THE ROOT OF RESONANCE

THE ROOT OF RESONANCE
'Unpacking Energy, Trauma & Truth Within our Voice'
Exclusive Interview with CC Rice
​Conducted by Allié McGuire

​We’ve all been told to "find our voice"—but what if we were never taught how? CC Rice, a master voice and body language expert, invites us not just to speak louder, but to speak truer. In this conversation, we explore the power, pain, and possibility of what it means to reclaim the voice we were born with—and how doing so might just set us free.

ALLIÉ: As we've all heard, it's not what you say, but how you say it. We've heard this, we know this. So I would love to start here. I would love to hear you speak on how the weight of words is dependent on how they're delivered.

CC: Yeah. Well, I would honestly say it's both. It is what you say and it is how you say it, because our subconscious mind is revealing things all the time through the language that we choose. The language we choose is connected to our history, whatever image is in our mind, and how we are defining that image. However we've processed or interpreted a feeling is coming through a pathway that is as old as we are, even if it's unconscious.

And then there's the other unconscious or conscious part of it, which is pitch and placement and breath and support and the shape of the body that's creating all of those things. So my major philosophy is your body is the instrument. Your voice is its music. And so whatever the body is doing, the sound of the instrument is going to be a product of that body—whether it is tense, tight, stressed, full of breath, or not. ​And all of that is going to interact with our history and our trauma and our habits and our holdings and our stress level and our comfort level and our health. It's all going to be filtered through whatever music is being played by the voice in that moment. So it all matters. I say that a lot to my clients: everything matters. And it's really okay for things to matter if we can take ownership of what matters for us.

​ALLIÉ: Yeah. Well, that's just about the most beautiful thing I've heard in response to that cliché that we all know. I will say that one thing, in terms of words and how we share and how we express them, is that I fell in love with sign language years ago. Because your body really becomes, as you said, the instrument. You know? And so you can say very different things. For example, I like to share: “I'm waiting.” You can say that [makes gesture], or you can say [makes gesture], or you can say [makes gesture]. Three different things I just said, and it had nothing to do with the words but with how they were conveyed.

CC: Absolutely. And that is beautiful, actually, because then you have to be attuned to all of it. You don't get to ignore any part of what's happening, and that's where I'm at.

ALLIÉ: Yes. Well, that's a beautiful place to be. So when we talk about the value of voice, we recognize it as more than a sound. It's, to your point, a memory, a vibration, even a wound. Question now for you is: when did you first realize that trauma can be voiced?

CC: Wow. I think I had to go through it to understand, and I had the opportunity to go through it pretty early in my life, which at the time I thought was a curse. But now I recognize that I was being prepared for a chapter in my life where I would actually be able to use these skills for people that are my peers—people that are not too much younger than I am—and that it actually helps me bridge a gap, you know. And so yeah, I realized it when I was probably 16 and my jaw started to lock. Every morning I'd wake up and I couldn't open my mouth. I write about this a lot in the book, and this started happening after years of having migraines. And I would get them pretty frequently—sometimes, you know, every day in a row.

When I started getting the migraines, I hadn't really put the pieces together. I didn't know that it was connected to all of these things that shifted and changed, to traumas and all of that, that had happened when I was eight—when the headaches started. I only put those pieces together later. But when I was about 16 or 17 and my jaw started locking, I had an inkling that it was connected to something I was holding onto, and that just continued to develop.

The more I took voice and speech courses in college, the more I took them in graduate school, the more traumas I remembered as a product of opening and releasing my body. Things would come back to me—memories I had blocked out. I would get sensations in my body and, the best way I can describe it, hear a little voice tell me what it was connected to. And then I started to work with my students as I progressed, and I'd put my hands on someone's body and it would talk to me. It would tell me, “Oh, this is where the pain is. Check right here.” I could both see it, feel it, and hear it, but I didn't know what I was doing or how I was doing it until I started to read books. The Body Keeps the Score was probably the first one. The Deepest Well was another one. And I started to practice reiki, and then things really started to make complete sense. But it was a slow process in developing the understanding of that connection. And it was through my teachers in voice and speech classes saying, “Let this go.” And letting something go in your body would lead to a drop in the voice, an expression of breath that you didn't feel as though you had control over, and the sound of your voice would change. I’d watch that happen to people over and over and over. They’d let something go, their voice would expand, it would usually deepen, and it would have more power behind it. And so I started to think, okay, here we go. This is a real thing.

