SNOHOMISH — Not long after her 25-year marriage ended in divorce seven years ago, Saacha K. Belgar picked up an Everett Community College class schedule and found her voice.
“I was thinking, I have to take a class,” she said. “I have to take a class, I have to figure out what it is that I’m really passionate about, that I really want to do.”
She found it near the back of the pamphlet: an introductory class on voice acting taught by former longtime radio disc jockey Mike Elmore.
“And my heart just leaped for joy,” Belgar said. “I could feel it.”
Belgar, 56, had a job in customer service for Snohomish County PUD, she said, but was looking for more meaning in her life. She attended the first voice class unsure of why it excited her. She left with a new career.
Something clicked, she said, when Elmore told her, “You have a motherly, nurturing voice and I think you will do very well in audiobooks for children.”
It was then Belgar remembered reading in a variety of voices to her two daughters when they were young and how much they’d loved it. She dreamed back then of someday writing children’s books herself. After that first voice-actor class, Belgar continued to research and learn, studying with the likes of The Great Voice Company’s Susan Berkley, known as the voice of AT&T and Citibank.
Belgar, who lives in Snohomish, got involved with her local Toastmasters Club — a nonprofit that helps members gain confidence through public speaking — serving as president this past year. She started writing children’s books and opened her own voice business, Vibrant Vibes.
Demos of Belgar’s work can be heard on her website at www.saachakbelgar.com, where the tagline is “Storytelling with Care and Concern.”
Belgar said she’s made a niche for herself working “with companies that are trying to make a difference, that are very earth-oriented, that are either spiritual or they’re on some path where they’re really trying to make a difference.”
Her projects include a voiceover in a commercial for the Natural Clothing Company in Snohomish, which features eco-friendly products “made of natural fibers hemp, organic cotton, bamboo and are good for the consumer as well as the planet.”
Belgar said she tries to infuse her voice with “positive energy and blessings,” which came to fruition in a message she recorded for the business answering machine of Body and Brain Everett Yoga Studio. “The phone message is usually something you tolerate so you can leave a message, but I have callers thanking me for such a pleasant message,” owner Maki Perry said on Belgar’s website.
When Belgar was searching for a business name, she consulted with Kabalarian Philosophy, based in Vancouver, B.C., a society that does name analyses drawn upon mathematics and Eastern and Western philosophies. According to the society’s website, the Kabalarians believe there is an intimate link between mind, language and math, and that a name creates qualities of mind from which all thoughts and experiences flow.
With the help of the Kabalarians, Belgar chose Vibrant Vibes as the name of her business, but the Kabalarians advised her to go further and change her own name as well. At first she resisted.
Then, she said, “I thought, well, how is this going to work on the computer when somebody’s trying to find me?”
So she typed in her birth name — Susan Smith — and up popped information on the South Carolina woman convicted in 1995 of killing her two young sons by strapping them into their car seats and letting her car roll into a lake, afterward stirring racial tension by claiming a black man had kidnapped them.
Appalled, Belgar had a change of heart.
“Writing children’s books, I’m like, I don’t really want people to type my name in and then they get that,” she said.
It’s been five years since she legally changed her name to Saacha Kesa Belgar and the Kabalarian promise of greater balance, harmony and happiness in her life is coming true, she said. Though she also believes in the importance of confidence, persistence and diligence.
The children’s book that she said contains “my life lessons in a nutshell” came to her during a daydreaming state of mind while she was cleaning house. Ideas that had been bubbling in her brain for years suddenly connected, she said.
“I was cleaning for a few hours and by the time I was done cleaning, I had the whole storybook,” she said. “And I said to myself, ‘Hurry, write this down before I forget.’ ”
Starring Hilda the Duck sharing her secrets of the universe and her thoughts on living a balanced life, “The Five P’s” emerged first as an audiobook in 2014 and a year later, as a book and CD. The “P’s” of the title are privacy, play, pals, possibilities and positivity.
Illustrated by artist friend Susan Broughton, of Sultan, “The Five P’s” is available at the Artisans Mercantile and at Grow Washington, both in Snohomish, as well as on Amazon and at Belgar’s website, www.saachakbelgar.com.
She attended college for only a year after high school in her hometown of Billings, Montana, but she’s taken classes throughout her life whenever the yen for knowledge strikes her, such as accounting classes in her former husband’s stomping grounds in Anchorage, Alaska.
That helped her get a job as an accounting clerk with the state of Alaska, after several years working as a waitress and bookkeeper for a popular restaurant, Clinkerdagger, Bickerstaff and Petts. When she and her husband moved to Monroe, Belgar started her own bookkeeping business, later using her skills to help her husband with a courier business they owned for a few years.
The growth of the internet has created endless opportunities in the voiceover business, she said. In particular, she is interested in the work people are doing on Vimeo, creating videos that resemble mini-movies.
While she hasn’t quit her day job at the PUD, she is brimming with ideas on how to use her voice and her skills to help others.
“I can teach them bookkeeping, I can teach them about the money aspect, how to be careful,” she said. “I can teach them about evolving and growing and all kinds of things.”
Helping others is important to her, Belgar said, because she believes she has a deeper mission in life.
“I am someone who just wants to learn how to live with my community, my neighbors, the animals, the plants,” she said, “so that we can all survive and be content and happy and peaceful.
“And we all can live in abundance. I really believe that is possible. And it has to start with one person at a time and it has to start with ourselves.”
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