0:00
If I could turn up my my volume, okay, do that. And if I turn up my microphone, it sounds like that. That
0:07
is better say a few more things. But I think it's better I could say,
0:11
oh, Horace, isn't it horrid when you're hot and in a hurry and you have to hold your hat on with your hand?
0:17
Yes, um, say talk a little
0:20
more. Is that a Swiss wristwatch or an Irish wrist watch? I'm not a thistle sifter. I'm a thistle sifter's son, and I'm busy sifting thistles 'til the thistle sifter comes. And if I do that,
0:37
so, yeah, so hang on or, or,
0:44
normally I'm switching between musician sound and not so often, because as soon as you start singing, of course, it chops out all the... so I have funny Advanced Settings, and that may be not brilliant for talking, but can you hear me? Okay. Now, is it less? Yes,
1:01
this is nice. And if we need to pause and shift to singing settings at any point, we can do
1:08
that.
1:10
Okay, all right, let me turn that off. Brilliant. Yeah, I like this. Okay, good.
1:22
Hi.
1:58
Welcome to the lettuce loves you, the Podcast where we explore belonging and nourishment through the perceptions of body, Earth and community. I'm your host. Jeanell Innerarity. For over 25 years, I've been helping people come home to themselves through somatic or body based practice, dreamwork, nature connection and relationship with self, other humans, and spirit. I want to get beyond belonging as a buzzword and beyond nourishment as a fitness strategy, and get to the heart of what it really means to belong and what it really means to be nourished. Each of my guests has a unique take on these ideas, and I hope you'll take home a greater sense of what belonging and nourishment mean to you. I hope you benefit from listening to the lettuce loves you, and if you do, it would mean a great deal to me if you would like, rate, and share the show so that more people can discover it and get the same benefit. Now let's dive into today's episode.
3:16
Welcome back to the lettuce loves you. I'm Jeanell Innerarity, and today I'm speaking with Julia Norton. Julia is a voice movement therapy practitioner, a Jungian coach, and an award winning singer, actor and podcaster, who for the last two decades has been empowering people to embrace their full voice, get unstuck and find joy. And Julia is passionate about bringing people together to uncover and transform any stories they have related to their creativity or vocal expression. She also advocates using herbs and teas in people's voice vocal health kit. So I'm excited to talk to her about her favorite plants. We have a special treat in store for you today with the plants that Julia loves, and this is going to be a really fun conversation. We're going to cover a lot of ground. So Julia, thank you so much for being here.
4:15
Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm delighted to be here.
4:18
Wonderful. We have so much to talk about, and I'd like to dive right into voice. I've talked with you about voice before, and I have a big journey with my own process being as a young person really afraid to sing or to speak up in any big way, and going on a long, winding track with taking voice classes and being in improvisational movement and vocal spaces and learning to sing in groups and play with my voice and chant, and getting to a point now where I feel. Perfectly comfortable making all kinds of strange sounds and being out of tune in front of other people and being really free to play. But it's been a long journey, and I'm curious. I know you support people with that kind of thing. How did you get into this work in general? What called you to this? Oh,
5:17
first of all, I love your journey, and I love that you've got to the place where you can just make all kinds of noises and not feel, you know, ashamed or uncomfortable. I mean, that's a huge amount of personal freedom, I think, like, once we can do that stuff, it affects every other aspect of your life. I got into it because I've always been a singer, from being a tiny little kid, right making up songs, singing around the house, jumping on the furniture. I sang in church choir with my mom in an old, you know, 15th century church. I don't know what century, very old church in a village that we moved to, and it was kind of my sanctuary from crazy stuff that was happening around but my mom sang alpha, and I sang soprano. And it was a really traditional kind of Church of England Church, which meant that we did a lot of early music. There was no there were no tambourines and guitars. It wasn't anything like that. It was like organs and early music, so super close harmony, singing about people getting nailed up and drinking blood, and, you know, crazy like to a child really, like the darkness in that, but also the beauty of the music. Anyway, it was a bit of a tangent, but so I had always sung. I was in folk bands and stuff. Growing up, there wasn't any, there wasn't any theater or music in my high school, none at all. So I didn't do a music degree, but when I was doing my as close as I could get to degree, I was running choirs, like community choirs. I think I ran my first workshop when I was about 19, and I was teaching what I knew, which was how to sing close harmonies. I think I had some Bulgarian songs up my sleeve, and probably some West African songs and, you know, stuff from workshops I'd been to. And being in this community center space in Bristol in England, I have probably about 35 people in the room, all older than me, obviously, like quite a lot, and people, a couple of women in the room, started crying during the singing or during the breathing, and I thought, Oh, I don't know how to I don't know how to hold that like, I don't know what you do with that? And I totally understood, because I still get moved to tears when I'm I'm singing in a group situation sometimes, or if I go and see something fabulous, I, you know, find myself crying in jazz clubs and at the opera and all over the place. I'm a very cry person, but at that young age, I thought, I want to know what that connection is between the time I said emotions, but really it was about spirit, about that internal, that deep sense of who you are, and the emotional kind of tangle with expressing yourself through your voice, and it was very clear that I needed to have more information. And so I kind of spent the next seven ish years looking in different areas to see if I could find the training that was that.
