Why my brand is called Sing Well.

Sing Well, a place where singing and healing meet. How we got here is my life’s journey: not so linear and a bit messy at times.

Not sure which came first:
My love for the human body and how it works?
Or my love for singing and self-expression?

Music, singing, and performing have taken center stage (pun intended) for most of my life. Health has always been part of the production, but it mostly stayed in the wings like an understudy (laughing at myself). 

When I got sick as a kid, every cold or virus went straight to my chest and immediately affected my voice. As I got older, losing my voice became a primary symptom of almost everything: illness, stress, fatigue, environmental exposure. Some people feel the weather in their joints; others get headaches. I lost my voice.

As a voice major turned professional opera singer, this was… a problem. I would get sick one or two times a semester and lose my voice for days every single time. After a few years of giving in to the freshman 15 (which, for me, was more like the sophomore 35), I finally decided to take control. My diet, my lifestyle, my energy, my cognitive function, my physical fitness.

I began eating better, running, and even joined Weight Watchers because I knew I needed structure (I later became a coach). A mentor suggested I read Alkalize or Die and Green for Life. I became a vegetarian, then a vegan (don’t do this, it was fine temporarily, but actually caused harm). I started running long distances, meditating, and seeing every specialist I could find. In the midst of this, I was diagnosed with vocal polyps on both folds at a major ENT practice. I didn’t like their prognosis, so I took matters into my own hands.

In 2007 I sought answers from every holistic healer or specialist (I very carefully do not call these practices ‘alternative’ bc they are more traditional than people know), devoured books, started lessons with a brilliant speech pathologist, and watched every documentary I could find. And a new idea was born:

What if I could learn enough to bring this to other singers? They need to know this stuff!

After healing my vocal polyps in 2008, I became obsessed with making health my north star  - while simultaneously chasing a career that I later realized was the antithesis of balance for me.

It started with trying to understand reflux, immune support, and how to speak healthily so I didn’t sabotage my singing voice. Along the way, I kept finding concepts that sounded like solutions but didn’t move the needle very far. So I kept asking questions, kept digging deeper, until eventually I decided to go back to school so I could begin my own research and work with clients.

In 2015, after years of feeling like I was shoving a square peg into a round hole, swimming upstream, and forcing something that no longer fit, I finally let go of pursuing my opera career - even though at the time, I didn’t entirely understand why. It was time to go back to school and obtain the knowledge I wanted to bring to the singer community.

Two years of integrative health and functional nutrition courses later, I was ready to start coaching singers and helping them become healthier instruments.

Over the next few years, I continued my education, attended conferences, and met countless healers, teachers, and practitioners. Many of them wanted to learn how to sing, harness their voice, or simply breathe better. I started receiving requests for voice lessons - and even for singing at conferences (not the place for big, loud opera vibrato, but the sentiment was sweet).

That’s when I realized how important it was to build a two-way bridge between singing and health.

In 2019 I bought a Squarespace page and was ready to build my studio. Then, my husband got a job offer, so we uprooted our East Coast lives and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. Long story, but I ended up in a job at a tech company, giving me a career that I genuinely love.

When the pandemic hit and health became a controversial topic, I stepped back from building a practice, but continued to dig into my own wellbeing.

Now, with career and financial stability, my passions can be just that. They’re not hobbies or side hustles - they are my callings. Drew Canole talks about “Your mess is your mission” in You Be You, and I’m finding my way back to bringing both of my callings into the world.

Even though I originally set this page up in 2019 as the foundation of my entrepreneurial dreams, I’ve decided not to change the Sing Well name or logo, because I still believe in the two-way mission where singing needs wellness and the healing community needs singing. 

You’re welcome to ask my (unprofessional 😉) opinion anytime, fo free.