My Own Voice

What’s the trait you value most about yourself?

When my children were young, I would read to them most nights before bed. Often children’s stories have multiple characters, and so I would attempt to create appropriate voices for members of the Berenstain Bear family or Junie B Jones or any of children’s favorites. Almost without fail when I was creating these voices, one of the kids would speak up, saying, “Use your ‘normal voice,’ Dad.” Sometimes it was a game to randomly throw in a “non-normal” voice to which they would respond with their “normal-voice” request.

I was pondering Voice today. Not the audible, vocal-chord produced voice so much as the deep inner voice. I was thinking about learning to speak with my own voice.

My life, not that unlike anyone else’s life, has been at least partially about learning to speak with a “pleasing voice,” so others would want to hear me and respond. Over a lifetime, that voice became my normal-ized voice. Wanting to be heard and listened to, I have spoken in ways that “offend-the-fewest and please the most.” Beginning in childhood I learned to please caregivers/parents; then, I learned to please other adults and then peers; being personally religious, I also tried to bend my voice to please God as I imagined God to be. Fr. Thomas Keating called this voice/person we create the “self-created self.” It is a conglomeration of faces and voices that keep us “fitting in” and “safe.”

Ten years ago, I began a contemplative practice. I would not have called it that at the time; it was just adding daily meditation and reading. Over time, other practices were added, my “style” of meditation changed, and some practices fell away. Meditation, the practice of sitting in Silence with attention, then later with intention, quieted my mind and emotions so that what is Real came more into focus. I am more than all this running-around-doing-stuff; I am not the thoughts and feelings that pop in and out of me. Neither are you.

Being present in Silence allows for the subtle voices deep within and beyond to rise and be heard: the voice of nature, the voice of Silence, the “still, small voice.” As I began to glimpse the Real more clearly and often, I also began to recognize My Voice. Bearing the image of the Divine means The Divine Voice is reflected in the unique image I bear. That reflection is “My” Voice.

As I awaken more to this inner voice, I begin to learn to “normalize” this voice as my own. I learn to speak what arises from Silence. I unlearn the habit of saying what I imagine someone would like me to say. That normal voice I used most of my life is a voice I only imagined was my voice.

I am thankful to that self-created self for bringing me to this place in my life; that self-created voice was simply doing its best to keep me alive by making as few waves as possible. “Thank you, self-created voice of my imagination, for all you did for me.” Using that protective pattern, the self-created self kept me alive to adulthood.

These days, I am unlearning and re-learning how to speak. It is not about measuring an imagined audience and saying what I hope “they” want to hear. I have mastered that skill! “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, thought like a child, reasoned like a child. Now that I have become an [adult], I [release from service] childish things.” I am learning to speak from an inner place. It was that inner voice who gave me the Truth by which I new seek to live, spoken in My Voice:

You [everyone and everything] is infinitely precious and unconditionally loved for the gift you [everyone and everything] already are.

-My Voice

May you find the Voice that reflects the image you bear! For my part, I will keep listening, trying and failing, and listening again. I am thankful for my own voice.