EP241: Healing Your Voice and Speaking Your Truth With Lydia McClain
Today we are exploring the concept of speaking our needs and rewiring and awakening the throat chakra.
I met Lydia about 2 years ago, I felt called to invite a breathwork facilitator into my space, and somehow there she was on my Instagram. We have been connecting, and opening up to each other, and building a friendship since then.
I hope you all enjoy this conversation as much as we did!
Lydia: Only in the past 6 months have I claimed chakra healing as my wheelhouse. All healing work is chakra work. For anyone who is new to chakras, these are the subtle energies of the body. We cannot see them, but we feel them. They govern everything in our lives. Whenever we experience ourselves as a soul, at least for me, I experience myself as a chakra system. When our chakras are not aligned...we know it. Things feel stuck or out of balance, or we are moving backwards in our growth and healing. When things are aligned, it's like we are moving forward without even knowing or realizing. We all have the power to activate and heal our chakra energies. It is really hard to harness that energy ourselves and be in an environment where we can attune to that.
Lydia: I grew up professionally singing, I had a voice lesson as a teenager (16/17) and heard about throat chakra but was really not into spirituality at that point but my teacher said “I think you have some blockage”. My aunt was a reiki master and tried to get me involved but I was not ready but a seed was planted. So much of my healing journey has been about working through my throat chakra and reclaiming my voice beyond singing. I was identified by my pretty singing voice but engaged in a lot of self-censorship and self-silencing, trying to be the peacemaker in a family of addiction and abuse. I had to learn to speak up, assert my need and express myself, speaking my truth. For me this has been about allowing myself to be in that divine feminine receivership energy.
Lauren: I am working with cannabis today and am just in awe of the spiritual element of everything we are talking about today. So much of what you’re sharing really resonates with me. I feel like many lightworkers are faced with similar patterns and tendencies of attraction, and also the same patterns of learning how to effectively use our throat and speak our truth. In this season of my life I am really learning how to build a deeper relationship with my root energy, but more importantly creating the safety, and then channeling through what needs to be said to make that happen. For a long time, even with the voice I use to talk to myself I want safety and constantly talk about all the reasons why I am not safe. In this study I am actually speaking my safety to myself and communicating with the people in my life “I need more rooted energy here and in order to do that I cannot meet this expectation. I can't show up for this, or I have to do this differently.”
Lydia: Our voice is our vehicle to express our needs at any given moment. I have really been deepening into this concept of co-creating safety. How can I create a safe space for myself to fully express myself. We always have to start from the root, our primal instinct. My teacher always says we are both animal and angel, we cannot override that primal instinct, it is who we are and it is here to ultimately keep us safe. By tapping into what our basic animalistic needs are first, then we can build that foundation to speak our truth. If we don’t build that safety first we speak our truth from a trauma response and not in a clear way. Safety is the foundation for everything.
Lauren: At my Sedona retreat, I had a lot of friends as facilitators in this space and I brought in one of my sisters to help me assist and on day one I was like “I love her so much but this is not right, she is not in alignment for this but I know who is'' and I had to communicate that to her knowing it would affect her expected revenue, and I had to speak my truth. I could feel it bubbling up, I was so anxious, but it was very beautiful. Maybe we can talk a bit about your thoughts and feelings on what does that journey look like of building that safety to speak your truth to build your business and your empire.
Lydia: What I hear nervous system 101. This is about how do I co-regulate my own nervous system, what are the tools to feel safe going live on Instagram, doing a podcast, showing up without notes. For myself, the big thing that got me into healing work was chronic, debilitating performance anxiety. On stage I had no problem but before, I felt like I had to let myself have a full panic attack before I could perform, it was exhausting. It took away my sleep, my sanity, I felt like I was trapped in my body and I had no choice but to surrender to anxiety. What I came to realize is it didn't matter how many mantras I told myself, how much I practiced my singing, there was something not lining up. I started getting into practices that address the subconscious mind, it doesn't matter if we think something if our body is on a different page, the body will always win. We can get body and mind on the same page, coexisting, but we can’t bypass the body. Our body is always in the present moment. I started with the general introduction; yoga, meditation, reiki, some hypnotherapy, and the second I got introduced to breathwork my whole body lit up and I felt for the first time I had a vehicle to really release all that feeling of unsafety.
