Your Voice Makes You Human
Your voice is a sacred gift of your humanity. In these times, when so much is at stake, it’s your connection with your humanity that will give you the motivation, inspiration, and vision to bring forth your greatest self.
When you lose this basic connection to your humanity, you lose hope. You feel lost, disconnected from your self and the value of your life, and the contribution your soul longs to make to the world.
It’s easy to feel drained and slide into despair, when you lose your connection with your own voice.
When you find it, and forge a relationship with it that’s strong, solid and yours, you have come into possession of your self in a way that no one can take away from you.
Your voice is a sacred gift to you. It is part of the spark of divinity that gave you life when you were born, and it is part of what helps you grow and evolve into the unique expression of divinity that you are. It is a bridge between your humanity and your divinity, and if you recognize it as such, you understand more about its power and potential.
Your voice is as singular as your fingerprint, or a snowflake: no two are alike.
When you write, you come closer to your own humanity. You stop your busy doing and come right here, to this moment, where your heart wants you to be, so you can pay attention to what’s real.
Maybe the clouds in this morning’s sunrise opened you to a depth of sadness you’d been feeling just under the surface since your friend called to tell you her brother died suddenly. Now you can’t stop the tears as you write about your friend’s voice conveying her shock; and your words wash you clean. You’re present again, to what matters.
Writing can do that for you– restore you to yourself, in five minutes, if you let it.
Writing, if you let it, will take you right to the core of what makes you most human. As you touch that core, you’re changed. You see the world differently; and then, when you’re in the check-out line at the grocery store behind someone who doesn’t look like you, you’re more likely to remember that this, too, is a human being, whose heart aches and dreams like yours does.
Hand to hand, story by story, we touch each other. When you write, you’re more likely to be a link in this chain of human arms, and human hearts.
Empathy is built this way. You find compassion for yourself when you write, and compassion for yourself more easily leads to compassion for another.
The world I want to live in is one where I look into another person’s eyes and see, not a person to be afraid of, but a person who, like me, knows what it’s like to feel vulnerable.
When you write, in your own voice, you come closer and closer to remembering what matters about being alive in a world full of other people who are alive, like you are.
You remember the smile on the face of your cousin, last summer; you recall your sister’s laughter, that you know so well; you take the time to hear the story of your friend’s last visit with her mother, before she died. Without our humanity life becomes stale and hard, empty and barren. Your voice will help you find your way back to what makes you human, and will ripple out to touch other people’s lives in ways you can’t know, but will happen, as surely as when you throw a stone in the water, the ripples circle out.
Throw a stone in the water of your own self. Start to write for the sole purpose of remembering what makes you human, then walk in the world knowing that each person you see has their own story of what makes them human. This is how we create a world where life matters for everyone, human and non-human.
Your voice matters. Using your voice to write helps you to know that you matter.
How to begin?
Begin Now: Your writing practice: Set aside five minutes. Set a timer, if you can, to hold the space.
What are some of the qualities that you most cherish about your own humanity? Name two or three. Then, remember a moment recently when you felt yourself touching one of these qualities. What happened? Were you alone, or with someone else? What did you see, feel, hear? After you’ve written about it for a few minutes, ask yourself, what do I need to remember today, that will help me become more human, as I go through my day?
Trust the flow of your own words when you write. Your words will feel that trust, and the flow will continue.
Give thanks to yourself after you write. Know that your journey to move toward your own voice is a journey toward your humanity, and makes space for another person’s humanity to be known as well.
