This ability to express one's deeper feelings from the body sense is called voice. Voice is the ability to speak of the self with honesty and confidence in a way that is consonant with embodied feelings. Too often, we lose our true voice because our feelings are unacceptable and need to be suppressed. We succumb to speaking only from reason, logic and judgment. We lose our compassion. We despair.

Evocative language depends in part on the words themselves and in part on how they are spoken. In my book on body sense, I describe how sound quality depends on the breath but breathing is foremost among body functions in its exquisite sensitivity to our sense of safety and threat. An ongoing sense of threat as in situations of trauma or persistent environmental stress, because those involve chronic sympathetic nervous system activation, will cause chronic tension in the diaphragm and other respiratory muscles in the chest, neck, and throat, all of which affect what can be said and how it is said.

Relaxed breathing occurs when there is relatively little muscle tension in the body, when inspiration and expiration are relatively rhythmical, and when there is a detectable expiratory pause. An expiratory pause is the cessation of movement in the breathing muscles at the end of an expiration. A longer expiratory pause indicates greater relaxation while a short or non-existent expiratory pause indicate a sense of threat or tension.

Effortful breathing occurs in states of threat when there is contraction of breathing muscles through both the inspiration and expiration (sympathetic arousal), and generally higher levels of muscle tension in the body. Threat also suppresses our body sense, our ability to feel our body sensations and emotions. An effortful breath, therefore, is a diagnostic indicator of the emotions and sensations that have been suppressed by current and past situations of threat.

Psychophysiological research has shown that breath awareness and control training has the effect of activating the parasympathetic nervous system, replacing effortful with relaxed breathing, reducing pain, anxiety and depression. Breathing meditation has been shown to have a positive impact on a variety of conditions including anxiety, depression, PTSD, mood disorders, addictions, and stress tolerance.

Conversely, any intervention that increases the body sense of safety and reduces feelings of anxiety and threat will lead to more relaxed breathing and greater access to emotions that have been suppressed. The individual then has greater body sense awareness of emotions and increased freedom to express them using evocative language.

Evocative language, language that reaches and moves those who listen, can only arise from a person who speaks, writes or sings directly from an unguarded and vulnerable openness to their own feelings. Such words have the power to change us, to give us inner vision, to deepen our understanding of ourselves and our current woes and possibilities, to heighten our body sense as a participant in a fully alive and deeply gratifying human condition.