lockdowns, my nervous system went into what I can only describe as a state of collapse — panic attacks lasting an hour, followed by a crash of exhaustion so complete that I had to cancel sessions and spend the rest of the day in bed watching movies just to get through. That experience sent me deep into research on nervous system health, nutrition, and what it actually takes to keep the electrical highways of the body running smoothly. In this episode we cover: Why the nervous system deserves the same intentional care we give the cardiovascular and muscular systems — and why most of us have never thought about it this way. The digestion-energy connection — why your body prioritizes digestion above everything else, and what happens to your mind, your mood, and your nervous system when digestion is inefficient. This is the foundation everything else is built on. Exercise for the high-strung nervous system — why walking isn’t always enough, why intense cardio and weight resistance are particularly important for anxiety-prone people, and why I recently started running with a weighted vest once a week. The hydration framework — how to think about food in terms of water content, which cooking methods keep water intact, and why french fries are one of the worst things you can eat if your nervous system is already dysregulated. Coffee — why I finally gave it up and how after three and a half weeks of freedom I can already feel the difference in my voice, my sinuses, and my mornings. What it does to cortisol, to the voice, and to the nervous system. And what I switched to instead. Dairy, fried foods, sugar, and alcohol — the four things most worth eliminating or dramatically reducing if you are dealing with anxiety, panic, depression, or flashbacks. Specific substitutes for each. B vitamins and adaptogenic herbs — why supplementing makes sense when you’re dealing with a compromised nervous system, and my current favorites including cacao, lion’s mane, and ashwagandha (with a caveat on the last one — do your research). Singing as nervous system medicine — why voice work is one of the most direct tools available for regulating the nervous system, and why I’ll always come back to it as the foundation of this work. Links: * Free Beginner’s Guide to Healing Trauma Through Voice: * Join The Healthy Voice Community * Voice Liberation Method ($97) * Vocal Recess archive * Book a private session * Old Delhi Music harmoniums — 5% off Leave a comment: What do you do to protect your nervous system? And is there anything you’ve given up — coffee, sugar, alcohol — that made a noticeable difference? I’d love to know what’s worked for you. Keep going — because the world needs your unique voice. The Healthy Voice Writes is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Healthy Voice Writes at rawveganbella.substack.com/subscribe

    Nervous System Health — The Missing Piece of Your Wellness Routine

  8. Jun 27

    The Quiet Breakup

    Episode Description: I watched the film Gaslight for the first time last night. And it was hard — not just as a movie, but as a mirror. I didn’t learn the term gaslighting until about five years ago. Before that, I just called it what it was: lying and manipulation. Once I saw the film, the term made more sense — but I still prefer the word perspecticide: the murder of someone’s perspective. That’s what gaslighting actually is, and I think we should call it what it is. This episode is about something I’ve been thinking about for a long time: how to end relationships with difficult, manipulative people without giving them another opportunity to use your words against you. I call it the quiet breakup. In this episode I share two specific stories from my own life — two newer friendships where I started to recognize the familiar patterns I’d spent decades untangling from more significant relationships. The red flags. The boundary crossings. The moment I realized I was in it again. And what I did differently this time. We go into: The human magnet syndrome — why certain people seem to magnetically attract difficult, manipulative personalities, and what’s actually at the root of it. Ross Rosenberg’s work on this is worth looking into if this resonates with you. Why talking doesn’t work with this personality type. Every time I tried to address a boundary crossing diplomatically with a difficult person, I ended up apologizing for it. Understanding why that happens is part of the healing. What my therapist taught me that changed everything: learning to be okay with not understanding why someone does what they do. Sometimes not understanding is a gift. The three-strikes rule — and why I stopped making exceptions after the first red flag. The specific strategy I used in both situations: emotionally neutral, dignified, no door left open for manipulation. What that looked and felt like in practice. How hard it actually was, and why I did it anyway. Why the less you say to a difficult person, the better off you are. And why opening a conversation — even a compassionate, well-intentioned one — is an invitation for the chaos to start again. This episode is paired with two Substack articles from this week: one on managing chronic sinus conditions as a singer, and one on PTSD symptoms and how I’ve learned to build a life I’m genuinely proud of despite them. Links in the description. Leave a comment: Have you ever done a quiet breakup? Have you tried confronting a difficult person and had it backfire? I’d love to hear your experience — and which approach you think works better. Links: * Voice journaling YouTube video: * Sinus article on Substack: www.thehealthyvoicewrites.com * PTSD article on Substack: www.thehealthyvoicewrites.com * Join The Healthy Voice Community: https://the-healthy-voice-community.circle.so/untitled-page * Voice Liberation Method ($97): https://the-healthy-voice-community.circle.so/untitled-page-1-e9c083 * Vocal Recess archive: https://the-healthy-voice-community.circle.so/untitled-page * Book a private session: https://calendly.com/hello-bellapayne/75 * Free Guide to Healing Trauma Through the Voice: https://bella-payne.kit.com/freeguide Keep going — because the world desperately needs your unique voice. The Healthy Voice Writes is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Healthy Voice Writes at rawveganbella.substack.com/subscribe

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About

Healthy Voice Notes I'm Bella Payne, trauma-informed voice coach and founder of The Healthy Voice. These are my voice notes to you — unscripted reflections on voice, trauma, healing, and the work it takes to express yourself freely. If you've ever felt like your voice gets stuck, shaky, or silent when you need it most — you're in the right place. Subscribe and let's heal together. rawveganbella.substack.com

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