8:43
Now I have to say that I was also,
8:47
you know, I was a student, and then I was on welfare, and I didn't really have a job, so I didn't have the opportunity to go to different countries or anything. It was all quite just what I could find from the local library or flyers that were sticking around because we don't really have the internet then, which is kind of amazing. Anyway, I found a flyer when I had moved to London after I had lived in West Africa for a while and come back to England. Moved to London to study jazz, and I saw a flyer for voice movement therapy, and I was completely blown away by the all encompassing approaching the whole person, with the body and the voice and the emotions and the history and just this deep connection to Self and this getting away for this idea of perfection. Because I remember in that church choir, my choir master, because we sang at Big cathedrals around the UK and stuff, he wanted my voice to go from this open child like sound to that really. Pure, crystalline cathedral chorister, voice which has no air escaping, it's completely, do you know that kind of sound? I mean, and, and so this training was like, oh, no, we have to, like, explore all the sounds that the voice can make, because when you explore all the sounds that you can make, you can connect to all the different parts of yourself,
10:30
and you can
10:33
manage grief and address trauma and work with shadow. It's very Jungian kind of work, but it was based on this old chap called Alfred Wolfson, who was in the First World War. I believe he was a stretcher carrier, and he got terrible PTSD from that experience, and he was in, I suppose then they would have called it a sanatorium to try and recover. None of the therapies they were trying would help this chat, cover recover, and he was his head was just filled with the screams of the dying and the sounds of the trenches. It's all pretty horrific, but he cured himself by matching those sounds go out into the grounds, and he would actually repeat the screams he was hearing in his head, you know, or the wails or the moans. And in doing so, he cured himself, for want of a better word. He dealt with the the sounds, the oral hallucinations, went away. He was able to leave and he developed this voice studio where he would teach people how to do that, how to get, like, five octave ranges, six octave ranges, seven octave ranges, by taking off the limitations of, oh, you're supposed to be a soprano, you're supposed to be an alto. You know, that kind of stuff that's a that's a massive kind of backstory, but so I trained in that Roy Hart theater is another branch of that work, if you're familiar with that. And I kind of never looked back. I mean, that has been my work since my late 20s. So over 25 years, I've been a voice movement therapy practitioner, and interestingly, when I graduated, I moved to San Francisco right when I qualified, so I moved away from all my community, and there was this big decision, and it was like, do I continue my studies and become a psychotherapist, right? Go into that because the work is very, very deep. Do I do it like that, which is what half of our cohort did, or do I continue with the singing creating and stay in that performance kind of creation realm? And that was such a hard decision for me, it was such a hard decision, and I'll be honest, I really wrestled with it. I went to all kinds of meetings and classes at CIS here in San Francisco, and investigated all kinds of things, but I felt the need to keep creating and being in that world. So that's kind of where I have been, although I will say that my work, in terms of my private clients and my workshops, it runs the gamut from very, very deeply therapeutic to super creative, improvisational, you know, clan work and stuff like that. Being very clear that I'm not a therapist, right? Like, that's very clear I'm not a therapist, but this work is deep and it's healing and it Yeah, so that's how I got into it. Really, it was just seeing that need,
13:54
Wow, I love that. I don't know if you can hear it. My dog just started singing. She's the most vocal dog I have ever she's across the house, but I can hear her right now. I'm not sure if the microphone is picking that up
14:06
I didn't hear.
14:08
We're gonna let her participate.
14:12
That's so fascinating, because in I do a lot of trauma work with people, and one of the things that we're focused on, from the embodiment standpoint, is completing the experience, letting the body finish, protecting itself, defending itself, shaking something out, like, like, letting the nervous system complete the experience. And that's what I heard you describe in the vocal aspect there, is letting the the voice complete the experience and match the the experience. So it's not just banging around inside, right?
14:48
That's right, that's right. We do a thing called a voice movement journey, which is, you know, if you've done, I think you have done, like dance movement therapy and things like that. It's kind of like. Like a movement, journey in that authentic movement. But you add voice, you add sound. So those sounds will bubble up like any you know, undealt with stuff from the past, can bubble up anything that's lurking in the shadow, really in the unconscious, but you have a chance to to finish the dialog, to ex, to finish that whatever it was, and reclaim your power. Like sometimes people make sounds in that sphere that they had no idea they were capable of making. Yeah, right. Like the power, the volume, the pitch, sometimes it's astonishing. So, so it's incredibly important to create a very safe container for that work. I mean, it's got to be really a great container. And if somebody knows that they're going in with the intention of working on material like that. It might be that, you know, we'll work with the breath, and they'll exhale a color into their bubble, because we work with the idea of having a sphere around you, right, like a safe space, you know. And they'll exhale a color into the bubble that is healing or safe makes it safe for them. Maybe it's a golden light or white light or pink or whatever they need. Sometimes they'll take spirit animals in with them, right? They'll go in and they'll have an imaginary tiger or imaginary Rhino or whatever they need. And then afterwards, in that transition, after a voice movement journey like that one, they've done some mildly directed from me from the outside, but mostly I'm just holding the space and keeping the time. Sometimes I'm drumming or singing with them, but often these days, I'm just learning people at it, and then afterwards, they come out, and they'll do some drawing, journaling, whatever I get it out so into that, that expressive arts therapy kind of realm, and then we'll talk about it, so that there's a lot of room for that kind of like the processing of what that was to happen, and I've seen like, tremendous shifts happen for others and for myself doing that work.
17:31
I'm imagining that as you're you made the choice to go in the creative direction, rather than the,
17:41
I guess I'll say technically therapeutic
17:43
direction, yeah, sure, yeah, because it's clearly very therapeutic that I'm imagining that there's a type of freedom where people aren't coming with this sort of pressure, like I'm here to work on this thing, and then you have to be in the parameters of therapists, and within bounds, they're there to express, and you're supporting their creative journey. And I'm imagining that certain things can come out in that atmosphere that are quite different than what might come out in a more specific container, like
18:16
a psychotherapeutic situation. Yeah, it's interesting, because I think that's right, and I think what I try to do is hold myself accountable as if I were a therapist, right? It's like, I'm aware of the transference stuff. I Everything is completely you know, it's like Vegas, everything that happens in here, like it happens in here, and there's no leaking of the container. I'm really, really aware of my own projections, my own issues, you know? So I try and because I, because I'm just so aware of how deep the work is. You can't, you can't just go sailing in and having people bust open and then not, you know, so, so one of the things I had to start from pretty early on is I don't do one off singing lessons, for example, unless it's somebody that's worked with me for a period of time already, and they're coming for a tune up, and they're working on one song, and it's that, you know, because I just, I don't know how to work with one hand tied behind my back, because, like, I have a lot of tools, you know. And even if somebody is coming to me, you know, they're like, I want to get ready for this open mic and do this thing, and I'll be very focused on helping them with their mix, or helping them with their posture at the piano, or these kinds of things I can't but helps notice all the tension and wonder, what what are they what do they not feel? Safer by expressing here, like, is there? Is there something going on underneath? So I do always like to work with people, kind of in that depth way. First, you know, I worked with kids for years too. I used to give kids singing lessons, and and, and I loved that. And I had recitals in my home, and I watched kids go from elementary school through graduating high school, and it was just the most and my dog would jump on everybody's laps through the recitals. You know, it was just like the loveliest thing. So it had. My teaching really has run the gamut. But yeah, it is. I do respect the container. I do really respect the power of the work. And for those of my colleagues that went into the much more psychotherapeutic container,
20:51
you know, more power to them. You know,
20:54
I think that's a fabulous thing to have that string to your bow. But I do love that one week my client can turn up and say, Actually, today I just want to sing that Beyonce song that I've been talking about. Because there's something about that, right? There's something about taking on a sub personality like that, and just like challenging your whole challenging your whole body into it, you know? So, yeah, it is nice to be able to be flexible like that.