ALLIÉ: Wow. As you're saying that, I'm becoming more conscious of my breath, my voice, and how the mind and body work as one—our emotional, spiritual, physical selves. There are layers of the entity of us. But the fact that you were attuned to that—the way you were, the degree that you were—I think we all carry some kind of learned performance in our voice. For me, it shows up when I feel like I have something to prove or something to protect.

CC, when you work with someone and they're still performing, how do you help them find their real voice beneath the practiced and rehearsed version?

​CC: Well, first of all, I think it's really important that we let go of the idea of correcting ourselves in real time. One of the major practices I use is “set it and forget it.” You do the work: you move your body, you breathe, you spend time in your meditative practices, you do your warmups, you connect it to the voice, you move it through an easy belly, you practice your posture—and then you let it go. You live your life and allow the practice to show up for you, rather than forcing yourself to change.

You break a habit by overriding it, not by stopping doing something. The overwrite is making a more efficient pathway. So if your body gets comfortable being upright because you're practicing your floor work and aligning your spine every day, and you're meditating with that and breathing deeper, all of a sudden your body’s going to say, “It's not comfortable anymore to do this. It's not comfortable anymore to speak in a voice that is pushing. I can actually be easy and in myself, and that feels better.” And that's how it starts to shift on its own, essentially.

ALLIÉ: So it's almost like you're training yourself to be authentic.

CC: Yeah. It's like practicing scales to be able to play jazz. And when you're playing jazz, you have to be free. You can't be thinking about the scales, but you have to have practiced them enough that they're in you. You can hear, “Ah, this is the key we're in. I can play anything with these notes,” and then you just go. That’s basically what it is—setting the body in a place where it can release and continue to find comfort. That comfort will want to show up as the default if you give it time and actually practice.

ALLIÉ: Oh, fantastic. So your work feels like a bridge between classical and intuitive, the body and spirit, theater and therapy. What has it meant for you to stand at that intersection—especially, let’s give context now—as a woman and a voice of color doing something that doesn’t necessarily fit neatly into a box? What has this space felt like to you?
​
CC: I gave up on trying to fit into the box a long time ago because I just never could. I was always the round peg in a square hole, and that just wasn’t changing as I progressed through my life. So I had to embrace it.

I had hesitation about sharing what it is that I actually do with people. I had trouble sharing the intuitive piece of it—saying, “Yeah, this is actually in here.” I know it seems like something you can just read in a book or learn from a video, but actually there is a piece that comes from something we can’t really name. And that’s okay. It’s okay to embrace that. That was the hardest part.

But everything else—I was constantly in environments where I was getting feedback from people that they needed it. Every time I worked with someone and opened up a little more, gave a little more of what I knew was going on, and didn’t hold back the extra spice I uniquely bring—it got better. People trusted me more, they opened up more. It was a real energetic exchange. It was working with the universe, working with people. It was listening and saying yes to things, even though I was scared—and doing it anyway.

And as a woman of color, I think it’s very important—and I should say as a Black woman—it’s very important to show other Black women how to use their voices in a way that is sometimes perceived as threatening, and still be okay if that’s your natural voice. To exude kindness because of the kindness you show yourself—not because that’s what society wants you to do. You don’t always have to behave in a way that makes you seem angelic. Sometimes you do have to be ferocious. Sometimes you have to allow your righteousness to show up. Sometimes it’s appropriate to yell, sometimes it’s appropriate to cry. And again, the more I did that in my classrooms, and my students and clients could see that I was a real person demonstrating the full breadth of emotion, it gave other people permission to do so. And I kept getting that good feedback.

That’s also what theater does for you. In the rest of our lives, if you cry, yell at someone, or have a tantrum, people will often give you a negative reflection: “That was too much for me. That was too loud. That was too this, too that.” But you do that on stage in a Greek play—like the one I’m working on right now—and that’s what everybody needs to facilitate their own cathartic response to all those feelings they’ve been pushing down. And they applaud you for it. That really reoriented my relationship to emotional expression. I thought, “Oh my gosh, I have a place to put my big emotions, and people celebrate me for it.” Other people need a place to put their big emotions. So in this practice, you practice emotions. I teach people how to throw tantrums. I teach people how to yell in a way that’s not going to damage their voice but actually release the pain that wants to come out through sound.

ALLIÉ: I just love how you take your voice and are able to manifest so much healing—not only understanding how we understand others, but also how we understand ourselves, and how we utilize it as the tool it can be to help others and to help ourselves.

CC: Yeah. You must learn the self, because we are all so similar, as much as we are different. The more you learn about how your system works, the more empathetic you become toward how other people’s systems are working. “Oh, I recognize that. I’ve been there. I’ve seen that face. I’ve made that expression. I’ve heard that sound. I’ve made that sound.” That awareness is what awakens the part of our heart that wants to connect with other people.