Lauren: So to pause here and let the audience know, you've got a lot of magic going on behind the scenes in the Lauren of Love brand. For anyone interested in receiving the medicine of your chakra study, you have a whole section of the HEAL integration component with many modules, healing exercises and playlists around the chakra study. Also this month you are our guest ceremonialist for our membership.
Lydia: Words have a capacity of limitation, it's always about what the subtext is. At least in the work I’ve seen and experienced in clients, women on a healing path, when it comes to addressing the throat chakra, we have to address any time in our lives that we have not spoken up. We have to address that little girl inside who maybe didn’t know how to assert her needs, or how to feel safe to speak her truth, maybe got shut down, or the biggest one, was told she was too much. I like to call the throat chakra the super highway between our animal body and the vortex of our heart and our higher states of consciousness. We can get emotionally constipated in our throat and it produces physical sensations that are uncomfortable. The first thing I work on with people is allowing yourself to give voice to whatever you're feeling at any stage of your life in a safe environment. That could be having a really difficult conversation with family, or in your business. First and foremost is can you do this alone, or with a facilitator that you trust? Can you allow yourself to make noise? You’d be shocked at what wants to come out, a scream, or profanity, our throat chakra holds it all. Throat chakra is also our chakra of surrender. Where we surrender our personal will to divine will, and also where we start to receive a lot of those downloads so throat chakra clearing is all about surrendering to what is. There is no more powerful sound than the sound of our own voice. That is the most healing sound we can possibly make. We come into this world knowing to express our need, we cry, and then somewhere down the line someone tells us shhhhh….dont say that.
Lauren: In my season of study I have been really learning how to harness my creative expression and really speak what I have been moving through and how to do it in a way that my energy feels really protected, and just be grounded in my own space rather than listening to the chatter in my head. The more we do this work, the more pure and in alignment our lives can be because you are now actually creating the life you want, voicing your needs, and communicating effectively.
Lydia: It's like that's exactly it. That experience of chatter, we hear so much about the voice, how do I attune to the voice of love, my higher self, and to the voice of my ego, any resistance, what does that sound like? So much of voice chakra is also about listening to guidance. When we clear out with vocal toning, breath work, shaking, and doing so in a way that is non judgmental is so healing because it allows us to bust through the chatter. Your voice vibrates and so when you allow it to vibrate through you your body will know what to do and your path will be open. Many of us have worked through the heart, the number one place I see people get stuck is the throat. I am living in my heart, but how do I share it? How do I receive guidance for what's next? Whatever work you do in the throat is giving voice to you in the present moment and to little you in past lives, maybe burned at the stake, we can’t talk about throat chakra and not talk about the witch wound.
Lauren: I recommend the book Witch. I feel like a lot of the projection we receive, if someone is angry at what we're saying because someone is projecting a story about who they think you are versus who you really are. If the witch wound is causing you to feel attacked, or criticized, all of these things that come to us are here to be transmuted and to be fermissed, saying I am not doing this anymore.
Thank you Lydia for sharing about yourself, and your perspective on these modalities. I am looking forward to ceremony this week and to receive this medicine from you. Can you share about where people can find you and what you have going on?
Lydia: We will be doing a full breathwork practice and full vocal toning in ceremony next week and will be really practice attuning to our energetic chakra system. I am going to show you how to do it, you are your own most powerful healer, and it has always been you. I hang out the most on instagram @liberate_with_lydia. I have a course called 7 Days to Liberate Your Voice all about opening up your throat chakra and that would be the best place to start. I also do breathwork sessions. Next week my chakra healing and alignment program Liberate Your Body opens, so for anyone who is called to really go into the vortex, this is a 4 month program.