21:22
So how does at this stage in your process, in your career, doing this work, nourish you personally?
21:32
That's such a good question, because I think, I think that did happen for a little while, is I fell into that, I'm gonna say trap, but I fell into that rut that many healing creative types can fall into, which is you spend so much time helping other people with their thing that you're forgetting to Make time to create yourself, right? If you're getting to make time to and so, oh so over the last few years, and certainly during the lockdown for the pandemic, when we were all having all the big, deep thoughts about what's what's really important in life, right? I have to start singing again. I have to start singing again. And so a friend of mine had approached me about writing a musical. I started taking some classes at the local jazz school just to get back into the swing. You know, there were different little things. I started taking classes at my local JCC last year. I did two semesters of music theory because I didn't get any of that right. You know, growing up, so that's been feeding me like re engaging in that community.
23:00
And I think,
23:03
you know, I think that the writing,
23:08
right, when I write music, I have to just carve out chunks of time and just fall into it. And it's super interesting. What comes up for me when I'm in that place, because I started writing this music that was based on the poems of AA Mel and, yeah, and it was an Amel, of course, it's the chat that wrote Winnie the Pooh and all those things and but we're using the poems from now. We are six, and when we were very young, and I was approached by this clown friend of mine who is a theater director and everything, and he's like, I want to do a circus interpretation of these poems. Will you write the music? And I'm like, hell yeah, right, of course, right. Because I actually love clowns. Like Love clowns. I cannot be around clowns enough. And I saturated music, but my music was dark, you know, halfway down the stairs became this dissonant in five kind of very crunchy. It's like, oh, okay, all right, so this is a show for toddlers. We're going to need to lighten it a little bit, right, you know? So it's interesting how I have to kind of let my first shadow version come out, you know? And then I find the joy, then I find the playfulness in there. But I don't know if that answers your question. I kind of went off on a ramble, but there you go.
24:49
It does and I think that shadow work is so nourishing, and you've touched on it in a bunch of different ways. Me, you talked about your first introduction. To singing and singing all of these dark old songs, and you will get to this in a little bit. But you have another podcast that's called dark and twisty tales, folk stories and fairy tales for the unafraid. And you go into the shadow work there. And so it's not surprising to me, and you're doing this deep work with people where they're processing this, what in process work, we'd call secondary material, this stuff that's kind of in the background, that's maybe quite scary or disturbing. And so it doesn't surprise me at all that your that your music kind of took you into there, and clowns do that. I mean, clowns bring up all of this shadow material or this unknown, that's what makes them both funny and scary, depending on on the situation. I always say that my my retirement activity is going to be clowns like that's my second career. Because I love I love clowns too. And when we were chatting about this, you said you're collaborating with clowns, which I thought, What a great phrase, great way to talk about it. So that doesn't surprise me at all, and I am curious how you reoriented to not throw out the depth of what was coming through in that kind of shadowy material, but make it toddler appropriate? Yeah, well,
26:25
that's a great question. And I think that
26:30
I wrote an album
26:33
when my son was little, when my son was two, I think I went into fantasy Studios here in Berkeley, and I recorded an album of lullabies, because I was the first one of my friends to get pregnant, and, and I hadn't lived in the States for very long, and I couldn't really think of any lullabies. I thought, well, I'm pregnant. I need to sing him something, right, you know? And, and so I went on this quest to kind of find lullabies that weren't really saccharin or empty or and actually, turns out there's a lot that really aren't right. And then there's the super crazy dark ones, like, you know, Rockabye baby and all that kind of stuff. And so I made this album, and it was a kind of one of those happen chance things or happenstance things. I think happen chance is better, honestly, though, one of those happenstance things where a former client of mine, his next door neighbor, was a famous producer at fantasy records, I got an appointment with him, and he said, Well, do you want to make an album on Yes. And he said, What kind? And I said, Well, I don't know. And he said, Well, pick one. So I said, Okay, well, since I have a little boy, I'm going to make a lullaby album. But I wanted it to be a concept album, you know, like in the 70s, it would be that concept down, where you go on a journey, not like today, with Spotify, and you can jump around and do all the things, a proper album that you listen to in its entirety, and I wanted it to be the kind of thing that goes on in the bedroom when the kids are laying and it just takes them on a journey. And the idea is that their bed is a little boat, and they sail off to lullaby Island, and they're being rode by fairies and sung to by fairies. And they get there. And on the island, it's populated with woodland creatures from the British Isles, mostly. And so I got nature recordings and all this wave sounds. And so I made it into this, this concept album, and I did it in a week. Some of the songs I wrote the night before I went into the studio. I took Victorian poems and sent them to music. I found old things, I made stuff up. And one of the things that people have said to me about it so much is that it has depth, right? It has depth in that it's not always sweet at all, but I think that little kids know that already, right? Yeah, they know about the dark, yeah, right. They know about the monsters under the bed. So you give them something that doesn't address that at all, then they don't feel met, I think, you know, and so the and so I had toddler groups for years and things like that, and that was a little bit different. But the music I've written, because I've written music for kids, theater and circus and stuff before, and I don't want to dumb it down, and I don't want to diminish it in any way. So it's there's a balance between keeping that kind of harmonic complexity without. Not making it super dark, right? Like, keep it complex and interesting, just enough, you know, to have that flavor of fairy tale, that that whisper of darkness, but have the light kind of shine through, you know. So that's, that's, I suppose, where it always is with me. I mean, when I write music just for myself, it can get pretty dark, but that's okay. And I also write stupid, silly, Jolly songs, you know. So who knows, but I do tend to lean towards the dark, you know. And my brother is a novelist, and he wrote, he writes the darkest stuff ever. And, you know, I think there's such a lot processing going on, you know, a lot of processing going on on our creative lives, which I think, you know, what better way to deal really, is to create with it,
30:58
absolutely. And there's
31:02
such a and so touched by the way you described that with children in particular, because they do know, they know all of the dark, scary things that are happening and that are possible. And they have tremendous nightmares. I mean, I work with adults, and we work on childhood nightmares, because it sticks. It's so deep, and it's so telling about the nature of somebody's experience with the world. And so to be able to creatively honor that with young people and with adults and and take them through the journey that allows some sort of integration or resolution or sense of creativity or safety, or things are are going to resolve. They're going to be, I don't know if okay is the right term, but you're not going to be stuck in the dark. Yes, yes. Um, is such a is such a beautiful gift. I'm wondering if people can still get this album, that you may
32:05
get it on, um, they can get it on Amazon and iTunes, that you can download the album, you can play it for free on Spotify. It's always nice if you buy the album, but, you know, you can get it for free on Spotify. It's just called lullaby Island, uh, by my name Julia Norton, but yeah, you can still get on Amazon. I don't have any hard copies anymore because it was 2007 I released that album when people still had CD players. You know, now
32:35
it's hard to find some place to put your CD if you still have your I know.
