A Story of Voice: Finding my Singing Voice
Galitta’s personal story about finding her singing and speaking voice (1984)
My mother says I started to sing before I could talk, but in my childhood, my voice was always a “problem”. I was very often hoarse and sometimes could hardly speak.
My parents took me to a specialist to check my vocal cords but he didn’t find anything physical.
I have noticed that after every school trip, competition or games I would be a few days without a voice.
How frustrated I was. I tried to harness my outburst of enthusiasm but sometimes I could not.
Most of my extended family is blessed with amazing voices. My wish to sing was ridiculous, I was a dancer like my father and I performed often. When I tried to sing my mother usually complained I gave her a headache.
One day on a Saturday afternoon, there was nobody in the house. Soon it would be completely dark, the Shabbat would leave us, the men would come back from the synagogue and everybody would be home.
I entered the big empty bedroom and I sang for myself free from restrictions and opinions.
I don’t know why I remember that so clearly, maybe because I felt this deeper connection I know now as the presence of the spirit world. There was an opening for new thinking and new possibility.
My closest spirit guide always taught me to see beyond what I was told and when I sang I heard him better.
When I was 16 I joined the school band and was introduced to a new kind of music. My voice was limited and I lacked control, so I took years of voice development classes, with different teachers and with different methods. But the real evolution happened with my opening to a new consciousness.
When I was 18 the foundation my life was standing on broke down and I was shattered into a thousand pieces. My body was often ill, and, suspiciously, every time I needed to sing I had a throat infection.
I could not breathe, my pain-body was so full I only breathed shallow breaths. To use my voice I needed to be an open channel. I was full of blocks I could not open, I could not let go, so I could not go further.
My whole body was showing me the signs when I came to a crossroad. Always suffering from inflammatory inconveniences, I found understanding and help in methods that aided me to be free instead of being medicated.
My voice was always very low, I could sing bass tones, but high tones didn’t exist.
Training my voice and working on my self-gave me more range and it keeps expanding.
After the birth of my daughter and her long stay in the hospital, I started to use my voice in a new way. I started to chant as part of meditation and for communication with my ancestors.
When I am giving healing treatments I use my voice and still learn the impact of frequency on the body.
When my performances and my songwriting started to include both aspects of songs and chant, of extrovert and introvert, of feminine and masculine, I felt it was time to expand locally. I looked for a new teacher. This time something else happened.
As I was riding my bike in Amsterdam, my spirit guides were showing me the body as a hologram and how to use my voice with light and my energy field. I had to try it while I was training.
I find it interesting to not only use the voice, body, legs, and chakras but also the whole energy field we have around us, in a spiral including everything we are, and to experiment with it.
Now I can see that trying to be a good vocalist is completely parallel with our own personal growth.
The more ways I found to clean my body from traumatic memory, the better my breathing got and the more my voice improved. Deeper I went in knowing myself, my pain, my history, better mastery I had over my voice. More conscious I became about my physical, emotional, mental and spiritual body, healthier I got, and a better singer I became.
I believe we should all sing for health, liberation, and discovery as it IS a wonderful journey.
