This article contains notes I took to write a larger essay on this topic.
No truth, only genuine experiences
The words below are by nature partial, fragmenting reality through a perspective that is my own. Despite this reductionism, I hope — as always — to convey how the tension between the singularity and multiplicity of lived experience is precisely what grounds the feeling of belonging and connection between living beings.
Solitude, women, pioneers: as many words as there are experiences. Solitude as isolation or communion — and everything that lives between the two. Woman as a person belonging to a community still navigating heavy norms, joining all beings called to uncondition themselves in order to live more freely. Pioneer: one who cuts a new furrow — which is to say, each of us in one way or another, more or less visible, more or less celebrated or scorned by the world around us.
The role of the spoken, sung, written voice strikes me as essential to the capacity to inhabit one’s own singularity — when everything nearby exerts gentle or heavy pressure to fall back into line.
Here are some fragmentary, non-exhaustive notes to remind myself where to find rightness, how to make of my voice an ally, and of time a revealing mirror.
Solitude, between necessity and suffering
Solitude as grace: the gift of silence, a necessary threshold on the path to inner knowing, liberation, individuation, experiences of connection with the whole.
Solitude as harm: permanent anxious social avoidance, blind retreat without deepening one’s Way, silence that suppresses the Voice and the joy of speaking, singing, writing… Solitude sometimes born of judgment, incomprehension, criticism, mockery, the feeling of not quite belonging to this era. Born too late or too early to embody this Way?
In English, two words hold this distinction more clearly: solitude, loneliness — the difference between being alone and feeling alone.
Myth, the illusion of separation: me versus the others, my false self performing to meet expectations versus my truer self in solitude. The Voice: that place, that practice of unifying inner polarities. No unnecessary suffering, no judgment around being alone through misalignment with others.
Solitude: listening to the inner Voice that leads to discernment. Thoughts grow clearer, the Voice becomes more true, allowing a return outward — nourished by oneself, in order to nourish others. This back-and-forth is necessary for caring for others — which is to say: creating, leading, healing, accompanying, helping, teaching… loving.
Society judges those who withdraw, except in roles already associated with necessary solitude: the archetypes and stereotypes of witches, shamans, religious figures, hermits, healers — even the cursed artist. These figures are judged too, of course, but according to other criterias.
Confusion between withdrawal and severance — solitude then potentially experienced as a curse: I cannot be with others and still be myself.
Solitude approached well, through the Way of the inner Voice and the joyful practice of creative expression: sharpened discernment toward experiences and feelings, less hyper reactivity, and a natural selectivity toward places, people, activities — not out of snobbery or contempt, but as an act of self-love in service of loving others better.
Voice within, voices without
Identifying the internalized voices that want to reduce us to an image already projected a thousand times across preceding generations and centuries.
Noticing the outer voices that feed this kind of imaginary — a decoy, really, nothing but a screen of past projections.
For those who explore their Way through the Voice, it helps enormously to recognize this : how I use my voice, what I say, sing, or write, how I present myself to others, how much credit I grant them — and what debts I create by believing I owe them satisfaction.
Everything becomes sign and meaning when we pass our personal expression through the sieve of the Voice.
An observational practice that can happen daily, but also over the long arc — taking bearings to witness our own evolution.
At what moment do I unconsciously pressure myself to conform, to drift from my Way in order to approximate someone else’s?
Do I know how to use my Voice to comfort myself, to validate myself, to reenter and to protect myself?
Diverging : when the gap is no longer a problem
Diverging a little, a lot, not at all — in family, professional, friendly, spiritual, artistic, geographical, cognitive circles…
The theme of the subversive child, the one who reverses the wheel of karma, explored in my book S’autoriser à être. Visages de la honte, voix du plaisir.
Knowing the foundations and the collapses of our genealogical tree provides a precious compass.
“Sometimes you think you’re the ugly duckling, and you think you must keep proving your worth. If you’ve overcome the weakness of wanting to fall in line with what others expect, you still face the risk of going astray — of cutting your Way like someone entering a war. Diverging for the sake of diverging means nothing. A branch that grows toward a different corner of the sky does so thanks to the other branches that make space for it, thanks to the roots that carry it. Don’t forget: the feeling of difference, of being out of step, is entirely relative. It can become a trick of the mind, which then believes the separation between me and the others is truly tangible. And yes — I am one, the other is one. And yet everything unites us beneath the surface layers. Accepting divergence doesn’t mean fleeing others, nor contradicting them at every turn. It means finding the place where you can touch your own corner of sky, and let the others benefit from it too — giving the tree a different shape. Strange or twisted, perhaps. But alive. The image speaks or it doesn’t — for me, it’s simply obvious.”
Tracing one’s path
Where does the Voice fit into all of this?
Again, the tree: it traces its path among others, finding its way through the soil and toward the sky. My voice doesn’t exist without the voices of others. Neither does my Way.