32:39
I know. But fortunately, my car is so old it still has a CD changer in it. Nice, I know, pretty fancy.
32:47
Yeah? Nice. I was really sad when I transitioned from a car that had a CD player to yeah, there's no, there's no space for it anymore.
32:58
Yeah, yeah, beautiful. Okay, so lullaby
33:00
island that.
33:04
How do you find that doing this voice work, and in particular, you're doing all of this creative work for all different ages and all different genres? How do you find that this affects people's sense of belonging in the world?
33:21
Hmm, that's such a lovely question.
33:25
And I think,
33:29
you know, singing probably goes back further than, pretty much any other thing that communities did together, aside from, you know, hunting together, farming together, dancing together and probably getting drunk together, right? You know, singing is it's been there forever, and it's only in our kind of modern, Western idea of singing that it got separated off, you know, like dancing did, or like making art did. So I love the fact that there are so many more community choirs and things available, and pop up choirs and all these kinds of things happening. Now, I had a choir in London called Stokey singers. We lived in Stoke Newington, and again, back in the day, where you had to put flyers on windows of shops and things. And I had a flyer on the window, and I'd hand drawn a bunch of people singing with happy faces. Oh my god. It's kind of, it's kind of amazing. I feel like I was born in the area of them discovering the biplane or something, you know, like technology has just gone so fast. But anyway, I put a flyer in the window on our street and I and I talked to the landlord of the local pub, and I said, Okay, I want to rent your room upstairs for two hours on a Thursday night. I'm going to try it for one week and see if anybody shows up. I. And that very first night, of course, I didn't have a cell phone. There wasn't any way of knowing who was coming, I just showed up at this room above the pub, and I think about 35 people showed up. Oh, just wanting to sing. Wow, just wanting to sing. And so we did that, I want to say for about a year and a half, two years until I left the UK. But it was every Thursday night, no matter what, or Tuesday night. Can't remember today that we think it was a Thursday and, you know, they made a tremendous sound. And these, these were people who from all walks of life, from all genders and races and cultural origin, everything. It was the most eclectic bunch of people that room would be packed. I would get three part harmonies going. They were cheeky and interrupty, and there was lots of laughter, and most people would go downstairs to the pub afterwards and have a pine. You know, this is England, and people got married from that group, yeah. Like, there was serious friendships made in that group. And because it was pre internet, I lost touch with most of them when I moved to the States, because I moved over here in 2000 Yeah. So I lost touch with the room, which is such a shame, because they were such a beautiful, wonderful group of people. So I think what singing does so in that instance, for example, here was a North London borough, everybody's working really hard, raising their families, doing their thing, but once a week, they came together to sing songs from around the world and stuff I made up and improvised on the fly, and they felt their voices connecting with each other and blending together. And, you know, they got to play together in a way that grown ups don't get to play, you know. And I think it really, you know, people would see each other on the streets and make coffees, and it just builds community. And if I had the time and the bandwidth to run a community choir now I totally would. I don't, but I'm a huge fan and proponent of them, and I think that, you know, the non audition, just anybody go choirs, I just, you know, they're so valuable, and those choir leaders, they're working hard holding that together, because it's a lot of prep work. You're holding the space in the room. You're making sure everybody's voice is heard, and if you're good, you're trying to make sure people aren't injuring themselves when they're doing it. But that's actually really challenging in a group that big. But yeah, I think singing together is such a tremendous and I think as we go into an era of instability and upheaval, finding ways to sing in your community, it could be, it could be something like, you know, organizing Once a month, different hosts, like a different person a month, just invite your friends over, and maybe somebody reads a poem, or you sing some karaoke, or you there are so many ways we can gather and just be creative. And I think that that's what's gonna that's what's gonna hold us together is like community, really where we are. Because as much as I love how I'm able to coach people internationally and work with singers all over the place, my husband, I have been talking about this a lot the last few couple of months, actually, of wanting to just be so much more connected to our own community immediately around us, like just the people that we have right here, making sure that we're spending time with them too. Because it's really easy to forget your neighbor when you're in internet groups with people all over the world. Yeah. So you know, finding ways to sing together is,
39:23
is a great idea. I think,
39:26
you know, that's one of the interesting things that technology, for all of the magic and miracles that it's able to do, has not yet figured out how to really allow group singing online.
39:40
Yes, there are, there are technologies, but it's an investment, and so it's not for the casual singer. As far as I know. Just now, I know that I have friends and colleagues who are in, you know, more serious choirs where they all invested in the software so that they could sing simultaneously. Mm. Hmm, but because, I suppose my work isn't that kind of professional level and quiet choir directing. It hasn't been that. It's more. My stuff is more, you know, of a therapeutic nature, so as long as people can sing with me, you know, if I'm running a group, for example, like through COVID, I was running singers for sanity. Title, yeah, and people would join the group, and I teach songs, and they've been muted, which is sad for me, but they could hear me and sing with my voice, right? But I didn't get the benefit of hearing their voices, which is sad but, but that you can kind of do that. But, yeah, it is. You'd think it would be a bit easier to do than it is. It would be lovely if it was,
40:47
well, I like that. It's not. I think what spoke to me about that was the the power of, I mean, it's similar to touch, where I can do all sorts of somatic, body based work with people online, but there's nothing that replaces when I have a massage or body work client who's on my table, I can't I can. I can bring them into their own embodied experience online. I can attune to them. We can do a lot, but there's nothing like having somebody there in actual touch and and I hear that a little bit with the voice work too, where I didn't even know that the technology that you just described existed, but the feeling of 35 people from all walks of life showing up and resonating in voice together is only an in person thing. Yes,
41:46
that, I mean, that is an unmatched kind of experience, and I think that's why last year, I decided I was going to get back into running in person workshops. So last year, I ran four in person workshops from San Francisco to New York. I ran my first one in Manhattan. That was super exciting. I saw that, yeah, and it was, you know, it was just so lovely to be in a room with people doing the guided visualizations, moving, improvising, breathing, you know. And I think, as well this kind of, I want to say post COVID. I realize it's still around, but, you know, like post lockdown kind of, well, now we're vaccinated. For the most part, there's still something. There's a little fear in being in a room with other people singing in your face, breathing your air. You know, there's just say we're just kind of having to re acclimatize ourselves to what that is like. Yeah, and I tell you what, it's beautiful, beautiful thing to be in a room with people that haven't met each other before, and sharing, you know, their dreams for their voices and their creativity and their lives and singing, you know, yeah,
43:17
What's important about singing in a group?
