The Sound of the Womb Is Not “Shhh”, The Sound of the Womb is Holy

It began with a few of us saying that we felt as though our voice had changed or was changing during menopause and the lead up to it. For myself I noticed this change in ways that are difficult to define but I feel that my voice is sweeter, more soulful somehow. That is my singing voice. My speaking voice has changed too. It carries more weight, more substance. It sounds more resonant, more truthful.

From there the conversation turned to exploring the link between singing (particularly at sacred sites) and using our own voice to heal our bodies. We are fortunate to have a sound therapist on the course (The Alchemy of Menopause) who shared that particularly humming vibrates in the body in a special way to affect us positively. We contain the voice within our own system.

Something I have long done both alone and with those who accompany me on my visits to sacred sites, is to introduce myself to the land through my voice. I think of this as my “calling card”. No words, they are unnecessary and can sometimes confuse or complicate things, just sound. Within our voice is our history, our lineage, our ancestral memories, our intentions, our hopes, our fears, our past, and most especially our present. Where we are at that moment in time and space is alive in our voice.

In our voice we are recognised by the seen and the unseen world, the human and the other than human. We call to us a matching vibration in declaring our sound. Our kin on the other side hear our call. It is a prayer without words. By our voices we are known.

On the 10^th March this year I awoke from a dream with the words, “songs of moisture and repair”. In the dream I was dressed in white, singing beautiful, ethereal songs, and I felt joyful and happy. I realised that some aspect of my life had become arid and needed to be moistened in the waters of life.

And today I woke from the following dream:

I am in a kitchen with a man. The man is hostile and I have displeased him in some way. I feel vaguely threatened because there are two knives, one that is used for chopping vegetables and the other a machete, the purpose of which is unknown, but I submerge it in a basin of water at the kitchen sink. It seems the man is angry with me for not making the sound “shhh” as he has asked myself and another woman to make. I know he is angry for other reasons too. A third woman enters the scene; she is known to me as an ex-boyfriend’s sister. I tell her about the denied request to make a “shhh” sound. She agrees that to deny the request was the right thing to do because making that sound is not good for women’s wombs. 

 “Shhh” within the context of the dream was a sound to indicate to be quiet. Obviously, my womb was refusing this command. My womb, your womb, and the archetypal womb has a voice. It has a memory where everything that has happened in our lifetime and back through the lifetimes of our soul’s journey is stored. The womb has many untold stories to tell, and it seems it is time to tell them.

We tell the stories of our womb through sound, vibration, song, humming, connecting our voices with places, people, and most of all the divine spark that lives within our own being.

When women come together to sing, to chant, to tone, to hum, and to harmonise, the power is mighty. Women conspiring, breathing together. Women enchanting. The same is true of women moving together, dancing together. It is sad but not surprising that at a particular place and time in history women were banned from beating their drums.

The sound of the womb is not “shhh”. 

A tight, stressed, and shut a down womb does not vibrate with the song, the heartbeat, of the universe. The constricted womb is the constricted throat. The constricted throat is the constricted womb. Stories left untold are trapped in the womb. Like repressed gods and goddesses, they become pathologies. We get sick, we suffer, there are symptoms.

This is not just romantic conjecture; it is known that the uterus and the larynx (voice box) have a shared embryological origin.

During in utero development, the tissues that form the larynx, the reproductive system and the digestive tract arise from the archenteron (the primitive gut tube). This forms the cloacal membrane which forms the opening to the reproductive, urinary, and digestive tracts, and the oropharyngeal membrane which forms the mouth and throat structures.

As the spine develops these areas separate however remain connected by the connective tissue, the fascia. After birth and throughout life, these two areas continue to mirror each other.

Both the throat and the cervix are hollow organs that act as sphincters, that open and close in response to breath, emotion, and various stimuli.

An intimate nervous system connection is maintained via the vagus nerve and the influence of hormones. The vagus nerve is a crucial component of the parasympathetic “rest and digest” nervous system. It influences various organs, including the throat, heart, lungs, and the pelvic organs, terminating in the cervix. It responds strongly to sounds such as chanting, humming, and deep sighing.

When we are relaxed in a parasympathetic state, we release tension from the throat and the pelvic floor. This may explain why during menopause women have a lower tolerance for stressful situations.

It is interesting and makes sense that the throat and the uterus are also connected to the heart. When our hearts are open and we are operating from a place of love rather than fear, our vagus nerve attunes us to the love of the universe.

Hormones produced by the reproductive system have a direct impact on the larynx and vocal fold tissues. Receptors for sex hormones (estrogen and progesterone) are present on the vocal folds. This perhaps explains why our voice changes at menstruation and menopause.

During menstruation voice quality can fluctuate. Women sometimes experience vocal impairment such as hoarseness or loss of the high notes (dysphonia premenstrualis). High progesterone levels can cause mucosal dryness and swelling of the vocal folds.

Mucosal dryness/ vaginal dryness.

Perhaps the reason that many women complain of vaginal dryness at menopause has more to do with the trapped stories and the constricted voices that deny truth.

If we told the stories of our womb, if we sang the songs of “moisture and repair”, and if we reconnected ourselves to the vibratory web of life through our voice, we may find that many of the physiological symptoms that we experience, particularly in relation to menstruation, birthing and menopause, are relieved,  and that the voice of our wombs, the sacred truth teller, places us in our rightful and holy place.

Too much for now but writing this has caused me to reflect on all that Sunday school and Assembly singing we did as children. What words were we ingesting into the most sacred core of our being? I think too of the pop songs we grew up listening to on repeat. Both these types of songs, the religious songs and the pop songs seem to me now to have etched lyrics into our psyche that were largely disempowering. We always seemed to belong to another, to God, to Jesus, to a lover, but rarely to ourselves.