Your Voice as Emotional Expression Center

In his book The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals Charles Darwin's 4th chapter is called "Means of Expression in Animals".

Here's what he has to say in this chapter about singing... "whether we believe that the various qualities of the voice originated in speaking under the excitement of strong feelings, and that these qualities have subsequently been transferred to vocal music; or whether we believe, as I maintain, that the habit of uttering musical sounds was first developed, as a means of courtship, in the early progenitors of man, and thus became associated with the strongest emotions of which they were capable,-namely, ardent love, rivalry and triumph."(page 87)

Whether Darwin is right about this or not, the point he makes over and over in Chapter 4 is that the quality of sounds animals and humans produce are intrinsically linked to emotions. Pretty modern thinking for 1872, no? We now know through modern science that the voice is linked to the limbic system, a set of brain structures that governs emotion and long term memory among other things.

It isn't hard to understand - you can be in another room and if someone calls your name, you can tell from the tone of the voice whether they are happy, sad, angry or indifferent. When you are upset, you feel a lump in your throat. When you are excited your voice might take on a pitch that is slightly higher and a volume that is louder than your regular speaking voice. When our hearts are clear and our heads are quiet our voices ring true. We give voice to our truth by connecting emotionally to the core of a song. Our expressive ability is challenged when we've got emotions bound up in our memories and stored in our heart center.

For good and for bad, our voices are at the complete mercy of our emotions - and of our past via our long term memory.

In the summer between my first and second years of graduate school I lost my father to suicide. The level of grief was so overwhelming that it amounted to me feeling numb for most of the next year. I dutifully completed all the things I needed to, to finish my degree. I got by in classes where all I needed was my brain to function. My singing was another story. By the time May rolled around, my final recital, which was required to graduate, loomed. I knew I was going to stand on stage and sing right notes with no emotion. The emotions called for in the songs weren't accessible to me because when I tried to open to them all that came out was grief. The only emotion I had to offer was sadness and if I went there, all I would do was cry.

When I look back now I wish I had been brave enough to own my grief and just go to my voice lessons and cry. Every week for 9 months. What I know now, after more than a decade of time has passed since that event, and after many years of yoga study, is that our voices also have an incredibly powerful ability to help us heal. By staying with a difficult emotion and giving voice to it, we allow our psyche to release it, no longer giving it power over us. It wasn't until I traveled to Italy to sing for the summer after graduation where I reached the point that I could face my grief. And I cried. A lot. Sometimes in my voice lessons and sometimes on my own. Singing that summer as I processed those emotions, took on a new meaning for me. I finally owned my voice again.

Your voice might be bound up for different reasons - I meet so many people who love to sing but feel they shouldn't because some adult told them as a child that they couldn't sing in tune, or the quality of their voice wasn't nice. That moment of being told their voice was not good enough to be heard lodged inside them, taking up residence in their heart center. It leads to adults who hide in the back row of the choir, or those who feel guilty singing to their child. Their throat feels tight with muscle strain. Unless you are truly unable to distinguish between high and low pitches and speak in a monotone, you are not tone deaf. Your brain simply hasn't not developed the road map it needs to be able to tell your voice to sing specific pitches and you CAN learn that. If you got the message at some point that you can't match pitch, you also hold that emotional energy in your body and it hinders your brain's ability to do its work. When you do sing it helps if you are willing to sing out. I mean, sing LOUD. I always say to my singers, "if you're going to sing it wrong, sing it loud." I can work with wrong notes, I can't work in between the cracks. Beyond the bravery to sing out when you think others will cringe at what they hear, we need to release the energy you've stored up about how terrible you sound.

In our yoga practice of asana, pranayama and meditaiton, we bring attention to our heart center liberating it from the energy of past emotions. It is in doing this that the energy of the throat and the heart gain a fluid pathway on which to travel. Finding an expansive heart takes bravery.  It is hard to go to places of discomfort and knowingly acknowledge hurt and the person who incurred the hurt -whether that hurt is new or old. You probably will cry. That's okay!

Everyone deserves the chance to sing, as Darwin said "with the strongest emotions of which they [are] capable".  Yoga helps make this possible by combining a sense of community and trust with physical and emotional tools to work with the heart.