43:22
Well, I think it is that it's that recognizing the common humanity, recognizing that, you know, we all have a larynx and lungs and you know, we're just trying to and here's the thing, is that most people are scared of the same things. I did a lot of workshops for women last year because I felt the need to make that space.
43:51
And
43:53
you know that giving self permission to take up space and with sound and with creativity and with expression. I can do that with somebody in one on one work, but I tell you what, it's much more alive when you put them in a room with people and then ask them to take up space. Wow. Like, okay, we just took the stabilizers off our bike, wow. And I never push anybody into doing that, but like, the opportunity is there, and so you can really kind of be in that aliveness of what the fear is, what the excitement is, what and again, it brings up all that unconscious shadow material that you can then work with, right? Because if you, if you're not, if it's not tangible, it's really hard to work with because it's unconscious, right? So, so it's so having ways for that to bubble up, and then just the love in the room and the smiling faces and. And the laughter, you know, that's just medicine in itself. Seriously, you know, the singing kind of almost feels like, wow, you know, just I brought people together, we sang, we breathed, we visualized, and they laughed a lot. And I don't know which is the biggest medicine, you know, because laughing,
45:22
yeah, yeah, beautiful. And so that brings me to sort of another layer of your work, which is that you're also a Jungian coach, and you have a fascination with fairy tales, which gets into all of this secondary, shadowy, unconscious material, and also voice and different voices and different characters that that come through. So first, can you tell us a little bit about what a union coach is, what that even means for people who aren't familiar? You
45:55
know, I hadn't heard of the term until a friend of mine, Patricia, told me about it, and she had just done the qualification, and it's basically taking many of the principles of Carl Jung's process, so working with archetypes and shadow and the process of individuation, but putting it into a coaching model, so that it's not about, you know, this long, ongoing therapeutic connection. And I have to say, I know quite a few people have had the benefit of doing Jungian analysis over the years, and I can totally see like that's an amazing, beautiful gift, but not everybody has the time for that commitment or the desire for that kind of depth work, and I think with Jungian coaching, where, because I was already, and this is the reason why my friend told me about it, because I was already working with archetypes and shadow material anyway, because that's it was in my washroom, therapy training. And this gave me a container and more of a logical process, so that I could go through the stages of individuation with somebody in a coaching container.
47:31
And so
47:34
I work with people as a Jungian coach. And it doesn't always involve singing, right? It doesn't always involve voicing. Sometimes it's about dealing again, though, with that feeling that it's not safe to take up space. You know, I've worked with a lot of women who
47:56
are resisting leveling up in their careers
48:01
because of unconscious fears of being kicked out of the tribe or rejected or, you know, and I think that working with that unconscious material can help to integrate the feelings from the past and we play with things. So I still quite creative. So I have people, actually, I do nearly always include something. I nearly make somebody write a song or a poem or something. It's hard for me to not, but I think really it's just enriched what I was doing already, and it's given me more of a framework. And it makes, for me, it makes the other kind of life coaching seem really surface, in a way, you know, I think it's great. I'm not knocking anybody's thing at all. And I think if you want a business coach to help you get from this place to this place, you know, and you've got to get your strategies in order, and, yeah, you know, or you want a marketing coach to help you. This is all brilliant. But the thing is, I was already swimming in shadow, right? I was already navigating those rounds and, and, and I think, I feel like the more I have swum in my own shadow and swum alongside others with theirs, the more joy I have felt in my life, and I See that for my clients too, because, as you know, right, it takes enormous amount of energy to hold material down, and once we can make space, make space in the lungs, make space in the pharynx, make space for sound to come. Through for our thoughts and expression, our creativity, our hopes and our dreams, then we can use the energy that we're no longer pressing everything down with to manifest some of that, you know, to integrate it into our lives. So yeah, so Jungian coaching is different completely from analysis, but we're using a lot of the same structures in terms of the wonderful, creative gift that Carl Jung gave us all you know,
50:31
oh, there's so much I could talk to you for six more hours just in the little the little window that you just opened with that information. But something that stands out to me is that I know from my own shadow work that the more
50:49
I do,
50:52
the less
50:55
I guess disturbing it is like the deeper I go, the more it's just interesting. And even it's not that fear doesn't come up, but fear itself is less scary. It's just like another energy, just like playing in voice, where it's like, oh, that was a weird sound. It's not out of tune. It's just like, what? Whoa, what was that? Where did that come from? And all of that shadow material starts to feel like that too. And I think the edge when people are first dipping their toe in, or when they've had very scary or traumatic things happen that make that kind of energy seem absolutely overwhelming and untenable to even touch. It feels so scary, but being able to go in little by little by little makes it approachable, where it just gets integrated into the light and dark and the night and day and the winter and summer of life, and it doesn't feel like this big, separate other, right? Terror,
52:03
that is such a great point. And you make me realize that what it is, it's that very thing of,
52:14
you know,
52:17
when we're meditating, or what have you, and you're, you're, you're becoming the witness, right? And it's that same kind of thing. I'm like, oh, that's, that's fear, and that's excitement, and that's eagerness, and that's, you know, and just being able to notice these things, just with a little bit more distance, right? A little bit more distance so that you can understand that these, these feelings, are there. We're not We're not denying that they're there, but they're not who you are, right? So, so as soon as you can get that little bit of distance the climb terrified, right? It's like, oh, I'm feeling terror right, like it just gives you enough space to be able to actually take a breath and ground and not get overwhelmed by the thing.
53:19
And one of the lovely things from my
53:23
voice movement therapy training is is working with some personalities
53:29
and
53:31
and we you take, say, a shadowy aspect that feels a lot right. And you create this full kind of character of it, right? So, so what, how is it dressed, and what is it looking and giving it a name. And then you write these adjectives about what it's about. And then you write the sentence like, I am, the one who, you know, you do this whole thing. There's this whole process. And actually, in my qualification for that, we had to do a cabaret presenting 15 of our sub personalities, and they have a totally different song, a totally different way of moving their bodies, a totally different way of sounding like you couldn't use the same vocal sound anyway. That was very exciting. But when we do that, like, I can see Cruella de Vil. I'm just revealing a part of myself here. I can see Cruella devel coming in, right? But when I first discovered her, I was like, oh, that's why I can't show up and have my own podcast, because people will think I'm evil and I want to kill the puppies or whatever, right? Terrifying. And now I think she's kind of, you know, she's kind of funny. She's like, she's a she's a character, but she's actually softened the more I've got to know her. So she's her coat isn't actually made of puppy skins. It's a fake and, you know, like. Things like that. So I think that we can take the terror out of some of the darker shadow elements. And, you know, of course, the gold that's in there, the treasures that we find, we can really absorb them and start sharing that, that side of ourselves.