ALLIÉ: And that’s the word I was just going to say—connection. I have a couple more questions. First of all, you mentioned your book earlier. Tell me more about your book. I need to know about this because I need to buy it, have it, ingest it. Tell me about this book of yours.

CC: Yeah, so the book is called The Root of Awareness: Tools to Ground and Grow Vocal and Physical Communication. It’s both an energy-reading book, where I’m teaching people how to read what is going on outside of themselves and inside of themselves by learning to read their own energy first, and a guide to connecting each energy center to the part of the voice it rules.

For instance, the root is connected to physical response. It is connected to the earth and our immediate, physical needs. It rules ages zero to two—the root of life—and that time period is where all the sounds you make are responsive to your physical well-being and environment. Baby’s gassy, baby’s tired, baby’s hungry—those are all going to be different cries, different sounds. Baby’s happy, baby’s sleeping—all of that. These are the sounds that just show up naturally. No one has to teach us how to use them. We don’t need a supreme understanding of anything. They are simply the sounds we come with.

Then we move up the body. Your sacral chakra is your intimate voice—the one you use when speaking to someone you want to be close with, someone with whom you can share intimacy. Then you move up to the solar plexus, the volume center, where the diaphragm lives. That’s where you can really produce more sound if you know how to activate that fire center.

Then you get to the heart—compassion—which also includes the lungs. Now we’re talking about pitch, and the heart voice is the compassionate voice. It’s the voice we use with babies: “Oh hi, how are you?” All that up-and-down we do, because we’re communicating through sound, not just language. The language is there because we need it, but we are using pitch so this other being can absorb us.

Then we get to clarity at the throat—where the teeth, lips, and tip of the tongue make sure what we are feeling comes through with clarity and containment. Then we move to the third eye, which is the inner voice. How do you talk to yourself? Whose voice is that? Is it yours? Your mother’s? God’s? A collection of voices?

Finally, we get to the crown—the head voice—our bell that can ring. Those high-pitched sounds that send frequency far beyond the body and help us connect to all the systems outside of us. The concept is like when opera singers hit a high note and it breaks glass: by reaching the same frequency, sound moves through space, beyond the body, finding things it can vibrate and synchronize with—bringing them into connection.

ALLIÉ: I’m kind of at a loss for words right now. That was so beautiful—the whole science and sacred quality of our voice, how and when we use it, and why. It really is powerful.
Now, for anyone who feels like they’ve lost their voice—not just in the literal sense, but in the emotional and energetic one—what would you say to them? Not as a teacher, but as a fellow traveler on a path back to self. CC, what would you say?
CC: Okay. Well, the first thing I would say is: read the book, because it’ll do a lot of that work for me. But part of the reason my company is called Guided Inspiration is because I tell my clients and students all the time: I’m not a coach. A coach is a person who stands on the sidelines and yells at you to do something better that they used to be able to do. A guide is someone who takes you along a path they’ve been down and shows you the way so that you can do it on your own.

So for me, it’s about, first, not thinking you have to do it by yourself. You must find community. You must find safe spaces. You must find safe people to practice expression with. And I think that’s really important—especially if you feel like you’ve lost connection to your voice. You can really only find that by experiencing speaking and letting it land on something or someone else, and feeling that energy reverberate through them.

It’s one thing to walk around and talk to yourself in your house, which I’m a big fan of and believe we should all do. It’s another thing to say those exact same things to the person they are meant for. You feel a completely different experience when you do that. But that takes practice, and it takes courage.

Oftentimes we’ve been put in positions where we’re in the deep end of communication without the foundational skills. That’s what the book is for—it’s all that foundational root work to slowly bring you back to trust within yourself. The root is the safety, security, and trust center. So we start at the bottom, with safety. Making sure you have a safe space, a community, a person, a place to send sound. Or reestablishing and healing the times in the past when you didn’t have safety. Identifying those, putting language to them if you can. And if you can’t put language to them, just releasing sound about them—just feeling whatever’s still stuck in there and letting it out.

A lot of times we’re just compacted. There’s so much holding in us—so much tension and tightness keeping the voice from being expressed in the moments it’s needed—that we have to undo. We have to let a little air out of the tire so that we become more malleable, more able to listen and to breathe. ∎

Find & follow CC on Instagram:
@guidedinspiration

Get your copy of ‘The Root of Awareness’:
https://awarenow.us/book/the-root-of-awareness