Ariana Newcomer

Healing the soul's voice

Do you let your voice out to play?

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do you let your voice out to play

Being creative is essential to our success – in whatever we do. I wrote 2 articles recently about the process of creativity – Are You Crazy?, and The Art of Serendipity.

Here’s another crucial piece of your creativity that no one is telling you about: Your voice.

I’ve seen it over and over again with my clients. When you free up your voice, when you learn to play with your voice, and gain a greater range of self expression through your voice, your creativity sky rockets.

Your voice is an expression of your essence.
So, if you’re holding your voice back (which most of you are doing without realizing it), you’re holding back your essence. And you’re holding back your creativity, which is tied to freely expressing your essence.

Here’s what I recommend:
Read out loud regularly, especially from books or poems that are just silly and fun, so you can actually PLAY with your voice. 10-15 minutes 3x a week is enough. I love Dr. Suess books for this practice.Continue Reading

Your mp3 habit is messing with your voice and your brain…

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Did you know that listening to mp3 music can mess with your brain, and your voice?

I love my digital music. But I make sure I listen to CDs and high definition recordings, too.

Why? Because I know from personal experience that we can train our brains to stop paying attention to certain frequencies, and that’s BAD news – for our brains and our voices.

In last week’s article, I talked about how we don’t hear our own voices accurately. This is another piece of that important discussion.

When I had to stop performing as a singer, part of the reason was because I actually could not hear my own voice accurately in the heart of the soprano range. When I sang, I heard my voice as matching pitch with the piano, or another singer – but I wasn’t. Here’s the freaky part: I could hear that I was flat if I heard a recording of myself – just not while I was singing.

I found out how to fix that when I read about the work of Dr. Alfred Tomatis in a singing magazine. I had to re-train my brain’s ability to perceive all the frequencies in my own voice.

I had an audiogram at the beginning of my listening retraining program that showed a dip in my hearing at 2,000 hz in both ears.

After my listening program, that dip was gone. So was my inability to hear when I was singing flat. (I still had to retrain all the bad muscle habits that made me flat, but that’s another story. I couldn’t have fixed those without restoring my brain’s ability to hear my own voice accurately again.)Continue Reading

Are You In Partnership With Yourself?

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Are You In Partnership With Yourself?I’m passionate about creating true partnership between men and women, so we can all be in partnership with our planet to create a world we can all thrive in.

So, I’m taking a course based on Riane Eisler’s book, “The Power of Partnership.” I’ve been blessed to work with her directly in the past, and she is an amazing woman who has been inspiring me since the 80s.

Our first module is about our partnership with SELF – which is the place we have to start. We can’t create true partnership with others until we become a true partner with ourSELF.

For me, this means accepting ALL of me – even the parts that seem pretty dark or that look like they’re still sabotaging me in spite of all my years of personal growth work.

One issue that’s coming up again is the masculine vs. feminine within myself, and in our culture. I’ve found a more integrated way of looking at them in Riane’s work.

There are a lot of authors and coaches now working with “feminine principles,” “feminine power,” “feminine leadership models,” and “feminine” _______ (fill in the blank with your favorite). They encourage women to tune in to their “feminine” instead of their  “masculine,” which has been causing them to push too hard, to burn out, to operate from a way of being that isn’t natural.

Let me be clear – I’m FOR the resurgence of the feminine. We need to bring the traditionally-considered-as-female qualities — caring, nurturing, collaboration, deep listening, going with the flow, doing without forcing, etc. — into businesses, our lives, and our culture. We also need to raise women up to true equal (partnership) status with men.Continue Reading

Creative people are crazy, right? Umm, not exactly.

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It’s a common story about highly creative people – that they’re basically crazy. Creative geniuses end up as loonies, or borderline loonies, or minimally functional. The reclusive writers, the drunks, the suicides, the painter who cut off his ear (Van Gogh), the institutionalized artists…

Turns out, creativity is complex. It’s not dependent on your IQ, and you don’t have to be crazy. There are many characteristics and traits that go into being highly creative, and highly creative people may actually be MORE sane than “normal” folks.

Last week I wrote about boosting creativity through cultivating the Art of Serendipity. (Read that here.) This article builds on that one.

Here are some of the characteristics of highly creative people:

  • cultivating serendipity, or discovering “what they were not in quest of”
  • introspection and openness to their inner life
  • preferring complexity and ambiguity over black & white perspectives
  • a high tolerance for disorder and disarray
  • yet they are able to extract order from chaos
  • being highly independent and unconventional
  • willing to take risks
  • tolerance of uncertainty and contradictions

Highly creative people develop a higher self-awareness – including awareness of the “shadow” or “darker” aspects of the self. They engage with both the dark and the light – the full spectrum of life. The whole enchilada. The whole human being. All of themselves.Continue Reading

The Art of Serendipity

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IMG_0489Want to be creative? Cultivate the art of Serendipity!

Serendipity is such a wonderful word, isn’t it?

It makes me think of happy chance, and it’s related in my mind to synchronicity, another word I love.

I just found out that we can actually cultivate serendipity. This is exciting to me! Here’s a lovely story about the origin of the word:

In 1754, Horace Walpole wrote some thoughts on a Persian fairy tale that entranced him about 3 princes from the Isle of Serendip who had extraordinary powers of observation. Walpole suggested this tale contained an important idea about human genius: “As their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.” (NYTimes 1/3/16) He proposed the word “serendipity” to describe this talent.

So, serendipity is not something that happens to us by dumb luck. It’s something we DO. It’s about paying attention, casting a wider net, allowing plans to change based on a feeling, using an accidental encounter or happening to chart a new path or open new doors, or make new discoveries.

It means that having too narrow a focus or being too perfectionistic can actually prevent you from finding creative solutions to problems in your business and in your life.Continue Reading

Hold Your Tongue!

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How many times have you been told to “hold your tongue” or “bite your tongue”?

How many times have you “swallowed your tongue” or “held your tongue” when there was something you really wanted to say, but couldn’t (or didn’t think you should)?

These are common phrases we use to stop ourselves or someone else from talking, or from saying something in particular. They’re ways we hold our voices back.

You need to know 2 things:

1. Holding, biting or swallowing your tongue are not just metaphors for not speaking. They actually cause physical tension in your tongue, which can really mess with your voice.

Continue Reading