What Blocks Resonance?
(It’s Probably Not What You Think)
Tension is the enemy of resonance.
When muscles tighten, sound gets trapped. It can’t vibrate freely. It can’t ring. It can’t carry. It gets swallowed, squeezed, and stuck.
And most of the time, you don’t even know it’s happening.
A tight jaw muffles your sound. A tight tongue traps it in the back of your throat. A tight throat squeezes and strains. Tight shoulders collapse your breath. A tight belly kills your support.
Most people try to fix their voice by doing more — speaking louder, pushing harder, trying to project. But the real fix is usually less. Less tension. Less gripping. Less holding.
But here’s where it gets deeper.
Why are those muscles tight in the first place?
Sometimes it’s habit. Sometimes it’s posture. Sometimes it’s stress.
And sometimes it’s something older.
Fear of being heard closes the throat. Holding back tightens the chest. People-pleasing shrinks the voice into something small and safe. Trauma constricts the body to protect itself.
Your body is smart. If you grew up in an environment where being loud was punished, where your words got you in trouble, where being seen wasn’t safe — your body learned to close down. To swallow the sound. To keep it in.
And it kept doing that long after the danger passed.
So when I talk about releasing tension for resonance, I’m not just talking about stretching your jaw or loosening your tongue — although we do that too. I’m talking about giving your body permission to stop protecting you from something that’s no longer there.
That’s the work.
The tight jaw might be holding words you never said. The tight throat might be holding a scream. The tight chest might be holding grief.
And when you release those — through massage, through breathwork, through sound, through awareness — the resonance that was always there starts to come through.
Your voice doesn’t need to be built. It needs to be uncovered.
Resonance is a term also used in physics.
In physics, resonance isn't about force. It's about matching. When a vibration meets a surface that shares its natural frequency, the sound amplifies on its own. No pushing. No strain. Just alignment. Your body works the same way.
When I was 18, I decided to take up martial arts.
I was a petite girl who didn’t know how to defend myself against angry men. As a result, I myself was very angry. I learned in Tai Chi and Kung Fu lessons that my anger would never help me stand up for myself. I learned about energy, and how you have to be aware that energy influences energy.
So If I myself am angry, and I am up against another angry person, how can I ever truly win? I can’t. Especially since my anger is fueled by the feelings of resentment and self pity. Usually, the opponent of my past was fueled by feelings of dominance and power. Very different forces, and which ones do you think will usually win?
So I learned to control my own force.
To breathe slowly and become more aware of my voice as I responded to these difficult people. And I noticed something.
If I resonated a relaxed energy free of tension, they would usually bend to my will.
While they came in aggressively, expecting to dominate the force field, I was able to stand my ground calmly and easily manipulate the energy.
The secret was in mastering my own tension. Maintaining awareness that the tension was becoming too tight. Like a guitar string, some tension is good. Too much, and you break.
Through breath and body awareness, I could maintain a steady grounding energy field and almost always get the opponent to meet me where I was.
When you work on your voice, you work with your energy.
You learn to control your energy.
You learn to tune your frequency.
✍️ Journal Prompt: “I swallow my words when...” Complete this sentence as many times as you can.
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