55:24
Yeah, I think you and I could probably chat for hours. I'll be honest.
55:26
I know I have so, like so many threads from what you've just said. And one of the things that I often say to people when we're doing shadow work and doing parts work and bringing in all these different parts is there's so much fear in embodying these like Cruella de Vil type of characters, because if someone's been hurt by a character with that energy, by a person, a real life person with that type of energy, or that type of attitude or way in the world, there's so much fear around becoming like that. I would never want to be like that. And so something I often say to people, and that you just illustrated so beautifully, is you can pick up the essence. You can pick up the energy without the cruelty or without the harm, you can pick up the sharpness or the bigness or the loudness or the forcefulness or the heaviness or whatever it is, those are useful, yeah, and you don't have to then Use that to cause harm,
56:41
right? And that makes me, that makes me think of in the Jungian coaching training, one of the things that we have, like, there's certain scripts when you're first learning that you just kind of follow through these scripts to truly get to the meat and potatoes. And one of them is that, is that it's not that somebody is worried that they're going to behave like Cruella de Bell. It's that they like you're saying. They are so terrified of people thinking that they're like that they are limiting themselves beyond belief. Like so. So you go through these questions, and it would be like, you know, how would you feel if people thought that you were, you know, you less trigger words, selfish, cruel body, right? Or you'd be devastated, right? Like that would be like, completely like, not, that's just not. There's just not who I want to be in my life. Okay, so then, what are you doing to make sure that nobody ever thinks that you're bossy, for example, or while I sit on my hands in meetings? Well, I don't raise my voice when I when I really have an opinion. I clutch my jaw so that I don't right. Like it. It's like it is manifesting whether you like it or not. Right. Our unconscious material is running the show, whether we like it or not. Where you may as well meet the people inside of you, right? See what they see what they were protecting you from. See what they have to offer, see what they need, and see how you can integrate the good stuff. And it should, everybody should have access to this, you know,
58:37
yeah, yeah,
58:39
you know. It makes me think about the the work that you did with children and music and lullabies and fairy tales with children, and also the work that you've done with fairy tales, specifically in your podcast. And I've been going back through I have right here the complete grims fairy tales. I've been going back through my I'm really blessed that my mom read me a lot of them, like the traditional ones when I was a little kid, not the Disney ones. Yeah, and that Disney has an
59:14
I don't know if I don't want
59:16
to get into branding, right? But like the this sort of modernizing and sugar coating the fairy tales has done such a disservice. And one of the one of my mind blowing realizations was when somebody told me about the real frog prince story, okay, and how the sort of sugar coated version is the princess kisses the frog and then he turns into a prince, and the Grimms fairy tale version. And for folks who aren't familiar with grims Fairy Tales, right, the Brothers Grimm J. And Wilhelm Grimm went all around Europe and collected these folk tales. And I believe they altered some of them, and some of them are quite disturbing and problematic on a lot of levels, but they get to that shadow material, and in the real story, which is, I have it right here, I'm going to the frog king, or sometimes called Iron Henry the princess. Throw the frog is so annoying and he's so obnoxious and invasive that she throws him. It says she was terribly angry and took him up and threw him with all her might against the wall. And that's when he turns into the prince, or into the king, yeah, yeah. And that's the original tale. And so you're talking about working with women, taking up space and having voice, and that, that was the original tale that said enough is enough. And when you say enough is enough, then you get this beautiful reward. It's not kissing the frog, it's setting a boundary.
1:01:09
So great. You know what? I realized I missed, I missed an opportunity because I don't record those folk tales anymore, Malachi, because they took a lot of work, right? The narrating was easy, but I would write, you know, I'd improvise songs based on any verses that were in there. I create sound effects, or I'd find sound effects. So on that one, when I have that version of the story in my podcast, I think I found a splat noise from someone, you know, for the frog, and it'd be like, Oh, now this woman's getting put in a in a barrel full of nails and rolled down a hill. So how do I get that sound effect? You know,
1:01:50
fun to do.
1:01:53
But I, at that time, I wasn't doing any kind of Prolog or Epilog about the significance of the tales they're just like they are, just stand alone, dark, twisted tails, right? Because
1:02:11
I love that. I felt
1:02:12
the need to share them right, and I felt the need to do as as the original versions as I could find but I'd be honest, people started sending me requests for some really, really, really dark Italian tales and and things of, you know, ugly old women getting skinned alive and stuff like that. And I was like, you know, I'm gonna send a little break. Yeah, so, so I haven't recorded those for a long time, but there are lots to go and listen to, and people do still message me and say, Please do. These are more, but it's just hot. It's hard. I spend money keeping the podcast alive every month, but I've never broken even, you know.
1:03:01
So it's one of those things where
1:03:06
I feel really drawn to that, and I know that at some point in my life I'm going to do an audio version of The Snow Queen with all the music and everything. But, yeah, I love those tales, too. They're so good. There's a lot in there, but, but again, I'm, I'm not really, sadly, the person to talk to about analyzing fairy tales. I've just recorded the things that appeal to me and like, what is that one called? I
1:03:36
can't even remember the name of it now. Anyway,
1:03:39
fairy tales, there are many of them. They're fabulous. Listen to them.
