FROM STAGE TO SANCTUARY: HEALING WITH VOICES AND CHOICES
A Journey of Healing by Voice Consultant & Coach Mellini Monique, Founder of Vocal Culture Garden.
“Turn to your daughter and speak affirming words to her in your most gentle, loving tone,” I instruct.
The love pours forward as mothers try on new voices with a new frequency.
After 2 minutes, the room of nearly 50, on a retreat in the rolling foothills of Georgia, falls silent again.
Next, I address the daughters. “How did that make you feel?” I ask.
“Weird,” a 14-year-old says.
“Loved,” says a 15-year-old. “Acknowledged,” says a 17-year-old. “Good,” says a 14-year-old. But it’s the final response from an 8-year-old daughter that breaks our hearts open. Her word allows the light of possibility to enter the conversation. In her honey-sweet voice, innocently, she says, “SAFE.”
THE VOICE AS PRIMAL HEALER
My journey of healing began under the stage lights. As a young theatre student, I was fascinated by the human voice — the way a single note, a pause, or a tremor could ripple through an audience and touch the deepest corners of their psyche. In rehearsal rooms and on stage, I learned that the voice was more than sound. It was memory, emotion, and identity woven into breath, shaped utterances and words.
I thought I was learning to master a craft. Instead, I was meeting a teacher, my first and most powerful on the healing journey: the human voice.
Later, as a drama therapist working in adult and adolescent psychiatric units, I found myself in a different classroom. Here, the lesson was not how the voice impacts the psyche, but how the psyche reshapes the voice. Trauma, depression, anxiety, hysteria, these show up on medical charts and in broken speech patterns, muted tones, and voices that carry shrill, tense notes, or too much force.
I learned to listen differently. A patient’s hesitation at the end of a sentence was more telling than a clinical note. And a kind, whispered word could be a lifeline. Healing was not always loud or linear, but it was there, hiding in the pauses, or riding on an inflection, waiting to be heard.
One of my patients was a young woman. She had been mute for days, her voice utterly lost. Instead of pushing her to use words, I began to make primal sounds, grunting, moaning, and yelling. She joined me, barely audible at first, then louder, until we were both screaming, tears flowing. Finally, freed from congested negative emotion, she started putting words to what she’d been bottling up.
I, on the other hand, struggled to contain the healing that I had just experienced.
I had so much fear and frustration around truly being able to help my clients in a system that only seemed to care about insurance allotments and medication prescriptions. I had begun unconsciously disconnecting from my clients and colleagues, engaging from the surface while slowly retreating inside myself, and breaking out in hives every morning on my way to work.
So, I used my voice to make those same primal utterances. The primitive sounds were a conduit for me to release trapped emotions; they gave witness and expression to my internal state. It was a modality that allowed me to assess my role and reintegrate my power to choose how I wanted to show up, at work and in the world.
Sometimes healing begins in a blood-curdling scream, not with words.
The hives never returned. I had a renewed sense of purpose. And enough clarity to leave that job.
“I learned to listen differently. A patient’s hesitation at the end of a sentence was more telling than a clinical note. And a kind, whispered word could be a lifeline. Healing was not always loud or linear, but it was there, hiding in the pauses, or riding on an inflection, waiting to be heard.”
THE VOICE AS TECHNOLOGY
My path widened even further when I stepped into full-time service as a Gospel medical missionary. I met women carrying layers of dis-ease and dis-order, physical ailments compounded by emotional wounds and spiritual burdens.
One morning during a season of nonstop caregiving for a 4th-stage cancer patient, I was forced to acknowledge that I was running on fumes. My shoulders were tight, my body was heavy, and my voice was deep, raspy, almost gone. Out of instinct, I hummed one long note. It wasn’t pretty, but it felt like oxygen for my soul. I hummed again. I hummed low, I hummed high. I hummed until my body felt anchored and energized. In that moment, I realized my voice could hold me together when everything else was unraveling. My voice had the power to tune my vagus system and reset my parasympathetic nervous system– no other tools needed.
Natural remedies alone are not enough. Healing needs more than cleansing, herbs, and nutrition. It needs a revisitation and reuse of the ancient technology of voice, which each woman carries inside but has forgotten how to trust and deploy.
I began leveraging what I now call Voice Aligned Wellness™: a framework where the power of the inner voice is consciously aligned with the speaking voice and presence.
THE VOICE AS LIBERATION
When we unlock the inner voice, the one that knew Truth before it knew Fear, and allow it to shape the voice we share with the world, something shifts.
I’ve watched women experience physical healing, as chronic tension softens through breath and vibration; mental clarity, as voicing unspoken emotions dissolves fog and confusion; emotional freedom, as tears find safe expression and words return; relational repair, as authentic communication rebuilds connection; and financial and social breakthroughs, as women step into their power with a presence that commands opportunity.
Three years into my marriage, my husband told me, “You act like a man.” It was a sucker-punch. “What do you mean by that?” I was able to ask only after a ten-second internal tantrum. Everything he said was about my voice–the tone, the flow, the volume.
I had been raised in a household of six brothers, and fought for recognition in a male-dominated workplace. Ego and socialized norms would have said, ”This is just the way I am…just the way I sound…like it or leave it.” I knew better. I had to harness everything I’d learned about the power and impact of voice and apply it, not only to myself, but to my marriage.
I took time to adapt my voice and tune it to my husband’s ears. I softened my tone. Allowed my words to ‘flow’, not ‘thump’. I used more words that sounded like requests rather than demands. The change was radical. My husband felt seen, heard, understood, appreciated, and adored.
I changed, too. The decision to consciously calibrate my voice led to a myriad of empowering behavioural course corrections. My voice became a tool to soften my own edges, allowing me to embody feminine grace without losing fire. It signaled to Self that I was worthy without defense or performance – what freedom!
Since then, I have run workshops, retreats, and social salons in rural and urban areas across countries and continents, from Los Angeles to New York, the U.K. to Uruguay, and from Bali and Costa Rica to Kenya and Zimbabwe. I have come to know the voice as a tool for expression, a compass for wholeness, and a pathway to integration.
TRY THIS SIMPLE PRACTICE
Take a breath right now. Place your hand on your belly. Inhale gently through your nostrils and let the life force fill you. On the exhale, let out a hum. Don’t force it. Just let it be. Notice how the vibration feels in your chest, your jaw, and even your spine.
This small act is a reminder: your voice is not separate from your body or your story. It is the disseminator of your narrative; your life experience carried in sound.
FUTURE MEDICINE
I call myself a voice futurist because I believe, in the depths of my diaphragm, that the next frontier of healing, beyond what we ingest or how we move, is how we sound. The voice is the most accessible, portable, and personal wellness practice we have.
From stage to psychiatric wards, from missionary work to corporate workshops, from pitch performance to executive leadership development and beyond, my journey has shown me this: when we align our inner and outer voices, when we equip ourselves with vocal tooling, when we dare speak with authenticity and audacity, we become light, and healing ripples across every dimension of life.
Listen for your own voice — and share it, bravely, with the world.