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I Buried My Voice for 15 Years. Burnout Gave It Back.
- Ling Shi
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
There is a video I almost didn't share.
Me, sitting with my harmonium at our Women's Wisdom Circle in Berlin, chanting. Voice cracked open. Fully present. Alive in a way that used to terrify me.
I almost didn't share it because, for a very long time, I believed my voice wasn't meant to be heard.
The Child Who Performed in Stadiums
From the time I was small, I was a performer. Piano. Singing. Dance. I stood in front of thousands of people in stadiums and felt completely, entirely at home in my body. The music wasn't something I did, it was something I was.
Then came the voices, not from within, but from without. Parents. Teachers. Society. The quiet but relentless script that so many of us, especially high-achieving women, receive:
Be serious. Be productive. Put away childish things. A real career is what matters.
So I listened. I buried the piano. I buried the singing. I buried the part of me that moved with rhythm and sound and joy. I built a career instead, 17 years of corporate and startup leadership, climbing every ladder, hitting every metric, becoming the very definition of successful.
And then burnout came. Twice.
What Burnout Really Takes from You
When people think of burnout, they think of exhaustion. Of needing rest. Of overwork. And yes, the depletion is real. But what I've come to understand, both through my own recovery and through working with clients as a burnout recovery coach, is that burnout takes something deeper than energy.
Burnout takes your voice.
Not just your literal voice, though that too, many burned out women tell me they feel physically unable to speak up, to ask for help, to say no. But something more essential: the part of you that knows who you are outside of your output. The creative self. The playful self. The self that dances and sings and makes things not because they're useful, but because they're alive.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, which underpins much of my coaching approach, this is understood as Qi, life force energy. When we live out of alignment with our authentic nature for too long, our Qi stagnates and depletes. The Lung and Heart meridians, which govern grief, joy, and the capacity to both receive and give, become particularly affected in burnout.
Reclaiming your voice, literally and metaphorically, is not a nice to have in burnout recovery. It is a fundamental part of it.
The Harmonium and the Return
In the depths of my second burnout, I didn't pick up a piano. The piano felt too grand, too loaded with expectation, too much like the performing self I was trying to shed. Instead, I found a harmonium, smaller, more intimate, almost conversational. You hold it in your lap. It breathes with you.
When I played the first drone and let my voice find its way out, tentative, uncertain, cracked at the edges, something shifted. Something that had been held so tightly for so long began to release.
It was not beautiful, that first time. It was not polished. But it was mine. And that, that feeling of being genuinely, unapologetically myself, was something I hadn't felt in years.
Why Chanting and Sound Heal the Burned-Out Nervous System
This isn't mysticism, though I love that dimension too. There is solid neuroscience behind why using your voice is one of the most powerful tools available for nervous system regulation, which is at the heart of burnout recovery.
When we chant, hum, or sing, especially in a sustained, resonant way, we directly stimulate the vagus nerve through the vibration of the vocal cords. The vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve in the body, running from the brainstem down through the heart and gut. It is the primary pathway of the parasympathetic nervous system, the 'rest and digest' state that is chronically suppressed in burnout.
Many of us with burnout live in a near-constant state of sympathetic activation, the nervous system's stress response. Our bodies don't know how to turn off. We can't sleep even when exhausted. We can't rest even when we stop working. We're wired and tired, simultaneously depleted and unable to drop.
Sound, particularly the vibration of your own voice, interrupts this loop from the inside out.
This is why, across virtually every ancient healing tradition, Vedic chanting, Gregorian chant, Tibetan overtone singing, Taoist toning, sound has been used as medicine. Traditional Chinese Medicine uses the five healing sounds (the Wu Yin) as a direct therapeutic intervention for organ systems. Each sound corresponds to a meridian; each vibration moves qi that has become stuck.
Modern polyvagal theory, developed by Dr. Stephen Porges, now gives us the neuroscientific framework to understand why this works: vocalisation activates the ventral vagal complex, which governs our capacity for social connection, safety, and calm. When you sing with others, you are not just making music, you are co regulating your nervous systems together.
What Happened in the Circle
At our Women's Wisdom Circle in Berlin, I watched something I have seen many times now, and it never stops moving me.
Women arrive holding themselves. You can feel it, the tightness across the shoulders, the slightly held breath, the polished competence that masks deep exhaustion. They are so used to performing that they bring the performance even into a healing space.
Then the harmonium begins. Then the first chant rises. And something changes, not all at once, but gradually, like ice melting. Breath deepens. Shoulders drop. Eyes soften. The body, which has been living in its head for so long, begins to remember that it has a chest, a belly, a throat.
By the end of the circle, the room feels different. Not because I did anything extraordinary, I simply held the space and played. The sound did what analysis, advice, and strategy never can: it bypassed the thinking mind entirely and landed straight in the body.
Burnout isn't just exhaustion. It's what happens when we spend so long performing a version of ourselves that was never really ours.
For the Neurodivergent Women Reading This
I want to speak directly to something, because it matters to me personally.
As an AUDHD woman, I masked for decades before I understood what masking was. The suppression of my authentic self, including my creative, expressive, sensory seeking self, was not accidental. It was survival. The world told me, explicitly and implicitly, that my way of being was too much, too loud, too intense, too different.
For many neurodivergent women, burnout isn't just work stress. It's the cumulative cost of a lifetime of masking, of performing neurotypicality while your actual nervous system screams for something different.
Sound and somatic practices can be particularly profound for us, because they speak to the body directly, no translation required. The vibration doesn't ask you to think or analyse or perform. It simply invites you to feel.
How to Bring Sound Into Your Own Recovery
You don't need a harmonium. You don't need to be able to sing. Here are simple ways to begin:
Hum while you make your morning coffee. Even 5 minutes of humming has measurable vagal tone effects.
Try toning, sustaining a single vowel sound (AH, OH, HUM) for several breath cycles, feeling the vibration in your chest.
Sing in the shower, without judgment. Badly. Freely. The off key songs count just as much.
Explore sound baths, either in person or via recordings, as a passive way to receive the healing of vibration.
Come to a Women's Wisdom Circle and experience what happens when you use your voice in community.
Reclaiming What You Were Told to Bury
I am not the same woman who buried her voice in a stadium at fourteen years old. I am, in many ways, still finding her, through the sound, through the circle, through the slow, non-linear work of burnout recovery.
What I know is this: every time I play the harmonium and let my voice rise to meet it, I am not performing. I am not producing. I am simply, finally, being.
And for those of us recovering from burnout, from a lifetime of performing versions of ourselves that were never quite ours, that is everything.
If something in this resonated, if there is a version of you that you buried a long time ago and have been wondering how to find again, I want to invite you into a space designed for exactly that.
Our Women's Wisdom Circle in Berlin is a monthly gathering where we use sound, somatic practices, and collective wisdom to come home to ourselves. No performance required. If you are ready to go deeper into burnout recovery with ongoing support, my group coaching programme integrates these modalities with evidence-based coaching for lasting change.
Your voice was never the problem. The world just forgot to tell you that.
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