1:03:44
One of the things that I think is fantastic, though, is that you don't have to analyze in order to get benefit from simply going into the material. And it's the same with dream work, like just sharing a dream out loud with someone who's listening in a deeply witnessing kind of way is transformative in and of itself, even if there's no skill or capacity or time to quote, unquote, analyze the dream, just speaking it, just vocalizing it, expressing it. And I think the same with fairy tales. We keep telling them and telling them and and, yes, we could analyze each and every fairy tale in unimaginable depth, but there's value in in just hearing and telling a story. I think
1:04:33
that's right, and I think that's right, and I think that's what I was drawn to. Was just like, you know, again, in this kind of shadow realm, I just need to tell these and I just need to sing beautiful melodies to correspond with them. And but you're absolutely right about dreams, too. And my husband and I do make time in the morning to share our dreams with each other, because it feels, you know, it feels really important and and you know when you're going through processes. You know, periods of transformation and change, there's a lot of dream action happening, yeah, and it's giving you all kinds of symbols. I had this amazing one the other night, which I probably shouldn't be sharing right now, but, but, but means it's juicy. It's kind of juicy. But I was talking with these three other women, right? Three other women about about night terrors. And they were describing, here's what happened. These are and this one woman said, Oh, I've had, oh, I've had chairs, chairs, right? And chairs is when, apparently, in my dream is when you're sitting on a chair. But like in an earthquake, it goes back, forward, side, side, side, like that. Wow. She's actually, I said, Oh, I've had chairs too. I said, in fact, I've had all of those things, and they all look kind of horrified. And we're starting to walk down these cellar steps, I kid you not, right, the dark, shadowy creatures are coming up, and as you're walking down, I say, oh, but it's okay, because I've been to my doctor, and he told me I have a ghost living inside of me. And I woke myself up going,
1:06:05
like I actually woke myself up doing that.
1:06:10
So I obviously have some unfinished business. Yeah, okay, that's okay. I'm ready for it. But yeah, I mean, I think these dreams are amazing, and it is okay if you don't know right in the moment what it is. I write them down, I say them out loud, you know? I figure it out. Sometimes,
1:06:33
some dreams take years or decades to reveal, yeah, what they're really saying, yes,
1:06:40
yes, yes,
1:06:43
yeah. I love that dream so much.
1:06:46
It's kind of crazy, I know, and I kind of know what it's about, but, you know, it just, it just made me laugh. I woke myself up doing a fake ghost noise. It's kind of like I'm not afraid, you know, like I'm not afraid, you know, just bring it.
1:07:00
I would expect nothing less from a vocal coach. Exactly.
1:07:05
So funny.
1:07:08
Oh, I love that. So
1:07:12
I ask every guest what herbs and what plants they like to work with. And since you touched on nature and your doctor, your doctor saying you have a ghost living inside, you actually beautiful things. I think that's a good segue into your favorite herb or spice or medicinal plants. And I asked you, and most people, when I say, Pick one. That's an impossible question, but you gave me a list of plants that you use for different things, and one of the things that really stood out to me is that most of them are in the mint family. So you mentioned thyme and lemon balm and sage and salvia, and all of those are our mint family plants, and most people don't know. Most people have an association with those plants and and there are many more plants in the mint family that we use all the time, and most people don't know that they're all in the same family, that they're all related. So I'd like to talk a little bit about that family, but tell me a little bit about what those plants mean to you and that kind of family of plants,
1:08:25
I think it's just the My mom always had lemon balm and lemon verbena in her garden, the same with lemon geranium. Actually, I think that there was a geranium in there too. And there's something about that not meant just for, yeah, but I think I just find, you know, those the lemon balm and the lemon verbena, super, super, the scent is very evocative to me.
1:08:57
And,
1:08:59
you know, Sage I've always burned before and after my sessions. It's very calming and comforting for me. And you know, I didn't grow mint in my garden for a really long time. Interestingly, because everybody says, don't grow mint, never be able to get rid of it. It takes over. It takes over everything. So I have this kind of herb garden that I found, you know, whatever, and the side of my house, and I put a little bit of mint in the edge of it, and, of course, it decimated everything else. So now, instead of there being oregano and thyme and sage and pineapple sage and chocolate mint and mint. There's just mint, right? So it's like, well, I suppose Mint has no problem taking up space. How about that? I
1:09:55
love it. That's interesting. Yeah, yeah.
1:09:58
So I don't know what i. Have to say about it, though,
1:10:02
it has no problem taking up space. And it's actually, it's a it's a plant family in general, and mint in particular. But you also mentioned time and the chest healing magic of time, which is a mint family plant there. This whole family is strongly associated with the voice, with the chest and the throat and the airways, and opening up the airways and, like, that's part of the medicine of this plant. And take this, this plant family, and taking up space aromatics
1:10:35
so strong in them.
1:10:36
I love that and, and I do use, like, I think I said to you that I do steam inhalations and what have you. But also, when I've cleaned my car, my old car, with the five CD changer, I will sprinkle some mint on the carpet, like essential oil, and it makes it smell fabulous in there, you know? And really does. And sometimes I'll sprinkle mint or eucalyptus in my booth because I'm a voice actor as well. So in my vocal booth, I have it on the floor there so that it's in there, kind of clearing my airways where I'm working. The
1:11:10
mint family is Lamia ca in Latin, and it is so cool. People are often very surprised by the specific plants that are in the mint family that we don't think of as mint, because when we say mint, we think of spearmint or peppermint or mints that you buy at the store. But the mint family is actually quite distinct. It's a fairly easy family to identify. One of the really important things is that they tend to have a square stock. So the the central stock of the plant, if you roll it between your fingers, it's square. Now, there are other plants that have that, like nettles, which is not a mint family plant, but it has that square stalk. But the mint family additionally has opposite leaves, which means the leaves are directly across from each other on the stock and their entire leaves, which means they look like the leaf that you draw in elementary school. That's just like a classic leaf. It doesn't have big lobes, big
1:12:16
alterations or additional
1:12:19
parts to it. It just looks like that sort of classic Elementary School leaf. And the flowers of the mint plants have typically five petals, but they're united, or kind of fused, and usually two of them are up and three of them are down. So it looks like this sort of open mouth, like singing, right? We're talking about singing. We're talking about voice. It looks like this little sort of singing flower. They also have these seed capsules that have four, what's called a nutlet. It's like a tiny little seed that looks like a nutlet, and actually the chia plant, right? Chia seeds, or if you're familiar with chia pets, which I have a whole nother episode to talk about them in the future, because that was a really interesting phenomenon. But the chia plant is actually in the mint family, and many, many, many of the mint family plants, when you crush the leaves or rub your hands on the flowers of the stalks are aromatic, which means they release a fragrance you really can recognize, not necessarily minty fragrance, but sometimes it feels related, but they have that pungency, that sort of sense of really awakening and stimulating when you smell them. So some really common plants that you might not realize are in the mint family, are Augusta, which is or regionally, some people will say, agastache. It's a very common landscaping plant. It has one of my favorite smells, hemp nettle or false nettle. So not the stinging nettle, but the false nettle, pennyroyal hyssop. This is an ancient plant. It's actually a biblically mentioned plant, lamium or dead nettle, sometimes called hen bit, Mother wort, bugle weed, horhound. Horhound is in cough drops quite often. It's very soothing, of course. Mint, spearmint, peppermint, horse mint, or bee balm or bergamot. If you if you drink Earl gray tea, Bergamot is in Earl gray tea. Catnip is in the mint family. Or Nepeta, you'll see it as a landscaping plant, self heal. This is one of my favorites. It's actually an organ native plant. The scientific name is Prunella, and it's beautiful purple flowers. It's a ground cover. It's such a soothing plant to me to just have in the landscape. Skullcap, culinary sage, so that's the common garden sage. It's different than. In the white sage that's traditionally used in smudging bundles you can smudge with garden sage. And actually, I recommend that more, because White Sage is endangered and it's an important indigenous plant, and so really, at this point, should be left alone unless you have specific access or permission, or you're growing it yourself, but you can absolutely bundle and dry culinary sage. Then, of course, chia betani. I mean, it just goes on and on and on. So this is a huge plant family that's really underappreciated as a family, and comes back to that voice that opening up your lungs, that sense of refreshment and expression and the connection with the pollinators and the aromatics and just really beautiful. So I love Julia that you chose so many plants in this family.
