The quality of your voice, the way you speak, affects how you’re heard, how well others listen to you. Someone who speaks freely and confidently with a clear tone of voice is much easier to listen to than a person whose voice grates with stress or shakes with nerves.

There are many different causes of voice problems. Some are physical, with damaged or injured vocal cords causing inflammation and swelling. Others are mental and emotional, with tightness of the throat brought on by anxiety or stress. If the muscles of the throat, jaw, tongue and floor of the mouth are tight, the quality of the voice is affected. This problem is common and can be improved with relaxation, breathing, yoga postures and soundings.

Yoga’s physical postures, breathing and relaxation techniques relax the nervous system and assist with correcting respiration problems. With practice, muscle tension, alignment, respiration, relaxation, presence, centredness, focus and energy are all improved, in turn affecting vocal impact and performance anxiety. When you feel more relaxed and connected with yourself, many problems of confidence and expression will dissolve and the sound of the voice will improve. There are many different yoga postures designed to stretch the muscles in the neck, throat and upper chest, particularly the backward-bending postures.

Certain practices such as meditation, chakra awareness and nada yoga (sound yoga) can also help to access more of the voice. When we apply ourselves to sounding our words fully, opening our throat and using the muscles for voice production efficiently, we experience clarity of speech and acquire a voice that is much more pleasant to listen to. When the voice moves through a body that has been opened and relaxed with yoga postures, the sound naturally carries more freely and fully.

Carmelle Moore, a yoga teacher and speech pathologist for more than 20 years, running workshops throughout Australia, has integrated yoga practices and voice since she discovered the effect it had on her own voice. “The use of postures to alter the breath is one of the more obvious ways yoga can impact on the voice,” she says. “Simply by paying attention to the breath, which is integral to yoga, our breath generally deepens. As well, most postures release tension, enhancing freedom of breath.

“People who have previously been suffering stress can achieve a voice that makes them feel more empowered, that can completely alter the way others receive them. There’s a variety of reasons why people want to work on their voice. Some have real problems with their voice, while others just want to sound different — they feel their voice doesn’t reflect who they really are. They want more resonance, flexibility, power or range.

“Often, people simply need to re-posture their vocal tract so they can resonate their own true voice rather than use the patterns they have learnt from their vocal role models and perhaps outgrown. Other people find their voice responds automatically as they develop emotionally, spiritually, psychologically.”