Some kind of weird thoughts on chakra 5

I have in my notebook today a little diagram that looks like a standard bell curve, and an arrow pointing to it that is labeled "Not good". This is me trying to explain to myself what I want to *not* do with my vocal volume over the course of a phrase: start low, swell a bit, then drop off and end low. "Not good."

Rodenberg actually notes that women in particular tend to start and finish their thoughts with "less than wholehearted conviction." Our sentences tend to trail off or fade. This habit has been a beast for me; I remember that one of the first pieces of storytelling feedback I ever got from Dr. Sobol was about "landing." About making the end of a sentence--particularly an important one--punchy, and not trailing off into extra words or "feminine" endings. (How interesting/offensive/sad is that? The ending that pulls back the power is named for women.) This is hard; for some reason, getting to the end of a thought and really trying to stick it seems like an act of total audacity.

I've been thinking today about what this communicates, this tendency to weaken, to pull back, at the end of thoughts and particularly in intense moments. This got me to thinking about truth-telling. Now I'm no expert, but at least according to what I understand, the throat is the seat of the 5th chakra. The 5th chakra is associated with, among other things, creativity, self-expression, and truth. In my experience, at least, this chakra has the unfortunate (fortunate?) tendency to tell the truth whether your words do or not. Your words might be about something lovely, or angry, or powerful, or heart-breaking, but your voice can betray such truths as, "I don't want to be here;" "this truth is vulnerable for me;" "I want to hide;" "I don't feel like I can openly express my convictions;" "I'm not actually happy to be speaking in front of people;" and any number of truths that can under-cut the truths that we want our words to carry. And in my experience, the non-verbal truth tends to carry more strongly to the audience even than the content of the speaker's words.

We could try to tame this just by training the voice not to betray what we're feeling, but I kind of suspect that the 5th chakra wouldn't much like that. Not honest. Since the truth does come out, one way or another, I think the only way to really "integrate" every aspect of voice and body into a telling is to tell the whole truth. I definitely don't know the full depths of what that entails--I think that has a lot to do with presence, and it's hard-earned--but I think it does mean, for starters, feeling out every vulnerable place, and using it as a place to reach from, not hide from. Hiding (particularly hiding from our truth) = "not good".