Quality or Quantity

Last week I finished an hour-long voice lesson with a singer and she seemed slightly befuddled. Her brow was furrowed and she said, "well, we didn't get that much done, but it felt really productive."

I thought that was such an interesting perception of her lesson. My assessment was we had dropped deep in to the issue of breathing and body awareness and spent valuable time letting her body learn. As a beginner she has some long held breath and vocal patterns that aren't serving her singing. While I know her goals are not to become a professional singer, she is training to be a lawyer. She will be a professional voice user and be more effective in her profession when she is connected to her breath and able to use her voice efficiently.

Over the first 10 minutes of the lesson she sat and worked with a guided body scan to find a breath that was deep and free. I then asked her to stay with the breath to get a sense of how the body feels when she is breathing that way. We then vocalized in that position exploring how the tuning of the voice and placement are affected by the breath. About halfway into the lesson she stood and it took more time to re-find the breath connection from a standing position. We continued to vocalize and I asked her to identify what it felt like when the breath was free as it was when she was sitting. We used the mirror to provide a visual of the engagement of her neck when the breath was not working efficiently.

The work was slow, but it was clear she was in the zone the whole time. Her work was mindful. The voice was consistently in tune and pleasant in quality; two triumphs for someone who previously struggled to match pitch. We ended the lesson by talking about how she can find the breath that way again and identifying places in her life where she can explore it outside of singing.

My observation of people who are new to voice lessons is that most of them aren't used to actually living in their body. They have little sense of how their body feels and often little understanding or even ability to perceive the body in space, let alone understand what their breath is doing or how they are using their voice. If you are 25 years into life and have never explored that, the change doesn't happen overnight!

So often I tell students that I'd rather they spend 10 minutes practicing in a focused manner rather than singing through something 100 times in an hour. Learning simply doesn't happen when you mindlessly repeat something.

I will always take quality over quantity when working with the voice and the body!

The Very Opposite of Mindful

In general I work hard to practice what I preach, being mindful in my daily life. For the most part I succeed at this but sometimes life gets the best of me.

September was a busy month. This is the first fall that I'm teaching while running yoga programs for singers privately and at a few schools and have my own two children going to two different locations for their daily routine on top of a million other things that come with living life.

The month began relatively smoothly but quickly went south when my daughter's after school program feel apart. I mean really, really fell apart. As in there was no viable after school option for her to be cared for between 2:30 and 5pm on the days I was working. After a totally sleepless night we decided that in the short term I was going to do pick up while we sought out another alternative. All well and good except that my teaching schedule for the week was set and getting home by 2:30 wasn't exactly easy.

To make a long story a little longer, I rushed like mad out of work the first day to get to pick up. I finished teaching in Cambridge at 1:45 and had to be at her preschool, 19 miles away, in 45 minutes (if you live around here you know that this seems like a potential impossibility, but dammit I was going to make it happen). After walking as fast as humanly possible from the building I teach in over to Mass Ave in Harvard Square, I crossed 1/2 of the street with the light and stood on the median waiting for the light to cross the street and it was taking forever (or so it seemed). Suddenly there was no traffic coming south on Mass Ave. I saw my break and went for it.

You see where this is going, right?

Though I had looked to my right and identified that there was no traffic coming, I failed to look to my left to see whether a bus was coming up out of the underground T station.

I boldly stepped off the curb and walked right into the side of a moving MBTA bus.

My bag was over my left shoulder, my elbow bent, sticking out, my hand holding the straps of my bag. I think that very thing is what saved me from potential disaster. My elbow hit the bus first and I instinctively recoiled up onto the median.

Though I was shocked I wasn't really hurt. The poor bus driver very nearly had a heart attack and it took much reassuring that I was actually ok, for him to be able to breathe again. I walked away with a dime sized abrasion on my elbow and the astounding realization that I had very nearly been badly injured because I was rushing and not paying attention.

How often do we all do this? Go on autopilot getting from point A to point B, only to arrive and have no memory of getting there? Have you ever sung a concert and then can't remember much of it because you were so distracted, stressed and unaware? Have you spent an hour 'practicing' when really you were thinking about everything but the music? More often than not those events result in no harm. But, sometimes, you get hit by a bus.

In hindsight I am grateful for the reminder to be present and focused and I'm sorry that it took being hit by a bus for me to remember.

Be present to your life this day, this hour, this minute. Breathe.