Body of Work: Singing with the Body I Have

Lately I’ve been treating my midlife body as a kind of "body of work" —paying attention to what breathwork, walking, and group exercise classes are teaching me about how I lead.

Singing, it turns out, is not just what I do for joy; it’s one of the clearest mirrors I have for how I carry legacy and how I ignore or honor my limits.

The Spirituals Project Choir, Denver, 2007, with artistic director, the late Bennie L. Williams

As I celebrated a milestone birthday, I began a leg of the exploration with a simple question: How might listening to my body change the way I lead?

A Family That Sang Me Up

My voice was a gift I did not choose – cultivated by a family who filled my childhood with an awesome soundtrack.

My earliest memories of music are personal and playful. My dad would change the lyrics of songs to include my name and whatever we were doing that day, turning the radio into a running commentary on our lives. Even B‑I‑N‑G‑O became S‑I‑D‑R‑A, about a daddy and a daughter rather than a farmer and a dog.

Music was never just background noise in our house. My dad once earned a voice scholarship to college, which he declined so he could follow his siblings to a different school. According to my dad, my now‑deceased mom sang freedom songs during the 60s with well known folk singers. Along with their fellow activists, old spirituals became marching songs during the Civil Rights movement. My grandmother was the minister of music at her church until dementia narrowed her world and mobility. She was also my first piano teacher. My uncles Brad and Carey played in a band, and I would go down to their basement apartment and sing for them and their bandmates, a small girl playing at being part of something bigger than herself.

I never thought of this exposure to music as training. Music has always been in the water I drink.

When the song chooses you

Nearly 20 years ago, when I auditioned for a community choir, I arrived with a specific piece in mind, something I thought would show what I could do. The audition itself was terrifying; even though I had been singing at church for years, I still doubted whether I was good enough to make the cut. When I opened my mouth to sing “Steal Away,” another spiritual—“Go Down, Moses”—came out instead. It was as if my ancestors occupied my body and exited through my mouth, taking over the room. I’m sure they helped me secure that seat in the first alto section.

This choir’s repertoire focused on Negro spirituals. Near the end of each set, we would join hands and sing the spiritual “Oh Freedom.” The first time we did it in front of an audience, I felt overcome with emotion and tears flooded my eyes. I tried not to blink, tried to hold back the tears. There we were—different races, ages, nationalities, religions—fingers interlocked, voices blending together, singing a song that had lived in my family’s story long before I ever knew the words.

When singing starts to hurt

Soon after moving to the Washington, DC, area, my husband and I found a church home, and right away I joined the choir. As always, my choir community became a surrogate family, but for the first time it started to hurt to sing, which felt like a betrayal. About two years ago, I finally saw an ENT, and he confirmed what my body had been trying to say: the way my throat was working was causing the discomfort. I had been diagnosed with something called muscle tension dysphonia (MTD), a fancy way of saying that the muscles in and around my voice box were so tight that making sound took far more effort than it used to.

To treat MTD, my speech pathologist gave me exercises to reinforce the importance of diaphragmatic breathing, and she literally rubbed my neck, trying to invite softness back into muscles that had gotten used to holding on. That was the first time I really considered breathwork not as a wellness trend, but as a survival strategy. To keep singing without so much discomfort, I would have to learn to be in my body differently.

I’ve always worked at my singing, but there was still a kind of ease in how the sound came. These days, it feels more like something I have to negotiate with. When I sing now and the pain begins, I push through. I feel the sound thin out, the quality shift, the reach of my voice shorten. Those shifts tell the truth in a way my musicianship can’t override; knowing my part doesn’t change what my body is saying.

What my voice is teaching me about leading

This season of muscle tension and careful breath has been teaching me as much about leading as it has about singing. Like the other activities in this series—ice chopping, group Pilates, getting eyeglasses—singing is one more way my body refuses to be background to my leadership; it keeps insisting on being the teacher. In my professional life, I often step into roles where my job is to hold the room, shape the arc of an experience, and “stick the landing.” That kind of leadership can feel a lot like holding a note for a set number of beats: impressive from the outside, exhausting on the inside if I’m not paying attention to what it costs my body.​

Muscle tension dysphonia has not made me stop. I still talk for a living. I still sing at church. I still push through when it hurts, especially when others are counting on me. But it has made me more honest about what it takes. I notice how much energy goes into sounding steady when my throat feels tight. I pay more attention to how often I ask my body to “just get through this” instead of asking what it needs.

In that way, my voice is nudging me toward a different kind of leadership:

• Leading that honors limits instead of hiding them.

• Leading that makes room for rest and recovery, not just performance.

• Leading that remembers the body is not a separate instrument from the work; it is the work’s first home.

Every time I step up to sing with my church choir, I feel that history—family, freedom songs, community and church choirs, neck rubs in a speech therapist’s office—standing there with me. My leadership, like my singing, lives in a real body with real constraints and real history.

A few questions to carry forward

If you, too, are someone whose work depends on your voice—whether you are teaching, facilitating, preaching, or leading—you might sit with a few questions of your own:​

• Where are you still trying to lead like a flawless soloist, when what you really need is a choir?

• What tightness in your body have you been calling “normal” that might actually be asking for care?

• How might you let the songs you carry — literal or metaphorical — move through you in a way that changes you, not just the people listening?