Many still oppose claiming one’s singularity with making demands.
I carry neither flag nor scripture. I simply notice that I find myself in genuine connection with others very rarely — that’s all.
But my home is my Voice: within it, I feel bound — bodily and spiritually — to the heart of what makes humanity and all living things pulse.
More of these notes in my books on experiences of grace, encountered in the simplest way through solo improvisation.
Where the voice settles well, the entire inner universe makes itself visible outward. Harmony: as above so below, as within so without.
Tracing one’s Way becomes: knowing one’s spoken, sung, written Voice more and more intimately, so as to refine the messages we carry.
Faithfulness, faith? Yes, surely. Remembering that I am only a passage, a channel, an instrument. It becomes easier then not to feel crushed by responsibility, not to confuse oneself with something greater than what one is.
Humility is indispensable. Evidently.
Placing oneself in receptivity — to receive from the Voice the messages the soul wants to pass through, including those of the body. To remain attentive to the sufferings and joys of others, which teach me what I am and remind me that I am only a carrier in this world.
Find helping voices
Helpful, inspiring, galvanizing. Each of us has a dominant element — for me, air and fire — and it is the fire beings who most reliably light up my eyes and free my voice. To find them, call them, stay in contact with them, whatever form that takes.
A lineage of helpful voices to sustain my own — because of course we are all stars on intersecting orbits, of course the circles of our past, present, and future lives interpenetrate. Karma, the law of cause and effect, interbeing and interdependence, the beauty of communicating roots.
Finding allied voices that open the Way, in every sense. Who makes me sing, love, write, dance, dream, begin, move forward, initiate, dare?
My favorite practice when I no longer believe in it, when I feel I can neither go back nor conform — not even a little, in case it might be easier: calling upon these singular voices. Working with them.
Lineages of spirit, intergenerational lineages, inter-species lineages… no borders, only soul connection. Practicing this, of course, not neglecting it: I walk my path, I speak my way, thanks to all those others who came before me and those who come after — and those here with me now.
Training the Voice to dare again and again
Setting down one’s voice: affirming without going astray, while accepting challenges and detours when they come — to find oneself more fully on the other side.
Nervous and energetic regulation, the game of the ego slowly finding its bearings as it disentangles itself from what we believe about ourselves… Transmuting energy to acquire the wisdom to use it in service of life, rather than to prove things or exhaust the mind or the body.
All the work of exploration and sublimation through voice and body finds its meaning here: it takes very little to bring body and voice into harmony, yet it remains complex. What matters most is practicing with awareness, to remain ever closer to the heart of one’s own heart.
Nakedness, vulnerability, power, intuition: all of this plays out simultaneously. You cannot want one without the others. Or you return to a sterilized life where you can perform a role well enough — but you lose yourself, body and soul.
Nourishing my Way through the Voice was such a necessity for me that I made it my business (laughing) — I am busy with it. No — it is not an occupation. It is an art of living. The only way I have found. The voices that help me, I know them well; I know they too have made fairly radical choices: self-care, inner healing, energetic protection, meditation, an ultra-selective attention… not a catch-all, but a quality of attention — whatever its form — to coming back to oneself, so as not to be pulled away by others or by the mind. To be inspired, yes. To be diverted, no.
A path of peace and inspiration, of nourishment from without and within.
Understanding the meaning of one’s realization
Perhaps this becomes possible with age. Saturn and Kairos alliance?
What is for oneself becomes for others and vice versa — meaning: a deep knowledge of one’s limits, needs, desires. And offering others a part of one’s path without seeking anything particular in return. Being an example of what a human being can be — not to glorify oneself or compensate for a lack of self-love.
Possible only when the body has integrated that its scars are fertile ground for love and future realization.
For my part: no grievances, no sense of score to settle with life.
Being a pioneer — is that me? It matters little, except for this one certainty: I chose Life in order to follow this Way through my Voice.
What has been acquired: the meaning of wounds, the lessons of so-called past failures, an understanding of what my ego still seeks to prove, a finely tuned sense of what makes me joyful, available, and inspired, the duty of listening in non-doing rather than sterile and exhausting agitation. Alignment, as people say?
Meaning arrives in the moments of peace where questions quietly erode.
I believe the experiences of fullness — not necessarily grace, but fullness — are confirmations.
It falls to each of us to learn to observe, to listen, before setting out again on the road of expression.
To be a leader: above all, to be an actor rather than a spectator — a conscious leader and creator of new forms of living and thinking, new forms of loving.
Finally: silence contains everything. The unique vibration of a Voice and its Path of realisation is found in this void so full of pure and pulsatile life. To the one who sings with his heart, life always responds with infinite relevance and tenderness.
This loneliness is an alchemical crucible, not a curse. It is the point of initiation of great advances, and the place of true creation, where everything responds to give meaning, support, courage and confirmation.