1:15:58
I love that, but I had no idea that all those plants were in the mint family. So, yeah,
1:16:03
yeah,
1:16:04
there it's actually, and they're, they're, many of them are vasodilators. So they're like opening, literally opening up your, your airways and your, your circulation, yeah.
1:16:18
So you have
1:16:21
two programs that address voice and shadow. You have a class from stage fright to spotlight, which is designed for people who want more confidence with their public speaking needs, which is so needed, it's such I think I read at one point that that was the most common fear, at least among more than
1:16:41
dying, more than dying, it's like,
1:16:43
because that makes sense, because there's a type of death, of standing in front of people and being that vulnerable and or there's a potential for death, and there's a real history of like, what if The crowd turns against me? And I've heard stories of very, very famous performers. I mean, people like Robin Williams, who will say they have stage fright or they throw up before every performance, no matter how famous and experienced and established they are. And so you have another program too, but can we talk a little bit about,
1:17:22
yeah, absolutely, and it's super interesting, because I had terrible performance anxiety for years, and I really believe that it limited my creative career and and my business as well. You know, I had terrible stage fright, and I used to sing acapella folk stuff on my own at folk clubs and festivals around the UK, and when I was a teenager, and it meant that I would get up in front of 100 300 500 people, and just start singing really dark Scottish and English folk ballads, right? And I was fine once I was up there, but getting up there, I at one at this one festival, half my face weren't paralyzed before I was like, so great was my fear, right? So I've been working on that my whole life, and it's much less of an issue now, but I did notice from being all cloistered during the lockdown, it was much harder to get back out in front of people again. I've never really had a problem. Interestingly, in this kind of interview situation, that kind of thing, even acting is less scary than singing a song from myself, right? It's something, there's an extra layer of vulnerability that happens with that. So anyway, so it's something I know really well. I know the paralyzing fear, I know the shortness of breath, the sweaty palms, the running to the bathroom right as your name is being called. You know, I know all of that. And so I was actually interviewing entrepreneurial women and asking them what they needed. And I wanted to talk about but being vocally expressive and everything, and a few people like, actually, what I'm most afraid of is, like public speaking type stuff, like sharing about my business and and pitching to people. And, you know, telling people what I do. And I realized that I was just going to try that. I'm like, Okay, let me just try that. I'm going to this. One person in the group had said what I'd really like is a five week class, and each week we address a different kind of thing. I'm like, Okay, I won't do that, but you're going to get shadow work as well, because that's what's going to make. At work, because if we don't like saying before, if we don't address the underlying causes for the terror and the fear and the tightening so in this program, which is happening right now, and I love it, and it just filled up, like without me hardly doing anything to promote it, it filled up because it was, obviously there was a need. We look at the shadow material, the the mind stuff, the stories we're running in the background, right? We work on your physical voice, like vocal strengthening exercises, how to how to breathe, how to release tension, how to manage your nerves as well. So things like tapping acupressure points and and grounding and visualizations, all that kind of stuff. And also, every time they get chance to practice public speaking in front of each other in breakout rooms, because it's an online thing, so they have to do their elevated pitch, or they have to do their Q A kind of podcast interview thing, you know. So I've just started doing that, and it's coming really well, and I'm having so much fun doing it. So that's, that's one thing, and I think that, yeah, again, addressing the shadow work really helps to just transform that experience, because otherwise we're just polishing the terror. You know? Why would you polish that?
1:21:28
This is crazy. So, yeah,
1:21:31
that's that, that's that class, and that's uh, yes, from spotlight, from stage fright to spotlight. Yeah,
1:21:37
I love that phrase. Shadow Work makes it work. Why would you polish the terror? And you have another program called vocal discovery, which is a year long membership group for uncovering and freeing singing and speaking voice in an online community and course setting. What's that one about?
1:21:59
So that's a similar kind of approach, but it's a year long container, and it's also for singers. So we do a lot of, you know, we have more time to really dig into I do a lot of visualizations and working with movement and breath. And again, this the same three aspects of uncovering what's happening in the unconscious, work on your physical voice and practicing and sharing in front of a group. And that can be singing or spoken, right? So it's the same, it's the same kind of approach, but just you have this longer container to practice things, and you're working with a cohort group where you're trying stuff out and and there's a community group as part of it, so people get support in between the live classes, and it's just a bit more of an investment of time and money. But, yeah, I'm super excited about that as well. I mean, again, it's about community, right? With all of these things, it's about finding the support of a group to help you go through the scariest things in your life, right? That's, that's kind of what we're all looking for, isn't it? Yeah, we
1:23:12
all need that. Yeah, that's foundational. Yes, wow. So people can find you at your free voice.com, and you also have a podcast called your free voice, which we didn't even hardly talk about, covered so much other ground. Is there anything else that we missed? Is there anything that you really want people to take home?
1:23:36
I do think so, except just to say, you know, if you're feeling like you have more to share, if you're feeling like you're vocally blocked, it's not a static thing. You can change that. You can change that whenever you are ready, you know, so don't feel like that's the end. Doesn't matter how old you are, doesn't matter how young you are. You can change that story, just you know, get yourself in the right room. Well,
1:24:03
anybody who finds themselves in the room with you is very fortunate. Thank you, Julie Martin, for speaking and sounding and playing with me today. It's been a real joy. Thank you so
1:24:15
much for inviting me. Jeanell, I've really, really appreciated it
1:24:18
My pleasure. You sure.
1:24:33
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